Last year, everybody bought software. Quickly, under pressure, without much process. Fair enough. The building was on fire, you grabbed what you could reach. But now it's February 2021 and the fire's out. Time to look at what you're actually holding.
The Morning After
Here's what I'm seeing across our enterprise clients: twelve to eighteen SaaS subscriptions per organisation, up from five or six two years ago. Three project management tools because different teams signed up for different ones during lockdown. Two video conferencing platforms. A communication tool that overlaps with the one they already had. Document management in at least four places. And an integration layer that consists of "Sarah copies the numbers into the spreadsheet on Fridays."
40%
increase in average SaaS spend per enterprise employee between 2019 and 2021
Source: Productiv SaaS Trends Report, 2021
Nobody planned this. It happened because 2020 demanded speed, and speed meant buying tools that solved the immediate problem without asking how they'd fit into the broader ecosystem. Every purchase was rational in isolation. Together, they're a mess.
Three Problems Nobody Talks About
The overlap tax. You're paying for three tools that do roughly the same thing. Not because anyone decided to, but because nobody has the authority or the appetite to consolidate. Each tool has its advocates. Each team has its workflows. Ripping one out means disrupting people who are finally comfortable. So you keep paying.
The data fragmentation. Your customer data lives in your CRM, your billing system, your support tool, and two spreadsheets. None of them agree on how many active customers you have. Your finance team has one number, sales has another, and support has a third. This was tolerable when you had three systems. With fifteen, it's genuinely dangerous for decision-making.
The integration gap. The tools you bought in 2020 were chosen for features, not for how they connect to everything else. Now you need them to talk to each other, and the APIs range from "excellent" to "what API?" The result is manual data entry, CSV exports, and that special kind of organisational anxiety that comes from knowing your systems are slowly diverging.
30%
of enterprise SaaS licences are unused or underused
Source: Zylo SaaS Management Report, 2021
What Actually Helps
I'm not going to pretend this is simple. But there are practical steps.
Audit before you buy. Before adding another tool, map what you already have. Not just the subscriptions, the actual usage. Who's logging in? Who stopped logging in three months ago? Which tools overlap? You'll be surprised how much you're paying for software nobody uses.
Pick your integration battles. You can't connect everything to everything. But you can identify the two or three data flows that matter most and sort those out properly. Usually it's customer data, financial data, and project status. Get those right and the rest becomes manageable.
Consolidate where you can, tolerate where you can't. Some overlap is fine. If two teams prefer different project tools and both work well, that's not a crisis. Focus on the overlaps that create data fragmentation or duplicate cost, not the ones that just look untidy on an architecture diagram.
The answer isn't fewer tools - it's knowing which tools matter and making sure those ones actually work together.
Isaac Rolfe
Managing Director
The Bigger Lesson
The SaaS hangover is really an integration problem dressed up as a procurement problem. You don't have too many tools because someone made bad decisions. You have too many tools because nobody was thinking about the system as a whole. That's not a technology fix. It's a governance fix. And it's the conversation most organisations are avoiding because it means someone has to say "no" to something that's already in use.
Start the conversation. The hangover doesn't get better by ignoring it.