Where does your ITAM team report?

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Source: Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report
(Figure 1)

Compared to last year, we’re seeing a 5 percentage point increase in ITAM teams reporting to infrastructure management. Forty-five percent of respondents report directly to the CIO or CTO, and 31% report to infrastructure management.

FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice that maximizes the business value of the cloud, enables timely data-driven decision-making and creates financial accountability through collaboration between teams.

Results from this year’s survey show there’s a 5 percentage point difference from last year in organizations that have a dedicated FinOps team (down from 77% to 72% year over year). We suspect this could be due to growing convergence and collaboration between ITAM and FinOps teams, but we’ll continue to keep an eye on this trend as these specialties evolve.

That being said, when asked which teams SAM teams have significant interaction with, results from this year’s survey show that interaction with FinOps has increased from 32% to 38% year over year. Unsurprisingly, ITAM teams have the highest interaction with the traditional infrastructure and operations (68%), ITSM (55%) and security teams (49%). As more software moves into the cloud, we’re seeing increases in ITAM collaboration with FinOps (38%) and cloud teams (44%).

Which of the following teams does your SAM team have significant interaction with?

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Source: Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report
(Figure 3)

Which team is responsible for generating software savings in public cloud environments?

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Source: Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report
(Figure 4)

We also asked a new question in this year’s survey: Which team is responsible for generating software savings in public cloud environments? Results from our respondent pool show that roughly a third of companies have their FinOps teams manage software savings in public cloud environments—while nearly 60% are managed through ITAM teams. This suggests an area of opportunity for ITAM and FinOps teams to collaborate on optimizing software in cloud environments.

ITAM can’t be done effectively without key resources such as a focused team. With that in mind, we asked a new question in this year’s survey about how many FTEs organizations had to support HAM and SAM initiatives. Worldwide, only 25% of organizations surveyed have fewer than five FTEs.

It’s no surprise there’s a correlation between size of organization and number of ITAM FTEs. Most organizations with more than 50,000 employees have more than 10 FTEs, and most organizations with fewer than 50,000 FTEs tend to have between 1 and 9 ITAM FTEs.

This year, we adjusted our categorization of our methodology and implemented a more stringent use on what’s categorized as “advanced,” which includes tracking software asset lifecycles and software vulnerabilities for third-party applications. Because of this, when asked which statement best describes where participants were in implementing SAM in their organizations, we saw slightly more beginners and fewer advanced users. However, it’s still roughly a third across the board between beginner, intermediate and advanced categories telling us that businesses overall are implementing SAM at a more advanced level (37% beginner; 33% intermediate; 29% advanced). We’ll keep an eye on how this moves forward year over year.

Responding to audits remains the top priority for SAM-focused responsibilities this year (76% currently do; 21% plan to do) and increased by 2 percentage points year over year. What’s more interesting is that maintaining an accurate inventory of licensed software has dropped 5 percentage points year over year. This directly impacts the accuracy of complying to vendor contracts and therefore not being audited.

Another interesting finding is tracking the use of software licenses in public cloud environments has increased from 55% to 58% year over year, which shows that as more workloads move to the cloud ITAM teams have heard the call and are managing the software that runs on them.

It’s interesting that both beginner and intermediate programs overwhelmingly focus their responsibility on responding to vendor audits as their top priority, while advanced programs are tied to both discovery of software in use and maintaining an accurate inventory. Responding to audits is still a priority, but this underscores the importance of these responsibilities in order to proactively respond to audits.

Regarding HAM maturity levels, there aren’t many changes since last year’s report, and HAM-focused responsibilities remain the same year over year: Discovering and inventorying all assets are still the top priorities.

This year, with regard to SAM teams’ responsibilities and where they report, survey respondents indicated an increase in responding to audits and reporting directly to the CIO or CTO (77%). Software is a big deal to procurement: This year, 100% of respondents who report to procurement indicated they deal with software vendor contract renewals, whereas last year this was only 47%. It’s important to note that there were fewer overall respondents identifying as being part of procurement this year, but it’s still a noteworthy finding to keep an eye on.

When considering HAM responsibilities, we’re seeing an increase in those who report directly to the CIO or CTO and a slight decrease in responsibilities for teams under infrastructure management.

When it comes to wasted spend in general, more respondents thought SaaS and IaaS/PaaS waste has increased, which is similar to findings from last year’s report. On the other hand, findings this year indicate desktop software waste may be declining.

With that said, wasted spend continues to be a challenge across the board, with desktop spend and SaaS being the areas of most waste among advanced users (25%). A quarter of beginners also seem to have a large challenge with desktop spend. Intermediate users aren’t immune to wasted spend challenges in desktop either (30%), but 28% also report challenges with data center software.

One reason desktop spend continues to be a challenge is the increasing number of workloads moving to the cloud—and licenses installed on-premises are being forgotten and neglected as a result.

Wasted SaaS spend has decreased in the beginner category but increased by almost the exact same amount among intermediate and advanced users combined; this could be due to advanced organizations utilizing SaaS applications more.

Despite these challenges, organizations were more comfortable overall with their SAM practices this year as compared to last. There were higher percentages of respondents in last year’s report indicating they had “significant” or “somewhat” of a challenge across the board. However, this year tied for the top significant challenge for respondents is the complexity of software vendor use rights. This could be due to the complexity of software use rights in the cloud and companies moving more resources to cloud services.

When looking at challenges by maturity, it’s not a surprise that beginners have more trouble across the board, with the small exception of dealing with new environments—but that could be attributed to not utilizing SAM in those environments. There’s a bit of a decrease of “significant challenges” from last year in most categories, which shows organizations are continuing to get more comfortable with SAM.

Audits are extremely expensive, with 45% of companies reporting more than $1 million dollars in audit fines in the last three years. Organizations just starting in their ITAM journey tend to have a lack of resources, which impacts where they’re able to keep their focus. Spending time and effort to reduce enormous audit costs is essential.

Improving the management of SaaS products is a top priority for SAM professionals. When implementing SaaS management practices, there’s a 7 percentage point increase in tracking SaaS usage and an 8 percentage point increase over a two-year period for rightsizing SaaS contracts, demonstrating these initiatives are becoming more and more of a priority.

Looking forward over the next three years, there are some drops in data center software and desktop software as compared to last year’s findings (27% vs. 19% and 21% to 18% year over year, respectively).

There’s a bit of a slowdown in SaaS this year compared to results from last year’s report, but still a strong increase in adoption. A similar pattern occurs with public and private cloud. It will be interesting to keep on these trends as they develop.

Regarding the initiatives at the top of respondents’ minds for the next year, the results remain consistent: Optimizing software spend, expanding vendors covered and improving reclamation of unused software are all key priorities.

What do your hardware sustainability policies include?

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Source: Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report
(Figure 20)

The majority of organizations have a plan for aging hardware. Nearly all respondents are participating in some sort of sustainability practices: 63% participate in recycling, 58% are refurbishing/reusing assets and 56% are using a longer retention period. We didn’t see any decrease in any sustainability practices this year compared to last, which is a good sign that sustainability has become more of a focal point for organizations.

When asked how relevant certain software vendors are to respondents’ SAM program, there wasn’t much of a change year over year. The most relevant SaaS vendors were Microsoft, ServiceNow and Salesforce. But, when asked how relevant certain technologies are to respondents’ SAM program, Salesforce and Google Cloud Platform have grown in their order of importance.

Publisher audit rates remain relatively flat year over year, with a slight decrease in regulatory audit pressures.

Microsoft still audits half of respondents, followed by IBM (37%). SAP (32%), ServiceNow (21%) and OpenText (6%) moved up slightly, and Anaconda (3%) is a new vendor this year.

It goes without saying that those audits can be costly. This year, nearly half (45%) of respondents said they paid more than $1 million in software vendor audits. As companies adopt more SaaS and AI applications it will be interesting to see how this affects audits in the near future.

In Europe, this year’s survey is weighted more heavily toward large enterprises (29%), which is similar to last year.

The majority of European organizations with 5,001 – 50,000 employees have between five and nine FTEs and are dedicated to HAM and SAM initiatives. It makes sense that in organizations with more than 50,000 employees, European organizations have 10 or more FTEs devoted to these initiatives. Those with fewer than 5,000 employees have a varied amount of ITAM employees.

The majority of European respondents (36%) identify as intermediate when it comes to implementing SAM in their organization, and a third (33%) are advanced.

ITAM teams seem to have found their rhythm in where within their organization they report. Nearly half (47%) of European respondents report directly to the CIO or CTO, while about a third (34%) report to infrastructure management.

Three-quarters of European organizations surveyed have a FinOps team.

Additionally, European ITAM and FinOps team interaction has grown significantly from last year, from 29% to 43%—this is a great indicator of the collaboration between ITAM and FinOps teams as more and more software moves to the cloud. We’ll keep an eye on these trends moving forward.

Tracking software in containers (43%) continues to be a newer priority this year, along with optimizing software based on product use rights (49%). European respondents in this year’s report are a bit further behind their North American counterparts in SaaS, but further ahead in containers.

Regarding SAM challenges, however, European respondents seem to have more of a challenge when responding to audits than their North American counterparts. Thirty-six percent of European respondents indicate their biggest significant challenge is the amount of time and money spent responding to audits—the number one spot—whereas North American respondents ranked that as their second highest challenge (29%). This isn’t terribly surprising since they also indicate a higher sense of a lack of resources (31% for European respondents, 27% for North America). Complexity of software vendor use rights (30%) also ranked in the top three significant SAM-related challenges for European respondents.

Interestingly, when asked about their top SAM initiatives, improving management of SaaS products has taken quite a fall from last year (down to 8% from 17% year over year), and it’s quite different from the North American response (19%). Unsurprisingly, optimizing and finding savings in software spend (36%) and expanding the number of vendors covered (27%) are still the top initiatives—but improved reclamation of underused and unused software (22%) had a noticeable 5 percentage point year-over-year increase. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

Measuring these SAM initiatives can sometimes be tricky. Saving money on software continues to reign supreme as the top success metric for European respondents and it’s a bigger priority for them when compared their North American counterparts (56% in Europe; 52% in North America).

European respondents are audited most by Microsoft (50%), and they historically get audited by IBM more than their North American counterparts. This trend continues this year: 46% of European respondents were audited by IBM in the past three years, vs. 32% in North America. SAP had a significant jump in audits for European respondents, up to 41% from 32% year over year.