Assessing ROI across multiple web applications

The advent of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription model and the learn or work-from-anywhere era has resulted in the need to be able to remain productive on-the-go. School districts within K-12 Education as well as enterprise organizations today invest in a variety of Web tools that are accessible from anywhere through a few clicks on a web browser, offering capabilities to help boost the learning outcomes of students and the user experience of employees to maintain productivity. The average large enterprise today has 110 Web applications deployed across their user population.

With this rise in deployed Web applications comes the need to be able to efficiently track their adoption and assess return on investment based on annual license expenditure. Within large school districts, where Chromebooks remain the device of choice, it is common for students and staff to utilize a variety of Web applications such as instructional tools for content delivery, quizzing, and subject-specific learning aids as well as classroom management tools like attendance trackers and gradebooks. It’s a similar situation across enterprises, as organizations invest in Web applications for business productivity, communications, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and software development tools among others functions. In this fragmented environment, it is often challenging for IT teams and decision makers to know if they are getting value for each distinct Web application investment.  

To prepare for the next fiscal or school year, organizations typically undergo semi-annual or annual IT budgetary reviews of their Web subscriptions to identify ways to optimize licenses and expenditure. This could be through reducing duplication by identifying applications serving similar purposes or by optimizing licenses based on usage patterns across students or employees. Additionally, school districts specifically are required to justify their annual IT expenditure from pubic funding programs such as the US Cares Act in order to request for future funding. 

To effectively achieve these outcomes, IT practitioners need to monitor the usage of their subscribed Web applications and compare this with their annual license expenditure to gauge their overall return on investment. Having to go through this process individually for each Web application can be time consuming, inefficient and fairly overwhelming.  

Introducing New Web Subscriptions Report

Absolute’s new Web Subscriptions Report, an extension of the Absolute Web Usage reporting feature, offers IT and decision makers the ability to assess the value they’re getting from their Web applications in a more consolidated and efficient manner. Key capabilities include:

• Seamlessly track the return on investment across multiple deployed Web applications through a single pane of glass.
• Input license type (e.g. per device, per user or site), term and cost details for current Web application subscriptions to compare usage patterns with annual license expenses.
• Identify specific licenses that are being underutilized due to low usage or adoption by employees/students.
• Customize the report by timeline (year-to-date, last 30- or 90-days), export and share it on demand, or on a schedule with other users or decision makers across the organization.

The Web Subscriptions Report, along with the Absolute Web Usage capability, is available for customers subscribed to Absolute Resilience. To learn more, check out Web Usage and ROI Reporting.