When it comes to enterprise IT asset management (ITAM), there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that there’s poor visibility of IT assets across today’s complex technology stacks, declining from 47% to 43% year over year. The good news is that the need to cut costs is driving greater collaboration between teams focused on cloud, FinOps and ITAM, so IT pros are willing to work across organizational siloes—long considered a key management challenge in enterprise IT.
These findings are among the top results of the Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report, a survey of more than 500 IT professionals. The report delved into trends and issues around enterprise asset management, including how IT priorities are shifting, continuing concerns with cost management, and the enormous costs of software audits.
Key Findings:
Evolving priorities and challenges: Managing the complexity of software use rights has become a far greater challenge this year—rising from sixth place to first place on the list of ITAM concerns. This reflects the fact that the movement to the cloud is continuing, and cloud can present greater complexity of software rules and regulations.
Optimizing software use—and costs: Managing costs for software has grown as a concern, reflecting the enterprise’s desire to fight the seemingly intractable problem of SaaS sprawl. The Flexera report indicates a boost of 7% in concern with tracking SaaS usage over a two-year time period. Concern over right-sizing SaaS contracts grew 8% over the same time. In sum, companies want to know what they have, if it’s really being used, and if the most appropriate subscription contract has been purchase for staff needs.
Audits are a surprising expense: The grim results here show that many companies are still losing the battle to avoid software audits from major vendors—resulting in an astounding level of fines from these big providers. A full 45% of companies paid more than $1 million in audit finds over the last three years, the report found. The top vendors conducting audits are Microsoft (50%), IBM (37%) and SAP (32%).
Visibility of IT assets remains non-optimal: Understanding the lay of the land—clear visibility—is essential to managing costs and performance, but this all-important awareness is not yet perfect. Visibility into BYOL (Bring Your Own License) software is dismal, at a mere 27%. Only about half of organizations say they have visibility into their SaaS offerings. Not surprisingly, companies have better visibility into on-premise hardware and software, at 75%, and cloud instances of these assets, 63%.
Amid all the numbers, one core finding shines through from the Flexera report: Companies could benefit greatly from better resource management and improved systems to manage assets, from software cost to most appropriate subscription level.
Helping create this problem is the rapid pace of SaaS innovation, which generates a ceaseless stream of new tools and upgrades—and the rise of AI has only increased this. This breathless pace, however, only makes it more important that companies install consistent governance methods to track expensive assets.
