Case Study
Flexera SaaS Manager optimizes Google G Suite licensing for a financial management enterprise
At a glance
A financial management services company needed to quantify the number of new Google G Suite licenses required across the enterprise.
The challenge
A well-known international financial management services company wanted to analyze the use of its Google G Suite licenses across the enterprise. The company anticipated adding approximately 200 new licenses in the coming months but needed more accurate usage information to determine the actual number needed. Since the company had recently switched from Box and standardized on G Suite for its file sharing and collaboration tool, it wasn’t clear how well the new G Suite tools had been adopted across the enterprise.
Flexera SaaS Manager was connected to the company’s G Suite instance to gather activity data for 60 days.
The results
Flexera SaaS Manager discovered the company had a total of 10,892 licensed G Suite accounts. Of the total, 2,791 were found to be inactive and could possibly be reclaimed to lower the overall G Suite license expense.
Flexera SaaS Manager Scanning
Inactive G Suite Accounts 
2,791 Out of a total 10,892 licensed G Suite accounts.
Possible Reclamation Amount 
$300+K Annually
Let's Dig Deeper
G Suite offers users a host of tools to share files and collaborate throughout an enterprise. Users can use the G Suite tools to create documents, store files securely and share with other users. To determine how well employees had adopted the G Suite tools, the company used Flexera SaaS Manager to capture actual usage data.
Unlike other SaaS management tools that piggyback on singlesign-on (SSO) tools to gather login data, Flexera’s SaaS Manager has a DirectConnect™ integration with G Suite to capture robust user activity within the application. In other words, specific activity data is captured each time a user edits a Google Doc, creates a Google Sheet, views a Google Slide presentation or performs any other activity within the suite of tools. The robust data helps to inform business decisions and optimize license usage.
Google G Suite Findings Total G Suite Accounts: 10,892
Total active accounts Accounts with activity in the past 0-30 days
74%
Total underutilized accounts Accounts with activity in the past 30-60 days
.6%
Total inactive accounts Accounts with no activity in SaaS
Manager recorded history (120 days)
25%
No New Licenses Needed
Flexera SaaS Manager discovered that within the previous 30 days, 74 percent of the 10,892 accounts had some type of activity, making them “active” accounts. Going back 60 days, another .6 percent of the accounts had some activity and were classified as “underutilized.
The surprise was that a full 25 percent of the G Suite accounts throughout the enterprise had no activity at all in the history recorded by Flexera SaaS Manager.
Now it’s important to note that G Suite itself stores activity for 60 days. Flexera SaaS Manager monitored activity for an additional 60 days, which means that for 120 days, more than 2,700 G Suite accounts had had not performed a tracked action. For a company that is standardized on G Suite apps, that adds up to a huge amount of waste.
G Suite Optimization Turns Out to Be Very Valuable
The financial management services company was also able to use Flexera SaaS Manager to isolate the 2,791 accounts and examine whether they could be reclaimed. The cost for each account is $12 per month, which adds up to a possible reclamation amount of more than $300,000 annually. However, since the company was anticipating the need for about 200 more licenses, some of the unused licenses would be reallocated to new users. With that in mind the company estimated it could save roughly $250,000 each year by optimizing its G Suite licenses.
