SaaS Management

  • 6 min read

How to Optimize Your Zoom Licenses with Zluri?

Rohit Rao

10th July, 2022

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With trending SaaS adoption, employees don't think twice while signing up for software applications. Often this leads to SaaS wastage, and this could be happening with your Zoom licenses too. 

The Zoom cloud video conferencing is the most versatile and useful web conferencing application. It is user-friendly and relatively affordable; this makes it a commonly used application in many organizations. When there are multiple users for Zoom across an organization, its license management can be challenging.

Poor visibility into the Zoom estate can lead to difficulty in managing users, Subscriptions, and costs effectively. For instance, when an employee leaves the organization, these subscriptions are often overlooked and abandoned, resulting in the purchase of new ones unnecessarily.

With accurate visibility of the user activities and integration with the app, IT admins can easily discover unused subscriptions or abandoned apps.

Zoom has four pricing plans. The basic plan, which is suitable for personal meetings and can host up to 100 participants, is free. The Pro plan of Zoom includes everything in the basic plan, unlimited meeting duration for all meeting sizes, user management, admin feature control, and more, and costs $14.99/month/host.

The Business plan is the third one, ideal for small and medium-scale businesses and costs $19.99/month/host. While The last plan, suitable for large-scale businesses, caters to a minimum of 100 hosts and has business plan features along with more features like unlimited cloud storage, a dedicated customer success manager, and more for $19.99/month/host.

Even though the amount of a single subscription for Pro and above plans of Zoom seems affordable, paying the amount for a large number of unused zoom subscriptions results in budget wastage. 

There is a way to avoid paying more for the SaaS license and apps you are currently using. Even while paying the prices for Zoom, you can pay the same or less total amount as you are paying now by simply optimizing the app licenses. 

There are chances that your current SaaS landscape is unoptimized. Poor SaaS management practices result in redundant apps and unused licenses, leaving you vulnerable to paying more than required. This also causes compliance and security risks.

Optimizing Zoom License with Zluri

By using a SaaS management platform like Zluri, you can solve the challenges that are caused due to overloaded SaaS apps in your SaaS landscape. With the detailed data and stats about all the applications and vendors, you can make your company secure and compliant while automating many of the tasks, making it easy for IT teams.

Optimize Zoom license using the DUAAS framework

Zluri has developed the DUAAS framework to help companies prevent SaaS wastage, optimize existing SaaS expenses and save huge in the organization's overall budget. The full form of DUAAS is Duplicate apps, Unused licenses, Autorenewal of subscriptions, Abandoned apps, and Suitable licenses. 

Termination of duplicate apps

Employees and departments tend to buy applications independently as it just takes a few mins to sign up for SaaS apps. Sometimes the employees end up buying applications with the same use case or functionality as an existing app. This leads to app duplication, and you may end up paying for similar apps that perform the same functions.

For example, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex, etc.

Zluri has a robust and versatile SaaS discovery engine that finds applications with overlapping functionality in your SaaS landscape. It gives you departments and business until-level applications usage insights which help to decide whether to keep an app or discard it.

Right-sizing of unused licenses

It is common for companies to purchase licenses in bulk by forecasting their demands. If the forecasted demands are not met, the company ends up paying for unused licenses. This results in paying more than the budget. 

Zluri helps you find out the number of licenses that are left unused or unattended. You can then easily eliminate the ones which are not required and purchase new licenses when there is a necessity.

Automatic renewal alerts

IT contracts normally have an auto-renewal clause. After giving your credit card information, the vendor goes on to renew the application automatically according to the SaaS agreements. 

Sometimes, employees sign up for free trials on the corporate card and forget to cancel the license once it's over; the vendor then renews the license, automatically deducting the company's money.

Zluri provides a renewal calendar that helps you organize and plan for your renewals and alerts. It gives you a reminder way before the renewal date so you have enough time to decide whether you want to renew the license or discard the applications.

Eliminate the abandoned licenses

Most businesses have some procedures for SaaS buying, but there is no proper governance around its usage and termination after buying these apps. These software apps are never terminated; it leads to exposing your organization to compliance and security risks. 

Zluri helps you verify that all their SaaS apps have been terminated when an employee leaves the organization or shifts to another department. This will help you secure your data and also save money wasted on unused licenses.

Zluri collects software usage data and tracks the licenses that have been abandoned or unused. You can also deprovision the applications from Zluri's dashboard while offboarding employees.

Downgrading licenses to suitable tier

Organizations often overestimate their needs and purchase the topmost tier SaaS vendors offer. Sometimes after buying the top tier, all the features which are required are available in a lower-tier plan. Hence the extra features are mere waste of money.

Zluri helps to point out the least used applications that help you understand and decide the app usage patterns in the department, teams, groups, etc. You can then sign up only for the plan which suits your needs.

Zluri’s Zoom integration

Zluri's direct integration with Zoom helps to discover, manage and optimize Zoom usage in your organization. You can easily track which users hold Zoom licenses and how frequently they use Zoom. You can also know which features of Zoom the users are using. 

You can get detailed usage and engagement metrics of each user of Zoom in your organization. Zluri even lets you manage license ownership and provision Zoom accounts for employees.

With direct integration, Zluri will help you identify inactive users and unused licenses to save cost and secure your application stack.

Zluri provides the license count.

When viewing the Zoom app on the Zluri dashboard, you can see the total cost of the application, the number of users, and the number of licenses provided. The application module in Zluri lets you know the active user count, spend (YTD), and usage of Zoom or any other SaaS applications running in the organization.

When you click on the application Zoom, you get all details about it. The details include users, number of licenses, app insights, recommendations, security, and compliance. You can even find the active users out of the total number of users (licenses purchased).

This information helps resource leaders like software asset managers to understand the total deployment. Zluri also allows one to see each user's license type and specific utilization metrics. This provides helpful analysis to reduce license waste due to underutilization.

Zluri shows license users.

The user module in Zluri displays the employees, groups, services, and external users using Zoom or any other SaaS application in your organization.

You can track the activity of the users on your platform. Zluri maps users from their email ids that are collected with Google Workspace integration.

Zluri helps to find the users who are not employees of the organization but are added to different platforms or software for collaboration. They can either be clients, vendors or freelancers.

With this information, you can terminate the licenses when a project is over or when you want to end a contract with a vendor. The Zoom application detail page makes it easy to identify who utilizes free or paid Zoom subscriptions just by one glance at the dashboard.

Zluri provides details about licenses and contracts

The licenses module in Zluri provides the quality and cost of Zoom licenses. The subscription section gives information about the next renewal date of the Zoom license, along with the payment methods.

The contract section in the licenses module of Zluri displays the contract's end date and the cost to be paid. All these details are very valuable for the cost optimization of the Zoom application or any other SaaS application in your SaaS ecosystem. 

These details will help you to plan and decide your negotiation with a new contract. You can even terminate the application or decide to provision the application to more employees who need it.

Downgrade Zoom license using Zluri’s license workflow

As mentioned above, Zluri provided insights and details about licenses, contracts, users, and user activities. This information helps license management stakeholders to downgrade from a Pro plan user to a Basic plan user when necessary.

To enable this process, Zluri's integration features a Zoom-specific license management workflow that gets several steps into a cohesive, intuitive process, making it easy to use the benefits of the reduced license cost.

You can renew all underutilized Zoom users that could waste a Pro Zoom license and be downgraded to a Basic Zoom plan.

Post pandemic Zoom has become essential for remote working and distributed teams as more users rely on Zoom and other video conference tools to effectively work while outside the office; it has become more imperative to measure the utilization and make informed decisions on the right size licenses to meet user requirements.

Zluri is a comprehensive SaaS management platform for all organizations. You can recover from the repercussions that are caused due to poor SaaS management at your organization with the help of Zluri.

You can make your company secure and compliant while automating many of the tasks with detailed stats about all the apps and vendors. Zluri helps you optimize your SaaS applications’ licenses effortlessly. Book a Demo

About the author

Rohit Rao

Rohit works in the Community and Marketing Team of Zluri and is a strong advocate of community led growth.