The Future Is SaaS Management – Why CIOs Should Act Now

Daniel Fink

27.08.2025

SaaS apps are powering today’s digital business—but they come with new challenges. From shadow IT and security risks to wasted spend, unmanaged SaaS can quickly spiral out of control. In this blog we talk about SaaS trends and some key findings from the latest 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SaaS Management Platforms.

While SaaS offers versatility and variety, too many applications without proper oversight lead to chaos: higher costs, increased risks and reduced control.

Our latest market research reveals a major opportunity. In 2024, enterprises spent around 250 billion US dollars on SaaS—but 53% of those apps went unused. That’s 107 billion dollars down the drain.

That’s where SaaS management platforms (SMPs) come in.

As per our understanding, the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SaaS Management Platforms helps IT, procurement and security leaders take back control—solving problems like SaaS overspending, contract chaos, lack of visibility and security risks. Particularly at present, as generative AI boosts SaaS expansion.

The report outlines the SaaS Management market space and how customers can identify suitable tools to discover, optimize, automate and secure the SaaS ecosystem.

We’re proud that the Magic Quadrant™ recognized USU for the second year in a row for its SaaS Management tool — one of just 17 vendors worldwide and the only one headquartered in Germany.

With USU, you get full transparency into unused licenses, costs, and users—plus a system that’s up and running in under an hour. Connect your tools to pull data from SSO, browsers and expenses. Automate onboarding and offboarding. Drive deep SaaS optimization.

We are just getting started.

In March 2025, we partnered with SMP provider saasmetrix to enhance our capabilities. This boosts automation, optimization and insights—making USU even more relevant for IT ops, compliance and security teams.

What we think You’ll Learn From the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SaaS Management Platforms

Why SMPs are gaining traction as SaaS spend and shadow IT grow
What key features matter most—like license optimization, discovery and security
How market leaders are standing out with AI insights and automation
Why the markets maturing fast, especially from ITAM and FinOps roots
Gartner® warns:” Through 2027, organizations that fail to attain centralized visibility and coordinate SaaS life cycles will overspend on SaaS by at least 25%, due to unused entitlements and unnecessary, overlapping tools.”
And by 2028, over 70% of organizations will centralize SaaS management using SMPs—up from less than 30% in 2025