The Crisis Nobody Saw Coming
The diagram in the back of the sourcing playbook has always had an end stage. The step where you offboard a supplier. It's been there for decades, sitting between "Manage Vendor Performance" and "Lessons Learned."
Nobody looked at it.
Offboarding was the invisible step because it barely mattered. A vendor relationship ended. Access got turned off eventually. Data migrated at some point. No rush. The process existed in theory. It was understood but never really resourced.
Then something broke.
In 2024 and 2025, organizations finally looked at their software portfolios and realized they had lost control. Not gradually. Catastrophically.
The numbers sound abstract at first: large enterprises manage an average of 696 SaaS applications and spend $245.5 million annually on software. That's just the documented stuff.
But when you start looking at the real inventory—large enterprises routinely operate 561 to 812 applications, with hundreds of those being multiple instances, versions, and variations of the same systems. Add legacy infrastructure, custom-built internal tools, shadow IT applications nobody officially approved, and old versions running in parallel with new ones. One enterprise discovered 2,191 applications, many of which were no longer tracked.
That's not an outlier. That's increasingly the norm at enterprise scale.
The explosion didn't happen by design. Shadow IT took root. Point solutions accumulated. Multiple instances of the same systems got spun up to solve regional or departmental problems. Free trials never got cancelled. Executives bought "strategic" enterprise platforms that duplicated what was already in the stack. And 55 percent of enterprise apps are shadow IT—software employees use without IT's knowledge or approval.
When finance finally looked at the bill, the response wasn't deliberate optimization. It was panic.
The directive came down from every CIO's office in the same form: cut software spend. Consolidate. Eliminate the redundancy.
That's when procurement teams hit a wall they didn't see coming.
They can identify which 500, 1,000, or 1,500 systems the organization might be able to eliminate. They have the analysis. They know where the sprawl is. The diagnosis is clear.
But the cure?
Offboarding 1,000+ systems is not the same as offboarding 10. It is not even the same category of problem. And most organizations have no structure, no process, and nobody whose job is actually to do it.
This is the crisis that is about to hit every large organization. Not the recognition of the problem. The execution of the solution.
What is your current situation? Are you managing a vendor rationalization effort? How many systems are you looking at offboarding, and what is the biggest bottleneck you are hitting right now?