SoftWatch hunts VARs for licensing cost-cutting crusade

Vendor claims ditching Microsoft Office can save most business users 90 per cent on licence fees

An application analytics firm has landed in the UK channel, hoping to lure resellers are looking to win new customers by saving them heaps of cash on their licensing bills.

Israeli outfit SoftWatch – which was founded in 2009 – sells a real-time usage analytics tool through resellers which enables customers to see exactly how much they rely on certain software. The firm claims other products can track which applications have been opened by a user but insists that its offering is the only one that can accurately analyse real-time usage.

SoftWatch claims that most Microsoft Office enterprise customers do not use the suite enough to warrant their employers shelling out on the licence fees and that moving to Google Apps, for example, can save them 90 per cent on their bills. It also helps customers analyse usage of other software, such as Adobe's Creative Suite.

As the firm prepares to officially launch in the UK, SoftWatch unveiled its latest Microsoft Office usage survey which found that the average employee spends just 48 minutes using Office per day, which SoftWatch suggests is not worth the costly investment.

The survey analysed 150,000 global users' activities and the findings show that of the 48 minutes spent using Office, most is spent on Outlook, Word and Excel; but that PowerPoint was not being used at all by half the users.

Softwatch's co-chief executive Uri Arad told CRN that his company allows customers to make informed decisions on their licensing needs and insisted it is completely independent.

"We are not selling Google Apps," he said. "We want to uncover the blindness because decision makers don't really know what is happening. We show them the data and if they decide to move to Google Apps to optimise their licensing... it is their decision.

"In most cases they [move to] Google because the numbers show that moving to Google [makes sense] because people are not using their software so much; much less than they perceive before they see our analysis."

The firm already works with two Google Apps resellers in the UK – and 30 VARs worldwide – and is hoping to swell its ranks in the coming months.

Arad added that once resellers sign up and pay to work with SoftWatch, they can charge customers whatever they like for its offering.

"We partner with resellers and have an arrangement with them that they have to give us a specific [amount of] money to resell – we don't interfere [after that].

"If the reseller wants to sell it for a price, we don't care about that; if they want to give it away free because they believe it will enable them to sell Google Apps – and then make a lot of money – they do.

"We have our business model with resellers and we let them to do whatever they want in terms of licensing to their customers."