A colleague pointed me the blog of Ray Wang of Forrester Research, at http://blog.softwareinsider.org/ where his post for March 24th provides some guidance for organizations looking to squeeze costs out of their operations wherever possible.

The notes make absolute sense, but they point to the need to understand application usage, not just where it is installed. Software usage measurement has long been regarded as non-essential, something of a luxury, but I think this perception is changing rapidly in many organizations that are determined to cut out waste from their IT.