Are you feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of tools your company uses every day? Over time, businesses have piled on apps for project management, supplier management and day-to-day operations, creating a fragmented tech stack with disconnected systems and data silos. This leads to rising costs, frustration, and inefficiencies, making it harder to achieve your goals for bottom-line impact.
If your company is using 200+ apps, you’re not alone. A 2023 Productiv survey showed that companies with fewer than 500 employees use around 253 apps, those with up to 1,000 employees use 335 apps, and large enterprises manage 473 apps. While each solution might be great on its own, together they can create a mess of redundancy and inefficiency. Rationalizing your tech stack isn’t just about simplifying things—it’s a strategic move that can make your organization more efficient, save money, and better align with your business goals.
Challenges of an Overloaded Tech Stack
New tools often get added to solve immediate problems without considering how they fit into the bigger picture. It’s easy to sign up for a new app when a team needs a quick fix, but over time, these disconnected solutions pile up, producing a complex, and hard-to-manage tech stack with significant challenges:
- Budget Overruns: Multiple software subscriptions and licenses can quickly add up; a CloudEagle survey reported that, on average, companies spend between $1,000 and $3,500 per employee annually on SaaS applications.
- Security Vulnerabilities: Each additional application is a potential entry point for cyber threats. Managing security across numerous platforms increases the risk of data breaches and corresponding reputational and financial repercussions.
- Productivity Loss: Juggling multiple tools can lead to inefficiencies. Employees may waste valuable time switching between applications—11 or more hours per week—managing multiple logins and manually transferring data between systems.
- Data Silos: Information spread across disconnected systems can slow down decision-making. Without integration, it’s hard to get a clear picture of overall operations.
The solution isn’t to keep adding more tools, it’s to consolidate and simplify.
Why You Need to Consolidate Your Tech Stack
An overloaded tech stack is costing you time, money, and efficiency. When tools don’t work together, you face delays, errors, and missed opportunities. Consolidation helps you streamline operations and get more value from the tools you actually use.
1. Cut Costs by Eliminating Redundant Tools
Every tool comes with a price—including licensing fees, maintenance costs, support fees and training expenses. And when you have overlapping tools doing similar things, you’re essentially paying twice for the same outcome. According to a Gartner report, global end-user spending on public cloud services, including SaaS, is expected to reach $723.4 billion in 2025. That’s a massive chunk of the budget going toward software. Cutting out redundancy means you’re not wasting money on tools that aren’t adding value.
2. Work Faster with an Integrated Tech Stack
When your tech stack is overloaded, it creates friction. Employees waste time switching between apps, trying to find data, or manually entering information into different systems. Streamlining your tech stack helps reduce this friction and improve efficiency. driving better business outcomes.
3. Strengthen Security and Improve Compliance
If every team picks their own tools without oversight, it creates confusion and security risks. Unapproved tools make it harder to apply consistent security rules and meet compliance requirements. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of employees will create or modify tech outside IT’s control—up from 41% in 2022. Consolidating tools means you can centralize access control, apply consistent security policies, and keep your data safe.
4. Make AI Work for You
AI works best when it has clean, connected data. If your data is spread across different systems, it’s harder for AI to give you accurate insights. Grand View Research pegged the global AI market at an estimated $197 billion in 2023, projecting it to grow to $1.81 trillion by 2030. To get the most from AI, you need a simple, connected tech stack. When your data is organized and easy to access, AI can help you automate tasks, find patterns, and make smarter decisions.
According to Isaac Sacolick, President of StarCIO, "2025 will be a year when CIOs must elevate their organizations above the AI hype, demonstrate AI’s business value, convert productivity improvements into cost savings, and identify where AI can drive growth opportunities."
A simplified tech stack enables AI to automate tasks, uncover patterns, and improve decision-making.
Your Must-have Tech Stack Consolidation Checklist
So how do you get from chaos to control? Here’s a step-by-step checklist to help you clean up your tech stack and make things run smoother:
1. Start with an App Audit
Before you can consolidate, you need to know what you’re working with:
- List Your Tools: Start by creating a comprehensive list of all applications currently in use within your organization, from IT-managed platforms to department-specific or shadow IT tools.
- Check Usage: Evaluate the frequency and extent of use for each application. Determine which applications are critical to daily operations and which ones see minimal activity.
- Eliminate Overlap: Identify tools that perform similar tasks. Companies often have overlapping functionalities among different applications, increasing both cost and complexity.
- Cost Assessment: Analyze the cost associated with each application, including licensing fees, maintenance, support, and any other hidden costs.
2. Align Your Tech with Business Goals
With your app audit in hand, focus on aligning your tools with your business goals:
- Objective Matching: Ensure each application supports a specific business goal. Ask yourself: does this tool still help us achieve our strategic objectives? If not, it's time to reevaluate its place in your stack.
- Stakeholder Feedback: Gather input from the teams that use each application. Stakeholders can provide valuable insights into the actual usefulness of tools and suggest alternatives or improvements that better fit their workflows.
3. Clean Up Your Data Stack
Your data is one of your most valuable assets and ensuring it’s well-managed should be a top priority during consolidation:
- Data Flow Mapping: Map out how data moves through your current systems to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
- Data Redundancy Check: Identify and eliminate duplicate data storage across platforms.
- Tool Efficiency: Evaluate the efficiency of your data processing tools and platforms. Ensure they can handle your current and future data needs.
- Integration Review: Review how well your data flows between different data systems and applications.
4. Get SaaS Sprawl Under Control
According to Quickbase’s survey, 62% of IT professionals report that balancing costs for upgrades and maintenance is a significant challenge—often exacerbated by SaaS sprawl, where different departments adopt tools independently without centralized oversight. Here's how to address it:
- Centralized Management: Implement a centralized system to monitor and manage the usage of all SaaS applications.
- Access Control: Regularly review user access to prevent unauthorized usage, improve data security, and avoid unnecessary licensing costs.
- Contract Review: Regularly review SaaS contracts to ensure they meet current needs. Negotiate better terms where possible to ensure you’re getting the best value and services for your current needs.
5. Build Stronger Vendor Relationships
Consolidating your vendors is a crucial part of streamlining your tech stack:
- Vendor Assessment: Evaluate your current vendors based on their performance, reliability, and support. Identify the vendors who will be the best partners for your business.
- Contract Consolidation: Reduce the number of vendors by consolidating services where possible. This leads to more straightforward contract management and often better pricing.
- Strategic Partnerships: Focus on building long-term partnerships with key vendors. Strong partnerships can lead to better alignment and enhanced support for your organization.
6. Work Smarter with AI-Powered Workflows
A unified platform does more than just cut costs—it enhances your ability to innovate:
- Platform Evaluation: Assess how well your tech stack meets the specific needs of your industry.
- AI Readiness: Ensure that your tech stack is prepared for AI integration by consolidating and connecting data across platforms. With clean, connected data, AI can offer more meaningful insights, enabling smarter decisions across the board.
- Gray Work Elimination: Implement systems that reduce inefficiencies and manual data handling, minimizing Gray Work.
- Custom Solutions: Leverage AI-powered platforms like Quickbase to rapidly build custom applications that match your exact needs, without adding complexity to the tech stack.
7. Keep Your Tech Stack on Track
Set yourself up for success with a detailed roadmap for consolidation and monitoring of your tech stack:
- Action Plan: Develop a clear action plan for tech stack rationalization. This plan should outline the required steps, timelines, resources, and responsibilities.
- Progress Tracking: Measure progress and impact with KPIs.
- Continuous Review: Establish a schedule to regularly reassess and optimize your tech stack. This is essential for maintaining alignment with evolving business goals and technological advancements.
Use this checklist to track your progress and see where you stand. Let Quickbase help you consolidate the rest and simplify your tech stack for good.
Consolidation Starts with Quickbase
As you work through this checklist, consider how Quickbase can help you simplify your technology landscape combining different tools and business processes into one easy-to-use platform. Instead of managing multiple CRMs, project trackers, and scattered systems, Quickbase lets you bring everything together in a secure and flexible platform that saves money and improves efficiency.
- CRM replacement: Replace multiple customer management tools with one solution.
- Project management: Streamline project tracking and execution with automated workflows.
- Data integration: Eliminate data silos and create a single source of truth.
- Security and compliance: Keep data safe with clear access controls and consistent security rules.
Quickbase gives you complete visibility and control over your tools and data, helping you adjust quickly to business needs while keeping things secure and organized.
Choosing the Right Solution for Your Needs
At the end of the day, consolidating your tech stack isn’t just a budget-friendly move; it’s a strategic play. With a platform like Quickbase, you can streamline operations, improve data management, and customize solutions to meet the specific needs of your business. Yes, consolidation takes some planning, but the payoff—whether it's cost reduction, increased efficiency, or unlocking the power of AI—is well worth the effort.
Ready to simplify your tech stack and keep your IT budget on track? Request a free trial of Quickbase today!
