Names and identifying details are withheld. This is a composite built from real engagements, used to illustrate a recurring situation and a defensible approach. Savings are shown as ranges rather than exact figures.
Situation
The client was a professional services firm of roughly 900 employees across several offices. It had adopted Zoom early for external client meetings and webinars. Later, as it consolidated its productivity stack on Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams arrived bundled with the licences the firm already paid for. Teams was rolled out for internal collaboration and chat, and over time staff began using it for meetings too. Zoom stayed in place because it had always been there and nobody owned the decision to review it.
The result was two meeting platforms running in parallel, each with its own cost, its own administration, and its own renewal. Leadership sensed there was duplication but had no clear picture of how much Zoom usage actually remained now that Teams covered most of the need.
The overspend found
The assessment reconciled Zoom entitlements against actual usage. A large share of paid Zoom hosts showed little or no recent activity, because their meetings had migrated to Teams. The firm was paying for a near full deployment of Zoom while the genuine, active need had shrunk to a small group running specific external webinars and a few client facing workflows.
In other words, the firm was buying meeting capability twice. Teams was already paid for inside its Microsoft 365 licences. Zoom was an additional line covering a need that, for most users, no longer existed. The duplicated spend was the single largest recoverable item in the firm's collaboration budget.
How this firm eliminates Zoom after standardising on Teams
The approach was deliberate rather than abrupt, because the goal was to remove cost without disrupting the genuine remaining users. First, we confirmed which workflows truly depended on Zoom, separating habit from need. Webinar capability and a handful of client facing use cases were the only real dependencies. Second, we validated that Teams covered everything else, which it did for internal meetings and the bulk of external calls. Third, we built a short migration plan for the remaining Zoom users, moving them to Teams where it fit and retaining only a minimal Zoom footprint where a specific feature was genuinely required.
We timed the change to the Zoom renewal so the firm stopped paying for entitlements it had already retired, rather than waiting out a term on tools nobody used. We treated the contract mechanics as commercial advisory and recommended the firm's own counsel confirm the renewal and notice terms before acting.
Outcome
The firm eliminated the large majority of its Zoom spend, retaining only a small, justified footprint for the specific external use cases that needed it. The recoverable saving on the collaboration line was in the range of 20 to 30 percent, achieved with no loss of capability for staff, who simply used the Teams meetings already paid for. Administration also simplified, with one primary meeting platform to manage rather than two.
Just as important, the firm assigned an owner to its collaboration tools and added the meeting platforms to a renewal calendar, so the duplication could not quietly rebuild. The one time saving became a governed line rather than a number that would erode.
Lessons for buyers
The core lesson is simple: when you standardise on a platform you already own, review the tools it replaces and retire the duplication deliberately. Capability bundled into Microsoft 365, such as Teams, frequently overlaps a standalone product you keep paying for out of habit. Reviewed tool by tool, both look justified. Reviewed together, the duplication is obvious.
The second lesson is to separate habit from need before cutting. A small group usually has a genuine dependency, and protecting them is what makes the larger saving safe to take. The third is to time changes to renewals and to assign an owner afterwards, so the saving holds. This is exactly the work covered by our collaboration tool rationalization service, the wider collaboration and video pillar, and the bundled digital workplace cost optimization pillar that looks across the whole stack for this pattern.