Collaboration tooling is the easiest place in the digital workplace to accumulate duplicate spend. A team buys Zoom, another standardizes on Teams, support lives in Slack, and an acquired unit brought Webex. Each was a reasonable choice in isolation. Together they are a stack of overlapping licenses paying three times for the same meeting, chat, and calling capability. A collaboration stack cost review puts a number on that overlap and a plan against it.
What a collaboration stack cost review covers
We inventory every collaboration and video tool you pay for, map its capabilities, and measure actual usage against licensed seats. The goal is to see where genuine need ends and duplication begins.
Capability overlap
Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Webex overlap heavily across meetings, chat, and calling. In most mid market stacks you already own a capable platform inside a bundle you pay for anyway, often Microsoft 365. Rationalizing onto what you already own is one of the most reliable savings in the whole digital workplace, a theme we explore across our collaboration and video cluster.
Seat level waste
Beyond duplicate platforms, individual tools carry inactive seats, oversized tiers, and add ons nobody uses. We right size each one, drawing on our license right sizing method, before deciding what to consolidate.
The consolidation path
We do not rip tools out on day one. We sequence a migration that respects how teams actually work, retire the redundant licenses at the right renewal moments, and protect adoption so the saving sticks. This is the core of our collaboration tool rationalization service.
Why independence matters here
Every collaboration vendor wants to be the survivor of your consolidation, and each will pitch accordingly. As an independent, buyer side advisor we have no stake in which platform wins. We take no vendor commission and are paid only by the buyer, so the recommendation follows your budget and your workflows, not a vendor's roadmap.
How it connects to the wider engagement
Collaboration is one slice of the stack. A cost review here almost always points to savings elsewhere, which is why this work feeds the bundled digital workplace cost optimization engagement. We capture the single vendor question you came in with, then show you the full stack picture behind it.
What you get
You leave with a clear map of overlap, a quantified savings estimate, and a sequenced consolidation plan tied to your renewal calendar. The duplicate spend becomes a decision rather than a mystery.