The Catalyst by Softchoice
A documentary-style podcast about how IT leaders tackle high-stakes transformations.
Each episode weaves together real voices, expert insights, and compelling narratives that reveal universal challenges and practical wisdom.
Season 7: "Small Teams, Big Dreams" explores the human stories behind IT transformations—from AI adoption experiments to burnout crises, from toxic job markets to infrastructure decisions that matter. These aren't polished case studies. These are authentic accounts from IT professionals navigating the same impossible gaps between expectations and resources that you face every day.
From Softchoice, a World Wide Technology company.
The Catalyst by Softchoice
The Save Money Episode: Foundation Over Flash
Everyone's chasing AI. Meanwhile, most organizations are wasting 25-30% of their software budget on tools nobody uses.
In this episode, we meet James Malek, Senior VP of IT Infrastructure at Lexitas, who inherited chaos—45 acquisitions in five years, no structured IT department, and a hodgepodge of contracts everywhere. Instead of chasing the next shiny thing, James took a different approach: foundation first.
What his team discovered when they finally got visibility into their software estate—including 300 employees using ChatGPT at a legal services company handling sensitive data—changed everything.
In this episode, you'll learn:
• Why software waste persists despite decades of awareness—and what actually fixes it
• How one company consolidated seven separate ShareFile contracts into one
• The shadow AI problem hiding in your organization right now
• Why you can't do it all yourself—and what to do instead
Featuring:
• James Malek, Senior VP of IT Infrastructure, Lexitas
• Elizabeth D'Amico, Manager, SAM Programs & Enablement, Softchoice
• Josh Brewer, Account Executive, Softchoice
The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.
So, hey, it's producer Tobin here. Uh, Heather, before we start today, I gotta tell you, we've gotten about three or four people in the past few weeks that think that you are ai. So I was wondering if you could just, what, yeah, I think you're doing such a good job that they think you're ai. I don't know if it's a compliment or what, but even like our colleagues when I'm on a call with them, they say, I didn't know that was Heather. I thought that was ai. And I don't, Philip, you're, you're here. Have you heard this before?
Speaker 2:I think I heard it once. I didn't know it was a purveying thing. I That's very funny.
Speaker 3:That's so funny. Here. Here's something that proves I'm not ai. If anyone was at the talent show two years ago, had Soft Choice headquarters in Toronto where I smashed my own face with a pie full of whipped cream on video, which I'm sure they can find somewhere. That is me. I did that and I'm here right now and I'm not ai. This is H hilarious. Okay, well if you enjoy listening to the Catalyst. I did when I was a seller at Softchoice and I listened to it as I was training for the Chicago Marathon, which there's also video proof of and photo proof. There's a lot of great episodes even before the time that I was part of being the host. So I, I really do encourage folks. My children enjoy teasing me and listening to the catalyst, repeating the words back that I say. Um, but I do encourage you to follow and to listen to the episodes and if you have something to share or maybe you wanna be in one of the episodes and bring a story forth and talk to us about it, I would really love to talk about that. So, yeah.
Speaker 4:To me, if you're just out chasing the technology and not really looking at your overall structure, your base, it's a bit of a house of cards. You're gonna put all your time and effort into chasing that new item, but you're never gonna have the foundation to support it and its growth. You're gonna risk potential security issues because as you're chasing the new technologies, you're not paying attention to some of the base fundamentals that you have.
Speaker 3:A house of cards. That's how James Malick describes what happens when it leaders chase the shiny new thing without getting the basics right. And right now there are a lot of shiny things to chase. Gartner predicts organizations will spend one and a half trillion dollars on AI this year. Meanwhile, MIT researchers found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots shows zero impact on the bottom line. But here's the thing nobody wants to talk about. Before the AI spending wave even hit, most companies were already wasting a quarter of their software budget on stuff nobody uses. So what happens when someone decides. To stop chasing and start building. From Softchoice, a worldwide technology company. This is the catalyst. I'm Heather Haskin. This season, we're doing things a bit differently. We're making audio documentaries, real stories from the front lines of it, exploring lunges of small teams chasing big drums. Today's episode, why the most important thing you can do might be the thing. No one's watching. We're calling it the save Money episode. Act one. The problem nobody wants to fix. There is a statistic that floats around the IT world and it never seems to change. According to Flex's 2025 state of IT asset management report organizations waste somewhere between 25 and 30% of their software spend every year. Elizabeth Dko leads software asset management programs at Softchoice.
Speaker 5:That 30 to 50% of waste number is widespread across all industries, and this is because many organizations still look to the tool to solve the software asset management problem. The real problem is deeper waste isn't just about uncovering data. It's that most assessments that are done even in house are point in time while buying and deploying software is that much easier now. So data goes stale quickly, and then the sprawl just returns if at ever. Goes away to begin with.
Speaker 3:The sprawl just returns and the scale is staggering.
Speaker 5:A customer can have between 300 and a thousand applications in their environment, depending on their size and the industry. Keeping up with that, especially if they don't have a dedicated SAM team is almost insurmountable. Comfortable.
Speaker 3:300 to a thousand applications and most mid-market companies don't have a dedicated team to manage them. Josh Brewer is an account executive at Softchoice. He spent eight years working with these teams.
Speaker 6:If you think about this from a lens of a company that more and more that you don't have big IT teams, you don't have a person to manage software, you might not have a procurement team, you might have one director of IT, and they have to do everything. Security, infrastructure, migrations, acquisitions, and what gets to the bottom of the pile? Contract management. What always creeps up to bite these companies in the butt is it's contract management, and it's not fun. It's tedious. It's always been very manual process.
Speaker 3:Contract management, the thing that always bites you and yet always falls to the bottom of the pile, and it's getting worse.
Speaker 6:This isn't new, it's just gone exponentially more complicated because of everything that it takes to run an organization. Everything is driven by technology now, and there are solutions for anything and everything for now with gen AI solutions too. It's gotten even more complex and even more dangerous, um, with a proliferation of sas. That has just really taken things up another level, because everybody has moved to a SaaS based model. So subscriptions are all over the place, and people are used to consuming subscriptions now too. They're used to the Netflix, they're used to one click buy on Amazon. And that's what has really just exploded this shadow it and now shadow AI sprawl within all of our customers environments,
Speaker 3:shadow it, shadow ai, the one click buy mentality we've all gotten used to at home has migrated into the workplace. So if everyone knows this is a problem, why doesn't it get fixed? Elizabeth has a theory.
Speaker 5:I speak to two types of customers. Mainly there's the mindset of the tenured leader who's really just worried that doing an assessment or peeking under the hood, so to speak, is gonna get them in trouble. But that's really just a perception. In the thousands of conversations that we've had with customers, these leaders end up using our expertise to solve problems using that roadmap to become the hero. Then there's the new leader who comes in. Maybe there was a change in leadership, um, and it's a new role and there's no visibility, so they're mandated to do something that they simply cannot see to solve the problem.
Speaker 3:Two types of IT leaders, the one who's afraid to look because of what they might find, and the one who's told to cut costs but can't see what they're working with.
Speaker 5:People will avoid doing any assessments that will provide visibility because they are scared that their leadership is going to think they did something wrong. When waste or lack of optimization is uncovered
Speaker 3:fear of looking bad, it's human nature. But what if someone decided to look anyway? Act two. Foundation first. Lexitas is a legal services company, court reporting litigation support, medical records, the kind of work that handles sensitive information every single day. Five years ago, the company was growing fast through acquisitions,
Speaker 4:so over the last five years, we've acquired approximately 45 companies to broaden our base of the organization across all the different business units that we have,
Speaker 3:45 acquisitions in five years. At one point they were buying a new company every six weeks. When James Malick joined as senior VP of IT infrastructure, he walked into chaos
Speaker 4:five years ago. When I got hired, we did not really have much of an IT department. We were a group of companies that had been acquired and brought together to start forming a larger organization, and there was no structured it. There was no real base to start with.
Speaker 3:Josh Brewer has worked with James for nearly eight years. First at a previous company. Now at Lexitas.
Speaker 6:What you usually find in that SMB to lower mid-market space, uh, companies grow and they just move. They don't think about consolidation. They don't think about the basics. They just need to scale and. Money. And then you bring in folks like James and their team that had experience working in an enterprise organization with processes and consolidation and a consolidated tech stack. And all of a sudden they inherit this whole hodgepodge of contracts everywhere, technology everywhere. Um, on top of that, you're doing, you know, a couple of acquisitions every single month. And then that just continues to make it even more complex. It's like whack-a-mole. You get one thing done and then you got 10 more things thrown on your plate,
Speaker 3:whack-a-mole, and every acquired company brought its own mess.
Speaker 4:Being driven by acquisitions causes a lot of chaos. Some companies we acquire will have great controls, great applications. Knowledge of what they have. The other side of it, we might get a smaller company that they have no idea what they have. Everybody's done their own thing, and so that person may have done all the IT related stuff for everything, and they may not even be coming over with the acquisition.
Speaker 3:Now, a lot of IT leaders in this situation might think we need to innovate our way out of this. A big digital transformation, an AI pilot, something that looks good on a quarterly report. James had a different instinct.
Speaker 4:Coming from a technical background, not just a business background, I tend to want to dig into the details on the infrastructure, the actual plans, the processes. New technology is great and a lot of people like to jump in head first, but I tend to take it a little bit more slow, a little bit more methodical with it. We typically wouldn't even start looking at the new flashy stuff until we had our base covered, our security in and on point, wherever it needed to be before we even jumped into anything like that.
Speaker 3:Foundation first, even when everyone else is chasing ai.
Speaker 4:AI is a great example of this. Like, Hey everybody, we need ai. We need ai. Okay, well, what do you really need? Ai? Do you need just a tool for searching? Do you need a genix? So I, I like to take it and really break it down and look where we're going before we just, you know, rush into something.
Speaker 3:Part of building that foundation meant knowing what was actually happening inside the organization. In 2024, James and his team adopted Softchoice Sam Plus platform, a software asset management tool. That could finally give them visibility. What they found surprised them.
Speaker 4:That initial value we saw was just recognizing how many people were out there using free online tools that. Weren't supposed to be in our environment and weren't things that you could easily just block on. Web filtering things like the amount of people using products like Grammarly and their free versions, which all these types of platforms can pose a security risk on their AI side. If you're not managing it because they're training their open models,
Speaker 3:but it wasn't just Grammarly.
Speaker 4:We have 300 people using chat GPT, but we also have co-pilot. Why are they using chat GPT? Do we need to restrict it? Do we just need to train our staff that, hey. Chat, GPT is when you're using it free, you're training models, you're not paying for it. You could be putting potential PII out there,
Speaker 3:300 people using chat, GPT at a legal services company that handles sensitive legal and medical information every day.
Speaker 4:Lots of folks don't realize or understand the technical side of training a model. So when you're in a company that has a lot of sensitive information, a legal world, medical world, those type, it's real easy to make a mistake. So we have to be extra vigilant on that and that's why we maintain the, the SAM Plus system
Speaker 3:and the shadow AI wasn't the only thing hiding, Josh says the file sharing situation was even messier.
Speaker 6:The other thing I think we found, what was more surprising was how proliferate it was, was the file share side of the house. They were running a box and Dropbox and share file and all this stuff, share file. I think they had seven different renewal dates, seven different contracts just for that one partner and now that's all consolidated.
Speaker 3:Seven different share file contracts, seven renewal dates, all for the same tool. That's what happens when acquisitions pile up and nobody's watching, but finding the waste is only half the battle. The real value James says is ongoing visibility, not just a onetime audit.
Speaker 4:I would say one of the reason you don't get a lot of full coverage or full usage out of the SaaS apps that you do own is simply because. Sometimes they only need it for a short period of time. Traditionally, it is not good about going in and checking and say, Hey, do you still need this? You've only, you used it for the first month, but you no longer seem to use it. We typically only look at that annually, but through tools like Sand Plus, you can view them on an ongoing basis and get their, their statistics,
Speaker 3:ongoing visibility, not just a snapshot, but a continuous view of what's actually being used. And when they found the Shadow AI problem, they didn't just flag it, they fixed it.
Speaker 4:We've spent a lot of time and effort doing internal training and sessions on how to use other products that we have. We have internal teams that will talk to them about, Hey, we have a competing product already. You need to use this. These are our security controls. These are our security policies, our AI policy, and that seems to work good.
Speaker 3:Elizabeth D'Amico says, James's approach building the foundation before chasing innovation is exactly the mindset that separates companies that thrive from companies that struggle.
Speaker 5:The right mindset is what makes businesses more likely to succeed. In general and specifically around their software asset management practice. James said it perfectly. It's not about jumping into new tech. No amount of flashy tools are going to help if the base isn't solid. Companies that treat Sam like a strategic discipline rather than an afterthought that they're running around for. Those are the ones that free up budget and real time for innovation.
Speaker 3:Act three, building the base. So what happens when you don't
Speaker 5:build the foundation? Elizabeth has seen it firsthand. I have unfortunately seen many customers lose access to business critical applications and tools firsthand due to missed renewals calling us in a panic, and understandably so because their business has ground to a stop. It has cost them millions of dollars. Um, another example of how true it is that the House of Cards will fall if the foundation isn't strong. One of our customers had a security breach from a self-serve security software where an employee decided that they really wanted to use this security tool on their laptop, and then they didn't update it. And what happened was it left a vulnerability open. If their IT teams had known about that, they either would've removed it or pushed out an update. So things like this can very quickly bring down that house of cards. If there is no real foundation
Speaker 3:breaches, drained budgets, the house of cards doesn't just wobble, it collapses. But building a strong foundation isn't complicated. Elizabeth says it comes down to a few basics.
Speaker 5:A strong SAM practice is about governance, foundational work, and consistency. So what does that actually mean? It means removing decentralized and siloed procurement and giving back accountability to it. Finance, procurement from that user who has gone out and self-serve.
Speaker 3:Governance, consistency. Accountability, not flashy words, but when you're dealing with hundreds of applications and a lean team, they're the words that matter for James and his team at lexitas. That foundation has changed everything. Five years in the chaos he inherited has become something else entirely
Speaker 4:bringing in a stable and rapid deployed IT department. That was the biggest complaint this company had was there was no way to get any sort of resolution on anything. We brought in everything we needed to and, and now we have a great functioning IT department. We're no longer a complaint point. We're a positive to the business
Speaker 3:from complaint point to positive, from chaos to foundation. It didn't happen by chasing the flashy thing. It happened by doing the work nobody was watching. Josh Brewer says The lesson for other IT leaders is simpler than it sounds.
Speaker 6:The first thing is identifying that you can't do it all yourself. It is impossible. You will fail 100% of the time every single time. There's too much for a, even, even a team to handle. Of these things. So first off, if you identify that and then say, what are my core competencies? What am I paid to do at this company? And it's probably not managing renewals in a spreadsheet, right? It's probably not calling up a hundred different vendors to get co-term quotes. You're probably paid to do innovative and digital transformation activities or secure your company. So offload that work right to a partner.
Speaker 3:You can't do it all yourself. And the irony is getting help with the foundational work is what actually frees you up to innovate. Josh says the partnership isn't about selling more software. Sometimes it's the opposite.
Speaker 6:We might be losing money by making recommendations to them around right sizing, but customers appreciate that when I come in there and say, Hey, I can cut your spend with us by. 30% like we did with their Azure spend a couple of years ago, right? That might hit our pocketbook, but that's the right thing to do by the customer.
Speaker 3:Cut your spend with us by 30%. That's not the pitch you usually hear from a vendor. When I asked James about his relationship with Softchoice, he didn't talk about software. He talked about partnership.
Speaker 4:Kudos to our account team. They, they are phenomenal. When you're a person who likes to deal with the relationship side of it, not just someone who can send a quote over, but someone who is actually a partner with you. There's been no better than our current account team of Softchoice,
Speaker 3:not a vendor, a partner. That's the thing about foundation work. It's not glamorous. It doesn't make headlines, but when the house of cards around you starts to wobble, when the AI spending craze burns through budgets, when the shadow IT chickens come to roost, the organizations that build on solid ground will be the ones still standing. Foundation work is invisible when it. Done right. Nobody notices the renewals that didn't get missed, the security breach that didn't happen. The budget, that didn't spiral, but James Malick noticed something else. His IT department went from being a complaint point to being a positive from chaos to credibility. That's what happens when you build the base. If you are an IT leader, listening to this and thinking, I know we have ways hiding somewhere, but I don't have the bandwidth to find it. You are not alone. And you don't have to do it yourself. Softchoice has spent more than 35 years helping organizations get visibility into their software estate and turn that data into decisions. Their Samus platform can help you see what's really happening, so you can stop playing whack-a-Mole and start building a foundation that holds. Visit softchoice.com to learn more. The Catalyst was reported and produced by Tobin Dalrimple and the team at Pilgrim. Content Editing by Ryan Clark With support from Philippe Dimas, Joseph Byer, and the marketing team at Softchoice. Special thanks to James Malik, Elizabeth Dko and Josh Brewer for sharing their expertise and stories.