Enterprises Say Vendor-Driven Changes Consume 28% of Software Budgets

What changed

Enterprises say an average 28% of their software budgets now goes to vendor-driven upgrades, migrations and licensing changes they would not have chosen themselves. In a survey of 2,018 senior IT decision-makers in the US and UK, 95% said they had paid for at least one such change in the past three years; the latest cost an average $12.87 million.

Why it matters

This is not just a licensing headache. It can turn working technology into a forced replacement programme.

Nine in 10 respondents said their organisations retired working hardware to meet software support deadlines, leaving an average 1.65 years of useful life behind. Experienced engineers were regularly pulled from other projects by 84% of respondents. That helps explain why 90% said vendor-driven costs contributed to delayed, paused or cancelled AI or data projects.

Our read: the hidden cost is not the upgrade invoice. It is the work that never gets done while teams keep a vendor’s roadmap alive.

The imbalance is clear. Seventy-six percent said they had little negotiating leverage with major software vendors. That makes an unwanted change a practical requirement when refusing could mean losing support for systems the business already depends on.

The survey was commissioned by Origina, which sells independent software support, so its commercial interest matters when weighing the findings. Even so, the pressure described here is concrete: money, hardware life and engineering capacity are being redirected from internal priorities.

Nine in 10 respondents backed legislation giving enterprise software customers protections comparable to those for long-term residential tenants. Eighty-two percent supported maintenance requirements similar to EU hardware repairability rules. The argument is moving beyond procurement departments: software support is becoming a question of how much control businesses retain over technology they have already bought.