What changed
Large companies are spending an average of 28% of their software budgets on upgrades, migrations and licensing changes they did not want. A survey of 2,018 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers found that 95% had approved a vendor-driven change they believed would reduce performance, reliability or business value in the past three years; 53% had done so more than once.
Why it matters
This is software lock-in showing up as a budget line.
Three-quarters of respondents said they have little real leverage in negotiations. Four in five said leaving a major vendor would cause significant disruption. When refusing an upgrade risks losing support for systems the business depends on, “yes” becomes less a choice than a form of insurance.
The cost does not stop at licensing. Respondents said unwanted changes drew funding away from innovation, human resources, security and customer-facing investment. Liberty Mutual’s CIO said an upgrade cycle can occupy senior technical staff for the better part of a year, turning a renewal decision into a recurring drain on engineering capacity.
The survey also found strong support for laws giving enterprises protections comparable to those available to long-term residential tenants. That idea points to the core imbalance: companies may own the data and depend on the software, yet still have limited practical power to leave.
The useful negotiating moment may therefore come before adoption. The report’s authors recommend agreeing in advance on migration assistance and limits on renewal and expansion price increases. That will not remove switching costs, but it could make the exit visible before the entrance becomes permanent.
These findings are self-reported, and the commissioning organisation sells independent software maintenance, so the commercial interest is clear. Even with that caveat, the pattern is hard to ignore: enterprise software can consume not only money, but the people and projects that money was supposed to support.
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