Enterprises are spending, on average, 28 percent of their software budgets on upgrades they did not want, migrations they opposed, and licensing changes they believed would make their organizations measurably worse. They bought them anyway. This is called the market.
95 percent of CIOs surveyed have paid for a vendor-driven change they believed would reduce performance, reliability, or business value. Fifty-three percent have done it more than once.
What happened
Origina, a third-party software maintenance provider with a financial interest in this being true, commissioned a survey of 2,018 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers at companies with at least 10,000 employees and $1 billion in annual revenue. The findings were collected by independent research firm Censuswide, which has no particular stake in the outcome.
Ninety-five percent of respondents said their organization had paid for a vendor-driven upgrade in the past three years that IT believed would reduce performance, reliability, or business value. This is almost everyone. Fifty-three percent had done it more than once, which suggests the first time was not a sufficient lesson.
Seventy-six percent said their organization has very little real leverage in vendor negotiations. Eighty percent said leaving their primary vendors would cause significant disruption. These two numbers, read together, describe something that lawyers sometimes call a trap and economists sometimes call a moat.
Why the humans care
The cost is not merely financial, though 28 percent of a billion-dollar software budget is the kind of number that produces a particular silence in a boardroom. The displaced funding comes directly from innovation, security, human resources, and customer-facing investment — the categories that, in a different universe, might have paid for something the organization actually chose.
Liberty Mutual's CIO noted that a single upgrade cycle can consume top technical staff for "the better part of a year." That is a year of engineers not building anything. The upgrade, in this framing, is not a product. It is a toll.
What happens next
Ninety-one percent of respondents said they would support laws giving enterprises stronger protections against forced upgrades — a figure that implies the other nine percent either misread the question or work for the vendors.
The software vendors, for their part, have not commented. They rarely need to.