(Specifies wording in 2nd bullet point to say to "vendor-driven" instead of "vendor-mandated")
Oct 20 (Reuters) - LargeUS and British companies spend 28% of their software budgets on average to pay for vendor-driven upgrades, migration and licensing changes they would not have actively chosen, adding avoidable costs and operational risks inthe race to adopt AI solutions, a surveyby software maintenance provider Origina showed on Tuesday.
These hard-to-avoid recurring costs and operational disruption were described as a "software tax" in the study that surveyed more than 2,000 companies."When the alternative to an unwanted upgrade is losing support on systems the business runs on, saying yes is often a rational response,"OriginaCEO Tomas O'Leary said.
• 95% of respondents said they had paid for a vendor-driven upgrade they expected to worsen outcomes, while 80% said leaving a major software vendor would significantly disrupt their business
• 84% said senior engineering staff "always" or "often" devoted time to vendor-driven software changes rather than innovation or business-focused development
• 91% said they had retired fully functional hardware in the past three years to comply with vendors' support deadlines, sacrificing 1.65 years of remaining useful life on average
• O'Leary said the issue was largely universal and also applied to other regions, with older companies with more entrenched technology stacksfacing the biggest challenges
• According to the report, the most recent vendor-driven software change resulted in an average annual cost of $12.87 million for the surveyed organizations
(Reporting by Anastasiia Kozlova in Gdansk, editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)
