The number behind the complaint every CIO already has
CIOs have groused about forced upgrades for years, but a new survey commissioned by Origina, an independent software maintenance provider, puts a specific number on it. Among US and UK organizations with revenue above a billion dollars or more than 10,000 employees, about 28 percent of the software budget, averaging close to 12.9 million dollars a year, goes toward initiatives the vendor pushed rather than ones the customer initiated. That spending buys no new capability the business chose, it simply keeps the organization current with a vendor's own roadmap on the vendor's own timeline.
The more damning figure sits alongside the dollar amount: 95 percent of surveyed IT leaders said they paid for a vendor-driven upgrade in the last three years that they believed would make performance worse rather than better. That statistic reframes the entire conversation into a story about customers being billed to adopt changes they themselves doubted were improvements, with little practical ability to decline. The buyer's reluctance here targets paying for modernization they never requested and did not expect to help, a far narrower complaint than resistance to modernizing in general.
Why saying no to an upgrade is harder than it sounds
The survey's central argument is that vendors hold structural advantages that make refusal expensive. Declining an upgrade frequently means losing vendor support entirely, which is not a real option for a system running core business operations. Vendors also bring far more experience to contract negotiation than most buying organizations do, since negotiating software terms is their core competency and a periodic task for everyone else. Origina's research suggests current buyer negotiation tactics simply are not keeping pace with how vendors structure these deals.
There is a structural dependency problem underneath the negotiation imbalance. Software embeds itself into business processes more deeply and for longer than buyers typically plan for at purchase time, and organizations consistently underestimate how long a given system will remain load-bearing. By the time an upgrade arrives, switching costs have grown well beyond what they were at initial purchase, which is exactly the leverage point vendors are positioned to use.
What this looks like inside a real budget
Omar Amassine, founder of digital agency TripleW Digital, gave a concrete version of the abstract statistic. His firm spends 20 to 30 percent of its software and maintenance budget on vendor-driven migrations it never requested, concentrated most heavily in CRM, marketing automation suites, and cloud infrastructure. He points to a specific mechanism behind the cost spikes: vendors bundling AI features into existing products or shifting from seat-based pricing to usage-based tiers, moves that have produced price jumps of 20 to 35 percent at renewal time.
Amassine's countermeasure is procedural rather than purely contractual. TripleW now runs migration feasibility studies six months ahead of each renewal date, modeling what switching away from a vendor would actually cost and how long it would take. That exercise alone has prompted vendors to offer multi-year price freezes once they see a credible alternative being evaluated, which suggests that much of the current imbalance persists simply because most customers never visibly prepare a real alternative.
The quieter cost: time, not just money
Zachary Lewis, CIO of the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, describes a parallel burden that does not show up directly in the budget line. His team negotiated contracts so that vendors handle upgrades and security patches directly, since the university's IT staff is too small to manage patching manually across every system. Even with that arrangement, Lewis describes an ongoing time tax from simply following up on patches, confirming they landed correctly, and troubleshooting the inevitable friction they introduce.
Lewis is candid that switching vendors remains an option in theory but is rarely simple in practice, which is precisely why vendors can keep pushing upgrades with limited pushback. His experience illustrates that even a CIO who has structured contracts thoughtfully to offload upgrade labor still absorbs a meaningful coordination cost that never appears as a line item anyone budgets for explicitly. Small IT teams at smaller institutions feel this hardest, since they have the least staff capacity to absorb the follow-up work and the least negotiating weight to push vendors toward smoother rollouts.
Origina's prescription, and its limits
Tomas O'Leary, Origina's CEO, says he was surprised by the sheer scale of the cost once it was measured directly, calling it a hidden cost on companies, and a significant one at that. His recommendation centers on contract mechanics: negotiate shorter terms, and negotiate exit provisions explicitly and repeatedly rather than treating them as boilerplate to accept once and forget. Shorter contracts give CIOs more frequent leverage points to push back on vendor-driven changes before they become locked in for years at a time.
That advice is sound but incomplete on its own, since shorter contracts only create leverage if the customer is prepared to credibly walk away, which is exactly the capability TripleW Digital's feasibility studies are built to create. Negotiating harder without building a genuine alternative is negotiating from a weaker position than the vendor already knows you occupy, and vendors price that imbalance into every renewal. A CIO who pairs O'Leary's contract advice with Amassine's habit of pricing out the alternative six months early closes most of the gap either tactic leaves open on its own.
What CIOs should change in the next contract cycle
The practical response has several parts, and none of them require waiting for vendors to change their behavior first. Favor modular, open-standard architecture and headless designs where feasible, since they lower the structural cost of eventually exiting a vendor relationship even if you never act on it. Treat vendor management as an ongoing partnership discipline rather than a procurement event that happens once and gets revisited only at renewal under time pressure.
CIOs should also consider sharing experiences with peers facing the same vendors, since collective information about pricing tactics and upgrade patterns is one of the few ways individual buyers can approach the negotiating depth vendors bring as a matter of course. None of this eliminates the software tax entirely, but it shifts the balance of leverage enough that the next forced upgrade comes with real options attached rather than a bill with no alternative.
