A survey commissioned by Origina found technology leaders at large U.S. and U.K. companies attribute an average 28% of software budgets to vendor-driven changes, leaving less room for new projects.
Those expenses include upgrades, migrations and licensing changes that respondents said their organizations would not have chosen independently. Respondents put the average cost of their organization’s most recent vendor-driven change at $12.87 million.
Origina linked the results to customers’ difficulty replacing software embedded in their operations. 80% of respondents agreed that leaving a major vendor would significantly disrupt business. Over the three years before the survey, 95% said they had paid for an upgrade they believed would reduce performance, reliability or business value; 53% said it had happened more than once.
The costs also affected work beyond software maintenance. Asked about their most recent artificial intelligence or data program that had been delayed, paused or canceled, 34% said vendor-driven costs made a major contribution to the setback. Another 56% said those costs made a moderate contribution.
Staff time and equipment were affected as well. 84% said senior engineers often or always worked on vendor-driven upgrades instead of developing future capabilities. In the three years before the survey, 91% said they had scrapped functioning hardware to meet a software vendor’s support deadline, giving up an average 1.65 years of useful life.
Censuswide surveyed 2,018 chief information officers and senior IT decision-makers May 11–19, 2026. Their employers were in the United States or United Kingdom and had at least $1 billion in annual revenue or 10,000 employees. Each organization used at least one of IBM, HCL, VMware/Broadcom or SAP at meaningful scale.
Origina sells independent software maintenance and has a commercial interest in how companies respond to vendor policies. Origina CEO and founder Tomás O’Leary said that when continued support for essential systems is at stake, “saying yes is often a rational response.”
