Software upgrades eat nearly a third of companies’ IT budgets, survey finds

Large US 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 in the race to adopt AI solutions, a survey by 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.