In 2026, IT spend management and software asset management are getting harder, not easier. AI-driven features are pushing software price increases above historical norms. When Microsoft announced the removal of programmatic/tiered (waterfall) discounts for Online Services under Enterprise Agreements (EAs), large enterprise customers faced price increases of up to 13.6% . Broadcom's VMware pricing strategy has triggered increases ranging from 800% to over 1500% for some customers. Other major vendors are likely to follow suit.
CIOs simply can't absorb increases like these because their budgets aren't growing to match. In fact, the majority of IT leaders I am talking to are being asked to continue to modernize and innovate with flat budgets.
While these appear to be mutually opposing goals, there is opportunity in this challenge as well. This pressure and the rapid shifts in technology are emboldening leaders to adapt a strategic IT value optimization mindset where every investment delivers measurable ROI.
It’s no longer just about tracking assets: it’s about understanding how each tech decision connects to real business results. That means keeping investments under control, staying aligned with strategic goals, and making sure every tool in the stack is delivering measurable value.
Based on what I’m seeing across our customer base and the broader market, here are four key factors for consideration when approaching ITAM and cost optimization in the coming year.
For years the boundary between IT Asset Management and FinOps has been dissolving, and many ITAM leaders now share joint KPIs with their finance and procurement counterparts.
The business case for this shift is straightforward: if you manage public cloud, private cloud, SaaS, and traditional software licenses in isolation, you will miss opportunities to create additional value and optimizations. Multi-cloud complexity and increasingly hyperconverged infrastructure demand unified visibility. In 2026, you simply will not realize your full value in IT investments if your ITAM and FinOps teams are using different terms and metrics.
FinOps drives value creation through financial accountability, informed decision-making, and continuous innovation of technology investments, while ITAM brings governance, compliance and contractual accountability. Together, they enable a holistic approach to technology spend and its value, clarify addressable cost, and reduce risk, waste, and audit exposure.
AI presents a double-edged sword for cost optimization. On the upside, it creates optimization capabilities that were impossible with historical, deterministic approaches. But it also drives unpredictable cost increases and, potentially, new governance problems.
63% of organizations now track AI spend, up from just 31% in 2024. That doubling signals the velocity of this shift. However, from a value perspective, this AI spending is often supplementary rather than substitutional: it adds new cost layers rather than replacing existing ones. GenAI features are now embedded across software enterprises already own, and vendors are raising prices accordingly.
Conversely, AI-powered discovery and analytics have the potential to outperform traditional rule-based methods. We can now use machine learning to classify vast numbers of usage signals, normalize noisy data, and surface optimization opportunities that would be missed at human scale.
We have advised ITAM teams for years not to "boil the ocean." Let your MSP experts focus on your Tier 1 vendors, and your internal team focus on Tier 2. Historically, Tier 3 was largely ignored because the manual effort required to manage the long tail wasn't worth the return. Now, AI provides the scale needed to finally tackle Tier 3, though it remains a developing solution rather than a mature one. The strategic move for 2026 is deploying agentic and AI cost optimized solutions faster than AI-driven costs can compound.
Audit risk and financial exposure are now at levels that warrant executive attention, though your level of exposure will differ significantly according to your vendor relationships.
Some vendors quickly resort to legal notices when customers push back on subscription terms. Others take a different approach. Oracle continues its Java per-employee pricing push, with Gartner predicting one in five Java-using organizations will be audited in 2026. SAP maintains strict audit practices. Microsoft, by contrast, has largely moved away from traditional audits as it secures revenue through subscription models. AWS or Google don’t audit customers for third-party software license compliance nor participate in vendor audits.
This mixed picture is another reason for gaining holistic visibility across your whole IT estate so you can clarify vendor relationships, hone your audit strategy, uncover non-compliance and identify optimization opportunities. We're having conversations with customers on this topic every day so they can get a clearer picture of where they stand on audit exposure. They don’t want to rely on vendor goodwill: they want facts and data.
Organizations consistently underestimate their level of SaaS sprawl. In my experience, many enterprise organizations “think” they run somewhere between 500 and 1000 SaaS vendors and applications only to find that the real number is closer to 1000 – 2000. Less than half of provisioned licenses are actively used or even assigned to people that have changed roles or even company, leaving millions of dollars per year tied up in unused or underused SaaS subscriptions. In addition to the cost implications, SaaS sprawl also represents a widely recognized risk for the proliferation of shadow IT.
Monitoring this spend is becoming easier as cloud marketplaces fundamentally reshape how SaaS gets purchased and governed. These marketplaces create centralized visibility where governance can actually function. The complicating factor is that they also make software purchase friction-free, so organizations can easily end up with more software even if they are able to monitor it more accurately.
Despite this, controlling SaaS spend represents low hanging fruit for cost optimization. License cancellations and tier downgrades can produce savings in the next billing cycle, with some guidance suggesting 8–15% of monthly SaaS spend can be recovered in the first 1–4 weeks.
Obviously, the four topics I’ve listed here are not the full story on ITAM in 2026. But they do illustrate how to connect the dots to build a coherent strategy for maximizing value and optimization costs.
ITAM-FinOps convergence creates the foundation of visibility. As AI capabilities mature, they multiply what that visibility enables. Proactive audit defense protects capital, and SaaS governance captures quick (as well as long-term) efficiency gains. Together, they create a virtuous cycle where optimization funds innovation, which drives further optimization. Every dollar saved through license optimization, cloud waste elimination, or SaaS consolidation becomes a dollar available for innovation.
Our customers consistently achieve an average of 31% savings on software and cloud spend by combining licensing optimization, contract benchmarking, and negotiation expertise. That is capital that can be used to fund innovation agendas rather than fighting for new budget.
Unless you expect a corresponding 31% increase in your IT budget this year, it may be worth a conversation with SoftwareOne on how value optimization can become your competitive edge in 2026.
Vendor price hikes hitting hard? Learn how strategic ITAM transforms cost pressure into innovation funding.
Vendor price hikes hitting hard? Learn how strategic ITAM transforms cost pressure into innovation funding.
