How to Escape the Multi-Billion Software Trap

Global IT spending was projected to reach $5.61 trillion by the end of 2025, according to Gartner, a 9.8% increase from the previous year. Yet for many enterprises, this growing investment delivers diminishing returns. The reason lies not in technology itself, but in who controls it.

A 2023 report from Dell estimates that organizations allocate up to 80% of their IT budgets to maintaining existing on-site hardware and legacy applications. That leaves 20% for everything else, including the innovation that drives competitive advantage. This software trap, driven by endless upgrade cycles, represents a structural problem — one that software support specialist Origina, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and Plano, Texas, has made its mission to solve. 

Beware the hidden cost of vendor roadmaps

When software vendors dictate upgrade cycles and support timelines, enterprises spend the majority of their technology budgets on maintenance rather than on transformation. The consequences of that dependency were evident after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, when customers reported price increases ranging from 800% to 1,500%, with little recourse beyond acceptance or costly migration. 

Tomás O'Leary, CEO and founder of Origina, is blunt about the industry dynamics at play. "We're effectively dealing with a cartel," he argues. "A handful of dominant vendors have convinced the market that their roadmap is your roadmap, that their timeline is your timeline, and that you have no choice but to keep paying. We have to stand up to the bad guys."

O'Leary points to a fundamental misalignment between vendor incentives and customer needs. "Only 10% to 20% of the software a typical enterprise runs drives innovation," he says. "The rest is operational, keeping the lights on. Yet vendors treat all of it as requiring constant upgrades, constant spending, constant dependency. That's the upgrade cycle. That's the software trap."

Helping enterprises reclaim control

Origina provides independent software maintenance for enterprise applications worldwide, including IBM, VMware, and HCL. The company's model allows organizations to extend, protect, and enhance functioning systems without mandatory upgrades, redirecting savings toward strategic priorities rather than following a vendor's timeline.

In one case, a media company client faced a deprecated cryptographic standard, prompting its compliance team to panic. The vendor proposed an expensive upgrade. Origina asked a different question: what if they developed the new standard into the existing system? The client maintained compliance, escaped the software trap, and freed up resources for genuine innovation.

Origina's approach requires a shift in mindset. Technology leaders must distinguish between software that genuinely requires updating and systems that function perfectly well in their current state. Not every application needs the latest version, particularly when the upgrade delivers no meaningful capability improvement and often drives hardware changes, which drives further cost, further disruption, and further downtime.

For O'Leary, the principle is straightforward: "Your vendor's roadmap is not your strategy. The question every technology leader should ask is simple: where do we need to innovate, and where are we just feeding the upgrade cycle machine?"

Escape the software trap, break the upgrade cycle, and the answer becomes obvious. Stay in it, and you will keep paying to stand still.

This advertiser content was paid for and created by Acumen. Neither CBS News nor CBS News Brand Studio, the brand marketing arm of CBS News, were involved in the creation of this content.