Enterprises keep buying software upgrades that IT thinks will make things worse

Enterprise-sized businesses spend, on average, 28 percent of their software budgets on unwanted upgrades, migrations, and licensing changes. Often, those firms’ IT heads think those changes are detrimental.

大型企业平均将其软件预算的 28% 用于不必要的升级、迁移和许可变更。通常，这些公司的 IT 负责人认为这些变动是有害的。

Those results are according to a survey of 2,018 chief information officers and senior IT decision-makers at companies with at least 10,000 employees that Origina commissioned for its report, “The Software Tax.” About half of the respondents (1,011) are from the US, and the rest are from the United Kingdom. All respondents worked at companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue.

这些结果来自 Origina 为其报告《软件税》（The Software Tax）委托进行的一项调查，受访者包括 2,018 名首席信息官和高级 IT 决策者，他们均来自员工人数至少为 10,000 人的公司。约半数受访者（1,011 名）来自美国，其余来自英国。所有受访者所在公司的年收入均至少为 10 亿美元。

Keep in mind that Origina provides maintenance for various enterprise software. Its report points to independent software maintenance as a way for IT leaders to regain control over software budgets, illustrating its potential bias. A third-party research consultancy, Censuswide, conducted the survey.

请注意，Origina 提供各种企业软件的维护服务。其报告指出，第三方软件维护是 IT 领导者重新掌控软件预算的一种途径，这表明该报告可能存在偏见。此次调查由第三方研究咨询公司 Censuswide 执行。

Among the report’s most concerning findings, enterprises often make software purchases that IT heads believe could hurt the organization. Ninety-five percent of respondents said “their organization has paid for a vendor-driven upgrade, migration, or licensing change in the past three years that it believed at the time would reduce performance, reliability, or business value,” the report says. Fifty-three percent of respondents “have done so more than once,” the report notes.

在报告最令人担忧的发现中，企业经常进行 IT 负责人认为可能损害组织的软件采购。报告称，95% 的受访者表示“其所在组织在过去三年中曾为供应商驱动的升级、迁移或许可变更付费，而当时他们认为这些变动会降低性能、可靠性或商业价值”。报告指出，53% 的受访者“不止一次这样做过”。

“Some 76 percent say their organization has very little real leverage in negotiations, and 80 percent say moving away from major vendors would cause significant disruption,” the report says, referring to the share of respondents who selected “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” to those statements.

报告称，“约 76% 的受访者表示其组织在谈判中几乎没有真正的筹码，80% 的受访者表示脱离主要供应商会导致重大业务中断”，这是指选择“非常同意”或“比较同意”这些陈述的受访者比例。

“When the alternative to an unwanted upgrade is losing support on systems the business runs on, saying yes is often a rational response,” Tomás O’Leary, one of the report’s authors and Origina’s CEO and founder, said in a statement. “That’s exactly the problem. The market has left some of the most experienced technology leaders in the world with little room to refuse, and that cost shows up in budgets, in engineering time, and in innovation that never gets funded.”

“当拒绝不必要的升级意味着失去业务运行系统的支持时，答应升级往往是一种理性的回应，”报告作者之一、Origina 首席执行官兼创始人 Tomás O’Leary 在一份声明中表示。“这正是问题所在。市场让世界上一些最有经验的技术领导者几乎没有拒绝的余地，而这种成本体现在预算、工程时间以及从未获得资助的创新项目中。”

The result is less funding for other areas, particularly, per the report, innovation (named by 36 percent of respondents), human resources (32 percent), security (31 percent), and “customer-facing investment” (31 percent).

结果是其他领域的资金减少，根据报告，特别是创新（36% 的受访者提到）、人力资源（32%）、安全（31%）和“面向客户的投资”（31%）。

In a statement accompanying the survey’s announcement, Liberty Mutual’s CIO, James McGlennon, pointed out that an upgrade cycle could occupy top technical workers for “the better part of a year.” “That’s not a one-off cost, it’s a recurring drag on capacity, and every year it repeats is a year those people aren’t working on the initiatives that actually differentiate the business,” he said.

在随调查公告发布的一份声明中，利宝保险（Liberty Mutual）首席信息官 James McGlennon 指出，一个升级周期可能会占用顶尖技术人员“大半年的时间”。他说：“这不是一次性成本，而是对产能的持续拖累，每年重复一次，就意味着这些人少了一年时间去从事那些真正能让业务实现差异化的工作。”

The majority (91 percent) surveyed would support laws that give enterprises “protections comparable with those available to long-term residential tenants.” Only 1 percent opposed this (with the rest signaling that they neither support nor oppose the idea).

大多数（91%）受访者支持制定法律，给予企业“与长期住宅租户相当的保护”。只有 1% 的人反对（其余人表示既不支持也不反对这一想法）。

CIOs should “negotiate the exit before the entry” to have more control over software budgets, Marshall Van Alstyne, the report’s co-author and an information sciences professor at Boston University, said in a statement. Origina’s report suggests “settling the terms of a potential exit,” including setting a price for migration assistance and caps on renewal and expansion prices, during initial negotiations with the software vendor.

报告合著者、波士顿大学信息科学教授 Marshall Van Alstyne 在声明中表示，首席信息官应“在进入前先谈好退出”，以更好地控制软件预算。Origina 的报告建议在与软件供应商进行初步谈判时，“确定潜在退出的条款”，包括设定迁移协助的价格以及续订和扩展价格的上限。

Origina’s report didn’t call out any specific vendors as forcing enterprises’ hands. However, every survey respondent currently runs “at least one of IBM, HCL, VMware/Broadcom, or SAP at meaningful scale.”

Origina 的报告并未点名任何特定供应商强迫企业就范。然而，每位受访者目前都在“相当大的规模上运行 IBM、HCL、VMware/Broadcom 或 SAP 中的至少一种软件”。