In short:
Vendor licensing changes alter software spending, update planning, AI cost governance, and audit exposure across large publishers. Learn how to build visibility and share the fact base needed to act before cost and compliance pressures narrow their options.
Software licensing becomes harder to manage and easier to make mistakes. Vendors are changing pricing models, adding AI-related requirements, terminating long-standing agreements, and implementing subscription-first commercial models. For many organizations, these changes create real pressure on costs, compliance, renewal planning, and operational budgets that leaders must maintain.
SHI’s software licensing experts created this guide to help you see what’s changed, where risks may occur, and how to prepare before an update or audit forces the issue. This includes major software publishers and cloud providers, including:
What our guide covers
This guide provides IT, procurement, software asset management, IT asset management, and finance teams with a unified view of future decisions, including:
- M365 price changes and end of support deadline.
- Shifting exposure to Oracle Java and database support.
- SAP maintenance cliffs and FUE access rules.
- ServiceNow AI packaging and consumption pricing.
- VMware by Broadcom switches to subscription-only licensing.
Where risks can occur
Small licensing decisions can have long-term consequences. Updates starting from the wrong baseline can result in excessive spending. Cloud workloads without clear cost ownership can turn AI experiments into production expenses without a responsible owner. Weak rights data can increase audit exposure before your team has time to fix it.
How to move forward
This ebook also lays out a practical approach to optimizing software spend. Start by creating a complete picture of contracts, rights, usage, renewal dates, and spend across your highest priority vendors.
From there, use that fact base to identify underutilized software, over-provisioned access, misaligned requirements, and the financial impact of doing nothing.
The job also depends on alignment. When IT, procurement, finance, and business teams work from the same facts, they can focus on the riskiest updates, issuer changes, and governance decisions.
If you’re preparing for an upcoming update, evaluating cloud and AI investments, or tightening software governance, use this guide to see where your exposures currently stand, vendor changes may impact your roadmap, and focused actions can reduce risk without slowing modernization.
NEXT STEP
Download our eBook below to learn about major changes in software licensing. Talk to a SHI licensing expert to get industry-leading guidance on how you should move forward.
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