From cost risk to opportunity: Navigating modern software licensing:
See where vendor licensing changes could affect software spend, renewal planning, and risk.

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From cost risk to opportunity: Navigating modern software licensing:See where vendor licensing changes could affect software spend, renewal planning, and risk.
Reading Time: 2 minutes
In brief:

Vendor licensing changes are reshaping software spend, renewal planning, AI cost governance, and audit exposure across major publishers. Learn how to build the visibility and shared fact base needed to act before cost and compliance pressure narrows their options.

Software licensing has become harder to manage and easier to get wrong. Vendors are changing pricing models, adding AI-related terms, retiring long-standing agreements, and enforcing subscription-first commercial models. For many organizations, those shifts create real pressure on cost, compliance, renewal planning, and the operating budgets leaders need to defend.

SHI’s software licensing experts created this guide to help you see what is changing, where risk can build, and how to prepare before renewals or audits force the issue. It covers major software publishers and cloud providers, including:

What our guide covers

The guide gives IT, procurement, software asset management, IT asset management, and finance teams a shared view of the decisions ahead, including:

  • M365 price changes and end-of-support deadlines.
  • Oracle Java exposure and database support shifts.
  • SAP maintenance cliffs and FUE access rules.
  • ServiceNow AI packaging and consumption pricing.
  • VMware by Broadcom’s move to subscription-only licensing.

Where risk can build

Small licensing decisions can create long-running consequences. A renewal that starts from the wrong baseline can lock in overspend. A cloud workload without clear cost ownership can turn AI experimentation into production spend with no accountable owner. Weak entitlement data can raise audit exposure before your team has time to correct it.

How to move forward

The ebook also lays out a practical approach to software spend optimization. Start by building a complete view of contracts, entitlements, usage, renewal dates, and spend across your highest-priority vendors.

From there, use that fact base to identify underused software, over-provisioned access, misaligned terms, and the financial impact of doing nothing.

That work also depends on alignment. When IT, procurement, finance, and business teams work from the same facts, they can focus on the renewals, publisher changes, and governance decisions that carry the most risk.

If you are preparing for upcoming renewals, evaluating cloud and AI investments, or tightening software governance, use this guide to see where your exposure sits today, where vendor changes could affect your roadmap, and where focused action can reduce risk without slowing modernization.

NEXT STEPS

Download our ebook below to stay ahead of major software licensing changes. Speak with an SHI licensing expert to get industry-leading guidance on how you should move forward.

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Speak with an SHI expert

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