Guillaume Geudin, director of purchasing performance at Elee, publishes an opinion piece in CIO Online warning about the uncontrolled drift of software and cloud costs within IT budgets. The finding is quantified: CIO invoices are rising 12 to 14% per year, a pace that far exceeds inflation and threatens organizations' financial balance.
The author identifies three structural factors behind this escalation. First, since 2020, the massive migration from perpetual licenses (Capex) to SaaS subscriptions (Opex) has turned the cloud's promise of flexibility into a permanent budgetary drift. Second, vendors use opaque and unpredictable billing metrics (API calls, storage, active users). Third, the historical discounts negotiated in the 2010s are shrinking rapidly.
The per-vendor figures are telling. Between 2020 and 2024, Microsoft raised its prices by 11 to 25%, with an 85% jump for Copilot AI. Google Gemini shows increases of 20 to 45%, Salesforce 15%, Oracle 8 to 12%, and SAP 3.3 to 5%. The most aggressive strategy consists of embedding artificial intelligence features by default, with no option to opt out, which inflates average revenue per user (ARPU) by 30 to 80%.
Without corrective action, Geudin projects a 50 to 60% increase in IT spending by 2028. To regain control, he proposes five concrete levers. First lever: fine-grained usage analysis, since 30% of software licenses go unused and represent an immediate source of savings. Second lever: rationalizing the application portfolio to eliminate redundancies. Third lever: early negotiation, to be initiated 12 to 18 months before contract deadlines in order to secure a favorable bargaining position. Fourth lever: implementing continuous FinOps monitoring, which can generate 20 to 30% in savings. Fifth lever: resorting to alternatives such as open source and multi-sourcing to create competitive pressure.
The author's conclusion is programmatic: the software portfolio must be considered a strategic asset requiring the same management rigor as payroll or Capex investments. The era in which CIOs could passively absorb price increases is over; controlling software costs is becoming a critical organizational competency.