For most of the past two decades, buying enterprise software was a settled discipline. A company licensed a number of seats, knew its annual bill to a reasonable approximation, and the negotiation reduced to the size of the discount. The data now suggests how far that world has already moved.
Governance is where the difficulty begins. Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index finds that only 54% of licences in the average enterprise are used, equivalent to around $19.8m of waste a year, with the typical organisation running roughly 305 applications and adding nine a month. Gartner is more direct still: without centralised visibility, an organisation will overspend on software by at least a quarter through 2028. A meaningful share of the spend is loose before any price is negotiated.
The scale is itself part of the difficulty. With several hundred applications in play and more arriving each month, no single renewal is large enough to command a board's attention, yet the aggregate is among the fastest-growing lines on the budget. Value tends to leak not through one poor negotiation but through many small ones, conducted by teams who see each contract in isolation and none of them in total.
On top of that sits genuine inflation. Zylo reports that 79% of IT leaders met a price increase at renewal in the past year; the Vertice SaaS Inflation Index puts the average renewal rise at 12.2%, roughly five times headline inflation, against IT budgets planned to grow by under 3%. Gartner has noted increases of 10 to 20% from several large vendors.
The structural change is in the pricing model. As vendors embed AI, they are shifting from per-seat to consumption pricing. Suplari found that 78% of IT leaders had been surprised by usage-based charges, and 61% had cut projects when a bill moved unexpectedly. A consumption bill behaves quite differently from a seat contract, and a cost that grows with unmetered usage is not easily governed by a team that sees it only once a year.
There is a further shift beneath this. Gartner estimates that some $234bn of software spend is exposed as AI agents begin to work around the interfaces that seat licences were built to charge for; where an agent performs work a licensed person once did, paying by the human seat becomes harder to justify. Against all of this stands an unusual condition — leverage. Vendors are under real revenue pressure, and most buyers are nonetheless about to sign a routine renewal without making use of the stronger position they hold.
This is where MomentumX works, and the starting point is visibility rather than negotiation. Through its Value Engine™, the firm ingests the client's software and usage data — however dispersed or inconsistent — and produces a single, current picture of what is being consumed and where it is growing. A cost that cannot be seen cannot be restructured, and that picture usually reveals the real exposure to be concentrated in a handful of teams and lines.
Against it, the firm builds a Rate-Anchored Should-Cost™ for the estate: an independent view of what the software ought to cost, tied to objective rates rather than to a negotiating instinct. It is this that turns a renewal from a test of nerve into a matter of evidence, and it is what an incumbent vendor finds hardest to argue with.
The recoverable value is then sized on the Four-Lever Framework™ — price, specification, demand and cadence, kept separate so that nothing is double-counted — and each figure is anchored to the MomentumX Benchmark Basis™, the library of cited public references behind every number the firm presents. Only once the number is established does the negotiation itself begin: a Software Value Reset™ that meters usage, caps and tiers the consumption lines, secures flexibility between seats and consumption, guards against paying twice as agents replace seated work, shortens terms with a benchmarking provision, and rationalises an overlapping estate.
The work is delivered through the Operating-Advisor Model™ — senior judgement held in one place, execution from a specialist bench — and, where a client prefers, reward is aligned to the savings realised and followed, quarter by quarter, on the Value Realisation Tracker. The result is a software estate a business can forecast, and a figure it can defend to a board at a time when few of its peers are able to.
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