Webinars Hardware Pricing Update: Current Pricing Trends, What to Expect in Q3, and How to Minimize Rising Costs Hardware Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. Enterprise IT hardware costs are surging at a pace procurement teams haven't seen in over a decade. Join NPI as we discuss what enterprises can expect heading into Q3, current pricing trends by category and vendor, and what procurement leaders need to do right now to avoid absorbing increases that go well beyond actual cost pass-throughs. What You'll Learn: An update on how AI demand and supply chain disruptions are impacting hardware costs and when we can expect price stabilization Vendor-specific behaviors procurement teams need to recognize now to minimize cost escalations and risk Our Memory & Storage Price Tracker analysis across different product categories and what the outlook signals heading into Q3 2026 Negotiation and procurement posture and tactics that are proven to create leverage in the current environment Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.
Webinars AI Token Economics and the Enterprise Cost Gap: What Procurement Needs to Know Before the Next Invoice Arrives AI Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. Enterprise AI spend jumped 108% year-over-year in 2026, and more than 85% of organizations are missing their AI cost forecasts. Join NPI for a discussion on what enterprise IT procurement leaders need to understand about AI token economics, where billing visibility is breaking down, and how leading organizations are building cost governance programs that hold. What You'll Learn: How token-based billing works across the largest enterprise AI vendors and where consumption outpaces what procurement committed to in the contract The billing architecture gaps that produce five-figure surprise invoices, including cloud marketplace monitoring blind spots that most procurement and FinOps teams have not accounted for How agentic AI workflows change the cost calculus, which usage controls are non-negotiable before any agentic deployment, and what contract terms should be negotiated to govern mid-term repricing as AI features roll out The consumption modeling and governance approaches procurement leaders are deploying after signature to maintain visibility, enforce spending limits, and create measurable accountability for AI ROI Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.
Webinars Confessions of a Software Auditor Audit Defense Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. What really happens behind the scenes of a software audit? In this session, a former software auditor pulls back the curtain on current vendor audit tactics including what triggers them, how targets are chosen, and the playbook auditors use to drive compliance revenue. Join us to learn how to spot early warning signs, protect your organization from unnecessary exposure, and turn the tables to maintain control during an audit. Whether you’re facing an active audit or trying to avoid one, these insider insights will sharpen your strategy. Attendees will learn: Common red flags and behaviors that make enterprises audit targets The internal audit tactics vendors don’t want you to know Proven strategies to stay audit-ready and negotiate from a position of strength Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.
Insights Hardware Cost Surge Update: An Enterprise IT Procurement Briefing on Memory Price Escalation May 29, 2026AI, Hardware Download Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. Understand where hardware costs are headed and how to protect your organization from unnecessary price escalation. Compounding forces are driving the most significant enterprise IT hardware cost surge in over a decade. Memory prices surged through Q1 2026 and remain on a steep climb as AI-driven demand, geopolitical dynamics, and ongoing supply chain disruption is pushing hardware pricing higher. Midway through Q2, vendors continue to shorten quote validity windows, extend lead times, and introduce price increases that often exceed underlying component cost changes. With meaningful price stabilization unlikely before 2027, IT procurement leaders need a clear strategy for protecting budgets and preserving leverage. In this whitepaper, we provide a detailed analysis of: An update on the current dynamics shaping the hardware market landscape What’s changed since Q1 2026 and where the market is heading The current memory and storage pricing outlook by category/product Recent changes to pricing, lead time, and quote validity windows by vendor The latest negotiation and procurement posture guidance based on what’s working in the trenches right now Download the whitepaper for updated guidance on how to navigate rising memory costs. Download Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.
Blog Cisco Deal Optimization Strategies That Actually Deliver May 27, 2026Cisco, Hardware Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. If you’re responsible for managing a Cisco estate, you’ve probably noticed that the rules of engagement have shifted. List prices are climbing, quote windows are shrinking, and Cisco’s go-to-market motions are getting more sophisticated. The good news? Enterprise buyers who understand what’s actually happening in this market are still landing significant savings. The key is knowing where the real leverage lives before you sit down at the table. Here’s a look at what’s driving deal outcomes right now, and the strategies that are making a material difference. Interested in diving deeper into this topic? Check out our webinar on The New Cisco Negotiation Environment. The Ground Has Shifted Under Hardware Pricing Start with what’s happening on the hardware side, because it sets the context for everything else. Since early 2026, AI infrastructure demand combined with global supply chain disruption has driven list price increases of up to 250% on select Cisco SKUs. Helium supply constraints are adding pressure on chip production, and Cisco leadership has signaled that additional price changes are on the way. However, if you’re assuming your negotiating position has weakened, you’re wrong. Even in a rising-price environment, strong opening discounts still have meaningful room to move. Equipped with the right leverage, we’re seeing customers regularly increase discounts by 10+ points. The catch is that you need to track pricing at the SKU level, not just at the deal level. Cisco’s list prices are a moving target right now, and a flat discount percentage on a higher list price inflates your actual spend. Monitoring list price, discount, and net price on every quote line isn’t optional anymore. It’s the baseline discipline that separates buyers who get good outcomes from those who do not. Quote Volatility Is a Real Risk Now Cisco has changed how it prices and protects deals, and the language in its current agreements reflects this. Quotes that were previously locked can now be reopened and repriced. Validity windows have contracted to roughly two weeks or less in many cases. Promotions and deal registration discounts have been cancelled on certain product lines, and margin protection tactics are being applied broadly rather than only to genuinely constrained SKUs. What this means practically is that an approved budget can be undermined between the time a quote is issued and the time a PO is submitted. If your procurement process has any length to it, you’re exposed. Documenting discount precedents in writing and pulling purchases forward where feasible are crucial to risk management. The VMware Migration Is Creating an Unexpected Opportunity The Broadcom acquisition of VMware continues to ripple through enterprise infrastructure decisions in ways that affect Cisco negotiations. Mass migration from VMware to Nutanix is underway, and NPI is seeing win rates on competitive VMware replacement deals running about 15 percentage points higher than baseline. Cisco is aware of how urgently customers want to move and is using that urgency as leverage on server purchases. The right response is to be prepared to run an RFP on server purchases rather than defaulting to sole-source conversations. Factor the actual total cost of a Nutanix migration into your planning before you commit and use the transition as a negotiation point with Nutanix itself. They have a meaningful interest in helping customers make the economics work. Enterprise Agreements Are Worth a Closer Look Than Cisco Would Like Cisco’s EA 3.0 bundle was the second most-purchased SKU NPI tracked over the past year, and it’s easy to see why Cisco sells it hard. Consolidating sprawling entitlements into a single agreement with fixed multi-year pricing and true forward billing sounds compelling, especially if you’ve been burned by mid-term true-up invoices in the past. But the economics deserve real scrutiny before you sign. NPI recently identified $2 million in annual savings on an EA, which works out to $10 million over a five-year term. It came from a deal that the customer thought was already well-negotiated. The main issue with EAs is that “simplified” frequently means less mid-term flexibility, and the stickiness benefits Cisco as much as it benefits you. Price predictability is only valuable if the starting anchor is right. Most first-offer EA pricing has 15% to 25% additional room when benchmarked against what comparable enterprises are actually paying. Where Competitive Dynamics Are Creating Leverage Three product areas stand out as particularly ripe for negotiation right now. Networking: Cisco holds roughly 40% of the enterprise networking market, but the competitive threat from HPE Aruba, Fortinet, Juniper Mist, and Arista is more credible than it was five years ago. Catalyst refresh cycles are increasingly evaluated against alternatives, and cloud-managed networking is becoming commoditized in ways that push pricing pressure downstream. The right move is to use competitive quotes as genuine anchors in your negotiation rather than just informational references. Security: The SASE market has disrupted Cisco’s traditional security stack in a meaningful way. Zscaler, Netskope, and Palo Alto are displacing point security purchases, and Microsoft E5 is competing directly with Cisco’s XDR and identity offerings. The Splunk acquisition closed in early 2024, which has changed how security stacks get bundled and introduced new lock-in vectors that buyers may not have fully priced in. Benchmark Cisco security SKUs against equivalent SASE and XDR proposals, and be cautious about contract clauses that would prevent a partial migration to alternative platforms later. Collaboration: The math on every Webex renewal has been fundamentally changed by Microsoft Teams. Most enterprises are already paying for Teams through their Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 licensing, which means a significant portion of Webex’s value proposition is redundant for a large share of customers. Cisco knows this and has been discounting Webex aggressively to defend its installed base. Don’t accept Webex Suite pricing without an explicit analysis of Teams overlap and make sure any renewal conversation includes device buybacks and migration credits. The Cisco Deal Optimization Areas That Move the Needle Most Beyond the product-specific dynamics, three core issues account for a disproportionate share of overspending on Cisco estates. Baseline inflation in EAs. Enterprise Agreements project forward from your current entitlements, not from actual deployment. NPI consistently sees baselines inflated 15% to 30% compared to real usage. Buyers end up paying for entitlements they don’t own, don’t use, or have already retired. Once that inflated baseline gets locked in, it becomes the floor for true forward billing at renewal. The fix is to reconcile entitlements against actual consumption before you sign and negotiate the baseline down, not just negotiate the discount up. List price versus market price. A “40% discount” can be best-in-class or below average depending on the product and the market. Without peer benchmarks, you have no way to know. Cisco anchors discount conversations to list price rather than to what the market is actually paying, which means first offers routinely leave money on the table. Requiring SKU-level pricing detail on every quote line and benchmarking against real deal data before accepting any “best and final” offer are non-negotiable practices. The true forward mechanism. True forward billing means Cisco automatically invoices for growth above your committed baseline at renewal, at pricing that was set at the original agreement anchor. Growth projections are almost always underestimated at signing, and by the time renewal arrives, switching costs have increased and Cisco’s leverage has expanded considerably. The way to protect yourself is to model growth scenarios realistically before you commit, and to negotiate optionality, exit provisions, and co-termination clauses into the original agreement rather than trying to add them later when you have less leverage. Getting Your Timing and Approach Right The single highest-ROI activity in a Cisco deal cycle is pre-quote positioning, and most buyers underinvest in it significantly. Engaging 90 to 120 days before a quote gives you control over the timeline, which is one of your most valuable assets. Cisco’s leverage increases when you’re up against a deadline. Yours increases when you’re not. Two windows are particularly favorable for negotiations: the midpoint of Cisco’s Q2 fiscal quarter and Q4. Entering those windows with benchmarked pricing data, a negotiated baseline, and a clear position on term, co-termination, and exit clauses is what separates deals that deliver real savings from deals that look good until someone runs the numbers. The market dynamics are real, and Cisco is a sophisticated commercial counterparty. But enterprise buyers who are willing to do the analytical work before the quote arrives are consistently landing outcomes that look nothing like the opening position. That gap between first offer and final outcome is where the strategy lives. To learn how NPI can help you negotiate a best-in-class outcome on your next Cisco purchase or renewal, contact us. Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.
Bulletin Preparing for Your Next Adobe Deal: Pricing, Packaging, and Negotiation Changes to Watch May 27, 2026Adobe Download PDF Download My Copy Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. Adobe has executed a sophisticated and coordinated pricing and packaging realignment over the past 24 months. AI feature gating, ETLA SKU consolidation, and the erosion of standard commercial terms have shifted the negotiation math in Adobe’s favor. This bulletin shows procurement and IT leaders what has changed, where the leverage now lives, and how to negotiate Adobe outcomes that reflect real customer requirements and value. The Adobe Commercial Landscape Today A VENDOR WITH MOMENTUM AND PRICING POWER Adobe has expanded from desktop creative tools into a coordinated suite spanning Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud, with AI features bundled across each. Today the vendor is mission-critical for marketing, design, and digital teams, creating a footprint that compounds these procurement challenges: Limited substitution. Creative Cloud’s flagship apps (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere) have few enterprise-grade alternatives, limiting competitive leverage on the core Creative stack. AI as a revenue lever. Firefly, AI Assistant, Acrobat Studio, and Agentic AI in Experience Cloud are being used to justify list-price increases and force upgrade paths inside the existing customer base. ETLA cycle compression. The three-year ETLA cycle gives Adobe a long runway to engineer new versions, bundles, and AI features that become “required” components of the next deal. Where Enterprises Are Overpaying Understanding where spend leaks occur is a prerequisite to effective negotiation. NPI’s analysis of enterprise Adobe contracts identifies four common overpayment vectors: ETLA RENEWAL ESCALATION who only need basic PDF 20 to 30% renewal increases are now typical even when nothing has changed – no volume changes, no product changes. When required product upgrades are bundled in, increases routinely top 80%. The three-year ETLA cycle gives Adobe time to engineer new versions, bundles, and AI features and position them as required at renewal. ACROBAT STUDIO OVER-PACKAGING Approximately half of Q4 ETLA renewals included an Acrobat Studio upgrade, adding $200+ per user per year. The bundle includes Acrobat Pro, AI Assistant, Adobe Express, and Firefly tools. Clients who only need basic PDF functionality pay full Studio cost for capability they never use. FORCED PREMIUM STOCK BUNDLING All Apps Edition 4 with Premium Stock is the new default Creative Cloud ETLA SKU. Adobe reps are heavily incentivized to land Premium Stock, but the SKU is available without it. Procurement teams that validate actual stock-asset needs before agreeing consistently right-size away from the default. EXPERIENCE CLOUD METRIC SHIFTS AND PREMIUM TIERS Customer Journey Analytics is the rep-incentivized upgrade replacing Adobe Analytics – more expensive and priced on a different metric. When the licensing metric changes, historical benchmarks no longer apply. Premium support and success tiers priced as a percentage of license spend scale up automatically with every renewal and product upgrade. Pre-Renewal Preparation: The Five Imperatives Regardless of where an organization sits in its Adobe renewal timeline, the following preparation disciplines are non-negotiable for achieving a defensible negotiation outcome: IMPERATIVE 1 Start 6-9 Months Before Renewal Six to nine months prior to renewal is the minimum effective preparation window. Adobe will compress your timeline so own the schedule before they do. Late engagement eliminates leverage and invites auto-renewal at full list. IMPERATIVE 2 Right-Size by User Persona First Independently validate which licensing option best meets your needs by user persona. Don’t take Adobe’s word for what your users require. It is difficult to claw back a higher-tier license choice once Adobe locks in that revenue. IMPERATIVE 3 Validate the Bundle Against Actual Use Cases For every upgrade Adobe positions as required (e.g. Premium Stock, Acrobat Studio, AI Assistant, CJA) confirm with business owners that there is a documented use case. SKUs without a named accountable owner should not appear in the renewal. IMPERATIVE 4 Benchmark Against Independent Market Data Bundled deals and renamed SKUs make internal benchmarks unreliable. SKU-level peer pricing data provides a factual counterpoint to Adobe’s proposals. Without it, procurement teams negotiate from a position of information asymmetry. IMPERATIVE 5 Make Every Commercial Term Explicit Renewal caps, true-up rates, swap rights, and metric definitions are no longer standard. The protections that held the prior contract together have to be re-negotiated, not assumed. Every term left implicit is a term Adobe will reset in its favor at renewal. Starting early is the single most costeffective negotiation strategy available to any Adobe customer.It is difficult to claw back a higher-tier license choice once Adobe locks in that revenue. Right-sizing must happen before signature, and that requires runway that must be budgeted into your internal renewal preparation timeline. Specific Negotiation Guidance ON CREATIVE CLOUD AND DOCUMENT CLOUD ETLAs Don’t accept Premium Stock by default. Validate actual stock-asset needs before agreeing to the upcharge. If you don’t need stock, demand the Edition 4 SKU without it. Don’t auto-upgrade to Acrobat Studio. For users who only need basic PDF functionality, hold the line on Acrobat Pro pricing. Quantify how many users will actually use AI Assistant, Express, and Firefly before paying for them. Right-size by user persona, license-by-license. Independently validate which licensing option each persona needs and document the rationale. Lock in renewal caps, true-up rates, and swap rights in writing. These standard protections are the ones most likely to be quietly dropped from the next ETLA. ON EXPERIENCE CLOUD Run a structured competitive evaluation. Unlike Creative Cloud, every Experience Cloud product has a credible alternative. RFIs and RFPs work here and meaningfully change Adobe’s posture even when you don’t intend to switch. Validate metric definitions in writing for any product migration (Adobe Analytics to CJA, Audience Manager to RTCDP). When the licensing metric changes, historical benchmarks lose force and Adobe chooses how the new metric is measured. Expect a step-up on renewal even with flat volumes. Cap language from prior 3-year deals is rarely re-extended at the original terms. Be sure to model the next-cycle exposure before signing. ON USAGE-BASED PRICING AND PREMIUM SERVICE TIERS Model the worst-case scenario, not just planned usage. Credit-based models make it harder to assess true competitiveness. Ask Adobe for the equivalent traditional pricing so you can compare apples to apples. Quantify the actual support value used in the prior term. Premium service tiers priced as a percentage of license spend scale automatically with every renewal. Right-size where consumption doesn’t justify the percentage. Make Every Commercial Term Explicit.Renewal caps, true-up rates, swap rights, and metric definitions are no longer standard. The protections that held the prior contract together must be re-negotiated, not assumed. Every term left implicit is a term Adobe will reset in its favor at renewal. Turning Preparation Into Negotiation Power Adobe is growing as fast as the broader software market, and AI is becoming the primary revenue lever. Enterprise customers are absorbing the price increases, and Adobe has neither the incentive nor the market pressure to give back at the table without disciplined customer-side preparation.The most powerful lever in any Adobe negotiation isn’t the size of the contract; it’s the quality of the preparation. Prepare accordingly. The strongest Adobe deal outcomes aren’t negotiated at the table.They’re built months in advance through disciplined preparation, independent usage data, internal alignment, and benchmark-backed insight. Download PDF Download My Copy Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.
Blog Why Red Hat May Be the Most Overlooked Audit Risk in Enterprise IT May 19, 2026Red Hat Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. We have been having a recurring conversation with clients around Red Hat audit risk lately, and it usually starts the same way: “Red Hat sent us a request to share data ahead of our renewal. It looks routine. Is it?” The short answer is probably not. The longer answer is that Red Hat has joined a growing list of enterprise software vendors using “renewal preparation” as a softer-sounding label for what is functionally a software license audit. The audit clause never gets invoked. The word “audit” never gets used. But the data being requested, and the leverage being built on the back of it, is the same. Post-IBM acquisition, Red Hat has materially increased both the frequency and the scope of these reviews (often branded internally as “Requests to Review”). The tactic is working, in part because most customers do not see it coming. Why Red Hat Customers Are Caught Off Guard There is a persistent assumption inside most procurement and IT organizations that audit risk scales with annual spend. The vendors with the biggest line items (think: Microsoft, Oracle, SAP) get the most scrutiny. Everyone else gets less. That logic does not hold up well against the Red Hat estate. A large enterprise typically has multiple Red Hat agreements that are individually modest but cumulatively significant. Subscriptions get bought by different teams, inherited through M&A, and scattered across business units. No single agreement screams “audit target” but the aggregate exposure absolutely does. Layer on environmental complexity. Red Hat’s portfolio spans cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix), and Linux deployments across hybrid environments. The licensing rules and use rights inside that footprint are not intuitive, and they were not designed with self-audit in mind. Overdeployment is not a sign of negligence; it is the default outcome of running real workloads across a real enterprise environment. So, when a “renewal preparation” request arrives, two things tend to happen at once. The customer underestimates the risk of a Red Hat audit, and the customer’s actual deployment data is uncertain. That is exactly the moment a vendor wants to be on the other side of the conversation. The Subtle Mechanics of a “Request to Review” Critical point incoming: Formal audits come with contractual rules, defined scope, notice requirements, and the involvement of legal and procurement. “Renewal preparation” comes with none of that. The request is informal. It is often routed directly to a technical contact rather than to procurement. The data goes back to the vendor under no defined chain of custody and with no agreement about how it will be used. Anything the customer hands over becomes the new baseline. Whether or not the vendor formally calls it non-compliance, that data will shape the renewal proposal. If the renewal arrives with a sudden inflation of the entitlement count, the customer is no longer negotiating from “what did we agree to last time?” They are negotiating from “what did our own engineers tell Red Hat we are running?” That is a very different conversation, and it is one the vendor almost always wins in our experience. What to Do to Stay Ahead of Red Hat Audit Risk We advise every Red Hat customer with a renewal on the horizon to do six things, in roughly this order. Treat informal data requests like formal audits. That does not mean refusing to engage. It means routing requests through procurement and legal, validating the accuracy of anything shared, and refusing to let “this is just renewal prep” justify skipping the controls you would apply to any audit response. Run a full licensing review of your Red Hat estate before the vendor does. This includes every product, every agreement, and every inherited environment. M&A is where a lot of surprise non-compliance lives, and Red Hat’s footprint after the IBM transaction is wider than most customers map. Assess deployments across every environment that touches a Red Hat subscription. Cloud, virtualization, OS, disaster recovery, non-production. The places customers most often forget to look are the places that produce the most uncomfortable findings. Validate entitlements against actual usage. In our experience, gaps almost always exist. Sometimes those gaps are real non-compliance. More often, they inflate the baseline of the next renewal in ways that cost real money even when nothing was technically wrong. Start early. Ninety to 120 days before a single-agreement renewal. Six to 12 months out if you are dealing with a multi-agreement estate. The runway is what lets you right-size, remediate, terminate unused subscriptions, restructure SKUs, and walk into the conversation with evidence rather than improvisation. Control the narrative and the data. This is the most underrated of the six. Centralize all Red Hat and IBM communications through a single point of contact. Require any compliance discussion to reference contractual audit language, not informal data requests. The minute the vendor is allowed to talk to five different people about five different parts of your environment, you have lost the thread — and the leverage. The Broader Pattern is a Warning Red Hat is not an outlier here. They are a particularly clear example of a broader vendor playbook: take the contractual rights you already have, repackage them in friendlier language, and use renewal pressure to compress the customer’s response time. It works because most customers respond to the framing rather than the substance. The substance is unchanged. A request for deployment data, regardless of what it is called, is a compliance event. It deserves the same rigor, the same governance, and the same negotiating posture as any other event of that kind. If you have a Red Hat renewal on the horizon — or a “Request to Review” already sitting in someone’s inbox — that is the right moment to make sure your house is in order before the vendor has a chance to do it for you. NPI helps enterprise technology buyers conduct licensing reviews, defend against audits, and negotiate from a position of evidence. Contact us if a Red Hat renewal is on your horizon. 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Webinars Preparing for Your Next Adobe Negotiation: What’s Changed in Adobe Pricing, Packaging, and Commercial Strategy Adobe Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. Adobe customers are facing a rapidly changing commercial landscape driven by AI bundling, forced product migrations, evolving licensing structures, and increasingly aggressive pricing strategies. Whether you’re evaluating a new Adobe investment, managing an existing ETLA, or preparing for a future renewal, understanding where the leverage is has become significantly more complicated. Join NPI for a practical discussion on the market trends, negotiation dynamics, and optimization strategies enterprise sourcing teams are using to control costs and make smarter Adobe decisions. What You’ll Learn: How Adobe’s evolving packaging and AI-driven product strategy is changing enterprise costs and licensing complexity Where customers are seeing the biggest pricing increases across ETLAs, Acrobat, Creative Cloud, and Experience Cloud The negotiation tactics Adobe is using today, including bundling, forced upgrades, usage-based pricing models, and compressed negotiation timelines How sourcing teams are evaluating alternatives, structuring commercial protections, and improving leverage in Adobe negotiations Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.
Webinars The New Cisco Negotiation Environment: Deal Optimization Strategies That Actually Deliver Cisco Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. Cisco customers are entering a very different buying environment than they were even a few years ago. Preparation and a clear direction for where optimization will drive meaningful ROI is essential. In this session, NPI will break down the latest Cisco pricing and negotiation trends, where sourcing teams are successfully creating leverage, pitfalls to avoid, and useful tips for optimizing your next Cisco purchase or renewal. What You’ll Learn: The market dynamics and pricing/licensing changes having the biggest impact on enterprise spend right now Where competitive pressure in networking, security, and collaboration is creating new leverage opportunities The most important areas of optimization that will reduce cost and risk across your Cisco estate The negotiation and optimization strategies that are driving better deal outcomes in today’s Cisco deals Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.
Blog AI Spend is Outrunning Procurement. Here’s What Sourcing Leaders Are Actually Doing About It. May 7, 2026AI Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. When we asked 89 IT sourcing leaders from large enterprises what their biggest AI spend challenge is right now, 56% picked the same thing: unpredictable usage and scaling costs. The other four options barely registered. That kind of consensus is unusual in a room full of procurement people, and it tells you something. The category isn’t behaving the way enterprise software is supposed to behave, and the people responsible for buying it know it. We hosted this “peer connect” on the back of NPI’s most recent Client Advisory Board meeting, where directors and CPOs from major brands made it clear they wanted us to bring the conversation downstream. The CAB had spent its time on AI cost governance (what’s working, what isn’t, what the next twelve months look like) and the practitioners actually managing these contracts deserved the same forum. The response to the invite told us the demand was real. So did the polls. Tokenomics and the SaaSpocalypse We’ve been discussing the SaaSpocalypse at length here at NPI — the steady deflation in SaaS valuations and how customers are shifting away from buying narrow point solutions in favor of building AI-driven workflows in-house. That’s the macro. The micro is what’s keeping sourcing teams up at night: the move from per-seat pricing, which we all knew how to negotiate, to consumption- and token-based models, which most IT procurement playbooks were not built for. Tokens. Credits. Multipliers that change by model. Vendors who define a “credit” one way in the order form and another way in the documentation. Bundling that buries AI features inside existing renewals and quietly raises the price of the bundle. None of this is new in spirit — software vendors have always optimized monetization — but the speed and opacity of the shift is new. You can’t forecast what you can’t predict, and you can’t govern what you can’t see. Half of Large Enterprises Have an AI Center of Excellence. Half Do Not. The cleanest split of the day came on the AI Center of Excellence question: a 50/50 break. We’ve talked to organizations on both sides of this and the honest read is that having a CoE is not, by itself, the answer. What our CAB members emphasized, and what the breakouts reinforced, is that even companies with dedicated AI roles often don’t have a coherent AI strategy. The org chart is ahead of the operating model. What does seem to work, regardless of whether it lives inside a formal CoE is treat tokens and credits as an internal budget. Allocate them to business units. Make people request more when they run out. That single change does more for cost discipline than any vendor-side negotiation, because it forces the organization to confront its own consumption patterns before the invoice does. Looking Ahead: Where AI Cost Pressure Will Come From in the Next 12 Months The third poll was the most interesting because it was the most distributed. Token and API usage growth led at 27%, but new vendor pricing changes (23%), more employees using AI tools (22%), and expanding AI into production workflows (19%) were all clustered behind it. It’s clear there is no single dominant pressure. There are four of them, and they’re all happening at once. That’s the part to pay attention to. It’s tempting to build a cost program around one of these (say, employee adoption) and assume the rest will follow. The organizations who are furthest along are running parallel tracks: usage governance for what’s already deployed, contract strategy for what’s renewing, vendor diligence for what’s coming next. They’re not picking one! Emerging Best Practices From Deep Within the Trenches A few patterns surfaced across our breakout sessions that are worth flagging because they aren’t in the standard procurement deck yet. Pilot-first, with shorter terms. The pattern emerging is one-year renewals on AI tooling — sometimes shorter — specifically because the underlying technology and pricing are moving too fast to commit to three-year deals. Procurement is trading discount depth for optionality, and on AI right now, that’s the right trade. Super caps and price-change clauses. Several organizations are negotiating contractual ceilings on consumption-based pricing and explicit clauses governing how vendors can redefine credits or change token multipliers mid-term. If you haven’t asked for this language yet, ask. The vendors who push back on it are telling you something. Forward deployed engineers as a hidden line item. One of the more underappreciated cost drivers came up in a breakout session: the professional services attached to AI deployments (particularly forward deployed engineers from the model providers themselves) are scarce, expensive, and often not modeled into TCO. If a vendor is offering FDE time as part of a package, find out what it’s actually worth. It’s frequently the most valuable thing in the contract. Data, training, and the quiet legal exposure. Breakouts raised real concern about what happens when proprietary data ends up in training sets, intentionally or otherwise. Most organizations do not yet have policies specific enough to be enforceable. The procurement contribution here isn’t writing the policy; it’s making sure the contract language reflects whatever policy legal lands on. ROI measurement remains the unsolved problem. Discussions revealed that most organizations are tracking spend under management on AI just fine. Attributing productivity gains or savings back to those investments is much harder. We don’t have a clean answer either, and we’d be skeptical of anyone who claims they do. The honest version: ROI on AI right now is a portfolio conversation, not a per-tool conversation, and the procurement teams getting traction are the ones helping their finance counterparts frame it that way. Where We Go From Here Several of our clients have asked us where this conversation goes next. That’s part of why we’ve launched Atrium, NPI’s peer community built specifically for practitioners working on these problems. The format is peer learning and one-to-one connections with people who have already solved (or at least wrestled with) a specific challenge, whether that’s contract language, governance design, or how to talk to the CFO about consumption-based forecasting. The challenges surrounding AI cost governance won’t settle down in the next twelve months. In all likelihood, they’ll become more problematic. Vendors will keep moving. Pricing models will keep shifting. The organizations that come out of this period in the best shape will be the ones whose procurement teams treat AI cost management as a formal discipline under build. We’re here to help, and this conversation will continue across webinars, NPI Summits, and virtual meetings within our Atrium peer community. If you’re interested in learning more about Atrium, contact us. Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.
Bulletin Turning Oracle Pressure Into Negotiation Leverage Apr 29, 2026 Download PDF Download My Copy Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. Oracle runs one of the most sophisticated enterprise software sales operations in the market. Compliance pressure, support pricing, fiscal calendar urgency, and cloud bundling are engineered to extract maximum spend from every renewal. This bulletin shows procurement and IT leaders how to reclaim control, reframe the commercial conversation, and negotiate outcomes that reflect actual market value. The Oracle Commercial Landscape Today A PLATFORM BUILT FOR LOCK-IN Over four decades, Oracle has systematically expanded from its relational database roots into cloud infrastructure, business applications, and platform middleware. Today the vendor is mission-critical for most large enterprises across ERP, database, Java runtime, and cloud services – a footprint that creates three compounding procurement challenges: Compliance risk exposure: Oracle’s license metric complexity and LMS audit infrastructure mean most enterprises carry unresolved compliance risk at any given time. Support dependency: Annual support at ~22% of net license value with compounding 8% renewal uplifts creates structural cost growth that is rarely challenged. Stakeholder fragmentation: IT, finance, legal, and business units hold independent relationships with Oracle account teams. This is misalignment that Oracle actively exploits. FOUR COMMERCIAL TACTICS RESHAPING RENEWALS Procurement leaders must understand four structural features of Oracle’s commercial model: 1. Artificial Deadline Pressure Oracle manufactures urgency around four fiscal quarter-ends: January 31, February 28, May 31, and August 31. “Approval windows closing Friday/this quarter” are a scripted tactic. 2. Bundle Discounts and Shelfware Oracle bundles ERP, HCM, database, and cloud products with large headline discounts. Shelfware commitments inflate the baseline for every future renewal. 3. License Compliance Audits as Sales Tools Oracle’s License Management Services (LMS) audit function is deployed ahead of renewals to create compliance anxiety that accelerates deal timelines. Audit frequency correlates with Oracle’s fiscal calendar, not independent audit triggers. 4. Cloud and AI Bundling Pressure OCI and Fusion SaaS are aggressively positioned as part of every renewal. AI features are gated behind premium service tiers, mirroring tier-upgrade pressure seen across the enterprise software market. Enterprises that succeed in Oracle negotiations are those that understand Oracle’s incentive structure better than Oracle’s account team understands theirs.Oracle’s account teams arrive at every renewal with detailed consumption data, a staged discount approval hierarchy, and a clear upsell roadmap. Procurement teams that are unprepared cede the information advantage before the conversation begins.The organizations that succeed in Oracle negotiations start early, own their data independently, and approach the conversation with a unified internal front. Where Enterprises Are Overpaying Understanding where spend leaks occur is a prerequisite to effective negotiation. NPI’s analysis of enterprise Oracle contracts identifies four primary overpayment vectors: SUPPORT COST INFLATION Oracle’s standard support runs ~22% of net license fees annually, with a default 8% renewal uplift. Most organizations accept this structure without challenge. Procurement teams that negotiate multi year price holds or reference third-party support (TPS) pricing materially reduce their total Oracle cost basis. TPS providers including Rimini Street and Spinnaker Support price at around 50% (or higher) of Oracle Premier Support. JAVA SE PER-EMPLOYEE PRICING Oracle’s January 2023 shift to per-employee Java SE licensing created material cost exposure for enterprises with large headcounts and legacy Java deployments. Organizations that previously paid per-processor or per-named-user now face costs 3-5x higher on a like-for-like basis. Viable migration paths to tools like Amazon Corretto and Red Hat OpenJDK exist for non-commercial Java workloads. SHELFWARE AND OVER-LICENSING Oracle’s bundle discount model creates strong incentives to contract for products that are never fully deployed. Every unused license removed before renewal cannot be cited by Oracle to justify price increases – and creates a direct credit-generating concession opportunity. The prior year’s invoice is a ceiling, not a floor. CLOUD BUNDLE COMMITMENTS AND AI UPSELLS OCI credits negotiated as part of on-premise renewal bundles frequently go underutilized. Simultaneously, Fusion SaaS contracts increasingly include AI feature tiers which may result in future nonforecasted costs. Procurement teams that accept compounding uplift clauses in multi-year Fusion terms embed structural cost growth that is difficult to reverse at subsequent renewals. Pre-Renewal Preparation: The Five Imperatives Regardless of where an organization sits in its Oracle renewal timeline, the following preparation disciplines are non-negotiable for achieving a defensible negotiation outcome: IMPERATIVE 1 Start 6-12 Months Before Renewal 6 to 12 months prior to renewal is the minimum effective preparation window. Starting earlier allows procurement to leverage Oracle’s own incentive structures (early renewal credits and scope concessions) in the customer’s favor, rather than reacting to Oracle’s timeline. Late engagement eliminates leverage and invites auto-renewal at full price. IMPERATIVE 2 Own Your License and Deployment Data First Conduct an independent license position analysis before engaging Oracle. Confirm deployed products, actual user counts, and license metrics against deployment reality. Do not rely on Oracle’s LMS data. It reflects Oracle’s commercial interests, not your actual compliance posture. IMPERATIVE 3 Build Your Bill of Materials from Actual Usage, Not Last Year’s Invoice Interview business owners for every Oracle product in your estate. Any SKU without a named accountable owner and an attached use case should not appear in the renewal. Eliminate shelfware before Oracle can use it as a baseline justification for price increases. IMPERATIVE 4 Benchmark Against Fair Market Value SKU-level peer pricing data provides a factual counterpoint to Oracle’s proposals. Without benchmark data, procurement teams negotiate from a position of information asymmetry. Oracle’s team arrives with your transaction history; you need independent market data to counter with credibility. IMPERATIVE 5 Align Internal Stakeholders Before Engaging Oracle Designate a single internal Oracle relationship owner. All communications route through that person. Oracle account teams are skilled at identifying the path of least resistance through an organization. A unified internal front with clear walk-away points is one of the most powerful negotiation tools available. Shelfware is the structural liability of Oracle cost management.Every unused Oracle license removed before renewal is one that cannot be cited by Oracle to justify price increases. It also creates a direct credit-generating concession opportunity.Oracle’s account teams know your contracted footprint. The negotiation begins with who understands actual deployment reality better. Specific Negotiation Guidance ON ORACLE SUPPORT PRICING Challenge the default 8% uplift. Request a multi-year price hold or flat renewal in exchange for early commitment. Oracle will concede on uplift before conceding on base pricing. Obtain a formal written TPS proposal. A documented ~50% (or higher) cost alternative shifts Oracle’s position materially, even if you never switch. Separate support renewal conversations from any concurrent LMS audit activity. They are legally and commercially distinct processes. ON JAVA SE Conduct a full Java discovery. Identify every system running Oracle JDK, confirm version, and assess migration viability to OpenJDK alternatives before negotiating. Calculate full compliance cost exposure under the per-employee model. That delta is your negotiating floor. Oracle only discounts when migration is a credible, documented threat. Build a migration plan with timeline, resources, and proof-of- concept. Vague migration threats are ignored; documented plans move Oracle’s position. ON OCI AND CLOUD DEALS Never accept Oracle’s first quote. Counter every OCI proposal with AWS/Azure equivalents and formal written competitive quotes. Back-of-envelope estimates are useless. Negotiate annual flex credits. Do not accept use-it-or-lose-it OCI credit structures. Request a ramp structure for multi-year Universal Credits commitments. Lower in years 1-2, escalating only after confirmed adoption. ON FUSION SAAS CONTRACTS Lock in user count flexibility for the contract term. Start conservative and negotiate a right to add users at the agreed price, not Oracle’s future list price. Lock in future module pricing at contract signing. Years 2-3 pricing not contractually fixed will be held against you at renewal. Negotiate go-live protections: standard support fees should not begin until deployment is confirmed if Oracle delays your go-live. ON ULAS (UNLIMITED LICENSE AGREEMENTS) Do not enter a ULA unless Oracle deployments are growing rapidly across multiple products. A ULA benefits Oracle in stable or declining footprint environments. Run LMS scripts 6-12 months before term end to establish your own certified count baseline before Oracle’s team does. If you certify, be aware that the Oracle ULA standard terms establish that post-term annual support fees cannot be less than the support fee paid immediately prior to ULA expiration. After certification, you can then begin the process of potentially right-sizing downward Oracle support to match your current utilization. The strongest Oracle deal outcomes aren’t negotiated at the table.They’re built months in advance through disciplined preparation, independent data ownership, internal alignment, and benchmarkbacked insight.Oracle negotiates for a living. The organizations that win are those that match Oracle’s commercial preparation with their own. Turning Preparation Into Negotiation Power Oracle’s commercial sophistication has grown in direct proportion to its product depth. The vendor arrives at every renewal conversation with detailed consumption data, a staged discount-approval hierarchy, a clear upsell roadmap, and a team of account professionals trained to identify and exploit internal misalignment on the customer side. Achieving favorable outcomes in Oracle deal negotiations isn’t limited to the largest customers with the most perceived leverage. It’s for organizations that start early, own their data independently, align internally before engaging externally, and approach the commercial conversation with benchmark-supported, use-case-validated positions. The most powerful lever in any Oracle negotiation isn’t the size of your contract – it’s the quality of your preparation. Oracle’s account teams operate on tight timelines and quota pressure. A wellprepared procurement team that controls its own data, has documented alternatives, and presents a unified internal front consistently outperforms unprepared teams regardless of deal size. Download PDF Download My Copy Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.
Blog Salesforce Just Made the “Own Your AI Layer” Argument a Lot Harder to Ignore Apr 22, 2026AI, Salesforce Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend. We have been having the same conversation with nearly every client over the past few months. It goes something like this: “Who owns your AI orchestration layer? Do your own agents orchestrate across your systems of record, or does each vendor own that layer and bill you separately for the privilege?” Many CIOs and procurement leaders are considering a departure from the norm: own it yourself. One AI bill instead of many. No lock-in to a single vendor’s agent stack. Full visibility into what your agents are actually doing and what it costs. There are many unknowns regarding the work involved to execute this approach, but there is definitive interest (if not momentum) behind the notion. This week, Salesforce made that path significantly more credible. They’ve also raised several questions that will test the viability of owning your own orchestration layer. What Salesforce Actually Announced At its TDX 2026 developer conference in San Francisco, Salesforce launched Headless 360. The short version: they have exposed their entire platform as APIs, MCP tools, and CLI commands so that AI agents can operate Salesforce completely without a browser or a human login. Your Claude agents. Your ChatGPT agents. Your own orchestration layer. They can now call directly into 25 years of Salesforce data, workflows, and business logic without Agentforce as the middleman. The release ships over 100 new tools immediately, including more than 60 MCP tools and 30 preconfigured coding skills. Salesforce also released Agent Script, an open-source language for defining agent behavior deterministically, which signals that they are serious about making this infrastructure-grade rather than demo-grade. This is arguably the most important move a large enterprise SaaS provider has made in the AI era, and an indication of what’s to come. Salesforce is doing more than simply building agents on top of their platform and selling you access to those agents. They are making the platform itself available to whatever agent runtime you choose to run. Why This Matters for the “Own Your Layer” Debate The core tension in enterprise AI right now is this: every major SaaS vendor is simultaneously building agents and positioning their agent platform as the coordination layer across the enterprise. If you let that happen, you end up with five different agent layers, five different pricing models, and no unified view of what any of it costs. The alternative, which is gaining real consideration in some companies, is building or designating your own orchestration layer and having your agents call into vendor systems via APIs rather than running inside each vendor’s walled garden. Until recently, Salesforce was a hard platform to adopt this approach with. The depth of workflow logic, process automation, and customer data inside most Salesforce implementations made it difficult to run meaningful agent workflows against the platform without going through Agentforce. Headless 360 could change that. It is not a workaround. It is Salesforce explicitly opening the infrastructure to external agents. The Catch Nobody Is Talking About: Consumption Pricing Sound too good to be true? Possibly. As companies debate the feasibility of “own your own orchestration layer,” they need insight into two things: At what cost? How do we predict and manage these costs? Salesforce has not announced how Headless 360 will be priced. But we can expect premium, consumption-driven pricing once SKUs appear. It will likely be tied to Agentforce and Data 360 usage rather than traditional seat licenses as Salesforce finds a way to meter and charge for access. Salesforce has already shifted its Agentforce pricing from per-seat licenses to consumption-based billing. That shift reflects an AI reality: when agents are doing the work, seats are the wrong unit. But consumption pricing pushes the visibility problem entirely onto the buyer. When humans consumed software, you forecasted seats. When agents consume it, you are forecasting token burn rates across workflows that do not behave the same way twice. (at least for right now – the repeatability factor is improving with every iteration). Now imagine five platforms with consumption models and your own agents calling into all of them autonomously. If you do not own the intelligence infrastructure to govern that spend, you have traded vendor lock-in for vendor chaos. When we sit down with clients on this question, we talk through two paths: Path A: Rely on each vendor’s agent layer. Each platform (Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Microsoft, etc.) orchestrates within its own domain. You get faster time-to-value within each system but no unified orchestration, no consolidated cost visibility, and a bill from each vendor’s agent platform on top of your existing license spend. Path B: Own your orchestration layer. You run a central agent runtime, you call into each platform via APIs, and you maintain visibility and control over what agents are doing and what it costs. Much like the traditional buy versus build debate, there is higher upfront investment in architecture (although this cost is becoming cheaper for teams that know how to effectively wield AI coding tools). The byproducts? A significantly better position at renewal time and in managing total AI spend. The pattern we are seeing is that organizations considering Path B are doing it not because they have a fully formed strategy, but because the math on Path A is getting difficult to defend to the CFO. What NPI Is Advising Right Now Headless 360 is fresh to market and there is still a lot to be evaluated (pricing being an obvious example). But it’s worth a serious look for any organization where Salesforce is a core system of record and where you are already building or planning to build agents. Before you move, get clear on three things: Your consumption baseline. What does your current Salesforce spend look like in terms of API consumption, automation runs, and Agentforce credits? If you do not have that number, you are not ready to let agents run autonomously against the platform. Your contract terms. Consumption pricing with credit multiplier provisions is not the same as fixed-rate API access. Know exactly what triggers cost increases and where your protections are. Your governance layer. Owning your AI orchestration layer will only be an advantage if you can see what it is doing. That means logging, cost attribution, anomaly detection, and workflow-level spend visibility across every system your agents touch. Salesforce has made the platform available. Whether you can take advantage of it in a way that is actually sustainable comes down to whether your own house is in order first. NPI helps enterprise technology buyers optimize AI spend. Interested in a conversation? Contact us. Share This Article Subscribe For Updates Uncover negotiation leverage and unlock savings across your IT spend.