Regulations and laws such as the European Accessibility Act, coupled with the rising number of accessibility lawsuits in the US, are putting pressure on firms to make accessibility a requirement when procuring software. Having a diverse design team, one key ingredient for creating inclusive experiences, also pays off from a business perspective.

Our Budget Planning Guides help you plan spending in 2026. Tailored to different areas — IT, CX, B2B and B2C marketing, digital business, and more — these guides assist you in thinking through where to invest more, where to reduce spending, and where to experiment strategically.

Reduce Spending And Regain Control Across Microsoft Agreements

Hyperscalers absorb responsibility for capacity planning, hardware refreshes, baseline security controls, and availability at scale, reducing operational risk while improving financial flexibility. FinOps practices emerge not to reduce spend outright, but to make cloud costs more transparent and governable. These days, this comes in the form of access to AI infrastructure without the same supply chain challenges. Improve reliability, resilience, and global reach of core systems.

Hyperscalers assume responsibility for capacity planning, hardware refreshes, baseline security controls, and availability at scale, reducing operational risk while improving financial flexibility. FinOps practices emerge not to reduce spending outright, but to make cloud costs more transparent and governable. Today, this comes in the form of access to AI services with digital sovereignty support. Boost the reliability, resilience, and reach of core systems.

As companies shored up their finances and simultaneously invested in AI to answer investor and market demands, they reduced spending on DevOps solutions — and struggled with questions about how AI would affect the nature of their DevOps teams in the future. This was a miss. Rust will enter the top 10 of the TIOBE Index, while C and C++ drop in rank. Grade: C. While we made this prediction following White House advice to prefer memory-safe languages, we missed on this one as well.

Public cloud is primarily used to procure services without new contracts (46%), access specialized infrastructure (45%), and extend or modernize existing applications (33%). Cloud spend continues to rise. In 2024, European VP-plus-level public cloud decision-makers reported spending, on average, $32 million in the prior 12 months.

However, buyers will soon benefit from advances in personal productivity software and investments by procurement software vendors and buying-ecosystem providers. Many signs indicate that initial, slow experimentation among buyers will quickly give way to widespread adoption. These signs include: Most B2B professionals already use genAI on a regular basis.

At this time, AWS has formal support for major procurement vendors Coupa and SAP Ariba — but not for all major procurement systems. For example, one of our clients found that integration with his Oracle procurement system was not available out of the box. Also, not all marketplaces offer this; this is currently a highlight of AWS that is still somewhat rare in the world of marketplaces. Hard dollar savings due to spending commitments.

Through this volatility, tech leaders are looking for ways to reduce spend and optimize their budgets. One way to do this is through technology contract negotiations, both for new contracts as well as renewals. However, these negotiations are often challenging: Strategic failures results in negotiations going astray. Contract negotiations rarely fail as a result of problems with oversight.