Most people think they would know illegal software if they saw it.

A suspicious link. A cracked download. A price so low it feels impossible. But illegal or non-valid software does not always announce itself that clearly. Sometimes it arrives through a polished website, a convincing seller, or an offer that looks like a legitimate discount.

That is especially complicated for small businesses, where every purchase matters. Professional software can be a major investment, and customers are often trying to balance cost, flexibility, and the tools they need to keep their work moving.

But when software is not genuine, the risk can follow the customer long after the purchase. It may mean no updates, no support, potential security concerns, and a difficult discovery later that the software they paid for was not what they thought it was.

To better understand the issue, Autodesk News spoke with Kristian Sneltvedt, vice president and license compliance lead at Autodesk, about what customers often misunderstand, what happens when illegal or non-valid software is identified, and how Autodesk works with customers to find a path forward.

For many enterprises, virtualisation has become so foundational that its strategic importance is easy to overlook.

Hypervisors, management tools, and the surrounding infrastructure stack quietly support the systems that run finance, operations, customer engagement, supply chain and other business-critical processes.

When that layer changes, the impact is rarely confined to IT.

It can affect cost, resilience, agility and the organisation’s ability to set its own technology roadmap.

That is why the latest shift in the VMware ecosystem deserves close attention from technology leaders.

With vSphere 7 reaching the end of general support and newer platform models emphasising bundled, subscription-based private cloud architectures, many organisations are being pushed into a compressed decision cycle.

The question is no longer simply which version to upgrade to. It is whether a vendor-driven platform shift aligns with the business, operating and financial outcomes the organisation is trying to achieve.

That distinction matters. A version upgrade is a technical project, but a virtualisation strategy is a business decision.

And business decisions should be guided by requirements, value and timing, not simply by changes in a vendor’s roadmap.

For five years, IT was slowly winning the war on cloud waste. Tech pros got better at tagging what they built and shutting off what nobody needed. In Flexera’s annual State of the Cloud survey, the estimated share of infrastructure spend going to waste shrank a little every time. That streak ended in 2025. Wasted IaaS and PaaS spend rose to 29%, the first increase in five years. The survey’s authors state that the cost complexity of AI workloads and the introduction of new PaaS offerings may be contributing factors to the overall increase in costs, particularly regarding AI workloads.

If you run IT at a smaller company, you can guess where your share of that waste hides because it never arrived as one approved line item. More likely, this waste accumulated through a departmental software trial that continued beyond its pilot phase and a virtual machine (VM) that was sized for a peak demand that never materialised.

Enterprise teams can put a FinOps platform and a dedicated analyst on this problem. You can get most of the way there with the cost instruments AWS, Microsoft, and Google already built into their consoles, on the infrastructure side and the subscription side alike. If you approach the job the way you approached a telecom bill before renewal—the target is bigger and messier, but you’ll find that the instincts transfer.

The email arrives on a Tuesday afternoon. It is polite. It is addressed to someone in procurement or IT who has never seen one before. It references a section number in an agreement signed years ago by people who no longer work at the company. It asks for a call to “discuss your licensing position” and requests that you run an attached script and return the output within thirty days.

There is no dollar figure in it. That comes later — and by then, the number will have been built almost entirely out of information your own team handed over in the first week.

This is the central and counterintuitive fact about software license audits: the most consequential decisions are made before anyone knows what is at stake. By the time a seven- or eight-figure demand arrives, the evidentiary record supporting it is already closed, and your company built most of it.

The audit demand is not calculated from what you deployed. It is calculated from what you reported, measured the way the publisher’s tools measure it.

In July, the European Union (EU) approved SAP’s commitment to allow its customers to split their SAP software landscape into separate parts, permitting them to choose different maintenance and support (M&S) service providers, different levels of support from SAP, or none for each part.

SAP also agreed that customers can terminate their licences and the respective M&S fees if there are changes to the customer’s business leading to a workforce reduction or bankruptcy. SAP also agreed to abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back-maintenance fees charged to customers who return to SAP’s support after a period of absence.

The changes are likely to benefit those SAP customers still running SAP ECC (Enterprise Core Components). Mainstream support for ECC 6 is due to end in 2027, but customers will be able to extend support until 2030.

However, those who have made a commitment to move to the S/4Hana platform can continue to extend support until 2040, as the German-speaking SAP user group DSAG explained, in response to SAP’s commitment.

It said: “Those already working on an S/4Hana system have a maintenance commitment from SAP until 2040. Therefore, it can be assumed that the new possibilities will primarily be used by customers who have previously opted against S/4Hana.

“However, those who remain on this landscape indefinitely will not benefit from the innovations that SAP is developing for S/4Hana, and especially in the cloud environment. Nevertheless, it is possible to continue operating proven core systems and selectively supplement them with cloud ERP components. This allows existing investments to be preserved and innovations to be used gradually.

“The EU decision thus expands the scope of action for companies – but, at the same time, requires an even clearer strategic definition of the target architecture for the coming years. Therefore, careful consideration is needed.”

In effect, if organisations continue to run ECC, they are unable to take advantage of the latest developments coming out of SAP – and this is related to artificial intelligence (AI). The transcript of the company’s latest quarterly earnings call shows that SAP has significantly increased its research and development investments.

CEO Christian Klein said: “In the past 12 months, we invested into new job profiles in R&D [research and development], data scientists, data engineers and invested in full-stack developers for industry AI. But we will now heavily slow down the hiring for the other profiles because AI productivity is kicking in, we see productivity gains of an average of 30%, so there is no need any more to hire additional people.”

During the quarterly earnings call, SAP was asked how the changes to maintenance and support would affect its business plans.

SAP chief financial officer Dominik Asam said the changes reflect the needs of some SAP customers who are “prioritising lower spend over the advantages of maintenance and support. This is an agreement between the EU and SAP to commit to certain mitigations in terms of flexibility on maintenance.

“First, I want to stress that the maintenance is extremely highly valued by the lion’s share of our customers: the value of being current on cyber patches, compliance patches, legal patches and some functional improvements we can bring to the table.”

Asam claimed SAP previously granted flexibility and opportunity to customers enabling them to adjust their software spend based on their needs. He said this practice has now been to some degree through the agreement with the EU.

He said: “We do see quite a nice pickup in returns from third-party maintenance. People try that for a while, tend to be more nervous over time about incidents happening, and then come back.”

“Some of the discussions in that context are about how we deal with the customers who are knocking on our door saying, ‘We want to come back’, and how much back-maintenance fees they need to pay and so on.”

He said those returning to SAP for maintenance often ask how much maintenance they will need to pay in lieu of the time they were not paying SAP. When asked whether SAP customers may now continue to remain on ECC given the changes SAP has made, Asam said: “There might be an impact, but we think we can manage it.”

He added that SAP is also converting customers onto its cloud-based Rise platform, which he claimed is unrelated to the transition from ECC.

The implications are that SAP is hoping organisations on third-party support use its own support instead. But it needs to work out how those returning customers are charged as organisations that have unbroken SAP maintenance and support contracts are generally charged for the continued development of the product, which is something a returning customer has avoided paying.

In a blog post, Stefan Steinle, executive vice-president and head of global customer support at SAP, confirmed that returning customers will not be charged any administrative fees and SAP will limit the back-maintenance fee to the minimum of six months, or 50% of the fees for the time off. The SAP Note 3776551 lists outdated products where there are no back-maintenance fees.

Commenting on the changes, Jon Gill, vice-president of EMEA at Spinnaker Support, said: “The trust of SAP customers has been repeatedly tested over the past decade. A new platform is announced, the business case is made and customers commit at scale. Then, once dependency is established, the terms change to align with SAP’s needs rather than those of their customers.”

Gill also believes SAP’s focus on AI is partly due to challenges it faces moving customers to the Rise cloud-based ERP platform: “To understand why AI now, it helps to understand SAP’s position. Rise migration is slower than SAP needs.

“What customers have been asked to undertake come with a price tag that, for large enterprises, runs into hundreds of millions. Customers who built a financial case for it have largely come back with the same conclusion: the return is not there,” Gill added.

A growing number of VMware customers are doing something that looks contradictory on paper: renewing their VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) subscriptions in full, then declining to take the very upgrade those subscriptions exist to fund. They are paying for VCF 9, but they are not installing it.

It’s a pattern that has grown steadily since the Broadcom acquisition, and it isn’t a handful of stragglers waiting out a compatibility issue. It’s a consistent category of customer behaviour in its own right, sitting somewhere between full migration and full commitment to VCF 9.

You might expect the explanation to be technical: a workload that isn’t ready, a compatibility issue, a migration too complex to schedule on Broadcom’s timetable. There’s some truth in that. The obstacles most frequently cited by customers are migration complexity, higher-than-expected alternative costs, and technical barriers. But the concern that ranks above all of those is price: 85% remain worried about further increases, and three in five have already seen renewal costs rise by more than a quarter. Technical readiness explains why some migrations are slow. It doesn’t explain why so many customers aren’t attempting one at all. What customers are really weighing has little to do with whether VMware still works. It is a question of whether to commit to Broadcom’s subscription now, on terms that could look very different by the next renewal, or to hold that decision open for as long as the 2027 deadline allows.

That change in direction has a starting point. Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023, and within weeks had stopped selling perpetual licences altogether: every VMware product would be sold as a subscription from that point on, bundled predominantly into VCF. Broadcom also offered VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), a lighter version of VCF, before withdrawing it from certain markets. Existing perpetual licences weren’t revoked, but the support attached to them now had a fixed shelf life rather than an open-ended one. At the time, that looked like a licensing technicality. It is now the deadline shaping almost every conversation customers are having about VMware’s future.

AI was supposed to deliver efficiency. That was the promise that fuelled aggressive investments across enterprises over the past few years. But a growing body of evidence tells a different story—one that’s starting to feel familiar for IT leaders.

A recent article in Inc. highlights a stark reality: Many companies are seeing AI costs rise much faster than expected, with budgets expanding rather than shrinking. In fact, Gartner predicts worldwide spending will reach $2.52 trillion this year. And a KPMG survey finds that many organisations have shifted to a usage-based AI model, leaving many shocked at the cost of AI.

New research from the Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report and the Flexera 2026 AI Pulse Report reinforces this trend, revealing that organisations are still struggling to gain visibility and control over AI-driven spending.

As enterprises accelerate AI adoption and modernise their operations, traditional procurement processes are struggling to keep pace with increasingly fragmented software environments, subscription-based services, and growing governance requirements.

During the “Simplifying Technology Procurement in Hong Kong” roundtable, organised by Jicara Media and hosted by AWS, IT, procurement, finance, and risk leaders discussed how software purchasing models designed for an earlier era are now creating friction across the enterprise.

Participants from sectors including banking, insurance, hospitality, shipping, and retail described procurement cycles that are often slowed by siloed purchasing, compliance requirements, vendor onboarding complexities, and uncertainty around emerging AI technologies. At the same time, organisations are under pressure to move faster.

“Procurement teams are no longer just focused on cost control or compliance,” noted Vincent Wong, who leads the Hong Kong partner business at AWS. “They are increasingly becoming part of broader business transformation.”

Anyone responsible for a budget knows that uneasy feeling: The annual financial statement is on the table, the figure is higher than expected, and no one can really explain it. Not because anyone was negligent, but because the tools that served us well for years were designed for a different model. In consulting practice, this isn’t an isolated case. It’s a pattern. And it’s one that can be avoided with the right tools.

As long as SAP was a fixed-cost item, the question of value didn’t require a nuanced answer. One license, one maintenance contract, one budget line item. For a portfolio consisting of cloud ERP subscriptions, BTP consumption, Business AI credits, and Business Data Cloud, that’s no longer enough. The question hasn’t changed. The complexity of the answer has.

AI is transforming how leaders interact with technology data. Natural language queries and automated recommendations make insights faster and more accessible. As a result, many executives are asking a reasonable question: “If AI can analyse everything, why do we still need IT Asset Management (ITAM) and FinOps platforms?”

The short answer is that AI accelerates insight but it is not held accountable. That gap introduces real risk.