This was the year of AI agents. Chatbots that simply answered questions are now evolving into autonomous agents that can carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, so enterprises continue to invest in agentic platforms as transformation evolves. Software vendors are investing in it as fast as they can, too.

According to a National Research Group survey of more than 3,000 senior leaders, more than half of executives say their organization is already using AI agents. Of the companies that spend no less than half their AI budget on AI agents, 88% say they’re already seeing ROI on at least one use case, with top areas being customer service and experience, marketing, cybersecurity, and software development.

On the software provider side, Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise software applications in 2026 will include agentic AI, up from less than 5% today. And agentic AI could drive approximately 30% of enterprise application software revenue by 2035, surpassing $450 billion, up from 2% in 2025. In fact, business users might not have to interact directly with the business applications at all since AI agent ecosystems will carry out user instructions across multiple applications and business functions. At that point, a third of user experiences will shift from native applications to agentic front ends, Gartner predicts.

It’s already starting. Most enterprise applications will have embedded assistants, a precursor to agentic AI, by the end of this year, adds Gartner.

IDC has similar predictions. By 2028, 45% of IT product and service interactions will use agents as the primary interface, the firm says. That’ll change not just how companies work, but how CIOs work as well.

Agents as employees

At financial services provider OneDigital, chief product officer Vinay Gidwaney is already working with AI agents, almost as if they were people.

“We decided to call them AI coworkers, and we set up an AI staffing team co-owned between my technology team and our chief people officer and her HR team,” he says. “That team is responsible for hiring AI coworkers and bringing them into the organization.” You heard that right: “hiring.”

The first step is to sit down with the business leader and write a job description, which is fed to the AI agent, and then it becomes known as an intern.

“We have a lot of interns we’re testing at the company,” says Gidwaney. “If they pass, they get promoted to apprentices and we give them our best practices, guardrails, a personality, and human supervisors responsible for training them, auditing what they do, and writing improvement plans.”

The next promotion is to a full-time coworker, and it becomes available to be used by anyone at the company.

“Anyone at our company can go on the corporate intranet, read the skill sets, and get ice breakers if they don’t know how to start,” he says. “You can pick a coworker off the shelf and start chatting with them.”

For example, there’s Ben, a benefits expert who’s trained on everything having to do with employee benefits.

“We have our employee benefits consultants sitting with clients every day,” Gidwaney says. “Ben will take all the information and help the consultants strategize how to lower costs, and how to negotiate with carriers. He’s the consultants’ thought partner.”

There are similar AI coworkers working on retirement planning, and on property and casualty as well. These were built in-house because they’re core to the company’s business. But there are also external AI agents who can provide additional functionality in specialized yet less core areas, like legal or marketing content creation. In software development, OneDigital uses third-party AI agents as coding assistants.

When choosing whether to sign up for these agents, Gidwaney says he doesn’t think of it the way he thinks about licensing software, but more to hiring a human consultant or contractor. For example, will the agent be a good cultural fit?

But in some cases, it’s worse than hiring humans since a bad human hire who turns out to be toxic will only interact with a small number of other employees. But an AI agent might interact with thousands of them.

“You have to apply the same level of scrutiny as how you hire real humans,” he says.

A vendor who looks like a technology company might also, in effect, be a staffing firm. “They look and feel like humans, and you have to treat them like that,” he adds.

Another way that AI agents are similar to human consultants is when they leave the company, they take their expertise with them, including what they gained along the way. Data can be downloaded, Gidwaney says, but not necessarily the fine-tuning or other improvements the agent received. Realistically, there might not be any practical way to extract that from a third-party agent, and that could lead to AI vendor lock-in.

Edward Tull, VP of technology and operations at JBGoodwin Realtors, says he, too, sees AI agents as something akin to people. “I see it more as a teammate,” he says. “As we implement more across departments, I can see these teammates talking to each other. It becomes almost like a person.”

Today, JBGoodwin uses two main platforms for its AI agents. Zapier lets the company build its own and HubSpot has its own AaaS, and they’re already pre-built. “There are lead enrichment agents and workflow agents,” says Tull.

And the company is open to using more. “In accounting, if someone builds an agent to work with this particular type of accounting software, we might hire that agent,” he says. “Or a marketing coordinator that we could hire that’s built and ready to go and connected to systems we already use.”

With agents, his job is becoming less about technology and more about management, he adds. “It’s less day-to-day building and more governance, and trying to position the company to be competitive in the world of AI,” he says.

He’s not the only one thinking of AI agents as more akin to human workers than to software.

“With agents, because the technology is evolving so far, it’s almost like you’re hiring employees,” says Sheldon Monteiro, chief product officer at Publicis Sapient. “You have to determine whom to hire, how to train them, make sure all the business units are getting value out of them, and figure when to fire them. It’s a continuous process, and this is very different from the past, where I make a commitment to a platform and stick with it because the solution works for the business.”

This changes how the technology solutions are managed, he adds. What companies will need now is a CHRO, but for agentic employees.

Managing outcomes, not persons

Vituity is one of the largest national, privately-held medical groups, with 600 hospitals, 13,800 employees, and nearly 14 million patients. The company is building its own AI agents, but is also using off-the-shelf ones, as AaaS. And AI agents aren’t people, says CIO Amith Nair. “The agent has no feelings,” he says. “AGI isn’t here yet.”

Instead, it all comes down to outcomes, he says. “If you define an outcome for a task, that’s the outcome you’re holding that agent to.” And that part isn’t different to holding employees accountable to an outcome. “But you don’t need to manage the agent,” he adds. “They’re not people.”

Instead, the agent is orchestrated and you can plug and play them. “It needs to understand our business model and our business context, so you ground the agent to get the job done,” he says.

For mission-critical functions, especially ones related to sensitive healthcare data, Vituity is building its own agents inside a HIPAA-certified LLM environment using the Workato agent development platform and the Microsoft agentic platform.

For other functions, especially ones having to do with public data, Vituity uses off-the-shelf agents, such as ones from Salesforce and Snowflake. The company is also using Claude with GitHub Copilot for coding. Nair can already see that agentic systems will change the way enterprise software works.

“Most of the enterprise applications should get up to speed with MCP, the integration layer for standardization,” he says. “If they don’t get to it, it’s going to become a challenge for them to keep selling their product.”

A company needs to be able to access its own data via an MCP connector, he says. “AI needs data, and if they don’t give you an MCP, you just start moving it all to a data warehouse,” he adds.

Sharp learning curve

In addition to providing a way to store and organize your data, enterprise software vendors also offer logic and functionality, and AI will soon be able to handle that as well.

“All you need is a good workflow engine where you can develop new business processes on the fly, so it can orchestrate with other agents,” Nair says. “I don’t think we’re too far away, but we’re not there yet. Until then, SaaS vendors are still relevant. The question is, can they charge that much money anymore.”

The costs of SaaS will eventually have to come down to the cost of inference, storage, and other infrastructure, but they can’t survive the way they’re charging now he says. So SaaS vendors are building agents to augment or replace their current interfaces. But that approach itself has its limits. Say, for example, instead of using Salesforce’s agent, a company can use its own agents to interact with the Salesforce environment.

“It’s already happening,” Nair adds. “My SOC agent is pulling in all the log files from Salesforce. They’re not providing me anything other than the security layer they need to protect the data that exists there.”

AI agents are set to change the dynamic between enterprises and software vendors in other ways, too. One major difference between software and agents is software is well-defined, operates in a particular way, and changes slowly, says Jinsook Han, chief of strategy, corporate development, and global agentic AI at Genpact.

“But we expect when the agent comes in, it’s going to get smarter every day,” she says. “The world will change dramatically because agents are continuously changing. And the expectations from the enterprises are also being reshaped.”

Another difference is agents can more easily work with data and systems where they are. Take for example a sales agent meeting with customers, says Anand Rao, AI professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Each salesperson has a calendar where all their meetings are scheduled, and they have emails, messages, and meeting recordings. An agent can simply access those emails when needed.

“Why put them all into Salesforce?” Rao asks. “If the idea is to do and monitor the sale, it doesn’t have to go into Salesforce, and the agents can go grab it.”

When Rao was a consultant having a conversation with a client, he’d log it into Salesforce with a note, for instance, saying the client needs a white paper from the partner in charge of quantum.

With an agent taking notes during the meeting, it can immediately identify the action items and follow up to get the white paper.

“Right now we’re blindly automating the existing workflow,” Rao says. “But why do we need to do that? There’ll be a fundamental shift of how we see value chains and systems. We’ll get rid of all the intermediate steps. That’s the biggest worry for the SAPs, Salesforces, and Workdays of the world.”

Another aspect of the agentic economy is instead of a human employee talking to a vendor’s AI agent, a company agent can handle the conversation on the employee’s behalf. And if a company wants to switch vendors, the experience will be seamless for employees, since they never had to deal directly with the vendor anyway.

“I think that’s something that’ll happen,” says Ricardo Baeza-Yates, co-chair of the  US technology policy committee at the Association for Computing Machinery. “And it makes the market more competitive, and makes integrating things much easier.”

In the short term, however, it might make more sense for companies to use the vendors’ agents instead of creating their own.

“I recommend people don’t overbuild because everything is moving,” says Bret Greenstein, CAIO at West Monroe Partners, a management consulting firm. “If you build a highly complicated system, you’re going to be building yourself some tech debt. If an agent exists in your application and it’s localized to the data in that application, use it.”

But over time, an agent that’s independent of the application can be more effective, he says, and there’s a lot of lock-in that goes into applications. “It’s going to be easier every day to build the agent you want without having to buy a giant license. “The effort to get effective agents is dropping rapidly, and the justification for getting expensive agents from your enterprise software vendors is getting less,” he says.

The future of software

According to IDC, pure seat-based pricing will be obsolete by 2028, forcing 70% of vendors to figure out new business models.

With technology evolving as quickly as it is, JBGoodwin Realtors has already started to change its approach to buying tech, says Tull. It used to prefer long-term contracts, for example but that’s not the case anymore “You save more if you go longer, but I’ll ask for an option to re-sign with a cap,” he says.

That doesn’t mean SaaS will die overnight. Companies have made significant investments in their current technology infrastructure, says Patrycja Sobera, SVP of digital workplace solutions at Unisys.

“They’re not scrapping their strategies around cloud and SaaS,” she says. “They’re not saying, ‘Let’s abandon this and go straight to agentic.’ I’m not seeing that at all.”

Ultimately, people are slow to change, and institutions are even slower. Many organizations are still running legacy systems. For example, the FAA has just come out with a bold plan to update its systems by getting rid of floppy disks and upgrading from Windows 95. They expect this to take four years.

But the center of gravity will move toward agents and, as it does, so will funding, innovation, green-field deployments, and the economics of the software industry.

“There are so many organizations and leaders who need to cross the chasm,” says Sobera. “You’re going to have organizations at different levels of maturity, and some will be stuck in SaaS mentality, but feeling more in control while some of our progressive clients will embrace the move. We’re also seeing those clients outperform their peers in revenue, innovation, and satisfaction.”

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HPE가 HP에서 분리돼 독립적인 여정을 시작한 지 10년이 지난 시점에, 최고경영자 안토니오 네리는 12월 3와 4일 바르셀로나에서 열린 HPE의 주요 연례 유럽 행사 무대에 올랐다. 네리는 이 자리에서 네트워크, 클라우드, 인공지능(AI)이라는 세 가지 기술 축을 중심으로 한 HPE의 로드맵을 공개했다.

네리는 HPE 디스커버 바르셀로나 2025 행사에 참석한 6,000여 명의 청중을 향해 “지난 10년 동안 우리가 함께 만들어낸 성과가 매우 자랑스럽다”라며 “앞으로 펼쳐질 변화는 더욱 기대된다”라고 말했다.

HPE가 제시한 세 축의 전략은 오늘날 기업이 직면한 핵심 IT 과제를 해결하기 위한 것이다. 네리에 따르면 기업들은 여전히 레거시 인프라 처리, 데이터 주권 확보, 지속적으로 증가하는 비용 관리, AI 확산으로 높아진 컴퓨팅 수요 등의 도전에 맞서고 있다.

특히 주니퍼네트웍스(Juniper Networks)를 지난해 7월 인수하며 크게 강화된 네트워크 기술은 이번 바르셀로나 행사에서 핵심 요소로 부각됐다.

주니퍼의 전 CEO이자 현재 HPE 네트워킹 사업 총괄을 맡고 있는 라미 라힘은 행사에 참석해 양사 통합의 첫 기술 성과를 소개했다. 양사의 네트워크 관리 플랫폼에 새로운 AI 기반 운영 기능을 통합하고, 공동 하드웨어를 처음으로 공개한 것이다.

라힘은 “지금처럼 네트워크의 중요성이 높아진 시기는 없었다”라고 말하면서, 이제 네트워크의 목표는 단순 연결이 아니라 ‘자율적 관리’라고 설명했다. 그는 네트워크가 스스로 구성·최적화·복구하는 방향으로 나아가야 한다고 강조하며, AI로 설계되고 AI를 위한 네트워크가 증가하는 기기 연결, 복잡해지는 환경, 고도화되는 보안 위협을 처리할 수 있다고 밝혔다.

네리는 “라미와 내가 가진 공통의 목표는 네트워킹 분야에서 새로운 리더를 만드는 것”이라고 말했다. 그는 주니퍼 인수 후 5개월 만에 HPE가 이미 이전 경쟁사였던 주니퍼 기술과 2015년 인수한 아루바 솔루션을 결합한 커넥티비티 제품을 시장에 제공하고 있다고 설명했다. 이어 “앞으로는 양사가 각각 무엇을 하고 있는지조차 구분되지 않을 것”이라며, “기본적인 이중 설계를 이미 지원하고 있다는 사실은 두 조직이 얼마나 빠르게 하나로 융합되고 있으며, 동시에 HPE의 혁신 역량이 어떻게 활용되고 있는지를 잘 보여준다”라고 덧붙였다.

HPE의 주니퍼 인수, 복잡한 과정을 거치다

140억 달러(약 20조 원) 규모의 HPE의 주니퍼 인수는 단순한 거래가 아니라 매우 복잡하고 긴 여정이었다. 2024년 1월 인수 계획이 발표됐지만 최종 거래는 2025년 7월에 이르러서야 마무리됐다. 미국에서는 특히 논란도 적지 않았다. 미국 법무부(DOJ)가 이번 인수가 네트워크 장비 시장, 특히 무선랜(WLAN) 분야의 경쟁을 약화시킨다며 소송을 제기했기 때문이다.

이번 인수 승인 과정에서 겪은 난관과 여전히 남아 있는 미국 내 비판에 대해 파운드리 산하 언론사 컴퓨터월드의 질문을 받은 네리는 먼저 “미국을 제외한 국가에서는 통상적인 6개월 내 승인이 완료됐다”라고 설명했다. 2024년 여름에는 3개국만 승인이 남아 있었고, 그중 2개국은 다음 3개월 내 승인을 마쳤다는 것이다. 네리는 미국의 경우 “선거와 행정부 교체라는 변수가 있었고, 이후 절차가 다시 진행됐다”라고 덧붙였다.

네리는 이번 사례를 분석하면서 “미국 법무부는 캠퍼스와 지사 시장, 특히 무선 분야에서 경쟁사가 3곳에서 2곳으로 줄어들 것으로 판단했다”라고 말했다. 하지만 실제 시장은 그보다 훨씬 크다는 게 네리의 설명이다. 그는 “미국 시장만 보더라도 시스코, 주니퍼, HPE, 캄비움네트웍스(Cambium Networks), 유비쿼티(Ubiquity), 아리스타(Arista) 등 7~8개 업체가 경쟁하고 있다”라며 산업군별로 강점이 다르고 대기업 시장과 공공 부문에서도 경쟁 구도가 다르다고 언급했다. 이어 “여러분(기자들)이 보도하는 시장점유율만 봐도 시장 규모가 크고 매우 분산돼 있다는 사실을 확인할 수 있다”라고 말했다.

결국 미국 법무부와는 “상호에 도움이 되는 건설적인 과정을 거쳤다”라고 네리는 설명했다. 그는 “이번 인수 시장은 경쟁을 촉진하는 환경임을 입증했다”라며, 미국의 대형 M&A 최종 심사 단계에서도 고객이나 경쟁사로부터 어떠한 이의 제기도 받지 않았다고 강조했다.

AI와 클라우드에 집중되다

바르셀로나에서 네리는 최근 몇 달 동안 HPE가 클라우드와 AI 분야에서 이뤄낸 기술적 진전을 강조했다. 그는 AI를 “전형적인 하이브리드 워크로드”라고 규정하면서, 두 기술이 불가분하게 연결돼 있다고 설명했다.

네리는 사용량 기반 모델로 시작해 현재 전 세계 4만 6,000명 고객을 확보한 하이브리드 클라우드 플랫폼 그린레이크(GreenLake)를 소개하며, 여기에 자율 에이전트 기반 프레임워크 ‘그린레이크 인텔리전스(GreenLake Intelligence)’와 같은 AI 기능을 추가할 계획이라고 밝혔다. 이 기능은 지난 6월 HPE가 발표한 것으로, 하이브리드 클라우드 환경에서 IT 운영을 자동화하고 단순화하는 데 초점을 둔다. 네리는 “IT 운영 단순화의 미래가 이미 도착했다”라고 말했다.

네리는 또 HPE의 에어갭 기반 프라이빗 클라우드 전략이 EU처럼 규제가 강한 지역, 그리고 군과 같이 민감 데이터가 중요한 전략 분야에서 큰 의미가 있다고 강조했다.

네리는 바르셀로나에서 공개된 또 하나의 솔루션에도 주목했다. AMD의 ‘헬리오스(Helios)’ 랙 스케일 AI 아키텍처가 이더넷 네트워킹과 통합된 첫 사례다. 그는 이 솔루션이 주니퍼의 연결 하드웨어와 소프트웨어, 브로드컴 토마호크6 네트워킹 칩을 결합해 “수조 개 매개변수 모델의 학습 트래픽, 높은 추론 처리량, 초대형 모델을 지원할 수 있다”라고 설명했다. 이 구성은 HPE 서비스팀이 공급한다.

네리는 또한 슈퍼컴퓨팅 분야에서 HPE가 보유한 강력한 입지도 강조했다. 이는 2019년 슈퍼컴퓨터 전문 기업 크레이(Cray)를 인수하며 확보한 기반이 크게 작용했다. 그는 “HPE는 세계에서 가장 큰 슈퍼컴퓨터 6대를 구축한 기업이며 이 분야의 글로벌 선도 기업”이라고 말했다. 다만 “AI 수요가 그 어느 때보다 커졌지만 모든 기업이 이를 처리하기 위해 슈퍼컴퓨터가 필요한 것은 아니다”라며, 그러나 “모든 기업에는 안전한 AI 스택이 필요하다”라고 덧붙였다.

HPE는 이러한 요구에 대응하기 위해 엔비디아와 협력해 프라이빗 클라우드 환경에서 생성형 AI 애플리케이션 개발·배포를 가속화하는 통합 인프라 솔루션 ‘HPE 프라이빗 클라우드 AI’를 제공하고 있다. 네리는 이 솔루션이 “법적 데이터 요구사항을 충족하며”, 동시에 AI 혁신의 핵심 과제인 “시간, 비용, 위험”을 해결하는 데 초점을 맞춘다고 설명했다. 그는 여기에 더해 HPE가 최근 엔비디아와 AMD와 함께 AI 구축을 가속화하는 고성능 네트워킹 솔루션을 추가했다고 바르셀로나에서 밝혔다.

본사업 기반 성장과 M&A 기반 확장

HPE가 지난해 9월 회계연도 3분기 실적 발표에서 제시한 전망에 따르면, 회사는 2025 회계연도(10월 31일 종료) 매출이 고정 환율 기준 14~16% 증가할 것으로 예상하고 있다. 2024 회계연도 매출은 301억 달러(약 44조 원)로, 2023년 대비 3.4% 증가했다.

네리의 리더십 아래 HPE는 총 35건의 인수를 진행했다. 네리는 바르셀로나 기자회견에서 이를 직접 상기시키며, 앞서 언급한 주니퍼네트웍스와 크레이 외에도 여러 주요 인수를 나열했다.

2020년에는 SD-WAN 기업 실버피크(Silver Peak)를, 2021년에는 데이터 보호 및 재해복구 기업 제르토(Zerto)를 인수했다. 2023년에는 보안 및 IT 운영 분야의 액시스시큐리티(Axis Security)와 옵스램프(OpsRamp)를 추가했으며, 2024년에는 하이브리드 클라우드 관리 기업 모르페우스데이터(Morpheus Data)를 인수했다.

네리는 “우리는 포트폴리오를 보완하고 목표 시장에서 규모를 확장할 수 있는 적절한 자산을 찾고 있다”라며 “이 자산은 매출과 수익 측면에서 타당해야 하며, 동시에 주주들에게 가치도 제공해야 한다”라고 말했다.
dl-ciokorea@foundryco.com

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Software management struggles that have pained enterprises for decades cause the same anguish to government agencies, and a bill making its way through the US House of Representatives to strengthen controls around government software management holds lessons for enterprises too.

The Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets (SAMOSA) bill, H.R. 5457, received unanimous approval from a key US House of Representative committee, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, on Tuesday.

SAMOSA is mostly focused on trying to fix “software asset management deficiencies” as well as requiring more “automation of software license management processes and incorporation of discovery tools,” issues that enterprises also have to deal with.

In addition, it requires anyone involved in software acquisition and development to be trained in the agency’s policies and, more usefully, in negotiation of contract terms, especially those that put restrictions on software deployment and use.

This training could also be quite useful for enterprise IT operations. It would teach “negotiating options” and specifically the “differences between acquiring commercial software products and services and acquiring or building custom software and determining the costs of different types of licenses and options for adjusting licenses to meet increasing or decreasing demand.”

The mandated training would also include tactics for measuring “actual software usage via analytics that can identify inefficiencies to assist in rationalizing software spending” along with methods to “support interoperable capabilities between software.”

Outlawing shadow IT

The bill also attempts to rein in shadow IT by “restricting the ability of a bureau, program, component, or operational entity within the agency to acquire, use, develop, or otherwise leverage any software entitlement without the approval of the Chief Information Officer of the agency.” But there are no details about how such a rule would be enforced.

It would require agencies “to provide an estimate of the costs to move toward more enterprise, open-source, or other licenses that do not restrict the use of software by the agency, and the projected cost savings, efficiency measures, and improvements to agency performance throughout the total software lifecycle.” But the hiccup is that benefits will only materialize if technology vendors change their ways, especially in terms of transparency.

However, analysts and consultants are skeptical that such changes are likely to happen.

CIOs could be punished

Yvette Schmitter, a former Price Waterhouse Coopers principal who is now CEO of IT consulting firm Fusion Collective, was especially pessimistic about what would happen if enterprises tried to follow the bill’s rules.

“If the bill were to become law, it would set enterprise CIOs up for failure,” she said. “The bill doubles down on the permission theater model, requiring CIO approval for every software acquisition while providing zero framework for the thousands of generative AI tools employees are already using without permission.”

She noted that although the bill mandates comprehensive assessments of “software paid for, in use, or deployed,” it neglects critical facets of today’s AI software landscape. “It never defines how you access an AI agent that writes its own code, a foundation model trained on proprietary data, or an API that charges per token instead of per seat,” she said. “Instead of oversight, the bill would unlock chaos, potentially creating a compliance framework where CIOs could be punished for buying too many seats for a software tool, but face zero accountability for safely, properly, and ethically deploying AI systems.”

Schmitter added: “The bill is currently written for the 2015 IT landscape and assumes that our current AI systems come with instruction manuals and compliance frameworks, which they obviously do not.”

She also pointed out that the government seems to be working at cross-purposes. “The H.R. 5457 bill is absurd,” she said. “Congress is essentially mandating 18-month software license inventories while the White House is simultaneously launching the Genesis Mission executive order for AI that will spin up foundation models across federal agencies in the next nine months. Both of these moves are treating software as a cost center and AI as a strategic weapon, without recognizing that AI systems are software.”

Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, was also unimpressed with the bill. “It is a sad, sad day when the US Federal government requires a literal Act of Congress to mandate the Software Asset Management (SAM) behaviors that should be in place across every agency already,” Bickley said. “One can go review the [Office of Inspector General] reports for various government agencies, and it is clear to see that the bureaucracy has stifled all attempts, assuming there were attempts, at reining in the beast of software sprawl that exists today.”

Right goal, but toothless

Bickley said that the US government is in dire need of better software management, but that this bill, even if it was eventually signed into law, would be unlikely to deliver any meaningful reforms. 

“This also presumes the federal government actually negotiates good deals for its software. It unequivocally does not. Never has there been a larger customer that gets worse pricing and commercial terms than the [US] federal government,” Bickley said. “At best, in the short term, this bill will further enrich consultants, as the people running IT for these agencies do not have the expertise, tooling, or knowledge of software/subscription licensing and IP to make headway on their own.”

On the bright side, Bickley said the goal of the bill is the right one, but the fact that the legislation didn’t deliver or even call for more funding makes it toothless. “The bill is noble in its intent. But the fact that it requires a host of mandatory reporting, [Government Accountability Office] oversight, and actions related to inventory and overall [software bill of materials] rationalization with no new budget authorization is a pipe dream at best,” he said. 

Sanchit Vir Gogia, the chief analyst at Greyhound Research, was more optimistic, saying that the bill would change the law in a way that should have happened long ago.

“[It] corrects a long-standing oversight in federal technology management. Agencies are currently spending close to $33 billion every year on software. Yet most lack a basic understanding of what software they own, what is being used, or where overlap exists. This confusion has been confirmed by the Government Accountability Office, which reported that nine of the largest agencies cannot identify their most-used or highest-cost software,” Gogia said. “Audit reports from NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency found millions of dollars wasted on licenses that were never activated or tracked. This legislation is designed to stop such inefficiencies by requiring agencies to catalogue their software, review all contracts, and build plans to eliminate unused or duplicate tools.”

Lacks operational realism

Gogia also argued, “the added pressure of transparency may also lead software providers to rethink their pricing and make it easier for agencies to adjust contracts in response to actual usage.” If that happens, it would likely trickle into greater transparency for enterprise IT operations. 

Zahra Timsah, co-founder and CEO of i-GENTIC AI, applauded the intent of the bill, while raising logistical concerns about whether much would ultimately change even if it ultimately became law.

“The language finally forces agencies to quantify waste and technical fragmentation instead of talking about it in generalities. The section restricting bureaus from buying software without CIO approval is also a smart, direct hit on shadow IT. What’s missing is operational realism,” Timsah said. “The bill gives agencies a huge mandate with no funding, no capacity planning, and no clear methodology. You can’t ask for full-stack interoperability scoring and lifecycle TCO analysis without giving CIOs the tools or budget to produce it. My concern is that agencies default to oversized consulting reports that check the box without actually changing anything.”

Timsah said that the bill “is going to be very difficult to implement and to measure. How do you measure it is being followed?” She added that agencies will parrot the bill’s wording and then try to hire people to manage the process. “It’s just going to be for optic’s sake.”