This year, we’ve observed a notable shift: ITAM teams reporting directly to CIOs or CTOs dropped by 6 percentage points, while those aligning with cloud management or FinOps saw a 5-point increase. This shift reflects closer structural alignment between ITAM and FinOps as responsibilities evolve. While reporting alignment increased, day-to-day interaction dipped slightly year over year, suggesting that as roles become clearer, collaboration is becoming more targeted rather than constant.

Most organizations (78%) now have a dedicated FinOps team. Regardless of an organization’s size, more than half of respondents say they regularly engage with these teams. However, compared to last year, there’s been a noticeable drop in ITAM and FinOps interaction overall—but when looking at the relationship between FinOps and ITAM teams, the good news is roughly half of respondents report directly to the same manager or VP/director, regardless of organizational size. To achieve comprehensive visibility and drive IT optimization, it’s vital for these groups to work closely together. Having both report to the same leaders could make collaboration easier and more effective.

ITAM and FinOps continue to converge, with 92% of ITAM team members reporting they’re upskilling for FinOps—an encouraging signal for the future of cross-functional cost management.

Which team is responsible for generating software savings in public cloud environments?

2025: N=506; 2026: N=512
Source: Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report
(Figure 7)

Year over year, we’re seeing a notable shift in which teams are accountable for generating software savings in public cloud environments. Organizations reported that ITAM teams are responsible for generating software savings in public cloud environments just 1 percentage point more often than FinOps teams. Last year, 59% of organizations reported this was managed through ITAM/SAM teams with 32% reporting management through FinOps teams.

As ITAM responsibilities expand, teams are also facing growing operational and organizational challenges—many tied directly to new environments, rising complexity and limited resources. Year over year, the largest enterprises report fewer FTEs dedicated to HAM and SAM activities. In contrast, medium and large enterprises show an increase in ITAM staffing. Staffing levels for smaller organizations remain roughly unchanged.

For ITAM teams’ SAM-focused responsibilities, maintaining an accurate inventory (78%) is the top priority, underscoring how foundational clean, enriched data remains. This year’s results reinforce that theme across multiple areas. For example, among advanced users, reclaiming unused software increased from 59% to 79% year over year. Tracking SaaS and public cloud software also continues to trend upward, and tracking the use of AI software is the top planned responsibility (47%).

Maturity continues to shape focus areas. Mature organizations tend to prioritize what’s in use and cloud software optimization, while less mature organizations are still building the foundational program elements. Tracking the use of software licenses in public cloud increased across all organization sizes year over year (from 52% to 53% for beginners; 60% to 65% for intermediate users; 62% to 75% for advanced users).

Among advanced users, several practices posted significant year-over-year gains:

• Tracking usage of software licenses in containers increased from 38% to 49%
• Reclaiming unused software increased from 59% to 79%
• Optimizing based on software use rights increased from 51% to 59%
• Providing data for regulation or ESG initiatives increased from 48% to 58%

How are you measuring AI spend?

N=512
Source: Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report
(Figure 12)

This year, we asked respondents how they track AI spend. Responses were similar across small and large organizations, but mid-sized organizations were most likely to include AI spend in software budgets rather than track it separately.

ITAM teams appear to be taking on more HAM responsibility, along with FinOps teams taking on more cloud software responsibility. Across the board, reported HAM responsibilities increased year over year, with maintaining accurate inventories remaining the central theme. Lifecycle management stood out, increasing by 7 percentage points.

What FinOps-focused responsibilities does your ITAM team have?

N=175
Source: Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report
(Figure 17)

Nearly all ITAM professionals report at least some responsibilities related to FinOps, with only 3% reporting none. Three-quarters are responsible for cloud software licenses, and 64% are responsible for SaaS licenses. More than half (51%) are responsible for AI spend visibility.

Findings for SAM team responsibilities are largely consistent with last year, with one notable addition: tracking the use of AI software. Fifty-two percent of ITAM teams that report to the CTO or CIO are tracking AI usage. That rate is higher when ITAM reports to cybersecurity teams (58%), while ITAM teams that report into FinOps track AI software less than the average (41%).

HAM team responsibilities and reporting lines are also similar year over year. However, security teams show notable increases across most categories.

What do your hardware sustainability policies include?

N=512
Source: Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report
(Figure 20)

For the second year in a row, sustainability processes increased across the board, with the exception of a statistically insignificant change in longer retention periods. Overall, sustainability policies continue to gain momentum across organizations.

As AI adoption and experimentation accelerate, 59% of organizations report that wasted AI spend has increased year over year. The Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud Report highlights growing cost pressure (including 45% using GenAI in public cloud services) across cloud environments, reinforcing why ITAM teams are expanding optimization and governance efforts across software and cloud licensing.

This year’s State of ITAM survey findings point to similar pressure across the IT estate. Reported SaaS wasted spend increased by 10 percentage points, and IaaS and PaaS increased by 8 percentage points.

New to the survey this year, tracking or adopting new AI applications ranks as the second-highest significant challenge and the top combined challenge overall (84% of respondents). Managing new environments is also rising as a significant challenge, up 9 percentage points year over year. As AI, SaaS and cloud continue to expand, this pressure is likely to increase and drive closer alignment between ITAM and FinOps teams.

Software vendor use rights are becoming more complex as well, up 3 percentage points year over year. By maturity level, new environments (such as SaaS, cloud and containers), tracking or adopting new AI applications and software use rights complexity are significant challenges across the board. For beginner ITAM practitioners, limited resources or a lack of SAM tools is another key obstacle, second only to use rights complexity.

What practices have you implemented for managing Saas?

N=512
Source: Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report
(Figure 25)

SaaS management practices are largely consistent with last year, with one notable practice increased by 14 percentage points year over year and is up 15 percentage points compared to two years ago, suggesting organizations are pushing for more value from their software vendors. Chargeback or showback is also a new category for the survey this year, with 23% of respondents reporting they use it for SaaS.

Organizations expect AI software investment to rise, and ITAM professionals anticipate their SAM focus will shift accordingly. Nearly half of respondents (47%) expect a significant increase in the attention paid to AI software over the coming years.

At the same time, respondents report lower expected focus in data center software (down 11 percentage points year over year), desktop software (down 4 points) and public cloud software licenses (down 7 points). Desktop and data center software also lead in reported decreased focus in the next three years. Overall, planned investment is down across most software categories outside of AI, which may reflect broader economic conditions and uncertainty about how AI will affect organizations.

Optimizing software spend remains the top SAM priority, driven by license reuse, contract negotiation and rightsizing across on‑premises, SaaS and cloud software environments. It’s more than 19 percentage points ahead of the next-highest first-ranking priority, up more than 9 percentage points year over year. This is also the largest gap we’ve seen between the first and second priorities since we began the survey.

Overall, priorities point to a “save more, spend less” theme. Tracking AI usage debuted in the middle of the pack, and we’ll be watching how it shifts as AI programs mature.

Microsoft remains the most relevant software vendor for many SAM programs, coming in with a 4.15 on a scale of 1 to 5. AI software is also rising in relevance as spend on AI grows.

When it comes to the importance of SaaS vendors and technologies to SAM programs, Microsoft continues to be the most important vendor across all categories. Notably, AI software has increased sharply in investment importance, moving from the lowest-ranked area last year to nearly the third highest this year. Its weighted average rose from 1.94 to 3.13, suggesting AI will continue to take a larger share of SAM attention as adoption expands. SaaS vendors across the board were ranked more relevant this year compared to last year.

Audit activity remains one of the most persistent drivers of ITAM effort and investment. This year’s findings look at both recent audit activity and longer‑term trends to show how audit pressure is shaping priorities, resourcing and optimization strategies.

Microsoft audits increased by 14 percentage points year over year and are the most commonly reported at 64%. Oracle also rose by 14 percentage points, while Adobe and VMware increased by 8 and 9 percentage points, respectively. These high numbers—and the increasing trend line—should be a concern for businesses.

Looking at reported audit costs over the past three years, the highest spend tiers declined this year (5% at $5 million to $10 million, 6% at $10 million to $25 million, and 2% at $25 million or more). At the same time, more respondents reported spend in the mid-range tiers (up 4 percentage points at $500k to $1 million and up 11 percentage points at $1 million to $2 million). Overall, audits remain prevalent, with 44% of organizations reporting more than $1 million in audit spend over the past three years. Tracking both to 1-year and 3-year audit activity provides a clearer picture of near‑term pressure and longer‑term financial impact.

Audit activity isn’t limited to the multi-year view. Nearly half of respondents (48%) say their organization received an audit in the past year. Among those respondents, 64% report a Microsoft audit and 50% report an Oracle audit.

Roughly half (51%) of companies annually spend more than $5 million on software running in the cloud and 29% of companies spend more than $15 million. Of that software, the majority of the spend is in three vendors: Microsoft, Oracle and SAP—with a huge bulk being Microsoft at 40%.

Reducing the number of licenses and downgrading licenses are the top two ways companies are saving on Microsoft. For IBM, rightsizing virtual environments and utilizing sub-capacity licensing is the top way they’re saving. For ServiceNow, reducing licenses is by far the most effective strategy for companies in reducing costs. And finally, reducing the number of physical cores/hosts that run Oracle workloads is where companies are finding the most savings for Oracle. Across the board, rightsizing the business by reducing licenses is a key way companies are saving on software across vendors—ranked first for Microsoft and ServiceNow, second for Oracle and third for IBM.

Overall, the metrics organizations use to gauge the success of their HAM initiatives were largely unchanged year over year. The main shift was a stronger focus on reducing manual effort, which increased to 41%—potentially reflecting growing interest in AI-driven automation.

For SAM initiatives, the top success metrics remain hard savings on software and compliance with regulatory audits, both of which continue to rank very high at 49%.

Compliance with vendor contracts dipped a few percentage points, but most categories are in line with last year.

New to the survey this year, 29% of respondents report adopting, tracking or measuring the value of AI software, and this metric is likely to rise as AI portfolios expand. We also saw a meaningful year-over-year gain in reducing growth on renewals, up 7 percentage points.

Savings patterns from organizations’ SAM programs remain consistent year over year, with license reuse continuing to deliver the most reliable gains. Organizations report significant savings by reusing licenses to avoid new purchases outside of cloud environments, with 43% identifying this as a key cost optimization strategy.

By maturity level, reusing licenses to avoid buying new licenses is producing savings across the board with 94% of advanced ITAM companies reporting savings. Strong negotiations also produce strong savings across the board. AI tools aren’t producing strong savings yet, but we plan to keep an eye on this trend line.

This year saw meaningful gains in cloud, SaaS and BYOL visibility, likely reflecting closer collaboration between ITAM and FinOps teams. New this year, AI software visibility remains limited. Only 31% of organizations report having visibility into AI software, underscoring how early AI governance remains as ITAM teams begin operationalizing tracking and oversight for this emerging category. Visibility across AI is critical for businesses moving forward.

Europe shows a similar overall distribution to the global sample, with a higher share of respondents from organizations with 20,000 to 50,000 employees and a smaller share from organizations with 50,000 to 100,000 employees. The number of FTEs dedicated to HAM and SAM activities among European respondents closely mirrors the global results.

Optimizing software spend and driving savings continues to be the top SAM priority for European respondents. At the same time, tracking AI software usage is already the number one priority for 10% of European organizations looking ahead to next year.