The incredibly shrinking shelf life of IT solutions

It’s a common refrain for CIOs: The pace of innovation is only getting faster.

And chasing that pace has IT execs increasing spending, as research firm Gartner has predicted that worldwide IT spending will increase 7.9% this year versus 2024. Outlays for software alone is expected to be up 10.5%, despite many CIOs pausing net-new spending due to macroeconomic uncertainties, Gartner reports.

One of the biggest factors driving those increases is the shorter lifespan of IT solutions deployed within the enterprise, according to CIOs, consultants, and researchers.

“Technology cycles are spinning faster and faster, and some solutions are evolving so fast, that they’re now a year-long bet, not a three- or five-year bet for CIOs,” says Craig Kane, partner in the digital and analytics practice of Kearney, a global strategy and management consulting firm.

Julie Irish, senior vice president and CIO of tech company Couchbase, is seeing that quicker churn of IT solutions within her company.

And the rise of AI is playing a role, as Irish specifically sees increasing churn in solutions supporting go-to-market work, as vendors in that space race to create applications that incorporate increasing amounts of artificial intelligence. That can send business leaders clamoring for the latest-and-greatest. “There are a lot more alternative solutions with new AI capabilities that the business is interested in,” Irish says.

Money is also contributing to faster turnover of IT solutions, says Irish, who has seen unexpected big jumps in renewal costs coming from some vendors whose products her company had deployed. That has pushed her to switch vendors more quickly than planned. “That’s driving some change. That’s always been happening to some extent but it’s happening more now,” Irish adds.

Additionally, Irish says some vendors aren’t keeping pace with the rapid clip of market innovations, prompting a faster replacement of their solutions than Couchbase had planned. “There are going to be some [solutions] that make it and some that don’t,” she says.

Another factor driving the faster churn is the ease of switching from one application to another in this era of cloud computing and software as a service. “It’s almost scary how easy it is to turn on a new solution,” Irish says. “The tech is very fast from a deployment perspective; we’re not spending as much time with migrations or deployment.”

Throw-away apps and fresh starts

Other CIOs make similar observations.

“We are living in a period of high user expectations. Every day is a newly hyped technology, and CIOs are constantly being asked how can we, the company, take advantage of this new solution,” says Boston Dynamics CIO Chad Wright. “Technology providers can move quicker today with better development tools and practices, and this feeds the demand that customers are creating.”

Greg Taffet, a fractional CIO working at Ceres Environmental and other organizations, has also found that the shelf life of solutions has shrunk.

“I am replacing solutions after a couple of years in some cases right now, because in some cases it’s better to start with new tools to get the better result than get patches and upgrades to the solution we have,” Taffet says.

Some software won’t even last months, let alone a year or two, he adds. He points to the growing use of throw-away apps — applications built for a specific in-the-moment need and then replaced or completely discarded — as an extreme example of this trend.

Taffet says it’s not just the rapid pace of tech innovation that’s necessitating quicker turnover of solutions; it’s the ever-faster pace of business, the market, and regulations.

“With all that change, we sometimes find that all of a sudden the application we have isn’t best suited for our business anymore,” he says. “In my own enterprises I see things evolving toward a shelf life of a year, with some of the core solutions two to three years.”

The varying lengths of a solution’s lifecycle

Not every CIO is switching out software as quickly as that, and Taffet, Irish, and others say they’re certainly not seeing the shelf life for all software and solutions in their enterprise shrink.

Indeed, many vendors are updated their applications with new features and functions to keep pace with business and market demands — updates that help extend the life of their solutions.

And core solutions generally aren’t turning over any more quickly today than they did five or 10 years ago, Kearney’s Kane says.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, for example, tends to stay put for a long time, he says, pointing out the high cost, effort, and complexity associated with implementing a new ERP — especially at larger companies. The decision to replace an existing ERP with another is not made lightly nor quickly, Kane says, adding that ERP systems in Fortune 100 companies can have 15- to 20-year lifespans.

Meanwhile, Eric Bloom, executive director of the IT Management and Leadership Institute, says much of the quick turnover of solutions may be unnecessary.

Yes, tech innovation is happening faster now than in the past, Bloom says, noting that we’re in a burst of innovation — namely around AI — and that the innovation will slow as the technology matures.

But Bloom does not believe such bursts of innovation always necessitate replacing solutions more quickly, and he attributes a good portion of the fast churn of software solutions in the enterprise today more to FOMO than need.

“I see the anxiety to stay up to date with tech and new innovations driving some of it, and vendors are always saying something new, or you need to upgrade,” he says.

Furthermore, he points out that rapidly churning through solutions for reasons other than true business needs generally does not deliver any benefits or ROI.

Buyer’s remorse

That explains in part why so many businesses regret their software purchases, says Olivia Montgomery, associate principal analyst at Capterra, a software review and rating platform that connects buyers and vendors.

Capterra’s 2025 Tech Trends Survey found that 59% of the 3,500 businesses surveyed regretted software purchase. Additionally, more than half of those regretful buyers reported significant to monumental financial losses from these investments.

“The software marketplace is being flooded with new solutions, and the main players are doing lots of releases and updates. That can overwhelm their clients,” Montgomery says. “There are more tools on the market, there’s more marketing of those tools, so we’re seeing higher rates of replacements.”

Montgomery says CIOs and business colleagues sometimes think the solutions they have in place are falling behind market innovations and, as a result, their business will fall behind, too. That may be the case, but they may just be falling for marketing hype, she says.

Montgomery also cites the fast pace of executive turnover as contributing to the increasingly short shelf life of IT solutions. She says new CIOs and new business execs often seek to replace some of the existing solutions they inherit in their new roles with ones they prefer or used in their prior jobs.

Those cases, too, often lead to buyer’s remorse, Mongomery adds.

‘Focus on the business problem first’

On the other hand, the organizations least likely to regret software purchases are those with CIOs who understand business objectives and have solid processes to evaluate whether existing solutions meet business needs and whether new solutions are truly needed, according to Capterra’s research.

Fractional CIO Taffet says that has been key for him when he’s feeling pressure to bring in new solutions.

“The fact that technology is changing so fast is not really anything that I focus on. I still have to focus on the business problem first and then apply the right technology to the problem,” he says. “So if I have something that is working and is meeting the business requirements, it’s not automatically replaced because the technology changes.”