The bill is rising. Part of it is technology tax.

What we mean by technology tax

The tax is not the invoice. It is the part of the invoice that buys nothing: unused entitlement, duplicated tools, seats that outlived the people they were bought for, and maintenance on platforms the business has not yet decided to keep or retire.

It does not show up as a line called waste. It renews.

For a group of about 2,000 to 12,000 people, software, SaaS, ERP maintenance, and the new AI layer are already a large annual cash outflow. Unused seats and paid duplicates are usually a multi-million-rand annual problem. The money comes back at renewal, not as a monthly windfall. No outsider can name your number without your contracts.

The problem is visibility, not appetite

Flexera's 2026 State of ITAM Report found complete IT visibility at 36%, down from 43% a year earlier. Seventy-eight percent of teams say keeping an accurate inventory is their top job, which is another way of saying they do not yet have one they trust.

SaaS wasted spend is still rising. AI is compounding the same pattern: wasted AI spend is up at 59% of organisations; only 31% report visibility into AI software. Groups of this size are buying faster than they can see.

Why the tax is heavier in this market

You buy in dollars and report in rand. Unused seats are a forex problem as well as a waste problem. When the rand moves, unused entitlement becomes more expensive without any extra capability.

The operating model adds copies. A listed group is often many legal entities, several countries, and more than one finance or HR stack. Vendor roadmaps, including the approaching end of mainstream SAP ECC maintenance in December 2027, still run on the vendor's clock.

Hybrid makes inventory harder. South African organisations are moving some AI workloads out of public cloud faster than peers, citing cost, data sovereignty, and control. That is rational. It is also more places for the same licence family to hide.

Procurement can outrun operational readiness. The Auditor-General's 2024-25 PFMA work found unused software licences at 14 public entities, and cases where systems were purchased but not used.

The EXCO test

Can you show, this quarter, which applications are duplicates, which seats are dark, which contracts renew on autopilot, and which value streams they support? If that view does not exist, the tax is being paid without a trusted picture to govern against.

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