20-30% Stock Drops. 30,000 Layoffs. What Enterprise Software Vendors Do Next.
Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow have all taken serious stock hits in 2026, some losing 30-40% of their market value. Oracle reportedly cut up to 30,000 jobs in a single week.
These aren't unrelated events. They're symptoms of the same underlying pressure: massive AI infrastructure bets that investors are no longer willing to wait on.
When vendors are under that kind of financial pressure, history tells us where they look to recover revenue. Not new customers. Existing ones. The mechanism is compliance enforcement.
What makes this cycle different is the compliance surface has changed. It's no longer just installed software on managed devices. It now includes SaaS user counts, cloud consumption commitments, token-based AI agreements and hybrid access rights, and vendors have real-time telemetry into all of it.
Full article here:
Join the conversation on LinkedIn:
Questions, Ideas, Suggestions?
If you have any questions, simply hit reply to this email, and while you’re there, I’d love your input. Send me any story ideas you’d like me to cover, people I should speak to, or examples from your world I can learn from. If you spot anything I’ve missed (or a better angle, data point, or takeaway), tell me, I read every reply and it genuinely improves what I publish. Cheers, Martin.
New here? See previous editions of the newsletter here: https://itamreview.beehiiv.com/