Cross-sector · Economics & Procurement
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7 articles · Cross-sector · Economics & Procurement
Articles
Week of 2 February 2026
Vendors repriced in a day, contracts run for years: the buyer’s side of the software selloff
In February, investors dumped software stocks on fears that AI agents would upend the business. Buyers in banks, hospitals and agencies faced a slower-moving problem: contracts priced per human user, locked for years, closed to automation and hard to exit.
Week of 25 November 2024
Blue Yonder put process-running vendors at the top of the risk register
A ransomware attack on Blue Yonder left baristas and warehouse staff waiting on schedules and pay, and exposed a blind spot. Most vendor checks ask who holds your data. The better question is whose failure would stop your work.
Week of 25 December 2023
Someone else’s lawsuit, your contracts: how the Times case reached regulated AI buyers
Banks, health systems and agencies were not parties to The New York Times’s December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. It still reached them in three ways: through the vendor promises they relied on, the content they published and the prompts their vendors kept.
Week of 20 November 2023
Why the useful response to OpenAI’s board crisis was a days-to-switch number
No vendor questionnaire could have predicted OpenAI’s November 2023 boardroom upheaval. What regulated buyers could control was how costly it would be to move away from any one AI provider, and that came down to contracts, architecture and fallbacks.
Week of 25 July 2022
Chip policy ran on a decade’s clock; IT backlogs ran on a quarter’s
The CHIPS and Science Act passed while network switches and servers sat on back order. It was about where chips would be made in the 2030s. IT leaders needed separate answers, on separate timescales, for the backlog, the refresh plan and provenance.
Week of 23 May 2022
An acquisition announcement is a free option on your exit plan
Broadcom’s deal to buy VMware gave customers eighteen months before anything changed. The organizations that fared best treated that time as a cheap option: they priced a way out, kept it alive with small investments, and used it, on evidence, at renewal.
Week of 19 October 2020
Antitrust moves in years; vendor dependency is set at signing
The Justice Department’s case against Google opened a long fight over platform power. It offered regulated buyers no relief on their own dependence on vendors, which is settled in contracts, system design and tested exit plans, far faster than any court moves.