Software vendors can boost revenue by tracking customer usage across products, while AI accelerates pricing and consumption decisions. It is hard to find any software vendor that sells just one product. Portfolios have expanded from modules to editions, cloud services, add-ons, and now AI capabilities. A lot can be achieved through an expanded portfolio. IDC research commissioned by Thales shows that customers with consolidated agreements “spend more, churn less, and deepen their relationship with the vendor over time.” However, there is one thing to note. Purchasing four products from the same vendor does not mean they will be treated as a single vendor, as each product has its own licensing, measurement, and sales terms. The Size of the Prize Existing customers are an obvious place to look for growth. The possible upside could be considerable. According to IDC research on software vendors from June 2026, 55% of software vendors believe that enhanced monetization would bring a 6% to 10% uplift in revenue, and 29% expect more than 10%. IDC has also linked a SaaS provider’s ability to capitalize systematically on new features and capabilities to net revenue retention and growth. Companies that excel at this see it in their valuations too. McKinsey research shows top-quartile B2B SaaS companies achieve 113% net revenue retention, growing 13% from existing customers alone, against 98% for bottom-quartile peers. Capturing that opportunity becomes harder when the commercial systems behind the portfolio cannot see across it. Sales teams may know a customer well, but they also need to know what that customer has bought, what they are entitled to use, and how much of it they are consuming. That information is what turns a general cross-sell conversation into a relevant one. Where Portfolio Revenue Leaks Away Product launches or acquisitions might occur at different times, and the business units could operate independently. With time, each one may build its own licensing approach, customer database, product catalog, and commercial model. IDC’s vendor research found that only 25% of software vendors have centralized usage data. In practice, vendors need to at least unify the entitlement system first. All of the products need to sit in one catalog before the vendor can create a bundled offer across them. Getting there can stall for technical, organizational, or budget reasons. But the reason to overcome those barriers comes back to the customer experience. A company may be optimized internally around separate product lines or business units, while customers still have to go to multiple places to access and manage products they bought from the same vendor. Customer pressure has historically forced companies to restructure and centralize around that problem. Licensing and entitlement ownership can move out of individual product lines and into a central function, such as engineering operations, product operations, supply chain operations, or SaaS operations. For that to work, the central function needs real authority rather than existing in name only. A customer could be approaching the limits of Product A while another part of the company sells Product B, which would be a logical next purchase. The usage data contains the signal, but it may sit in a system that the team responsible for Product B never sees. AI can multiply this problem quickly. Vendors no longer need to launch an entirely new application before they have something new to monetize. A new model, agent, workflow, or premium feature could all require decisions about entitlements, usage, and price. Over time, however, customers can end up with a growing collection of meters, contract terms, entitlements, and invoice lines. The vendor sees one expanding portfolio. The customer sees the work required to understand and manage it. Buyers are already feeling this pressure. IDC’s customer research found that 45% struggle to reconcile purchased licenses with actual usage, while 39% cite inflexible licensing models as a challenge. At the same time, 60% of buyers report an active drive to reduce the number of software vendors they use. Consolidating with a strategic supplier becomes much less attractive if it leaves the customer managing the same complexity under a single company name. What Unified Portfolio Monetization Enables A shared entitlement system brings products from different business units into one catalog, giving vendors a consistent view of what customers have bought and what they can use. That common foundation is what makes portfolio-wide bundles and offers possible. Vendors do not necessarily have to wait for every commercial system to be consolidated before they get there. Thales can bring third-party license generators onto one platform, while Central Migrate and Thales’s internal migration expertise and best practices support the move from existing licensing systems. Shared credits or pooled consumption can provide another option. Customers have a single balance that can be used across multiple products or capabilities. As vendors add AI features with different consumption patterns, this gives them room to introduce new capabilities without automatically introducing a standalone commercial model for each. M&A Creates Another Portfolio Opportunity The same issue appears after an acquisition. CEOs are looking for the “1+1=3” outcome: creating more value from the combined business than the two companies could separately. The acquirer can sell its portfolio to the acquired company’s customers, while the acquired company’s products can be introduced to the acquirer’s customer base. The problem is that full M&A integration can take time, particularly when ERP and ordering systems are involved. Entitlement systems can be unified much sooner and with considerably less work than a full ordering-system integration. That allows portfolio monetization to run in parallel with the heavier systems work rather than waiting for it to finish. The business can start cross-selling across the combined customer base sooner, giving leadership a way to demonstrate acquisition ROI faster. Turning Usage Into Expansion Opportunities Usage data then becomes useful beyond billing. Vendors can see which customers own Product A but not Product B, which customers are consuming, and which customers are regularly reaching the limits of their current entitlement. They can also change the renewal conversation. Actual consumption provides a much stronger basis for discussing the next contract than assumptions made when the previous agreement was signed. It shows what customers are using heavily, what they are barely touching, and where there may be a natural opportunity for upselling and cross-selling. Buyers appear open to this kind of consolidation. IDC found that 86% are somewhat and extremely interested in a single licensing agreement covering multiple products from the same vendor. Runaway costs are the biggest concern around vendor consolidation, cited by 74%, followed by lack of flexibility at 62% and lack of transparency at 59%. Those concerns put some useful boundaries around portfolio monetization. Bringing more products into one commercial relationship needs to make them easier for the customer to understand and manage. Visibility into consumption, clear entitlements, and controls over spend become more important as the portfolio grows. Making a Larger Portfolio Easier to Buy AI is likely to keep adding features, agents, models, and new forms of consumption to software portfolios. Portfolio growth works better when the entitlement system cuts across product and business-unit silos. Customers can see what they own, understand what they are consuming, and use more of the vendor’s products without having to navigate a new commercial process each time. The IDC report shows that buyers already want greater flexibility, visibility, and control. The opportunity for vendors is to make expansion across the portfolio easier to buy and manage, even as the underlying technology becomes more complex. About the Author: Manoj Tharakan is Director of Product Management, CDI, at Thales, where he works on software licensing, SaaS billing, and monetization. With over 20 years across software licensing, SaaS billing, and monetization, he’s helped build the systems vendors rely on to actually get paid for the value they create. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, AI)
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