"75% of the budget to maintenance, and 25% to new system acquisitions", which is what I suspect that statistic really means, isn't that bad. Honestly it might

"75% of the budget to maintenance, and 25% to new system acquisitions", which is what I suspect that statistic really means, isn't that bad. Honestly it might be heavy on new system acquisitions. I tend to think that enterprise lifecycles are too fast, most of the time, but that's because they're frequently driven by vendor licensing policies that make old-but-working systems prohibitively expensive on purpose. (IBM is notorious for this.) I don't know if there's a name for this already, but I think there's a common fallacy in which people think that a "chuck it and redo it from the ground up" effort will be easier than fixing their existing system's bugs and/or will result in a less-buggy system. But there's a danger in that you're just moving from a situation where you know where all the bugs are, to a situation where you haven't found them yet. I've seen companies that seem to be stuck endlessly in this cycle.