We went into the cloud before Azure was a thing. AWS was a thing on the US when we did it, but back then no one in the Danish public service would’ve put our data into an American cloud. We instead rented iron instead of buying it, which sort of amounts to the same thing except it isn’t in your basement, but in someone else’s. Perfectly fine when the business case is there, which it was, and it helped us immensely for the world of today since we began getting everything virtual back then. Anyway, a decade later and now the move is going toward Azure (it could just as easily be AWS if Amazon had Office365) but it’s not like we want to move away from Microsoft as such. Yes we are idealists who want more open source in the public sector, but we’re also realists who have a staff of 30 to deal with the IT needs of 10.000 employees, some of which can’t tell support if the device they need help for is an iOS or Android device. We also don’t pay our IT staff enough to hire equal level talent for Linux systems, because that talent mass is just so much smaller.
Getting back to my point though. Over the years we’ve gone from using different Kanban and planning tools to using Microsoft teams and planner. We’ve gone from using different document sharing systems (and the strict control over these) to using OneDrive for business. We’ve gone from using Cisco software phones to using Skype for Business and teams. We’ve gone from using dreambroker to using the video tools in windows and teams for presentation. We’ve gone from having different ways of running the scripts that maintain our org data, and BI tools that present them, to using azure services and powerbi. We started our using Softomotive as our Robotics platform and became the leading public sector organisation with it, and Microsoft just bought it. The list goes on.
In short, we’ve gone from buying software from 30 different countries to simply using what Microsoft is now supplying through its platforms. We know it’s maybe not the best strategy, but it’s hard to defend not doing it when it’s both cheaper, easier for the organisation and what our IT staff wants because it gives them CVS that can be used almost every where.
Maybe this is just Microsoft being very good at spotting trends in the European public sector, but they are just so much better at it than agencies like Gartner, Deloitte, E&Y and even their competitors in the form of IBM and Amazon. Although as far as legalisation goes, Amazon has them beat by a lot despite starting slow.