At a total contract value of £9 billion over five years they could at least demand interoperability of Microsoft with other systems and infrastructure, banding together with other countries (and the EU) maybe.

Otherwise I'll be looking forward to see how they ever want to break their systems and workflows apart again once the glue between Azure/Sharepoint/Office365/Exchange/PowerBI/Teams/Evolve/Copilot has fully dried.

It's already quite late anyway, but with the "MS Teams culture" not yet cemented in some sectors there's still a chance for it to be "mainly about MS Office and Outlook". Once all your employees shift daily communication to MS-Teams and all its integrated modules, you will have to deal with Office, Outlook, Teams+Sharepoint+PowerBI+Copilot+Azure+X...

> "Buying "off the shelf" (OTS) recognized and Industry standard proprietary solutions provides considerably better functionally, offers lower risks, and is more accepted by staff who use the same software at home."

> "Core digital and technology functions in government should be standard, using OTS software for major stuff like email and office productivity, focusing on innovative exploitation through recognised and proven tools, not using open source software."

The article seems to completely miss the issue of stickiness here. I agree with the stated benefits of OTS, but if the customer takes the comfort of "major stuff" OTS-software and doesn't use its leverage now to demand interoperability on the layers below, there soon won't be any room left for "innovative exploitation" with other suppliers.

There's no reason why a customer of this size shouldn't be able to e.g. award contracts for cloud infrastructure separately from "email and office productivity software", ESPECIALLY if its a government body.