Case Study Archives - Collabora Online and Collabora Office

Ideals to Entrapment: A UK Government Case Study of How Not to Run IT Infrastructure

Richard Brock — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 11:08:11 +0000

We’ve just worked through the CMA’s 637-page Final decision report (and a few appendices!) on the UK cloud infrastructure market. It’s packed with genuinely interesting data and analysis — the kind of numbers you rarely see in public (even if some of the juiciest bits are, inevitably, redacted).

This post pulls together a few of the findings we think matter most for public bodies and anyone building on the big clouds. It’s not about dunking on particular vendors; the CMA has already done the diagnosing. Our aim is simpler: highlight where incentives create lock-in and show how open standards + smart procurement keep your options open.

For more than a decade, the UK Government has championed openness, declaring in the 2012 Open Standards Principles that “government technology must remain open to everyone… [ensuring] our future technology choices will be affordable, secure, and innovative.”

Yet, as the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) bluntly stated earlier this year as the very first point of their 637 page report into cloud infrastructure services, “competition is not working well.” They found that, “less than 1% of customers switch provider each year” (point 24) citing barriers such as “the presence and magnitude of egress fees required to transfer data between cloud providers” (point 26) and technical hurdles from “the differentiation of features and interfaces in cloud services, meaning that customers are inhibited from switching or multi-cloud as they cannot easily compare, substitute, or integrate services from different providers.” (point 27)

Meanwhile, the UK government’s budget for cloud services goes up every year. A recent The Register article highlighted projected spending on Microsoft services over the next five years to be £5 billion. That’s £5,000,000,000. In response to a parliamentary question about the total spend on digital services from Microsoft over the past year, Georgia Gould MP admitted she was unable to provide a complete figure since “individual departments and public bodies are responsible for their own procurement […] however the Crown Commercial Service [has spent] approximately £1.9 billion on Microsoft software licenses in the financial year 2024/2025.”

The numbers are sobering, and the CMA’s assessment damning. It’s enough to leave government officials, and indeed every UK tax payer, asking, “How did we get here?!”

How did we get here?

A Decade of Drift into Dependence

The seeds of the UK government’s dependency were sown in 2013, when the Cabinet Office introduced its “Cloud First” policy for central government. The idea was simple: by default, departments should evaluate public-cloud solutions before considering on-premise alternatives. In theory, this would promote agility, save money, and avoid the expensive, bespoke IT systems of the past. All good?

In practice, however, “Cloud First” became “Two Cloud Hyperscalers First”. With the largest platforms (Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft) offering attractive terms, bundled services, and rapid deployment. It was easy for departments to sign on, and hard to justify looking elsewhere. Over time, critical workloads, data, and infrastructure all became deeply embedded with these two providers.

In 2025, the results are stark. AWS and Microsoft together control up to 80% of the UK cloud market. Once locked in, high switching costs, proprietary architectures, and restrictive licensing have made moving away prohibitively difficult – exactly the kind of vendor dependence that the 2012 Open Standards Principles were meant to prevent.

The Licensing Trap

You might think vendor lock-in is all about proprietary technology, but it’s also baked into the fine print of contracts and licensing terms. In their report, the CMA singled out Microsoft’s licensing rules as a major structural barrier to competition in the UK cloud market.

Under their terms, products such as Microsoft Office, Windows Server, and SQL Server cost significantly more to run on rival cloud platforms than on Microsoft’s own Azure service (for example, the Azure website states that migrating SQL Server to Azure VMs rather than AWS EC2 instances is up to 23% cheaper.) Customers who want to transfer existing on-premise licences to the cloud (known as Bring Your Own License – BYOL)* find they can only do so cheaply if they choose Microsoft Azure – running the same workloads on AWS, Google Cloud, or another smaller provider trigger extra fees or requires buying entirely new licences. As the CMA put it, “Microsoft’s licensing practices are adversely impacting the competitiveness of AWS and Google […] which is reducing competition in cloud services markets.”

This makes switching away from Azure far less attractive, even when rival providers might offer better performance, price, or features. It also undermines “multi-cloud” strategies, where organisations spread workloads across multiple providers for resilience and flexibility. Instead, once a department deploys Microsoft workloads in Azure, the financial penalty for moving elsewhere can be so steep that sticking with Azure feels like the only viable option – a textbook case of vendor lock-in.

*A mini case study inside this case study further illustrates the problems: in February 2025, Microsoft announced it would retire its previously supported BYOL policy for third-party vulnerability scanners (like Qualys or Rapid7) narrowing choice even for customers who stay on Azure. Customers who once had the flexibility to integrate their own scanning tools now must switch to Microsoft’s proprietary solution. A microcosm of the broader trend – support for outside tools is initially offered, then withdrawn in favour of Microsoft’s own platform, reducing portability and choice.

The Egress Fee Barrier

If Microsoft’s lock-in lever is licensing, AWS’s is data transfer pricing – better known as egress fees. These are the charges customers pay to move (their own) data to another provider or back on-premise.

The CMA’s investigation found that the “presence and magnitude” of egress fees were “a key commercial barrier” to customers who would like to change service provider.

Defending themselves and referencing a 2017 IDC Report for the European Commission, AWS told the CMA that “the egress fees incurred by switching customers represented less than 5% of their annual spend […] but did not explicitly explain how they calculated the estimate” (6.401 (a)). Microsoft also referenced the same report (6.401 (c)) and Google provided the same “less than 5%” figure (6.401 (d)).

The CMA challenged these figures however, noting that “the analysis referenced by both Microsoft and AWS used an individual ‘mid-sized’ customer with a specific workload as the base for its analysis. No reference was made to this customer being representative of any wider customer group and there is no reason to believe this is the case. We also consider that the 2017 IDC analysis is likely outdated given how much the markets have evolved in the eight years since its publication. We therefore consider this analysis is unlikely to be indicative of the egress fees the average customer may expect to be charged when switching” (6.403 emphasis added).

Additionally, “We further note that both AWS’ and Google’s analyses are based on customers that have been identified as having switched. Basing such an analysis on customers that have switched will only capture those customers that considered egress fees low enough that they do not disincentivise switching and will tend to exclude any customers that found egress fees too high and were deterred from switching. We therefore consider that these analyses may underestimate the cost of switching, and therefore we place less weight on these results relative to our own analysis of switching costs ” (6.404 emphasis added).

So what did the CMA’s own analysis suggest? Some customers “would have had to pay egress fees of more than [15-30]% of their annual cloud spend in a year” (Appendix M, M.37).

Clearly, these fees benefits AWS (and other hyperscalers) at the expense of competitive pressure. As the CMA put it, “We have not found any customer benefits clearly resulting from the charging of egress fees” (6.590), and “our conclusion is that egress fees reduce the ability of and/or incentives for customers to switch to other cloud providers and/or run a multi-cloud architecture. They also reduce the incentives of providers to compete for the business of their competitors” (6.591).

The Regulatory Wake-Up Call

To address the imbalance, the CMA is recommending that Microsoft and AWS in particular be designated with Strategic Market Status (SMS) under the new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. This designation would allow the CMA to impose targeted interventions on specific practices that undermine competition and lead to vendor lock-in.

The question now is whether these measures can meaningfully unwind more than a decade of drift into dependence – or if, as history often shows, it’s easier to write new policies than to loosen old entanglements.

Lessons and a Call to Action

The UK Government’s own principles are clear: technology choices should remain open, affordable, secure, and innovative. Yet over the past decade, the combination of “Cloud First” procurement, hyperscalers’ questionable tactics, and limited enforcement of open standards has created exactly the opposite – an IT estate deeply dependent on two dominant suppliers.

The CMA’s questioning of the dominance and anti-competitive practices of Microsoft and AWS is an important step, but designations won’t guarantee change. It will take political will, rigorous enforcement, and procurement reform to make a difference.

For public bodies and the rest of the market, the lessons are straightforward:

Don’t just write open standards into policy – enforce them in procurement.
Avoid companies, architectures and contracts/licenses that are designed to make moving difficult or expensive.

You should use software because you want to, not because you’re locked in. Collabora Online (along with our many partners) exists to make this choice possible – an open-source, open-standards, fully-featured and collaborative office suite you can easily run in your own environment or choice of cloud provider (Azure, AWS, STRATO, OVH Cloud…), integrate with your own servers or Kubernetes/OpenStack, even a Raspberry Pi for labs and demos, choose from our existing integrations, and even migrate away from without penalty! Because true digital sovereignty comes from systems designed to give you control.

And if anyone from the UK Government is reading this, why not give our demo a try? We’d love to help you live up to your Open Standards commitment to keep “government technology open to everyone […] affordable, secure, and innovative.”

The post Ideals to Entrapment: A UK Government Case Study of How Not to Run IT Infrastructure appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

How The German Government is Planning for an Open Future

Richard Brock — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 09:10:45 +0000

Launching openDesk 1.0 at the Smart Country Convention

After previously speaking about our involvement in the openDesk project here, we were very excited to attend the Smart Country Convention in Berlin last week as part of the openDesk platform, where one of the standout moments of the event was the launch of openDesk 1.0 – an initiative that aims to transform public administration through open-source solutions and shared resources.

We are thrilled to be part of the openDesk initiative, providing Germany’s public sector with a secure and open-source alternative for office productivity. Collabora Online enables users to easily migrate and collaborate around their existing documents, recovering their digital sovereignty. It’s exciting working together with so many other outstanding products to build a coherent solution for public administration.

Michael Meeks - Collabora Productivity CEO

Working together with Collabora Online and nine other digital service providers, openDesk aims to become the go-to office solution for public administration in Germany and beyond. With everything a modern office could need, including document editing, project management, calendar, email, chat, video conferencing, wikis and more, the pioneering project organised by the German government in collaboration with Zendis is designed to promote security and digital sovereignty, whilst fostering efficiency, and collaboration.

Why openDesk matters?

The launch of openDesk 1.0 is not just a milestone for Germany – it sets a precedent for all nations and organisations striving for digital transformation in their services. By leveraging open-source solutions, openDesk is paving the way for a more secure, sovereign, interconnected and responsive government, that prioritizes the needs of its citizens, and cannot be held hostage by proprietary solutions.

It is also an excellent showcase for the power of open-source solutions – with ten individual but open companies bringing their solutions together as one incredibly powerful and flexible product.

Looking ahead

Speaking with delegates at the conference from local and national government, as well as of course continued discussions with private organisations, it was obvious to see the demand for digital sovereignty, genuinely GDPR-compliant solutions, and responsive software providers is huge. As we look to the future, we are excited about the potential impact of openDesk on public administration. The combination of innovative technologies and collaborative practices promises to lead to more effective governance and enhanced citizen experiences.

We encourage all stakeholders in public administration to find out more about how open-source solutions such as openDesk can benefit them, and how they could be involved in this exciting initiative. Together, we can build a secure, sovereign government.

The post How The German Government is Planning for an Open Future appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

New Features in 2 Weeks? A Success Story of Productive Pivoting Spreadsheets

Richard Brock — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 11:54:44 +0000

At Collabora Productivity, we like to be productive by name and by nature. One recent feature fix for Danish insurance company – balticfinance, has shown this to be the case. Ten working days after being requested, the updated pivot table functionality was delivered.

Pivot tables are an extremely powerful feature, to reorganise (or pivot) data from one layout into another. In the image below for example, the data from columns B-D has been reorganised by ‘Category’ and the ‘Job#’ into columns F-H, with the Value of each Job automatically summed together at the bottom. As an additional convenience, each category could be collapsed/expanded by clicking on the – or + symbols to view the values itemised or summed for the category.

Data from columns B-D reorganised into a pivot table

As the cells within a pivot table have been generated by the spreadsheet, the contents cannot be directly edited. They instead mirror the value from the cells they are referencing, or automatically sum a category/total. This also makes cell formatting within pivot tables more complex than other cells. While Collabora Online has had strong interoperability with pivot tables created in Microsoft Excel for some time, previously we did not display cell formatting (such as background colours) for pivot tables created in Excel. balticfinance came to us with this exact request.

After receiving the support request on Friday 26^th January, Collabora engineers began work on the update on Monday the 29^th, with the fix delivered for testing on the 9^th February – two weeks from the initial request. The fix now means pivot table cells edited in Excel and opened in Collabora Online both retain their formatting, and survive the round trip export back to Excel in Microsoft’s OOXML format.

As well as being a great example of the deep interoperability offered by Collabora Online, we feel this story well illustrates the benefits of working with a responsive company such as Collabora Productivity for your office solution. Unlike some faceless companies, we are open and want to work with you.

If you have a special use case – get in touch! Let us help you free your documents. Learn more about our Consultancy or contact us at hello@collaboraoffice.com.

The post New Features in 2 Weeks? A Success Story of Productive Pivoting Spreadsheets appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Empowering Education with Collabora Online: A Case Study

Richard Brock — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 14:25:48 +0000

Note: Post archived from previous website - some links, images, and/or post formatting may not display correctly. Contact us using the contact page below if you have any questions about post contents.

During the global pandemic, the Friedrich-List-Gemeinschaftsschule in Mössingen, Germany, seamlessly embraced the challenge of transitioning to online learning. Throughout this process, privacy, reliability, and accessibility were held up, with an open-source strategy leveraging Collabora Online as a vital component of their educational toolkit.

“It simply works. And it is reliable. That is crucial for us. In combination with Nextcloud, it works wonderfully and is very performant.”
– David Binder, teacher and IT officer

Embracing Open Source for Education

The Friedrich-List-Gemeinschaftsschule has long been an advocate for open-source solutions, fostering an environment where students are prepared not only for academic challenges but also for the demands of a rapidly evolving digital world. With a robust IT infrastructure based on free software, including Linux clients and LibreOffice, the school was well-positioned to address the sudden shift to online education triggered by the global pandemic.

Reliability and Security as Key Factors

What sets Collabora Online apart for the Friedrich-List-Gemeinschaftsschule is its reliability and security. With approximately 70 teachers and 600 students actively using the platform, Collabora Online has seamlessly become part of the school’s everyday workflow. The software’s integration into the existing infrastructure, coupled with its commitment to data and document security, has provided the school with a reliable and privacy-conscious solution for online collaboration.

Collabora Online for Educational Empowerment

In an educational landscape where flexibility, reliability, and privacy are paramount, Collabora Online stands out as a tool that empowers both educators and students. Its usage at Friedrich-List-Gemeinschaftsschule showcases the adaptability of Collabora Online in addressing the unique challenges of modern education. As institutions continue to navigate the complexities of online learning, Collabora Online proves to be a reliable and secure solution, contributing to the evolution of education in the digital age.

Download the Full Case Study

Explore the full details of how Collabora Online enhances secure collaboration within educational institutions. Dive into the full white paper to uncover the benefits and insights.

Case Study

“Open Source helps students learn from home during lockdown”

The post Empowering Education with Collabora Online: A Case Study appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.