I work for a Danish municipality with roughly 10,000 employees. I’m not sure if you know, but our public sector has been competing with Estonia at being the most digitised in the world for a decade. We operate an estimated 300-500 different IT-systems, some of them enterprise sized SAP solutions deployed on old IBM mainframes with multiple layers of APIs to make their fronts somewhat web-based (don’t ask). Others are minor time registration systems or automated vacation-payouts. I said estimated because a day-care institution is free (though advices not to) buy it-systems without talking with any part of the centralised organisation.
Microsoft has been one of our better partners in all of this. They aren’t cheap, but they listen to us when we need something. We have a direct line to Seattle, and parts of what we ring up at tickets have made it into the global 365 infrastructure. Stuff like making it easier to hide teams-emails from the company-wide outlook address-book.
More than that though, our tech-team is trained and certified in Microsoft technologies. The combination of in-house staff and a 30+ year long good business relationship makes Azure such an obvious choice for cloud. Some of the co-municipal systems we buy through a joint-owned organisation called KOMBIT operate in AWS (support and operations is handled by private sector companies), and it’s not like we’re religious about not using AWS or something other, but we’d need to build a relationship and retrain staff to do so.
Microsoft has been one of our better partners in all of this. They aren’t cheap, but they listen to us when we need something. We have a direct line to Seattle, and parts of what we ring up at tickets have made it into the global 365 infrastructure. Stuff like making it easier to hide teams-emails from the company-wide outlook address-book.
More than that though, our tech-team is trained and certified in Microsoft technologies. The combination of in-house staff and a 30+ year long good business relationship makes Azure such an obvious choice for cloud. Some of the co-municipal systems we buy through a joint-owned organisation called KOMBIT operate in AWS (support and operations is handled by private sector companies), and it’s not like we’re religious about not using AWS or something other, but we’d need to build a relationship and retrain staff to do so.