How did Cloud First become Microsoft First? Bill McCluggage of Laganview Associates joins Penny Horwood to examine public sector tech dependence, cloud lock-in, AI, competition and what the CMA can do to help smaller players enter the market.
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How did the UK government’s Cloud First strategy become, in practice, Microsoft First?
In this episode of Ctrl Alt Lead, Penny Horwood speaks to Bill McCluggage, former Director of IT Strategy and Policy at the Cabinet Office, about the growing concentration of the UK public sector technology market.
Bill argues that decades of perfectly rational procurement decisions have created a deep dependency on Microsoft across cloud infrastructure, productivity software and now AI. Moving away can mean confronting switching costs, interoperability problems and changes to identity, data and skills, making meaningful competition increasingly difficult.
With Copilot adding another layer to that technology stack, Penny and Bill discuss whether AI risks deepening existing cloud lock-in, why multicloud has failed to deliver on some of its early promises, and what this means for technology sovereignty.
They also examine the role of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), why Bill believes regulators need to move more quickly, and what public sector buyers can do to create genuine competition rather than simply defaulting to more of the same.
In this episode: