Vendor concentration map
The suppliers, products and customers discussed in the survey are in the landscape database, with known spend and sources. The graph shows how they connect.
A small number of suppliers account for a large share of UK public-sector digital spend across multiple sectors. This page summarises which suppliers, where, and how the concentration has changed in recent years.
The dominant suppliers
| Supplier | Parent / ownership | Public-sector touch points |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | US public | NHS productivity (M365, Teams), council productivity, central-government productivity, defence enterprise IT, schools (M365 for Education), HE, growing Dynamics 365 footprint in council CRM, Azure hosting underneath an enormous slice of the SaaS estate. |
| AWS | Amazon (US public) | Underlying hosting for a large share of public-sector SaaS. NHS national services, GDS shared platforms, council SaaS, central-government cloud workloads. Less visible than Microsoft because it is mostly underneath other vendors’ products. |
| Oracle | US public | Cross-departmental ERP convergence (central government), council Oracle Cloud / Fusion deployments, Oracle Health (Cerner) acute EPR estate, multiple agency ERPs, defence civilian back-office. |
| Capita | UK public | Council revenues and benefits, schools MIS (historic SIMS, now divested to ParentPay Group), pensions administration, defence and central-government SI work, several long-running outsourced services. |
| Civica | Blackstone (US PE) | Council revenues and benefits, council finance, electoral, customer contact, social housing, library services, regulatory casework. Wide council coverage. |
| NEC Software Solutions (Northgate) | NEC Corporation (JP) | Council revenues, housing, electoral; police RMS (Connect, Athena); NHS pathways; pensions back-office; multiple national-programme deliveries. |
| Idox | Long Path Partners (US) | Dominant in council planning (Uniform), building control, regulatory services, FOI tooling. Long-running concentration in a single function across most councils. |
| Optum / UnitedHealth In the database: Optum, EMIS Health | US public | EMIS (~57% of English GP practices) since 2023. Substantial growing footprint in NHS analytics and pathway products. |
| Palantir | US public | NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP); intelligence-platform deployments in policing and defence (subset of these out of scope for the survey). |
| Cubic Transportation Systems | Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital (US PE) | TfL ticketing estate; smart-ticketing across multiple regional authorities. |
| Axon | US public | Body-worn video and digital-evidence management across most UK police forces; growing wider justice and emergency-services footprint. |
| System C / Liquidlogic (under CVC) In the database: System C, Liquidlogic | CVC Capital (Lux) | NHS acute and community (System C Careflow), social care case management (Liquidlogic) and social care finance (ContrOCC). One private-equity owner holds a large share of clinical and care case management. |
| The Access Group | Hg / TA Associates (UK/US PE) | Social care (Mosaic), mental health (RiO, via Servelec), schools (ScholarPack), and a wider public-sector footprint built through acquisitions. |
| Major systems integrators (Capgemini, Atos, Fujitsu, IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, EY, PwC, Capita Consulting) In the database: Capgemini, Atos, Fujitsu, IBM | Mixed (US, FR, JP, etc.) | Programme delivery for HMRC, DWP, MoJ, Home Office, defence, large councils, ERP migrations, NHS national programmes. Concentration here is in delivery rather than product. |
Patterns visible in the map
The PE-acquisition layer
A significant share of UK public-sector software has moved into US, European, or Canadian private-equity ownership over the last decade through chains of acquisition. Examples: EMIS to UnitedHealth, Cerner to Oracle, Civica to Blackstone, Idox to Long Path Partners, System C, Liquidlogic and ContrOCC under CVC, and Mosaic and RiO under Hg and TA Associates. The companies still operate in the UK, but their parent companies are based elsewhere. Foreign ownership does not by itself make a product worse, and many of these products continue to work well. It does affect sovereignty, and public-sector buyers should take it into account.
The hyperscaler layer
Most of the SaaS visible in the upper layers of the table is hosted on AWS or Azure. Microsoft and AWS are not the suppliers of record for council planning or NHS clinical systems, but they are the suppliers of compute underneath. This dependency rarely appears in spend reported by vendor, and the survey assesses it as the largest unmeasured sovereignty exposure in the public sector.
Horizontal and vertical concentration
Capita, Civica, and NEC are horizontal: they are present across many functions in the same buyer (a single council typically uses all three). The clinical-systems vendors and Idox are vertical: they dominate one function across many buyers. The replaceability strategies are different: vertical concentration can be addressed with a single open product; horizontal concentration has to be replaced one component at a time.
The systems-integrator concentration
The major SIs sell programme delivery. They sit on top of the vendor estate in the largest programmes (HMRC, DWP, MoJ, defence, ERP migrations) and shape what gets built. The lock-in here is to a delivery model. Part of the CIC’s case is that a small team of experienced engineers using agentic development tools can deliver some systems that would otherwise go to a large SI programme.
What this means for the CIC
Implications
Vendor concentration is highest in: council back-office (Capita, Civica, NEC, Idox), GP clinical systems (EMIS, TPP), social-care case management (Liquidlogic, Mosaic), and the hyperscaler layer underneath everything (Microsoft, AWS).
Of these, the areas a CIC-scale organisation can realistically address are the vertical concentrations in social care and council functions (planning, housing, waste, highways, customer contact), where open alternatives are tractable, regulatory complexity is modest, and willing council partners are likely to be found.
The hyperscaler layer is outside what the CIC can realistically change. The relevant measures there are procurement terms, which the CIC can argue for.