In February 2026, the Polish debate on digitalisation entered a new, hot phase. The Central Informatics Centre (COI) announced an ambitious plan: to build a national office suite for public administration to replace the Redmond giant’s solutions. This move is part of the broader European trend of ‘digital sovereignty’, but the Polish version raises as much hope as justified scepticism. For business and IT leaders, it is a signal that the hitherto “licence first” model is no longer the only path to state development. But is Poland ready for its own ‘Office’, or are we in for another billion-dollar project of dubious quality?
The dictate of one supplier: Diagnosing the monopoly
The starting point for the COI initiative was the Instrat Foundation report ‘Seemingly open procurement’, published at the end of 2025. The data are merciless: as much as 99% of the analysed public procurement of office software in Poland directly or indirectly favours Microsoft products. In one in five tenders, competitors are excluded outright, and in the rest, through specific technical requirements that only one ecosystem meets.
The vendor lock-in phenomenon has ceased to be a theoretical academic problem and has become a real threat to government budgets. As licence costs rise, the administration has nowhere to run, because the entire infrastructure, from mail to advanced spreadsheets, is based on closed standards. The head of the COI, Radosław Maćkiewicz, makes it clear: Poland spends too much money on Microsoft software, and these funds could support an indigenous IT ecosystem.
The other side of the coin: The spectre of “billionaire systems”
When the administration talks about ‘building its own solutions’, a red light goes on in the private sector. The history of Polish public IT is full of projects whose costs ran into billions and whose quality left much to be desired. A symbol of these concerns is the ZUS Comprehensive Information System (KSI ZUS). According to figures from recent years, the maintenance and development of this system over a six-year cycle (2015-2020) cost the state nearly PLN 2.8 billion. What is more, current contracts for the maintenance of KSI ZUS alone amount to hundreds of millions of zlotys (e.g. Asseco’s offer for nearly 350 million zlotys).
Critics rightly ask: should a state that struggles to manage such molochs efficiently embark on building an ecosystem from scratch to compete with Microsoft 365, which has been fine-tuned over decades? Building a modern office suite is not just a word processor, it involves hundreds of thousands of hours of developer work, security testing and cloud integration. There is a real risk that the ‘national alternative’ will become another bottomless pit, with billions of public money disappearing into it and the end product lagging behind market standards.
At the same time, it is worth bearing in mind the expert opinion on the quality of the software built by the COI, e.g. on the occasion of mCitizen. Although the application is popular, reports by the Defence CSIRT have pointed to security gaps, such as ‘dead code’ or vulnerabilities in the library supply chain. The scaling of these problems to a system on which every official in the country will depend for their work raises understandable fears.
Lesson from The Hague: Why sovereignty is not just about austerity
Arguments about costs are only part of the equation, however. The geopolitical turning point came in May 2025, when the Prosecutor General of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague was to lose access to his Microsoft-provided email account. The official reason was said to be the sanctions imposed by the Donald Trump administration.
Regardless of the corporation’s subsequent denials, the incident horrified European decision-makers. It became clear that relying on the US SaaS model was not only a matter of convenience, but also an exposure to US extraterritorial law (e.g. CLOUD Act) and the political decisions of a foreign power. It is this fear that is driving migrations today in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein (60,000 posts switching to Linux and LibreOffice) or the Danish Ministry of Digitalisation. In these cases, sovereignty over data is valued more highly than the polished interface of a US-based giant.
Transparency of savings: The myth of ‘free’ Open Source
The COI initiative is to be based on open (open source) solutions. This is key, because it lowers the barrier to entry – we don’t have to write everything from scratch, we can draw on projects such as LibreOffice, Collabora Online or Nextcloud. However, in the IT business, ‘open’ rarely means ‘cheap in the short term’.
Transparency of savings requires an honest look at TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). While the cost of Microsoft’s licences (around £38-49m per year for ZUS alone in 2024/25) is easily measurable, the hidden costs of migration are huge. Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein estimates that it will save €15m per year on licences, but at the same time invest €9m in 2026 alone in the transformation and training process.
The real cost of the national office suite will be:
1. training and adaptation: officials accustomed to Outlook can lose productivity drastically in their first year with the new tool.
2. maintenance and SLA: Open Source requires strong local support teams. Instead of paying Microsoft, we will pay Polish companies (e.g. in a PPP model), which supports the economy but does not necessarily mean a drastic decrease in budget expenditure.
3 Compatibility: Millions of historical.docx documents and advanced.xlsx worksheets must work flawlessly. The cost of fixing formatting errors can run into the millions.
European trend: Lyon and Schleswig-Holstein lead the way
Poland is not alone. Lyon, France’s third-largest city, is already deploying OnlyOffice and Linux on 10,000 workstations, arguing not only for sovereignty but also for ecology – open software allows older hardware to be used for longer. In contrast, the German openDesk project, developed by ZenDiS under the aegis of the German Interior Ministry, is becoming a ready-made standard for the whole of Europe.
This is where the opportunity for COI lies: not to build the wheel from scratch, but to become a Polish integrator of European sovereign solutions. Using Collaborator Online in conjunction with the Polish government cloud would avoid the fate of ZUS’s KSI, while at the same time providing a guarantee that citizens’ data will never leave the country.
Value for business
The COI initiative should be read as a call for diversification. A complete abandonment of Microsoft in commercial enterprises is unlikely today, but building ‘hybrid resilience’ is slowly becoming a necessity.
This is a huge opportunity for the Polish IT sector. The shift from a model of selling licences (where most of the margin goes to the US) to a model of high-margin implementation and maintenance services around Open Source can be a ‘flywheel’ for domestic integrators. However, business needs to watch the state’s back. If the ‘national package’ is locked within the walls of a single institution, it will become an expensive monument. If, on the other hand, it is built on transparent public-private partnerships and open standards, it can become the foundation of a modern state that invests in its own intellect instead of paying a ‘digital tax’ to giants.
The key to success will not be the technology – because LibreOffice or OnlyOffice are already ready – but the transparency of how these ‘saved’ millions are spent. True sovereignty is the ability to freely choose technology, not being forced to use software just because it is ‘national’. Poland must prove that it can build systems that are not only expensive, but above all effective.
