Q: Does anyone know of any EU-based company out there advising large organisations how to detach from big tech?
I know a couple of people in large organisations where removing reliance on US software is suddenly the main talking point at board meetings, but without a professional organisation to point them in the right direction it'll never move past a conversation.
Alexander Cobleigh
in reply to Fionnáin • • •Fionnáin
in reply to Alexander Cobleigh • • •@cblgh
Thanks! I'm not even sure such a large advocacy company exists (hello @autonomic ), but I know from years of experience that if you come to the door of a public body or a university, you need to be trustworthy to their way of working.
I was working in a university and present for the meetings when Microsoft pushed out Google and became the main campus technology. They talked a good talk.
I think these large bodies are a little bit lost right now and would gladly welcome guidance.
Alexander Cobleigh
in reply to Fionnáin • • •@autonomic
> I think these large bodies are a little bit lost right now and would gladly welcome guidance.
i don't doubt it. the big tragedy is that, at least around here, universities were the ones with the most expertise in running their own services. at least until some kind of management virus went around that convinced upper management otherwise. of what i'm not sure. maybe that it was cheaper (nicer?) to continually buy services from big corporations compared to retaining knowledge in-house
hope this wave of questioning past choices reverses the current state of megacorp entrenchment
Fionnáin
in reply to Alexander Cobleigh • • •@cblgh I think it might. I worked in Trinity College Dublin until 2020, and even as recently as then the school of computer science had refused to join the integrated system and had their own internal servers and systems. And then, tragically, they were pushed into it in 2021! I was also around to witness IBM and Microsoft pushing their lobby in the university; they were very aggressive and omnipresent.
But hopefully there is enough recent memory and experience that this choice can be reset.
Michael Westergaard
in reply to Fionnáin • • •It depends on the kind of detachment you're looking for. We do custom software and cloud-agnostic migrations (so hosting of cloud software, not standard software like Office 365 but we do offer/suggest alternatives for some software, e.g., self-hosted Gitlab instead of Github).
We have been looking at the European market and migrated our own stuff away from US providers to European #Scaleway. We're advising our customers (mid-large Dutch companies) on similar migrations, and have the past decade advocated for using standards-based cloud services to facilitate switching (e.g., using Kubernetes over ACS or ECS and plain Postgres over Aurora).
Fionnáin
in reply to Michael Westergaard • • •@michael I should be clear: I'm not looking. Last week, I spoke to two people. One a prominent staff member in a university, the other the director of a large arts organisation. Both keenly asked me to suggest open source alternatives to Google/Microsoft.
I could give them information, but I know how procurement works in large orgs. What they need is a consultancy that can offer a package as an alternative to existing services.
It sounds like you may do some of this. What is your company?
Michael Westergaard
in reply to Fionnáin • • •Homepage zomer 2024
OCSFionnáin
in reply to Michael Westergaard • • •Henrik Millinge Sørensen 🇩🇰
in reply to Fionnáin • • •Fionnáin
in reply to Henrik Millinge Sørensen 🇩🇰 • • •@henrikmillinge no, I'll have a look, thanks!
@semaphor