Beltug Vendor Observatory: Microsoft and tech sovereignty

Building on the success of our first post-PoC session, the Beltug Vendor Observatory reconvened in autumn 2025 to take a deeper dive into several pressing topics shaping vendor management and IT strategy today. Our members continue to share real-world experiences and challenges around vendor practices, cloud economics, and sovereignty imperatives.

General conclusions & takeaways

The session revealed key gaps remain in financial transparency, contract management, and sovereignty strategy:

• ECIF (End Customer Investment Funds) continues to lack clarity and is inconsistently applied, highlighting the need for structured guidance.
• Microsoft Dynamics adoption continues to grow, but contractual risks and limited localisation create friction in global environments.
• FinOps should be embraced as an organisational culture rather than a single role, especially as cloud commitments become more complex.
• Sovereignty discussions expose a gap between geopolitical ambition and practical IT realities — particularly in the domain of productivity software.

Microsoft

Microsoft ECIF (End Customer Investment Funds)

Topic: ECIF role at Microsoft, and the partner push

Members reported being approached by third parties promoting ECIF. However, knowledge levels vary widely across sectors, and there is often limited transparency from integrators and resellers. Companies are not always sure what ECIF is, when to request it, or how it fits into their overall negotiation strategy.

In practice, members frequently receive grants or discounts via partners rather than true ECIF. For example, free pre-sales assessments have been confused with ECIF-funded initiatives.

Experiences differ significantly depending on the partner involved. Some vendors are proactive in proposing ECIF-funded services, while others are less forthcoming, even when positioned as primary partners.

Key challenges

• Defining the scope of ECIF allocations.
• Clarifying the end-to-end process to access ECIF resources.
• Aligning ECIF support with internal roadmaps, rather than accepting vendor-driven initiatives.

Microsoft Dynamics

Topic: How to manage Dynamics contracts, from making the deal to implementation

While different companies use different Microsoft Dynamics product lines, CRM, Business Central and Finance & Operations (F&O) are among the most common. Participants appreciate the integration with the broader Microsoft ecosystem, but also highlight growing complexity in contracts and deployment.

Key challenges

• Multiplexing and indirect access remain ambiguous, creating uncertainty in compliance and licensing.
• Smaller organisations often struggle to secure direct Microsoft contracts, and must instead use intermediaries.
• Limited localisations in F&O create challenges for international operations.

MACC and FinOps

Topic: How to deal with the push and keep Azure spend under control

While the MACC (Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment) programme itself was not explored in depth, the discussion centred on FinOPs practices and culture.

• Participants agreed that FinOps is not a role, it’s a cross-functional practice.
• Successful FinOps requires training engineers, creating broad awareness, and embedding FinOps principles into each project.
• There are concerns that Azure-based applications could scale up without the company’s awareness.
• The shift of licensing to Azure is having an impact on the way organisations do traditional purchasing.
• Cost projection exercises may be difficult, but teams should be encouraged to do so anyway.

Some organisations reported being pushed into MACC contracts even though they didn’t have FinOps processes in place, raising concerns about meeting commitments.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty and risk mitigation

Topic: Risk mitigation strategies, including EU alternatives

Geopolitical developments have fuelled renewed calls for European cloud alternatives. Members agreed that actions should be guided by concrete risk analysis, differentiating, for example, between data access risks and operational dependencies.

Data sovereignty is seen as the first focus area, however participants noted that most EU-based providers still lack the scale needed to replace non-EU-based providers. Full migration away from them in the next three years is unrealistic. One participant described testing a French IaaS provider but quickly encountering scalability limits.

Participants agreed that there are no viable alternatives to productivity applications such as MS Office, Power Platform, etc. End-user applications remain dominated by US vendors, especially Microsoft.

Potential mitigation actions

• Adopting hybrid models that retain critical data on-premise or in customer-controlled environments.
• Classifying data to identify which sets require sovereignty measures.
• Exploring infrastructure sovereignty, while accepting the lack of alternatives for end-user software.
• Sharing information across organisations to better understand effective practices.

Upcoming sovereignty checklist

Topic: Questions to ask cloud providers

Organisations are collecting information and asking their cloud providers questions. Participants were very pleased with the draft of Beltug’s initiative to create a sovereignty checklist with questions to ask their cloud providers on sovereignty. The final list, based on the input from our members,  will be published shortly.

Takeaways

• It’s important to collect information on the ongoing attempts of the US cloud providers to set up independent EU subsidiaries.
• Contractual guarantees need to be critically assessed; solutions can be found in technical measures such as private keys and use of containers.
• The service pendulum has shifted too far towards ‘ease of use’, and is now swinging back to ‘control’.