Why did the Caisse des dépôts only recently begin to worry about its dependence on Microsoft 365? “Because our sensitive data wasn’t there,” said its deputy chief executive Catherine Mayenobe.
The subject was questioned in March by the National Assembly’s inquiry committee into digital dependencies. She explained that those sensitive data were “in on-site applications that we knew how to protect.” Generative AI has changed things. “Today, I no longer know how to manage the arrival of devices like Copilot in my colleagues’ work environment,” she said, adding there is “no guarantee” on data traceability.
As it stands, the Caisse des dépôts is in “total dependence” for the core of its email and collaboration tools, acknowledges Patrick Laurens-Frings, its Director of Operational Transformation, Digital and IT Systems.
From one contract to another, an increase of about 20% for the CEA
Baptiste Grigy does not talk about “total dependence,” but concedes that Microsoft is “deeply rooted” at the CEA, where he serves as CIO. Beyond Windows and Office, its technologies manage identity (Active Directory) as well as the administration of PC and server fleets.
The CEA has just renegotiated its contract with Microsoft for three years. The ballpark figure: €6 million per year. Compared with the previous contract, the increase “is in double digits,” laments Baptiste Grigy. It hovers around 20%, “which is far above inflation.” “Moreover, they practice bundled selling by including products we do not use. That was the case with Teams.”
SharePoint, “extreme dependence” for the CNRS
At CNRS, SharePoint is an “extreme dependence for collaborative spaces and the applications built on top of it,” concedes its CIO Marie-Pierre Fontanel. It amounts to €2.5 million in annual costs. The prospect of an exit is all the more urgent given that Microsoft “pushes us toward the cloud starting in 2029, which is orthogonal to sovereignty mandates.” The plan is either to deploy internal tools or to use those of Dinum. The latter currently offer the advantage of being free. In the meantime, Exchange mail (€3 million per year), run in-house, shifted in April to Zimbra operated by Renater (€600k per year).
At Inrae, €2 per year per device to extend Windows support
At Inserm, the biggest cost isn’t Microsoft: €350k per year, according to Damien Rousset, Deputy Director General for Administration, compared with more than €1 million for VMware, and presumably for Palo Alto and Splunk as well.
Inrae goes through Ugap. Its overall expenditure runs around €6 million. The share of Microsoft “must be between €400,000 and €500,000,” according to Louis-Augustin Julien, its Deputy Director General for Resources. Jean-Michel Vansteene, the institute’s CIO, adds that a three-year Windows support extension was secured at a cost of about €2 per year per seat.
From Windows to Linux: the Dinum starts with 250 agents
The Dinum recently announced its intention to move away from Windows in favor of Linux. Stéphanie Schaer, Interministerial Director of Digital Affairs, recalls that the approach begins “on an experimental scale” (250 agents involved), “but not binding” (the continuation will depend on results). The objective is to have rolled out this perimeter by the summer. Bridges have been built with other EU countries, including Denmark, which made the same choice as Dinum’s engineers by opting for the X/OS distribution.
Into the Education sector: the weight of the historic IT structuring
In education, all operating systems are now based on Linux, more specifically RHEL, notes Audran Le Baron. Director of Digital for Education at the Ministry of National Education, he indicates that the framework for technical coherence applied to all new projects and all upgradings is free of dependencies on non-European, or at least private, technologies. This was not the case at the origin, notably regarding the construction of the SI at an academic level.
On the collaboration front, the COVID period accelerated things. The ministry rolled out to its 1.2 million agents a suite of free tools, including a video and virtual classroom solution based on BigBlueButton hosted at Scaleway. Audran Le Baron cites two indicators: about 1.5 million video conferences hosted each year and roughly 500,000 participants each month. He also mentions the deployment of Nextcloud (300,000 active users, 500 million files) and the Tribu collaboration portal, built on the open-source Nuxeo technology.
There remains Microsoft on desktops (Windows + Office), especially as teachers and staff in institutions either buy their own devices or are supplied by local authorities. The contract for license maintenance stands at €2.4 million per year.
“We sometimes set aside our technical preferences”
In the realm of the Ministries of the Economy and Finance, IT directors are not the sole decision-makers for the software used by staff. This is particularly true within the strategic directions and ministerial cabinets, says Yves Billon, head of the digital service. “Some solutions that work perfectly for us personally are not considered suitable for the professional context of a large ministry like the Ministry of the Economy and Finance,” he explains. Notably for reasons of attractiveness. “Having solutions coherent with those used in private sector roles in equivalent functions” regularly comes up in discussions. That is why we sometimes set aside our technical preferences.
Yves Billon also touches on the user experience dimension. “Around the mid-2010s, we thought we could do away with Microsoft Office. But Office 365 introduced a disruption in services. Overall, LibreOffice did not keep up. We had to rebuild many things behind the scenes. Users felt the impact.”
Libre software, adds Billon, needs to be tailored before deployment in large organizations. He cites the DGFiP, which, not dependent on Microsoft, was urged to structure its IT around an equivalent of Active Directory. The chosen solution—Samba—did not cover all of the organization’s complexity. It required work to adapt. “We worked to pool actions at the interministerial level [but] we lost a year and a half in budget negotiations.” The DGFiP believes it will always be cheaper to assemble a dedicated team, while other leaner structures argue that the ROI is not so obvious.
A Windows remnant at the national gendarmerie
The DGFiP is now studying the possibility of switching to Linux (its fleet comprises between 110,000 and 115,000 desktops). The challenge lies in managing the fleet, especially since the Windows environment currently benefits from highly automated processes.
At the national gendarmerie, this step has already been completed. The transition to free software “was conducted with military rigor, perhaps a little brusque,” but completed in three years without major hiccups, summarizes General of Army Corps Marc Boget, Director of the Interior Security’s Digital Agency. “We no longer have a Windows server,” he adds. About a thousand desktops (out of 80,000) still use that OS “for very niche needs.”
Beware the digital commons?
“It isn’t that French companies aren’t patriotic, but they are bound by market imperatives and liquidity,” notes Maya Noël, CEO of France Digitale. She highlights the leverage that hyperscalers hold by controlling several strategic components of the IT stack, and their ability to offer “almost free” pricing on one piece if you are a client of the other. For instance, an Office 365 user could receive Azure credits.
For Alain Garnier, president of Jamespot, this is also a cultural matter. “At the moment Microsoft tried to enter schools, another American giant, Coca‑Cola, tried to distribute free cans in schools,” he recalls. “That created a backlash, and the project was rejected. Yet giving free Microsoft office tools to our children was seen as a good thing.” He views this anecdote as revealing: “It illustrates how, at that time, a form of acculturation took place.”
Garnier also warns about digital commons. Relying entirely on them would provide raw material to the GAFAM group. “We would be in a dangerous model: we would be financing through our taxes the software tools that GAFAM would reuse to generate profits,” he says.
When business models require Microsoft
The testimony of Luca Belli helped give the hearings an international dimension. He is a professor of governance and digital regulation at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro. He spoke of a “unique legal asset” in Brazil: Article 219 of its Federal Constitution, which enshrines technological autonomy as a constitutional objective. “To my knowledge, no other country in the world enshrines such necessity in its fundamental law.”
Brazil has not become a major exporter of technologies, he acknowledges. The mistake, in his view, was to see open source solely as a solution to adopt, and not as a technology to produce. Without this vision, the open-source emancipation policy adopted in 2003 “was abandoned by 2017.” The public administration is now “totally dependent on major providers like Google, Microsoft or AWS.”
France is not far behind in terms of office software, according to David Amiel. “90% of the state’s expenditures go to non-European players… and notably to Microsoft.”
Henri d’Agrain, General Secretary of Cigref, presents another reality: the economic activities that effectively mandate the use of Microsoft. He mentions a French company that generates more than 50% of its business in the United States, including public markets with federal agencies. In such a configuration, not using Microsoft would be equivalent to depriving itself of a major market share. This leads Henri d’Agrain to conclude that situations are “extremely heterogeneous depending on business models and geographies.”
