Every year, about 250,000 public sector authorities in the EEA spend around 14% of GDP, or about £2 trillion (yes £2000 billion), on public procurement. To create a level playing field, most of these public sector procurements must go via public tender.

Using Tenderlake Insight, we can analyse how brands and concepts feature in these procurement notices. This provides a picture of how well these brands are doing compared to their competitors and how much mindshare they have among European public sector procurement officers.

By analysing the data since 2012 we can see how brands and concepts have ranked over time and benchmark them against each other.

We also looked at how the brands and concepts rank in the different countries and they reveal some major differences.

The table below shows the ranking of each brand/concept from January 2012 to 24th September 2019. So, the more mentions a brand has, the lower the score.

Microsoft has been a consistent number one, but it is partly because of the relatively large number of sub-brands they have. 

In 2019 Microsoft is most often ranked first or second in the individual country, but not always. IN Italy for example, they rank 8th.

SAP is a consistent second. Public organisations clearly have the same appetite for their products and services as the private sector does. However, not all countries have the same appetite as SAP ranked 14th, 16th and 17th in Romania, Bulgaria and Lithuania.

HP has stayed constant over the years. Their high ranking is partly due to their printer business and the contracts for toner for, and maintenance of, these machines. However, they will be unhappy with their 2019 UK performance where they are ranked 17th.

Oracle has done consistently well over the years, also partly due to its very broad portfolio of products. In 2019 Oracle is number 1 or 2 in Poland, Romania and The Czech Republic, but only number 14 in Hungary.

Cisco and VMWare have also been fairly steady over the years, but with quite some variation between countries. In 2019 Cisco is 24th in Belgium and VMWare is 17th in the UK.

IBM have dropped from 5th position in 2012-2015 to 8th in 2019. 

Dell has shown steady improvement over the years but has large variations across countries. They are number 1 in Italy and Slovenia, but 21st and 25th in France and UK respectively.

Microsoft SharePoint has a long history with public sector customer and while it is slipping a bit in the rankings it still comes in at a respectable 11th place.

Google have enjoyed an upward trend moving from 19th position in 2012 to 12th in 2019. A key driver of this has been their cloud offering.

Microsoft will also be happy with the performance of Office 365. From no mentions in 2012 (when it was just called Microsoft Office, to 14th in 2019 and improving its ranking every year. Interestingly they are doing better than average in major markets such as United Kingdom, Nederland, Sweden and Switzerland where Office 365 is ranked 6th, 3rd, 3rd and 4th.

Microsoft will be less happy with the performance of SQL Server, which as dropped from 12th place to 15th in 2019. In 2019, SQL Server is doing well in Austria (8th) but not so well in the UK at 23rd.

While starting from a lower point, SAP Hana has moved from 31st position to almost match the position of SQL Server.

In the Business Intelligence space, it seems clear that Microsoft Power BI is winning the game against IBM Cognos.

Note also, that open source database providers such as mySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and MariaDB are all dropping down the list.

Microsoft Azure has also made improvements and have moved from 31st place in 2012 to 21th in 2019. In 2019 Azure is doing particularly well Denmark, Finland and Portugal.

SPSS and MATLAB seems to be sliding steadily, but also here we see regional differences. In 2019 SPSS is ranked 6th in Sweden and MATLAB is 12th in Bulgaria and 11th in Lithuania.

Thanks to strong products, Apple and Samsung have been doing well over the period analysed, with Samsung making the largest gains. Both brands are at an all time high in the ranking across all of the EEA. 

For 2019, Samsung is doing relatively better in Eastern Europe whereas Apple is doing better than average in the UK, Nederland, Luxembourg and Belgium.

Finally, it is interesting to see how SaaS (Software as a Service) has improved every year to finish a strong 3rd in 2019 (so far). In countries such as UK, Nederland, Sweden, Finland and France the concept is ranked number 1 of all the brands and concepts in this analysis. Countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Romania have yet to show a similar warmth for SaaS as the concept here ranks 14th, 17th and 14th.

Contact us to learn more about how Tenderlake Insight and see how we can help your organisation benefit from the insight and market intelligence locked up in millions of public procurement notices.