Background

When we founded our company in 2022, we - like most other companies - relied on the well-known US software solutions from Microsoft, Google and others. But even before the recent geopolitical changes, we decided to reduce our dependence on US solutions and find alternatives - more on our motivation later.

We are currently in the middle of this journey - in some areas we have successfully switched to European solutions, in others we are still trying things out and there are also topics for which we first need to find sensible alternatives.

In this blog series, we would like to share our experiences so far and give you some food for thought and recommendations for action. For the sake of simplicity, we assume existing solutions in the examples - but the procedure is similar when software is to be introduced in an area for the first time.

If this topic makes you want to take a closer look at the software you use, it’s the perfect time to fundamentally review your working methods and processes. Don’t miss this opportunity by simply replacing existing solutions with solutions from European providers without any changes.

This blog series consists of three parts - along the three questions that guide us on our journey.

1. Motivation (Why are we interested in alternatives?)
2. Goals (What do we want to find alternatives for?)
3. Approach (How do we go about it?)

If you’re mainly interested in the specific software solutions we’ve looked at and chosen, you’ll have to wait for part 3.

Let’s start with the first question: Why do I want to look at European alternatives?

Part 1 - Motivation

Some people simply like to try out new software out of curiosity (I am one of them), but that is not a sufficient reason for an extensive search for European alternatives, let alone a switch to them. The most important question to ask yourself is therefore why you are interested in European alternatives at all, especially if US solutions already in use cover your existing requirements well, or at least well enough.

It is important not to make things too easy for yourself. For example, “We want to be GDPR-compliant” is a nice start, but it doesn’t answer the real “why”. Why do we want to be GDPR-compliant?

• Because we want to reduce the risk of facing a - potentially financially or reputationally painful - penalty for breaching the law?
• Because we think it is a good marketing argument towards our target group?
• Because data protection is an important concern due to our morals?

A few other reasons, for example:

• We want to avoid the risk of large cost increases for US software due to trade disputes and tariffs.
• We do not want our data to be used to train AI and thus make company secrets publicly accessible.
• We don’t want US companies to be able to access our business-critical data and use it to their advantage.
• We want software that is better tailored to European requirements than US solutions.

It’s probably a mixture of different reasons with different priorities. In any case, take the time to think about it carefully. After all, it is the basis for your subsequent decisions.

Our Motivation

Roughly speaking, our motivation is based on two aspects - pragmatism and our values.

The pragmatic part is quite simple: it is our job to advise our customers, and to do this we need to be familiar with the widest possible range of solutions and be able to weigh them up against each other.

But the more important part for us is our attitude to the world of technology in general. We are strong advocates of data sovereignty and the protection of personal rights, both online and offline. Unfortunately, the world is currently moving in the opposite direction, and this is particularly evident in the case of large corporations. Be it political, such as the Cloud Act, which obliges US companies to provide US authorities with customer data - even if it is not stored in the USA - or commercial, such as the shameless use of other people’s data and creativity to feed the AI hype.

Next steps

Once you are clear about your motivation, you can ask yourself the following questions:

• Is the search for European alternatives relevant enough for us at this time to invest time and money in it? And if so
• Which areas have the highest priority?

How do we proceed now that we know our motivation? More on this in the next part of the blog series, which deals with the question: “What do we want to find alternatives for?”