Overview
- Bavaria will not proceed with the proposed licence‑bundling deal with Microsoft, Finance Minister Albert Füracker confirmed Wednesday, ending a public dispute inside the state government.
- The Bavarian Digital Ministry will run a limited pilot to build a modular “souveräner Arbeitsplatz” that avoids Microsoft programs and that will be tested in daily use by about 20 percent of its roughly 200 staff.
- The pilot will evaluate commercial market offerings alongside federal ZenDiS tools and Bavarian BayernCloudSchule solutions to design a basic, extendable sovereign workstation.
- Digital Minister Fabian Mehring framed the shift as a move toward digital sovereignty to reduce the risk that overseas vendors could disrupt public services, a point that clashed with the Finance Ministry’s earlier effort to secure volume discounts.
- Officials say the small pilot is intended as a redundancy and possible blueprint for wider adoption under the Minister Presidents’ Conference goal that sovereign workplace options be available by March 31, 2027, and the decision also avoids a framework contract that reporting estimated could have cost the state hundreds of millions of euros.