EU software & IT procurement: how competitive is the market, really?

The average EU software tender attracts fewer than 3 bidders

Across the tenders where bidder counts are disclosed, the average software or IT tender received 3.1 bids. That number should change how you read the market: the popular assumption that public IT contracts are fought over by a dozen suppliers is simply not what the award data shows. In a typical competition you are up against one or two other bidders - which means a well-chosen bid has far better odds than most companies expect.

6% of buyer markets are locked. 11% are wide open.

For every buyer we build a per-market competitiveness profile - who wins their software and IT lots, how concentrated those wins are, and how many suppliers typically bid (the methodology is public). Among the 3,029 buyer markets with enough award history to judge (five or more awarded lots):

• 6% are locked - one supplier holds 70%+ of awarded lots, or wins are heavily concentrated. Bidding into these markets without knowing it is how bid teams burn weeks for nothing.
• 83% are moderately contested - a recurring cast of suppliers, but no stranglehold.
• 11% are genuinely open - fragmented awards and four or more average bidders; markets where outsiders win routinely.

What a locked market looks like

These are real examples from the award record - public data any bidder could have checked before writing a proposal:

Incumbency is not wrongdoing - some of it reflects in-house state suppliers or genuine specialisation. But if you are bidding against it, you deserve to know it exists before you start writing.

Methodology & honest caveats

• Source: award notices published on TED (CPV divisions 48 - software, and 72 - IT services), trailing 36 months to August 2026, counted at lot level.
• Supplier identities are entity-resolved before counting - the same company under different spellings or subsidiaries counts as one supplier. Without this, incumbency is systematically undercounted.
• Bidder counts are averaged over tenders that disclose them (most, not all, do).
• We deliberately publish no aggregate euro totals: EU framework agreements are recorded at ceiling values, which inflate sums until normalised. We'd rather give you fewer numbers than wrong ones.

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