How does this company make money?
The company charges UK Local Authorities and NHS trusts an annual fee to use the software and to keep it maintained. On top of those recurring fees, it earns additional revenue each time it carries out a new system implementation or builds a custom integration connecting its software to a council's legacy systems.
What makes this company hard to replace?
Each council's connection to the software is built through custom APIs written specifically for that council's older systems and its own local planning rules — a competitor would need months just to rebuild those connections. Any replacement voting system must go through Electoral Commission certification from the beginning, which takes years and cannot be skipped. Planning application workflows are written into the council's statutory processes, and changing them requires regulatory approval before anything new can be deployed.
What limits this company?
Winning a new council takes 12 to 24 months just to get through public sector procurement, and budget approvals add more time on top of that. Even if a council decided today it wanted to switch suppliers, years would pass before a competitor could legally start building the custom connections needed. During all of that time, the current supplier keeps running the contract.
What does this company depend on?
The company cannot operate without five named inputs: UK Government Digital Service frameworks, which govern how public sector software is procured; Microsoft Azure UK regions, which host the software in a way that meets UK data rules; LGSS Law regulatory guidance, which shapes how Local Authority statutory processes are built into the software; Ordnance Survey geospatial data licenses, which underpin planning application maps; and Electoral Commission certification, which is the legal prerequisite for deploying any voting system.
Who depends on this company?
UK Local Authorities rely on the software to process planning applications and building control inspections — if it went offline, those statutory functions would fail. UK electoral returning officers use the certified voting systems to run local and national elections; without them, no legally compliant election could be conducted. NHS trusts use the software to share patient records across care providers, and losing access would break those connections.
How does this company scale?
Regulatory compliance frameworks and statutory workflow templates built for one council can be reused across other UK public sector clients at low extra cost — that part spreads cheaply. But every new council still needs its own bespoke API layer built to match its legacy systems and local planning policies. That custom integration work cannot be standardised or automated, so it stays slow and manual no matter how many councils the company already serves.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
The UK Government Digital Service is pushing councils toward cloud-first policies, which forces the company to migrate software that may still run on older on-premise hardware. Brexit changed the rules around cross-border data handling, requiring modifications to meet the new split between UK and EU data protection regimes. UK public sector budget pressure is a constant drag — councils have less money for software upgrades and new implementations, which slows the pace of new contracts.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If the UK Government Digital Service required all councils to move to a single new unified platform, or if the Electoral Commission decided to redesign its certification framework from scratch, every existing certification would become invalid at the same time. The company would have to restart the full multi-year approval process — and so would any competitor, which would temporarily remove the barrier, but the company's contracts would all be exposed before new certifications could be granted.
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