Part of our experience away from vendor specific tooling was building a team that could handle the transition. It started with perhaps 2 or 3 engineers doing Po

Part of our experience away from vendor specific tooling was building a team that could handle the transition. It started with perhaps 2 or 3 engineers doing PoC’s. Then an architect came on board with Azure experience. Things went from there. We’re now at about 40 engineers working for / with about 100 actuaries / quants. I know the lead architect has theoretical vendor neutrality in scope, but the aspect of successful teams working in the MS ‘package’ is alluring as well. We don’t need to squeeze the last drop - the projects are already successful both in financial and human terms. End of the day a business always has vendor risks. It’s about picking the cost-risk-reward structure that fits. All in all MS serves us well. (We do have healthy laughs about the internal accountmanager for MS always chasing the latest and greatest. Virtual desktops, Azure ML and such. The lead architect mentioned luckily decides on the stack, not our sales reps.)