why a vendor with the better product loses a Polish tender

A vendor with the better product loses a Polish tender because the tender was decided before anyone compared products. The decision sits in the specification, written months earlier, and in the scoring, which for supplies above EU thresholds is price-only in half the cases. After publication, “better” means compliant with every numbered requirement at the lowest price. Your work has to happen earlier, and through the people who will sign the bid.

two different contests

A private enterprise deal is a contest between products. The buyer runs discovery, sees demos, maybe a POC, and picks the one that fits best.

A public tender is a contest between offers against a document. The contracting authority publishes a specification, bidders confirm compliance line by line, and the award follows criteria fixed in advance. If your product does more than the specification asks, the extra counts for nothing unless the criteria score it. If it misses one mandatory parameter, it is out, however good the rest is.

A vendor that treats a tender as a late-stage enterprise deal shows up at the wrong contest.

what the numbers say about the Polish public market

The Public Procurement Office (UZP) publishes an annual report on the system. The 2025 edition, published in June 2026, gives the clearest public picture:

Indicator, 2025	Value
Contracts awarded under the Public Procurement Law (Pzp)	PLN 350.2 billion
Total public market, including exempted contracts	PLN 595.3 billion
Average number of offers, at or above EU thresholds	2.47
Single-offer contracts above EU thresholds	53.6% (supplies 56.7%, services 42.4%)
Price as the only criterion above EU thresholds	supplies 50%, services 46%
Appeals lodged with the National Appeal Chamber (KIO)	5,986, a record, of which 730 concerned IT

Contracts above EU thresholds that received a single offer, Poland, 2025

Supplies, including software licences and hardware56.7%

All contracts53.6%

Services42.4%

Three things follow for a technology vendor.

First, competition is thin. Software licences and hardware count as supplies, the category with the highest single-offer share. Many technology tenders are decided by whether a compliant offer exists at all.

Second, price decides a large share of awards. Where price is the only criterion, the technical work goes into meeting the specification, and the score goes to the lowest price.

Third, specifications get contested. Appeals are frequent, and IT is one of the larger categories. Requirements, clarifications and compliance tables are all fair game.

The pattern is wider than Poland. The European Court of Auditors’ special report 28/2023 found the EU-wide single-bidding rate rising from 23.5% in 2011 to 41.8% in 2021, with Poland among the countries above 50%. The Commission’s Single Market Scoreboard treats a single-bidder share above 20% as a red flag. Over 40% of the auditors’ survey respondents named restrictive criteria as a reason for single bidding. That is a perception without proof of cause, and it matches what bidders describe.

The UZP report does not analyse IT procurement separately, and I looked for a public Polish dataset that isolates software and cybersecurity tenders and did not find one.

the specification is where you win or lose

The technical specification of a Polish tender is the OPZ, the opis przedmiotu zamówienia. In security and software tenders it is usually a numbered list of requirements: functions, minimum parameters, integrations, licensing model, support terms, implementation services. Bidders confirm each one in a compliance table, and the authority may ask for product documentation or a demonstration.

The law is clear on paper. Article 42 of Directive 2014/24/EU, transposed into the Polish law, requires specifications to give equal access to bidders and allows a reference to a specific brand only exceptionally, followed by “or equivalent”. In practice, bidders widely report OPZs whose parameters are copied from one vendor’s datasheet, or combinations of individually reasonable requirements that only one product meets. Nobody publishes statistics on this. The high single-offer share for supplies is consistent with those reports without proving them.

A typical case, no specific authority. The OPZ for an endpoint protection tender has 140 requirements. 137 describe any serious product in the category. Three describe one product’s console, licensing unit and log retention default. A vendor with a stronger product reads the OPZ on the day of publication, finds the three, and has a few weeks to change them through clarification questions, or to file an appeal. The incumbent’s partner read the same three requirements months ago, in its own words, in a market consultation.

where a vendor can act before publication

The legitimate way to shape a specification is the preliminary market consultation, wstępne konsultacje rynkowe, regulated in Article 84 of the Polish Public Procurement Law and based on Articles 40 and 41 of the directive. The UZP describes consultations as a way for authorities to learn about new technical, economic and organisational solutions, and publishes model rules and forms. Authorities announce them on their own websites, on TED or on the e-Zamówienia platform.

Good practice in a consultation, as I understand it:

• Answer the authority’s questions directly, in Polish.
• Describe the need and the measurable outcomes the authority should require, instead of your product’s parameters.
• Explain architecture trade-offs: on-premises, hosted, hybrid. Public buyers in the region still often prefer on-premises or local hosting.
• Propose realistic implementation timelines and licensing metrics.
• Point out requirements only one product could meet, and propose equivalent wording.
• If you demo, show how a requirement can be verified, so the authority can write testable criteria.

Know the limits. Article 41 requires the authority to neutralise any advantage a consulted bidder gains, including by sharing what you told it with other bidders. A vendor that drafts specification text with its own product’s parameters invites a challenge, and in the worst case exclusion.

Monitoring them is cheap. Someone has to read the authority websites and the platforms every week. In most cases that someone is your distributor or your integrator partner, which is the second reason the channel matters here.

after publication: a sequence that works

Once the tender is out, the work follows a recognisable order.

1. Compliance assessment, requirement by requirement. Mark each one: met as standard, met by configuration, met with a partner component, met through equivalence, not met.
2. Bid or no bid. Weigh the non-compliant items against the chance that clarification questions will change them, and the cost of an appeal.
3. Clarification questions. The authority answers them publicly. They work best when they explain why a requirement restricts competition and propose an equivalent formulation.
4. Appeal to KIO, if needed. A legal step with deadlines, and a job for counsel.

Throughout, remember that the compliance table is a binding statement. An optimistic “yes” can lead to exclusion, or to contractual penalties when the product fails acceptance tests a year later.

why the partner signs, and why that matters

When your bid goes in through a local integrator, often supported by a distributor that prepares documentation, pricing and compliance tables, that partner is where Polish language, local references, experience with the authority’s procedures and the paperwork live.

It also changes what “the better product” needs in order to win. The integrator has to choose to bid with your product instead of another one in its portfolio. Partners choose the product they can make compliant, price competitively and implement without surprises. A vendor that is unknown to the integrators who bid on public tenders in a sector does not get to compete, whatever its product does.

Two practical consequences. Register tender opportunities with your distributor before publication so pricing can be prepared early. And agree a rule for what happens when two of your partners bid against each other on the same tender, before it happens.

a note on thresholds

National procedures apply from PLN 130,000. EU procedures apply above the EU thresholds, which for 2026 and 2027 are 140,000 EUR (PLN 603,400) for supplies and services bought by central government authorities, and 216,000 EUR (PLN 930,960) for sub-central authorities, converted at PLN 4.31 per euro under a UZP announcement of December 2025. Below PLN 130,000, authorities follow their own internal rules.

the verdict

In Polish public procurement, product quality matters most in the months before publication, when someone translates it into requirements an authority can verify. After publication, it is a compliance and price exercise run by your partner. Vendors that only show up for the second part lose to vendors that showed up for the first.