A lot of the time, that's ok. A few people in the know want to avoid a lengthy and wasteful evaluation process for the product or company they already feel confident will meet their needs. Or worse, they're afraid someone might underbid, people without context will pick the lowest cost option, and the product or service will end up being a disaster.

The problem comes in when things like this happen - that a company forces itself to be the only option through unnecessary infrastructure and proprietary software in the public space.

That's why biddings are well-intentioned but mostly bullshit.

The biased/corrupt person that ultimately is forcing the decision gets their pick, but doesn't face the full consequences of their decision because "hey it was a bidding, everyone got to offer". People making multi-million dollar decisions should be exposed with plenty of skin in the game for things to ever not be as rigged as they currently are.

But that’s also a failure of internal IT and processes. These types of architectural decisions really need to go through some sort of ARC before proceeding.