65 Matrix deployments now tracked across Europe's public sector

Sixty-five national- and international-scale Matrix deployments are now being tracked across Europe, as governments push to take control of sensitive communications and cut reliance on US technology suppliers. But the message from this week's Matrix Conference in Malmö was clear: replacing Microsoft Teams is a different matter entirely.

Matrix, launched in 2014, is an open standard for decentralized messaging. Like email, it lets users exchange messages between compatible apps from different vendors — Element, Rocket.Chat, and Automattic's Beeper among them. What began as an "interesting experiment" has become "the poster child for digital sovereignty, especially in Europe," Matthew Hodgson, co-founder of the Matrix Foundation and CEO of Element, told the conference Wednesday.

The geopolitical driver is concrete: Hodgson cited the suspension of an International Criminal Court prosecutor's Microsoft account last year as evidence that US suppliers could restrict access for political reasons.

Who has already deployed?

The deployments already running at scale include:

• France's DINUM, whose Tchap app runs on Matrix for more than 400,000 civil servants each month
• Germany's BwMessenger for the Bundeswehr and TI-Messenger for healthcare
• The European Commission, which completed its desktop rollout of Element in September 2026

The Commission's project started in summer 2025 with a proof of concept finished in December, and aims to secure internal communications for more than 40,000 employees. A mobile rollout is planned.

"We also wanted to have data control and ownership of the platform," said Diana Gheorghe, head of sector for Communication and Collaboration Services in the Commission's Digital Workplace Foundations team. The deployment also offers "contractual leverage" in procurement, she said.

It hasn't been frictionless. Users struggled to find colleagues across different servers, and the Commission disabled live presence after performance problems. A recent Politico article captured employee grumbling that unfavorably compared Element to Teams. Gheorghe cautioned against that framing — Teams has broader functionality, so "there's no 'one-to-one' parity" — and said Element will "complement" existing workplace apps, not replace them.

What does sovereignty actually buy?

Forrester principal analyst Dario Maisto argued the Teams comparison misses the point. "The risk is material that an organization tomorrow morning is not able to open the Outlook solution, the Teams solution, the collaboration tools, whatever. The risk is material — it has happened already," he said.

Maisto insisted adoption requires top-down change management: "This is not an IT problem, this is a board-level decision."

Kenneth Edwall, an IT architect at Sweden's Försäkringskassan, agreed on priorities. "The idea is not that these solutions need to be exactly like Microsoft Teams. That's not the driver — it's the sovereignty part," he said, adding that a single trusted tool "lowers the digital stress" for users handling sensitive information.

Sweden's federation experiment

Försäkringskassan belongs to eSam, a program spanning 42 Swedish government agencies. When Microsoft ended support for older Skype for Business versions, agencies scattered across different apps — raising fears their systems could no longer talk to each other. Three approaches emerged: larger agencies run Teams plus a separate platform for sensitive traffic (Element, Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, plus Pexip or Jitsi for video); some run fully sovereign systems; few rely entirely on public cloud.

Försäkringskassan's SAFOS Chatt service now serves 19 Swedish public authorities. A just-completed proof of concept federated Element at Försäkringskassan with Rocket.Chat at Trafikverket, meeting most requirements, and eSam will publish a final report in spring 2027. A live conference demo connected Matrix apps at the Commission, DINUM, Försäkringskassan, NATO, and Schleswig-Holstein.

"It's only a few firewalls away to France and Germany," Edwall said of wider federation. "The challenge is going to be who should interoperate with each other and how open should it be."

The Commission is assessing federation across EU institutions but has made no decision. "Federation, for us, is an unwritten story," Gheorghe said, citing GDPR and security considerations.

A gradual road

Maisto expects more adoption but warns against overnight expectations — especially with pandemic-era cloud migrations still being amortized. "I'm not going to get started on a €10 million project anew," he said. And communications is only one piece: "If I'm using the Microsoft productivity suite for everything else, how much does it help adding just the communication tool on a sovereign platform?"

His advice for CIOs: start there — "just be mindful that if you start there, there might be a lot more to consider very soon."