6-figure deployments show momentum of sovereignty in France

French Nextcloud customers shared insights from recent deployments of its sovereign digital workplace technology to millions of users with talks covering 6 figure deployments at ministries, cities and state level. The fast growth of Nextcloud in the French market underlines the increasing interest in resilient IT infrastructure with customers expressing concerns around global uncertainty, dependencies and legal risks.

French President Emmanuel Macron stated that “Europe is stepping up to accelerate the development of European innovation, to uphold strong data protection, and to call for fair market conditions” at the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty in November. The urgent need for action on sovereignty was emphasized by renewed pressure from the US government on the EU to reduce or cease enforcement of laws designed to protect citizens and businesses from market abuse.

At the Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Paris, Nextcloud CEO and founder Frank Karlitschek opened the day with a clear statement:

European values are non-negotiable, and we can’t put ourselves in a position to be blackmailed. That is why we must reduce dependencies in order to protect European sovereignty.

Frank Karlitschek

Nextcloud CEO and founder

France overwhelmingly chooses Nextcloud for digital sovereignty

Given the geopolitical situation, it comes at no surprise that French organizations are acting. At the customer and partner event focusing on digital sovereignty, around 200 participants joined from public sector organizations, companies, and schools and universities. This represents nearly a doubling of interest compared to 2024.

The wide range of French Nextcloud customers demonstrates that digital sovereign workplace solutions are ready for enterprise use and proven at scale, with deployments discussed ranging from thousands to millions of users at schools, universities, companies and public sector organizations from the local to the national level.

During the day, participants expressed concerns about the dependency on foreign, big tech vendors and many questions centered around migration strategies from Microsoft or Google to a sovereign Nextcloud setup.

As Europe’s only serious competitor to Microsoft 365, Nextcloud has been rolled out in thousands of large scale deployments in the public sector, education and at businesses to provide users with a sovereign, easy to use digital workspace. It recently announced to invest 250 million Euros in digital sovereignty to accelerate the roll-out of sovereign technology to businesses and public sector organizations across Europe.

At the event, French organizations customers gave background on their Nextcloud instances with millions of users who store and collaborate on documents, engage chat or videoconferencing, and manage calendars, emails.

Ministry of Energy Transition

The Ministry of Energy Transition presented the integration of Nextcloud and Collabora into their sovereign collaboration suite for 50,000 users. The ministry emphasized how the organization benefits from interoperability, security, collaboration, and sovereignty through open source solutions.

Nextcloud is a great modular tool, allowing a sovereign collaboration at the service of energy transition.

Cyril Aeck

Deputy Group Leader for Collaboration and Digital Services, Ministry of Energy Transition

Île-de-France

Sovereign cloud provider Leviia presented the deployment Nextcloud as collaborative suite for 550,000 teachers and students in the Paris metropolitan area Île-de-France. The ambitious digital transformation project integrates with the existing education platform, monlycée.net and connects students, teachers, and administrative staff across hundreds of high schools. In essence, they benefit from a secure, privacy-respecting environment for learning, collaboration and file exchange.

Leviia and Nextcloud are a perfect match for the digital sovereignty goal at Île-de-France in a complex environment.

William Méauzoone

Leviia co-founder

Ville de Lyon

Nextcloud is at the heart of the sovereign cloud of the Métropole and Ville de Lyon with service provider for the public sector SITIV giving a presentation with Nextcloud partner Easya Solutions. Nextcloud is hosted in regional data centers. Several thousand employees in seven local authorities are already using it, and the solution is designed to be shared on a regional scale.

We decided to use Nextcloud solutions for sovereignty, confidentiality and independence from GAFAM. The solution is hosted locally, enhancing security and making it GDPR compliant.

Stéphane Vangheluwe

managing director at SITIV

French Ministry of National Education

The French Ministry of National Education is rolling out Nextcloud, with already over 330K daily employees and administrative staff using it. The end goal is 1.2 million employees and the presentation showcased the implementation and rollout process at scale.

We wanted to roll out an open source solution that allows us to keep knowledge in-house, to ensure the independence and autonomy of education in France. As of today, hundreds of thousands of employees work daily with Nextcloud and it has changed how they collaborate with colleagues, administration and others. Nextcloud has become a key driver in their daily work!

Benoît Piédallu

project lead for shared digital services at the Ministry of National Education

Key questions around user acceptance and migration strategies

These and other customers provided insights into their journey towards a sovereign digital workplace, explaining their motivations, sharing best practices and answering questions. A big topic was user acceptance, with the major learning that with the right change management in place, introducing sovereign technology can be done while bringing users along.

Practical solutions: migration, interoperability and integrations

Additional sessions tackled a wide range of migration scenarios and interoperability solutions. Speakers included the expert in email, groupware, and storage migration audriga, the leading open source project management software provider OpenProject, Microsoft integration specialist Sendent, the provider of online collaborative document editing Collabora Online and French IT services provider arawa.

During the breaks, participants at the event had a chance to discuss various topics around digital sovereignty in France with each other and the speakers.

Nextcloud expands French ecosystem with new partnerships

At the event, Nextcloud also signed a strategic partnership agreement with Smile Group, the leading European open source integration and service provider. By combining Nextcloud’s collaborative workplace platform with Smile Group’s deep expertise in large-scale open source integration, the two companies are set to deliver viable, European alternatives to proprietary extra-European solutions.

Earlier in November, sovereign cloud provider Leviia announced the extension of its partnership with Nextcloud. Leviia Next is a digital sovereign alternative to Microsoft 365 for large organizations based on hyper-scalable cloud infrastructure hosted in France. The offering is designed to equip organizations with tens to hundreds of thousands of users. The new and extended partnerships add to the existing French partner ecosystem.

The event was closed by Yann Lechelle (CEO, Probabl) with a talk on digital resilience, EuroStack Initiative and openness as strategy to solve the sovereignty conundrum.

Concluding: it is time to move!

This year’s Enterprise Day underlined the massive momentum Nextcloud has in France. Our commitment is to continue this growth and help every organization looking to bring back their data under their own control! Contact our team and find out how Nextcloud and our partners can help you.

Coming up: Nextcloud Summit 2026

Or join us at the Nextcloud Summit in Munich on June 9th to learn from organizations across the world who share insights into strategy, real-world implementations, and discuss building the technologies that make digital sovereignty possible.