Digital sovereignty is gaining momentum in the Netherlands, Nextcloud Enterprise Day shows

In May, Nextcloud organized its first Nextcloud Enterprise Day in the Netherlands. Aiming initially for 60 participants, the event had to expand the venue twice to accommodate the nearly 300 attendees! This week, a second Nextcloud Enterprise Day in The Hague reached almost 400 participants, showing the continued growth of interest and awareness of digital sovereignty in the Netherlands in just the last 6 months.

A focus on real-world deployments

Since the beginning of the year, demand for sovereign work place technology has skyrocketed and Nextcloud has seen an eight-fold increase in inquiries from companies, public sector organizations and educational institutions looking to learn about digital sovereignty in the Netherlands. At the event, 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.

The program was heavily focused on customer stories, with a delegation from the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, a team from the cooperation of Dutch education organizations SURF and the Austrian ministry’s CISO all making an appearance.

They all detailed their journey towards a more autonomous and sovereign digital workplace, explaining their motivations, sharing best practices and answering questions. A big theme 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.

Digital workplace offerings and migration strategies

The quickly growing dutch partner ecosystem was present, spearheaded by KPN and Centric, both covering the new sovereign digital work place offerings on the Dutch in their breakout sessions. 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 and the provider of online collaborative document editing Collabora Online. The sponsors also included the Dutch branch of system integrator Bechtle, present with a booth.

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

The event was closed with known anti-trust economist and chairperson of the newly founded EuroStack Foundation, Cristina Caffarra, speaking to the audience in a Q&A format about trends in digital sovereignty in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe.

Concluding: it is time to move!

Our second Nextcloud Enterprise Day this year underlined the massive momentum Nextcloud has in the Netherlands. 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 achieve digital sovereignty in the Netherlands!