Element (formerly New Vector) has announced the world’s largest collaboration software deal with 500,000 seats deployed for the German education system. This is 150,000 more seats than Slack’s largest implementation; 350,000 seats at IBM.

Collaboration tools, like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Zoom, have become ubiquitous among businesses in lockdown but pose serious security risks, due to a lack of encryption and an over-reliance on centralised servers.

The German states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg deploy a Matrix-based solution for 500,000 users across public offices and education as part of its wider adoption of open source cloud strategy Project Phoenix being carried out by IT provider Dataport.

Matthew Hodgson, CEO, Element commenced, “Digital sovereignty has become a genuinely hot topic over the last few months, both thanks to the cybersecurity risks of applications run by other nation states, and desire for nations to naturally have autonomy over their own infrastructure.”

Hodgson continued “Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced organisations into remote working who simply cannot depend on typical Silicon Valley centralised services – and this has led to a huge explosion of interest in self-sovereign communication infrastructure, for which Element and Matrix are the standard-bearers”.

Element’s ultra-secure messaging system has also been deployed by the French government as part of a project designed to secure government communications, as well as the German military.

 

Pictured left to right : Founders of Element – Matthew Hodgson, CEO & Amandine Le Pape Chief Operation Officer