Sovereign by construction. Procurable by procurement.
Municipalities, schools, small agencies and statutory bodies live with two competing pressures: keep citizen interactions on infrastructure you control, but also actually deliver modern services. CodeB’s answer is to put browser phones, video meetings, AI voice and identity on a Windows + IIS box your IT team already understands — without hyperscaler dependencies under the surface.
Three pressures pulling in opposite directions.
Data-sovereignty pressure
Schrems II, sector-specific competent authorities and increasingly explicit ministerial guidance push public bodies away from US-hyperscaler cloud comms for citizen-facing services.
Modernisation pressure
Citizens expect to book an appointment online, get an out-of-hours answer, video-call into a planning consultation. Saying “we use a 2008 PBX” is no longer politically acceptable.
Procurement reality
Framework agreements, multi-year contracts and budget cycles don’t reward SaaS subscription escalators. Capital expenditure on hardware you own fits the budget shape better.
Local IT capacity
Small municipalities and schools have a few-FTE IT team. Anything that requires a third-party managed service or constant patching becomes a maintenance burden no-one signed up for.
Sovereign by construction, friendly to small IT teams.
Citizen-facing AI on a local backend
Opening-hours announcements, refuse-collection schedules, school-term-date enquiries, planning-application status. On-premise AI Voice Engine / on-prem inference backend — no caller audio leaves the box.
Browser softphone for officers + staff
Council officers working from home or on-site take calls on their laptop. Schools issue browser softphones to admin and bursary staff. No per-extension licence model.
Video meetings without M365 / Zoom
End-to-end DTLS-SRTP browser meetings for committee meetings, parent-teacher conferences, internal coordination. No vendor cloud sees the media. Self-host the recordings.
Built-in OIDC identity provider
Reuse one identity across the council intranet, the school’s WordPress, internal Nextcloud, GitLab. No external IdP, no cross-site cookies. The provider runs on the same Windows host.
A mid-sized municipality (~30,000 residents).
Three departments visible to citizens (citizen services, planning, waste/utilities), a few internal teams. Existing PBX is a regional cooperative SIP arrangement. Two-FTE IT team.
- AI on the citizen-services main DID. Handles 60-70% of calls (opening hours, refuse-collection schedule, “is the office open Monday after the bank holiday”) with the local backend. Transfers anything substantive to a human.
- Planning department: AI answers status-of-application enquiries by application number, reads back the case officer’s next-step note. Doesn’t give planning advice.
- Internal staff use browser softphones across home / office. The PBX coop continues to handle outbound and emergency.
- One identity layer across the council intranet (Nextcloud), the public-facing WordPress site, and a small internal GitLab instance.
Four reasons sovereign-cloud procurement gets uncomfortable here.
Hyperscaler dependency
Cloud voice products are built on cloud infrastructure that hyperscaler regulators continue to flag as sovereignty-questionable. CodeB has no hyperscaler dependency — you self-host on whatever Windows server you choose.
Cross-border data flow
Citizen-personal data crossing the Atlantic raises persistent procurement questions. CodeB’s media plane is local by construction; the AI plane is local-by-default if you pick the local backend.
Subscription escalator
Per-user / per-month SaaS pricing escalates over multi-year budgets in ways that don’t fit local-government capital cycles. CodeB is per-install + maintenance, more like a traditional PBX cost model.
Public-sector signal value
Adopting a self-hosted, European-sovereignty-friendly comms stack is itself a politically defensible decision. SaaS isn’t.
Patterns we see in the public sector.
On council IT’s existing Windows VM
Most authorities already run a Windows fleet. Add the bridge as a service to one of the existing servers.
Dedicated comms appliance
Mini-PC or VM dedicated to comms. Easier to scope for security accreditation.
Per-school or per-department
Where central IT can’t take this on, schools/depts can host their own — the multi-tenancy model handles it.
Pilot first
One citizen-services DID with the AI on the local backend. Six-week evaluation period. Roll out wider on the back of measured volume handled.
Procurement-friendly conversation?
We’ll happily talk through DPAs, framework-agreement routing, SBOM material and signed installers. Tell us what your IT team needs to sign off and we’ll get it to you.
Get in touch →Related: Privacy manifesto AI-call privacy OIDC identity Data flow vs. Zoom / Teams Buy / host Telecoms (EU Wallet)
Frequently asked questions
Does CodeB qualify as a sovereign-cloud option?
CodeB is software you self-host. Whether the deployment qualifies as sovereign depends on where the Windows + IIS infrastructure physically lives and who operates it. We don't make sovereignty claims on your behalf — but the architecture (no hyperscaler dependency, no SaaS media path, no central telemetry) is designed to let you make them honestly.
Is the AI voice feature usable in public administration?
Yes, with the local backend. The bridge ships with a on-premise AI Voice Engine path that keeps caller audio on the machine. Cloud backends (cloud AI Voice Engines) are pluggable but opt-in — they're not enabled by default.
Does it work with our existing IdP?
CodeB ships its own OpenID Connect provider, but it can also act as a relying party against an existing OIDC identity provider. Useful when central IT mandates SSO but the comms server lives in a smaller IT unit.
What about procurement?
Aloaha Limited is a Malta-registered company shipping signing, PKI and secure-communications software since 2003. We provide DPAs, SBOM material on request, and signed installers. Talk to us about framework-agreement procurement routes.