For public sector

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.

01 / The public-sector reality

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.

02 / What CodeB adds

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.

No cloud audioMultilingualOut-of-hours

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.

PWAHybrid-work-ready

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.

No SaaS mediaE2E encrypted

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.

Self-hosted IdPPKCE-only
03 / Worked example

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.

04 / Why not Microsoft Teams / Zoom Phone

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.

05 / Deployment

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