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Digital Samba at Salon Souveraineté Numérique 2026 Paris

6 min read

July 8, 2026

Last week, Digital Samba joined nearly 100 exhibitors at the inaugural Salon Souveraineté Numérique (SSN) in Paris - two days that made one thing clear: the conversation around digital sovereignty in Europe has decisively shifted from debate to execution.

Table of contents

A landmark event for European tech independence
What brought Digital Samba to Paris
Navigating an open-source-first audience
Positioning Digital Samba as the managed sovereign alternative
The mood on the floor: from debate to procurement
Looking ahead

A landmark event for European tech independence

The Salon Souveraineté Numérique, held on 30 June and 1 July at the Espace Champerret, was more than a trade show. It was a statement of intent. Organised under the patronage of Anne Le Hénanff, France's Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, the event gathered over 2,000 participants and close to 100 exhibitors who were all focused on one pressing question: how can European organisations reduce their dependency on non-European technology providers?

The numbers driving that urgency are stark. According to Cigref, 80% of European cloud spending (some €265 billion) flows to American companies. The Institut Montaigne estimates that 70% of French data is hosted outside the EU. As the event's programme noted bluntly, this dependency "limits autonomous decision-making, data security, and the capacity to innovate without external constraints." The salon was designed to offer a credible, practical alternative.

The programme reflected that ambition: more than 25 conferences and 30 workshops, structured around eight thematic tracks covering sovereign cloud, trusted AI, open source, European regulation, cybersecurity, digital identity, public sector procurement, and startup ecosystems. Speakers ranged from CISOs and CTOs at major French institutions to representatives of France's interministerial digital directorate (DINUM) and senior figures from organisations including EDF, Sopra Steria, and Docaposte.

What brought Digital Samba to Paris

For Digital Samba, the decision to exhibit was a natural one. We are a European video conferencing company, incorporated in Spain and operating entirely on European-owned infrastructure. We have no US parent company and no exposure to the kind of transatlantic data transfers that have made tools like Zoom or Teams increasingly problematic for public sector and regulated enterprise clients. The SSN is precisely the kind of forum where we belong.

Our pitch to visitors was direct: sovereignty in video conferencing is not just about where your server sits. It is about who controls the data contractually, who patches the software when vulnerabilities are discovered at 2 am on a Sunday, and who guarantees that the platform your hospital, ministry, or law firm depends on will still work at peak load during a crisis. We believe the answer to all three questions should be a trusted European partner, not a community forum thread.

Navigating an open-source-first audience

One of the eight conference tracks was devoted entirely to "Open Source, Digital Commons and Alternatives", and it was one of the most attended ones. France has a long tradition of favouring open-source solutions in its public sector, and many visitors arrived with that instinct firmly in place. Tools like Jitsi Meet and BigBlueButton are well known in the French public administration; LINAGORA's founder and president Alexandre Zapolsky summarised the prevailing sentiment at the event: that France and Europe "can and must develop their own digital third way."

We respect that instinct entirely. Our argument was not against open source - it was about total cost of ownership and operational reality. Open-source video conferencing tools are free to download. They are not free to run. The engineering time required to configure STUN/TURN servers, maintain WebRTC stacks, harden deployments, manage security patches, and develop features does not appear on any licence invoice, but it is very real, and it is ongoing. For organisations without dedicated DevOps capacity, the burden is substantial.

The conversations at our stand reflected that reality. Decision-makers from local authorities, healthcare systems, and financial institutions were candid: they had tried self-hosted video, they had struggled with it, and they were looking for something that combined European sovereignty with the reliability and feature completeness they had come to expect from commercial platforms.

Positioning Digital Samba as the managed sovereign alternative

Our core message throughout the two days was simple: Digital Samba delivers sovereignty as a service. This is not a contradiction in terms. Organisations can have full contractual control over their data, including DPA terms, clear Controller/Processor roles, and the guarantee that deleting a room permanently erases all associated data - while relying on a managed platform that handles everything beneath the API layer.

For larger organisations or those with strict data residency requirements, we also presented our on-premises deployment option: the full Digital Samba Embedded stack running inside the client's own infrastructure, with all the feature richness of the cloud version. This resonated strongly with public sector visitors in particular, for whom the phrase "your data never leaves your network" carries genuine weight.

The feature set itself drew consistent interest: end-to-end encryption, white-label and CNAME configuration, granular roles and permissions, screen sharing, shared whiteboard, polls, recording pipelines, and full REST API and JavaScript SDK access. We also introduced visitors to our MCP Server (a bridge between Digital Samba's video infrastructure and AI development environments like Claude and Cursor), positioning us not just as a conferencing tool but as a programmable video layer for the next generation of European AI-native applications.

The mood on the floor: from debate to procurement

Perhaps the most striking aspect of SSN 2026 was the tone. As one pre-event analysis noted, the market for digital sovereignty has changed register: IT directors are no longer asking whether to reduce dependence on non-European providers - they are asking how, and at what speed. That shift was palpable in conversations throughout the two days. Visitors were not there to be convinced of the principle; they were there to evaluate specific solutions against specific procurement requirements.

Grégory Wintrebert, Executive Director of Institutional Relations at Sopra Steria, captured the collective mood: "In a geopolitical context where technological mastery has become a strategic imperative, European sovereignty cannot be optional." Caroline Chopinaud of Hub France IA emphasised the AI dimension: "The SSN embodies the essential space for dialogue needed to build a truly sovereign AI, which is absolutely critical in the current context."

Digital Samba fits squarely within that framing. We have been building video infrastructure exclusively since 2003. We are not a US company offering a European data region. We are not an open-source project maintained by volunteers. We are a focused, independent European engineering team, and the solutions we offer are in production at scale including, most recently, as the infrastructure powering the official media press livestreams of the Eurovision Song Contest in both 2025 and 2026.

Looking ahead

The first edition of the Salon Souveraineté Numérique drew over 2,000 participants to its debut, mostly French companies and their representatives. The Institut du Numérique Responsable, one of the event's institutional partners, described it as establishing "a new reference event" for the ecosystem - and we agree. Nevertheless, we hope that an event of such kind is going to grow into a European one by attracting more European tech players, EU representatives, and any other decision makers in that space. The conversations we had in Paris confirmed that demand for genuinely European, enterprise-grade, API-first video conferencing is real, growing, and no longer being satisfied by either the American hyperscalers or the self-hosted open-source stack.

We left Paris with a strong pipeline of follow-up conversations - public sector bodies, enterprise IT teams, and system integrators looking for a video layer they can deploy confidently within a sovereign architecture. We will be back next year, and we expect the salon to grow significantly as the political and regulatory pressure behind European tech sovereignty continues to intensify.

If you met us at the stand and want to continue the conversation, or if you missed the event and want to explore what Digital Samba's API and on-premises options could mean for your organisation, we would be glad to hear from you.

→ digitalsamba.com/digital-samba-embedded
→ sales@digitalsamba.com