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Messaging has become the nervous system of modern organisations. It carries operational decisions, sensitive customer information, credentials, incident response coordination, and more. At GEN, we design, deploy, host, integrate, and support business messaging platforms that keep your communication private, compliant, and in your control.
We work across a broad mix of open protocols and commercial platforms, with Matrix as our primary recommendation and our own internal platform. We also support legacy environments and migrations from older protocols such as XMPP. We regularly integrate with Rocket.Chat, Slack, Mattermost, SMS, push messaging, AIO Talk, and voice/video layers such as Jitsi, Webex, and Zoom. Whether you need a simple internal chat service or a fully federated global messaging strategy with voice/video upgrade, we can build the right architecture and run it as a managed service.
Platforms & channels we support
We provide hosted instances of most open source messaging platforms for business use. That means you get the speed and convenience of a modern collaboration tool, but with infrastructure that is owned and operated for you, not monetised against you.
Deployment options include UK hosting, dedicated single-tenant private cloud, on-premises, and hybrid. We can integrate with your identity platform (LDAP/AD, SSO/SAML/OIDC), enforce MFA, provide audit logging, set retention policies, and build secure backups and disaster recovery.
Consumer chat apps are optimised for mass adoption, mobile convenience, and third-party cloud delivery. That often creates unavoidable trade-offs: limited administrative control, weak governance, unclear data residency, metadata exposure, and dependency on device security and third-party services.
A private, managed messaging service gives you clear control of where data lives, how it is protected, and who can access it. You can enforce policy, isolate sensitive teams, disable risky features, and evidence compliance.
Across government, defence supply chains, and other high-trust environments, there is increasing pressure to stop using consumer-grade and closed-source messaging apps for official communication. The driving force is sovereignty: who controls the code, the keys, the infrastructure, the data residency, and the operational response if something goes wrong.
Closed platforms create a single, central “trust anchor”. Even if they offer end-to-end encryption, organisations still have to trust the vendor’s implementation, update pipeline, telemetry, and account recovery processes. In practice, well-resourced actors (including state-level threat groups) can target endpoints, supply chains, identity systems, and operational workflows. If a vendor can provide access for compliance, eDiscovery, account recovery, or lawful process, that mechanism becomes a high-value target for attackers.
Messaging leaks are rarely a single “chat log got stolen” event; they tend to be systemic:
For a corporation, that can mean loss of IP, contract negotiations, incident response chatter, customer data, and reputational damage. For government, it can mean operational security risk and exposure of strategic decision-making.
Matrix is one of the most important emerging messaging protocols for organisations that care about data sovereignty. It combines modern UX with an open standard that can be deployed in your own infrastructure and still communicate globally. We design Matrix deployments for reliability and long-term maintainability: server sizing, storage strategy, encryption posture, key management, monitoring, and incident response.
GEN historically operated XMPP-based messaging (and we still understand it inside-out), but we now primarily deploy Matrix. If you have an existing XMPP estate, we can maintain it, harden it, and plan a migration path into Matrix or other supported platforms without losing control of identity, retention, and security posture.
Closed-source collaboration platforms are attractive because they are simple to adopt, but the security model often concentrates risk. Over the last decade, the industry has repeatedly seen how centralised, vendor-controlled ecosystems create high-value targets: a single compromise can impact many organisations.
Examples (illustrative, not exhaustive): WhatsApp has had multiple high-severity vulnerabilities over the years and has been a notable target for commercial spyware and nation-state operators; Zoom’s early pandemic growth surfaced repeated security/privacy controversies and a steady stream of vulnerabilities; and “Teams/365-style” cloud collaboration frequently fails in the real world due to tenant compromise, token theft, weak identity hygiene, and administrative overreach. In each case, the practical risk for a business or government is the same: if messages, identities, or metadata can be accessed at scale through a central control plane, then the blast radius of a breach is enormous.
Even privacy-forward brands are not immune to regulatory pressure. Apple’s decision to restrict certain optional iCloud encryption protections in the UK is a reminder that jurisdiction and legislation can directly shape what a service provider is allowed to offer. In some legal frameworks, providers may also be bound by non-disclosure requirements around specific access requests. This is why sovereignty-minded organisations prefer systems they can run themselves, with encryption and policy enforced under their own control.
Matrix is not “an app” controlled by a single company — it is an open standard and an open source ecosystem. That matters because it changes the trust model:
Matrix end-to-end encryption (commonly referred to as Olm/Megolm in the Matrix ecosystem) is designed so that encryption and decryption happen on user devices. With proper device verification and key management, this dramatically reduces the risk of bulk server-side content interception. Federation works with encryption too: even when messages travel between servers, the message payload remains encrypted end-to-end.
No platform can promise “perfect security” in the real world — endpoints, identity, and operational discipline still matter. The difference with Matrix is that you can run a messaging system where the provider and the hosting layer are not a permanent, unavoidable single point of trust for message content. That is exactly what organisations mean by genuine data sovereignty.
Federation lets you communicate across organisational boundaries without surrendering control of your data. With federated platforms like Matrix and XMPP, you can run your own server, set your own policies, and still interoperate with partners and customers.
We help you decide if federation is appropriate, then implement it safely: domain and routing design, allow/deny lists, rate limiting, abuse controls, and monitoring. For many organisations, the ideal model is private internal messaging with optional, tightly controlled federation.
Messaging is often the starting point, but real collaboration needs voice and video. We integrate and support voice/video services such as Jitsi and commercial platforms such as Webex and Zoom where appropriate. For open platforms, we can host and manage the stack to keep calls private, stable, and performant.
We start with a technical and operational review: who needs to message, what information is shared, what compliance rules apply, and what the threat model looks like. Then we design a messaging architecture that matches your reality — from a private internal service with strict access control, through to federation and interoperability with external parties.
GEN will deliver the full lifecycle: platform selection, design, secure deployment, integration with identity and workflow, documentation, training, and ongoing management. The result is messaging that is genuinely private, professionally governed, and ready for business use.
