Author
Markus Eickhoff
Lifestyle companies like AirBnB have a human-centered way of thinking about innovation. Similar to WeWork, they create the offline experience, turning to the customer journey as inspiration. Their strategy has been shaped by allowing members to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. They are selling amazing trips and organic networking opportunities – not an app or an office.
CLICK TO TWEET: CommScope's Markus Eickhoff explains that having access to the e-shelter innovation lab has helped foster creative and innovative collaboration.
Designing A Community Experience
As these industries move toward new business models, old ways of thinking are being disrupted. We’re also seeing this in the data center industry. It’s no longer about taking a proprietary and closed approach to innovation.
e-shelter, a leading data center operator in Europe and an NTT Communications group company, is designing this experience with its e-shelter innovation lab in Frankfurt. The lab provides the setting for customers to test and validate distributed cloud architectures in a real-world production environment faster, with greater flexibility, and with lower up-front investment.
Rather than just being a place for space, power and security, e-shelter offers CommScope and a vibrant community of partners, customers and the world’s most advanced cloud technology providers a platform to share new ideas in cloud technology. The knowledge community shares information via webcasts, bootcamps, meet ups and hackathons.
Customers of e-shelter, considered one of Europe’s largest data centers, also have the ability to design “proof of concepts” that specifically target their business goals, which can then be quickly migrated to the production environment.
Preparing for digital transformation
As emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality need detailed, accurate data management, we have found the e-shelter ecosystem of partners and customers are interested in finding out more about intelligent state-of-the-art data centers.
The e-shelter innovation lab has served as a test bed for documenting physical network infrastructure including all cabling and connectivity. Our peers can try out CommScope’s automated infrastructure management and see a complete picture of the physical layer, as well as the location and connection map for all of their devices.
The ability to generate electronic work orders and automate processes has been well received among potential new users. They’re also interested in how the technology increases security of the network by generating alerts to unauthorized or unplanned changes.
Having access to the e-shelter innovation lab not only reduces investment in complex new scenarios, but has helped foster creative and innovative collaboration. This is a win-win scenario for everyone.
