Innovation Contest, opened to everyone, drives service innovation for the IT Services for tomorrow’s data center
Fujitsu Siemens Computers is proud to announce the winners of its ground breaking Innovation Contest, ‘IT Services for Tomorrow’s Data Center’ – designed specifically to deliver leading service innovation that meets the precise and varying needs of its customers.
The Innovation Contest is a new concept that recognises the importance of driving innovation through wide-ranging collaboration and the use of multiple sources of information. It invites engineers, system administrators, IT managers, customers, partners, students, professors – in fact any knowledgeable person with an interest and experience in information technology and services – to submit ideas and suggestions via a dedicated web site.
This Innovation Contest focused on developing innovative IT Services for tomorrow’s data center, a strategically important area for Fujitsu Siemens Computers’s customers. Over 160 entries were submitted from across the globe with ideas to tackle this abstract and challenging topic. Fujitsu Siemens Computers values the vital open participation of every member of its innovation community and the organisers were thrilled to see so much collaborative exchange of thoughts and ideas throughout the competition.
The first prize went to Robin Thieman, a student from Munich, studying at the University of Innsbruck. He proposed a solution that offers easily-accessible on-demand storage to small and medium businesses to help them meet mandatory legal regulations.
A further 10 runners up delivered a range of compelling suggestions ranging from the engagingly simple to the very complex. The runners up each receive a Fujitsu Siemens ESPRIMO PC or LIFEBOOK notebook. Special prizes were given to the ‘most active contributor’ and the most valuable contributor, identified by community evaluation.
An expert jury evaluated each proposal against a number of criteria including conformity with contest goals and feasibility as well as alignment with Fujitsu Siemens Computers’s brand. The winning innovation scored the highest on these criteria while also showing strong potential for offering new valuable IT Services to our customers.
Joseph Reger, CTO of Fujitsu Siemens Computers, commented:“The competition for the best proposals for new Infrastructure Services was a great success. We not only opened our Innovation Process to new ideas from customers, partners and IT specialists from universities and other organizations. This contest also helped us to optimize our internal social network of innovators, both from the product and the service side. From the large number of diverse and interesting new ideas the proposal of ‘ Backup streams to data centers’ emerged as the winner, because of its strategic fit to our enhanced Infrastructure Service offerings.”
The Innovation Contest demonstrates Fujitsu Siemens Computers’s recognition that innovation is fuelled by utilizing many different sources of information. Richard Schlauri, Executive Vice President Infrastructure Services for Fujitsu Siemens Computers said: “The ability to innovate is a critical success factor in the IT industry. We’re increasing our capabilities with this fresh approach, successfully integrating creative and highly motivated experts. With the innovation contest, we’ve been in direct touch with experts all across EMEA and enabled them to participate in the development of their own creative ideas. I am convinced that this was an engaging experience for all parties involved.”
The contest was created with the help of HYVE AG – a Munich-based consultancy specializing in customer-centered innovation. The goal was to generate creative ideas from knowledgeable users, such as developers, consultants and computer scientists, which can then be integrated into the Fujitsu Siemens Computers innovation process.
The perspective these external users provide is a valuable complement to that of the developers working within Fujitsu Siemens Computers. Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ sees continued external collaboration and innovation as key to the strategic development of business in the future. It therefore plans to continue with open innovation in the future while encouraging regular collaboration with different universities and business schools to foster continuous learning and community-building and identify areas of end-user innovation to bolster its offering.
Visit the Innovation Contest homepage at: http://innovation-contest.fujitsu-siemens.com