In this article you will read about,

• how a start-up promotes and implements relevant innovation in companies with new, digital impetuses,
• which data and which IT resources make this possible, and
• how data protection is guaranteed and complies with GDPR.

platform3l creates a kind of digital impetus for companies – and thus solves an urgent problem for them: the start-up, which is supported by Telekom’s TechBoost support program, provides other companies with ideas about how they use digital tools to become more innovative and successful. platform3l curates examples of worldwide digital applications from research and industry, according to sectors and applications. And passes these impetuses on to other companies via the Open Telekom Cloud.

These are impetuses that are obviously sorely needed, because German companies are currently not becoming more innovative despite the constantly growing technical possibilities: since 2016, the number of patent applications in Germany has remained at roughly the same level as 20 years ago. One reason for this is routine: according to the Federal Statistical Office, almost every second employee remains loyal to his company for more than 10 years. The result: stewing in one's own juice.

"Long-term employment contracts speak for a high level of technical and specialist knowledge on the part of the employees. But this also means that they lose sight of the bigger picture," says Gabriele Riedmann de Trinidad. The founder and CEO of platform3l has worked for several decades in the field of innovation management at, among others, Siemens, T-Systems and the Metro Group. With her start-up, which uses “3l” in its name to refer to lifelong learning, she now wants to help companies improve their competitiveness in the knowledge age. 

New approaches in companies are sorely needed considering that, according to forecasts from IBM, human knowledge will double every 11-12 hours by the end of 2020. The approach: platform3l gives employees in companies daily future-oriented impetuses on how to solve problems with the help of technology directly on their smartphones. "With these impetuses, we give them ideas for their own approaches on how they can overcome challenges in their company using digital tools," says Riedmann de Trinidad. "The sum of the evaluations and the ideas generated become strategy consulting in the company. And then we help them to implement it – for example by finding the right solution providers."  

It goes without saying that this business model generates huge amounts of data. That's why the issues of data protection and data security were decisive when it came to platform3l choosing the technical basis for operating its solution. The start-up opted for Telekom’s public cloud, the Open Telekom Cloud. "We wanted to ensure that our customers' data was stored in a secure environment. This is an important sales argument for us. After all, one of the first questions potential customers ask is always: 'Where is our data?’”

But the law also demands a high level of data protection: Since the introduction of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018, all companies in Europe have had to comply with the stricter regulations for handling personal data. platform3l can feel secure here: The Trusted Cloud Data Protection Profile (TCDP) certifies that the Open Telekom Cloud is currently one of the few cloud offerings on the market to have a legally compliant privacy certification for defined cloud services. In addition, the data is stored in highly secure, multiple-certified Deutsche Telekom data centers in Germany.

When choosing a cloud solution, the CEO also attached importance to scalability. "In order to be able to use artificial intelligence even more in the future to support the curation of impetuses for companies and to help find solution providers, we need a solution that we can manage efficiently. With tools that can support workloads and cluster management and perform parallel tasks," says founder Riedmann de Trinidad. 

The Open Telekom Cloud meets these requirements: storage capacity can be quickly added as required – also automatically – and released again. platform3l thus has the costs under control, as resources adapt to business development. And last but not least, the Open Telekom Cloud is based on the open operating system OpenStack. This gives the start-up the greatest possible freedom of choice for applications and services and allows it to integrate innovative AI tools at any time. “We want to ensure that innovation through digitalization becomes a matter of course for companies," says Riedmann de Trinidad.

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