Two and a half years ago, I met Thomas Novotny, the CTO of Innovation at T-Systems. I was presenting the previous Collaboard version 2017 on a Surface Hub at the TechData booth at ISE in Amsterdam.
We started talking to each other, and I showed him how we were transforming collaboration processes at our customers with the online Whiteboard Collaboard. During this time, online whiteboards have been something very new, and most of the people were not aware of solutions like that.
Thomas, a visionary, responsible for driving innovation at T-Systems, was looking for an innovative partner who had the know-how to digitize the “A0 flipchart at the T-Systems innovation centre” in a "cloud-based solution".
Our shared vision was that online whiteboards would be an essential part of future collaboration between people from far away based on mobile infrastructure.
After the trade fair in Amsterdam, he and a team visited us in our office in Bonstetten, and we started brainstorming on how a large company like T-Systems (a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) could use online whiteboards to complement a solution to the company's existing products. It was during this meeting that the idea of HDS19 Module: TeamworkRevolution was born.
HDS19 TeamworkRevolution is an OEM version of Collaboard that is used internally by T-Systems and Deutsche Telekom and sold to their customers as an end-2end service for collaboration. TeamworkRevolution is hosted in data centres in Germany and has some unique features to meet the needs of large enterprises. (For example, we have developed a module that allows TeamworkRevolution to be hosted on customer infrastructure to be fully GDPR compliant).
Together with Thomas, we started digitalizing workshops and invited teams to the T-Systems innovation centre in Munich. During one of these workshops, we recorded this amazing video:
As we explained to our customers how they would work together in the future, we began to hold our TeamworkRevolution events and demos remotely. While Thomas and his T-Systems sales team were visiting their customers, I was always in Switzerland and connected remotely via video call. We ran demos of TeamworkRevolution together and showed how real-time collaboration with online whiteboards works. That was in 2019.
In 2020, we see a significant increase in demand for online whiteboards due to the effects of the corona crisis. With TeamworkRevolution we are now in the right place at the right time.
All the stories, use cases, improvements and new features we've developed over the last few months for TeamworkRevolution have made it one of the most innovative advanced online whiteboard and team collaboration platforms on the market. With Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems as strong OEM partners, we look forward to further driving innovation in the area of team collaboration.