Scan Magazine | Business | Enterprise Denmark
Specialising in IoT, Danish R&D company Xtel has helped Danish companies of all sizes embrace a completely new way of doing business.
The Internet of Things – the future of business Imagine your production equipment telling you if a component needs to be replaced to prevent a breakdown, or your product letting your customers know when a service check is needed or informing its owner of supplementary products and services. Specialising in the Internet of Things (IoT), Danish R&D company Xtel opens the door to a completely new way of doing business. By Signe Hansen | Photos: Xtel
Founded as an offspring of Denmark’s mobile cluster in 2005, Xtel, which is located in Aalborg near the city’s university campus, consists of more than 50 highly specialised hardware and software development experts. In recent years, the company, which originally specialised in the wireless technology of mobile phones, has expanded greatly into what is known as the Internet of Things. By helping companies connect their products to the internet, Xtel has helped numerous companies of all sizes create new business opportunities and revenue 76 | Issue 87 | April 2016
streams. IoT has changed the perception of how companies should approach their current business models as it facilitates a transition from selling a standalone product to a product and service. Sales and business development director Mogens Durup Nielsen explains: “Many Danish companies today have a very small profit margin on their existing products, and what they rely on to keep that margin is typically their flexibility and high-quality products. Starting up cooperation, we involve our innovation
team, which carefully maps out all processes connected to any given product. This process opens up the potential new business models enabled by combining a given product with the internet. We can support that by, for instance, developing and integrating low-cost sensors into their systems. Through these, you can get a stream of data on, say, temperature, vibration and wear – essential data to do business on. The result could be that in the end, with a complete IoT system, you can eliminate both breakdowns and superfluous service checks and optimise manual processes by continuously monitoring the production. In the future, you can also do smarter stock control as you limit or even eliminate the need for having service components in stock, and you can leave it to the IoT system to purchase components before they are needed.”