The young IoT company Alpha-Omega Technology impresses the innovation competition with an innovative product, a smart city model project and a decentralised, agile team
Schimberg and Berlin, 18 February 2021: Alpha-Omega Technology GmbH & Co. KG receives the TOP 100 seal 2021. Managing director Jan Bose founded the company for projects, products and consulting around the Internet of Things (IoT) five years ago in Schimberg in the Eichsfeld region of Thuringia. The seal is awarded annually to particularly innovative medium-sized companies. The innovative strength of the applicants is determined in a scientific selection process on behalf of the media company compamedia. For the first time, the assessment also looked at how well applicants are mastering the challenges of the pandemic. Small, flexible and well-connected companies with flat hierarchies, agile methods and strategic partnerships, such as the team around Jan Bose, scored well here. His company Alpha-Omega Technology has long since made a name for itself with the online shop www.iot-shop.de, the KLAX product development and the innovative model village SMARTinfeld.
Five years ago, Jan Bose founded his company in the small municipality of Schimberg in the Eichsfeld district of Thuringia, far away from the big technology hotspots. The business rests on three pillars: projects, consulting and products around the Internet of Things (IoT). Alpha-Omega Technology sells hardware for building IoT environments through its own online shop iot-shop.de, establishes IoT networks for municipalities and companies such as energy utilities together with partners, and advises on implementation. The focus is on new technologies that transmit small amounts of data, such as temperature or CO2 readings, over long distances with very little energy. One example is the LoRaWAN radio standard, for which many municipal utilities are currently building separate networks.
Product innovation: the KLAX optical reader
In 2019, Alpha-Omega Technology and its partner Zenner IoT Solutions GmbH presented the product development named KLAX, an optical sensor for reading the optical interfaces of smart metering systems for electricity and gas. Values such as gas temperature or gas pressure can thus be read continuously and made available. KLAX is therefore suitable for energy utilities, for example to increase transparency in the grids, or for monitoring plants in industry. Previously there was no technical solution for capturing such data in a LoRaWAN network and evaluating it continuously. The KLAX product innovation has closed this gap.
Lighthouse project: "SMARTinfeld"
The Internet of Things model village "SMARTinfeld" was launched back in summer 2018. In future, Martinfeld, a district of Schimberg, is to have the highest density of IoT applications in a single municipality anywhere in Germany. As a first step towards becoming a smart city, the municipality converted its entire street lighting to intelligent LED lights. Since then, sensors detect faulty lamps and, where required, control the switching time of each individual street light. This saves the municipality money in the long term and increases safety and comfort. The infrastructure was provided by the local company Alpha-Omega Technology, which is also in charge of project management. https://smartinfeld.de
Success factor: strategic partnerships
Specialising in digitalisation and IT projects for municipal utilities, Thüga SmartService GmbH has opened an online shop for IoT end devices for its customers at smartservice.iot-shop.de . The shop was realised by Alpha-Omega Technology as part of a strategic partnership with Thüga SmartService. The new shop is based on iot-shop.de by Alpha-Omega Technology. "The implementation was possible within a short time because our IT infrastructure allows scaling," explains Jan Bose, managing director of Alpha-Omega Technology. The benefits of the cooperation for Thüga SmartService and its customers are lower prices and streamlined processes in IoT procurement: "Through our partnership with Alpha-Omega Technology, our customers get the entire logistics for their IoT project from a single source: from planning, setting up and operating the system with us to the efficient procurement of certified end devices through Alpha-Omega Technology. Scalable from small to very large requirements, with automatic integration into the IoT platform," says Urs Wehmhörner, Head of IoT and Energy Efficiency at Thüga SmartService.
The team: digital, connected, flexible and agile
The employees of Alpha-Omega Technology are spread across several locations in Germany. For this reason, the digital communication channels had long been installed and established when the first wave of the pandemic last spring forced many companies to enable working from home overnight. "We are a virtual team. Our IT and our company organisation were designed from the start so that it does not matter where our employees work. With digital tools for location-independent collaboration such as Slack, Teams, Jira and Confluence, we can react extremely quickly and flexibly to new requirements," explains managing director Jan Bose. For project and product management, the entrepreneur relies on the agile Scrum method. "We are not short of innovation either, rather of the time to implement all the ideas and improvements. As managing director, I have deliberately promoted this kind of corporate culture from the very beginning." In addition to agility, a passion for innovation and dynamism, Jan Bose attaches great importance to continuous quality management, which is why Alpha-Omega Technology has been certified by DEKRA to ISO 9001 since 2019.
TOP 100 assesses the repeatability of innovation performance
On behalf of compamedia, the organiser of the TOP 100 innovation competition, innovation researcher Nikolaus Franke examined the innovative strength of Alpha-Omega Technology on the basis of 120 assessment criteria from five categories: innovation-promoting top management, innovation climate, innovative processes and organisation, external orientation/open innovation, and innovation success. At its core is the question of whether innovations are the result of a planned approach or a product of chance, in other words the repeatability of innovation performance, and whether and how the corresponding solutions succeed in the market. Because of the current situation, this round also included a special section examining the entrepreneurial response to the coronavirus crisis. Alpha-Omega Technology is among the TOP innovators for the first time.