Of course. Our projects in the StableNet^® Innovation Lab go through a defined process. At the beginning, our focus was on initial contact with many different interest groups and stakeholders. Among other things, we used our regular meet-ups and Snapshot webinars to provide targeted insights into individual projects and arouse interest. Customers and partners have also actively expressed their interest in one or more projects via our StableNet^® Community Portal, which has resulted in a number of valuable discussions with various interested parties as well as further opportunities for collaboration.

The general subject areas of our projects are a cross-section of our Infosim^® research projects. Here we are researching together with various project partners on similar topics such as AI, visualization, IoT, 2D/3D layouting, quantum communication and much more. We were also inspired by our participation in the TM Forum with our Catalyst on the topic of “Autonomous Networks Hyperloops VI“.

The more detailed project topics then arise on the one hand from feedback from customers and partners, but also from our own ideas and experiences. Our current topics range from AIOPs, quality of experience and IoT to visualization and quantum communication. Since the launch of the lab, we have steadily expanded the portfolio of topics and more topics will be added in the future.

With some of the other topics, we are still in the initial phase or just have a PoC (Proof-of-Concept) or prototype. For us, a PoC means that the concept has been proven and has been run at least once. A prototype goes one step further and implies that we have a finished script or a finished portal that fulfills the requirement of running continuously so that we can show a demo at any time.

However, none of the projects are complete yet. This will only be the case once the pilot phase has been successfully completed. The next step after that would be to pass it on to our development team, which would then work on integrating it into StableNet^®.

In addition to the growing portfolio of topics, the biggest addition was probably the StableNet^® Innovation Lab Collaboration Center, which launched with the StableNet^® 24 Annual Release.

We have established our communication around the lab on three levels of visibility. On the public level, for example via YouTube or our landing page, we generally promote our lab and the subject areas in which we implement projects. On the second level we provide a more detailed overview of the individual projects in the StableNet^® Community Portal, which is only accessible to customers and partners. Here, interested parties can also actively express their interest in one or more topics and sign up for the newsletter.

The last level is the Collaboration Center, which is exclusively for interested parties and project partners that are actively contributing. It offers a deeper insight into the topics and an interactive access to a wide range of additional information on the projects, such as planned functionalities, methodology, architecture and more. In addition, the Collaboration Center provides an easy way for our project partners to share detailed feedback or further ideas on the content.

One addition, which was added at the beginning of this year and which we want to establish further, are standard sessions on project topics for which there has been a lot of interest. These sessions take place every 3 months on a fixed date for half an hour, at which customers and partners can dial in and freely exchange ideas without any obligation.