56K.Cloud moves to Technopark Winterthur
At the beginning of this year we moved our office (yes believer it or not, we have had an office). Why we moved and why we keep a central point and purpose of having a "brick and mortar" location we will share in this blog post.
For the last 3 years we've been located in a number of Regus/Spaces office, for both the location and corporate co-working model. That served us well and you can read more about it in a previous blog post =>
Why the move?But as our cloud work evolved more and more towards 5G, IoT, Machine Learning, Smart Infrastructure and Industrial Systems there became the need for a more hands-on collaborative setup incorporating a workshop/lab, "a hybrid office", with connected hardware etc.. That work meant we stated to expand out of the capabilities of our co-working setup and with the COVID epidemic hitting us hard financially along with more and more remote setups we decided we had to both economically and focus the physical office presence as a lab. There where other factors too, which we'll share later.
What has on office in Technopark to offer?
Allot of the modern office facilities we had before, provided WiFi, underground parking, serviced toilets, waste disposal and recycling, all this is standard at Technopark. However the location has a higher concentrations of start-ups in sectors we work closer in, Industrial Tech, Life Science and early-stage tech start-ups. The conferencing and meeting room facilities are larger and for most events free of use for tenets provided open to the public. This is something we needed (pre-COVID) as we are quite active in the tech community managing over six meetup groups, with a reach of 3000 engineers across the Swiss developer community. _ When COVID allows us_
Are we losing the co-working spirit? No, not at all. For now it's not common (COVID) but it's changing, people are more inclined to meet for more substantial reasons, travelling off-site, retreat and physical working on workshops / labs and generally when collaborative work can bring value from meeting physically. But we do see a potential here for more socially applied co-working, with the recent extension and rebuild of the canteen to feature more a lough/bar like atmosphere the setups is ready.
Room to expand and Lots of space, this location is big and with a movement of tenets, there isn't long to wait for more room. As mentioned, recently Technopark have been investing to renovating the first two floors of the older building and adding a larger restaurant and bar. This included about 700m2 of additional space for events and co-working areas. Checkout there construction newsletter here:
Fair pricing and Start-up focusedThis was important part which motivated our move, as we see costs of office locations becoming drastically more aggressively priced with the move to working from home becoming more widely accepted and companies reducing there office space as an effect. For start-ups, Technopark has a few offers, which is available for the first 3 years, "Förderangebot" This we managed to win as part of the start-up on-boarding, Was great work by the 56K team and the community at Technopark for including us in this program. More information can be found here: https://tpw.ch/en/startup-support/overview/
The Move in: In early December we decided to move and where happy we could arrange quite quickly a move. Between Christmas and new year we moved our office and lab contents. We wanted to move before the construction started on the ground floor as the lift would be disabled for 3 months, Technopark where very flexible here and we managed to move in before our contract.
Another nice benefit of the location is some start-ups that we collaborate and have friends here too, Qualist and Terraview to name a few.
Meet 56K.Cloud @ TechnoparkLooking for Cloud Native, DevOps, Cloud Migration, IoT and 5G engineering and consulting feel free to drop by our office in Technoparkstrasse 2, CH-8406 Winterthur, we are located in the old building on 2nd Floor. Welcome to come by and visit the team, https://events.56k.cloud/meetings/56k/team
References:
Original building https://dhpa.ch/projekte/umbauneubau-technopark-winterthur/ TPW April Newletter: http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.crsend.com/140000/140883/rss/media/12641499.htm
