Data Center Services Provider Drives Its Expansion Strategy With Curated Intelligence On Key Focus Areas

Founded in 1998, the company provides carrier and cloud-neutral colocation data center services and has a presence in 11 European countries. It has 500+ employees and generates over 560 million Euros in annual revenues.

The data center solutions and services landscape has been evolving rapidly in recent years, more so since the onset of the pandemic which has accelerated cloud adoption over the last two years. Strategy and Marketing teams at the client organization realized that to ride this momentum in the market effectively they needed periodic, timely, and actionable insights around key market trends, competitors’ activities, and focus on customer segments and geographies.

In the current state, their market and competitive intelligence (M&CI) team was overwhelmed with a sharp increase in demand for actionable insights from the executive leadership and the functional teams given the rapid shifts and drastic surge in market activity levels; they were also burdened with other competing priorities.

As a result, the M&CI team was unable to provide timely and regular intelligence to their functional teams and often struggled with timely activation of intelligence gathered due to a lack of time/competing priorities.
To mitigate the above challenge, the Market Strategy and M&CI Leader at the client organization started evaluating various possible solutions including hiring additional analysts, outsourcing select projects and tasks, and leveraging the market and Competitive intelligence platform. After careful deliberation, the client decided to try an M&CI platform to support them with timely intelligence collection, analysis, and distribution and with an eye on freeing up the team’s bandwidth for high-value activities like deeper analysis and timely activation of intelligence gathered.

Thus, the client started looking out for an M&CI platform solution provider that could offer them curated, actionable intelligence on their key focus areas and topics as well as provide periodically analyzed insights based on the intelligence gathered in the form of market intelligence reports at an agreed frequency (weekly/monthly).

After evaluation of various offerings in the market and required due diligence, the client chose Contify as their partner, and a pilot run was initiated as ‘proof of concept’ for the Contify solution.

After developing a thorough understanding of the client’s strategic objectives, M&CI program objectives, specific use cases, and associated research requirements, Contify designed and configured a customized solution that offered the following enhancements over the client’s existing approach:

1. Source enhancement and noise reduction
Contify’s solutions team worked with the client team to optimize the source list for each specific use case – adding several new sources such as tech portals that provide extensive coverage specific to data centers markets such as DTVE, Data Center Magazine, IT News; and adding an extra set of search filters to intelligence getting sourced from the generic sources to improve relevancy. The team also did an extensive review of non-relevant intelligence that was getting automatically sourced on the platform and reduced those significantly by leveraging the platform’s AI capabilities.

2. Keywords and companies list enhancement
Contify team worked with the client team to enhance the list of competitors, current and targeted clients/partners, and keywords to add/enhance coverage of new entrants in the market, in-focus customers, and fast-growing market segments like OTT and content sharing platforms. Leveraging Contify’s M&CI platform, the team has been able to expand the scope and depth coverage for each of the use cases while reducing the overall effort required.

3. Contify-produced Market Intelligence Reports
Given that Contify’s team of analysts was reviewing and curating intelligence getting sourced on the platform on a daily basis, the client saw an opportunity to transfer the creation of market intelligence reports to the Contify analyst team. Since then, Contify has taken over the creation of 5 such market intelligence reports using Contify’s Newsletter Manager tool – freeing up more than 50 hours per month for the client team, that they are able to spend on timely activation of intelligence gathered and for other high priority strategic projects. Contify team has also been able to enhance the coverage and quality of insights for these reports while ensuring 100% adherence to agreed timelines and frequency.

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Informing Expansion Strategy Based on Market Trends and Competitor Activity
Using Contify’s customized market intelligence reports, the company was able to keep a constant watch on its key geographic focus areas, track competitors’ activities, stay updated on market shifts and developments, as well as keep tabs on the movements of its customers and prospects. This allowed them to drive strategic decisions and enabled them to strategically position their services against their competitors, explore the market landscape in a better manner, and capitalize on new opportunities.

Saving Time Spent on Manual Tracking, Gathering, and Organization of Intelligence
Earlier, the client team spent ~30% of their research time on manual research, data gathering, and production of market intelligence reports, i.e., 25 hours per week. Contify’s solution removed all of this from the equation, enabling them to spend their time on higher-value tasks such as analysis and activation of intelligence gathered and stakeholder feedback gathering and analysis for new solution design/optimization.

Increased Consumption of Intelligence in the Organization
As of February 2022, the market intelligence newsletters are being sent to 150 users across the Strategy and Marketing functions. According to the Market Strategy and M&CI Head, consumption of intelligence has increased 25% since Contify began delivering its intelligence reports, which has resulted in almost twice as fast decision-making.

“Contify is simple, professional, and informative. What I like the best about our engagement with them is the ability to pinpoint relevant insights out of all the noise, and the quality of the subsequently written analysis. The services are great and there are no issues. Impactful insights are distributed to each relevant reader.”

– Global Head, Market Strategy and Market & Competitive Intelligence