Economic and business conditions

A typical Data Centre is comprised of multiple hardware and software components from different manufacturers, each with their own management tools, silo dashboard and limited sharing capabilities of business operations control data. This problem seems to get worse as IT-based companies are moving towards dynamic and complex virtualized and cloud environments. Moreover, when working on system´s safety, disrupting even one element of this fragile infrastructure runs the risk of affecting other systems, causing serious damage to the business. The average reported incident length is of 86 minutes, resulting in an average cost per incident of about $690,200. CorreAssess™ is an innovative game-changing Data Center Optimization Management system for business IT leaders that empowers companies with a complete visibility and control on all their IT infrastructure, through accurate detailed analytics insights delivered on a daily basis. It helps to generate valuable information for wise usage of IT infrastructure investments, resource allocation efficiency, IT alignment to defined SLAs, compliance, service availability, data recovery risks and easier cloud migration, alerting in advance before threats impact the company business. With CorreAssess™ companies will be able to reduce up to 25% the infrastructure investment costs and prevent risks of business failure by improving business continuity up to 80%. So far, €2M million have been raised and invested into the development and testing of the system to ensure its robustness and efficiency and move into the next stages of commercialisation. Within the overall project, we intend to finalise systems engineering and conduct a wide pilot trial within Europe. Current IP portfolio will be expanded to EU. The proposed work in Phase 1 of the SME instrument fits into our overall plan to reach the market by contributing the financial resources needed to plan a fast sound wider deployment of CorreAssess™ and its market uptake.

Since almost 150 years, Luxembourg depends on two kinds of migration, qualified and non-qualified, in order to deal with the workforce needs of its economy. Compared to the other EU Member States, Luxembourg is the country with the largest proportion of foreigners; however, this foreign population is mainly composed of EU citizens. Due to its size and geographic position, Luxembourg was able to have access to a very particular form of economic migration: cross-border workers. Globalisation has also played a decisive role in the development of economic migration for the Luxembourgish labour market. The financial centre was obliged to become highly specialised in order to remain competitive in regards to other financial centres and to maintain its volume of business. In order to maintain its competitive advantage, Luxembourg needs highly skilled personnel, which the country has found, up until now, within the Greater Region. This reality is even more pronounced with regards to the labour market: the number of actives (salaried and non-salaried) on 31 March 2014 shows that Luxembourgish nationals represented only 31%, EU citizens 65% and third-country nationals only 4%. Cross-border workers from Belgium, France and Germany represented 42% of the workforce and the resident migrant population (EU citizens and third-country nationals) 28%. Cross-border workers, which consist of skilled and highly skilled labour are substantially attracted for two reasons: 1) more competitive salaries on the Luxemburgish labour market ; and 2) a geographical location which allows the commuting of cross-border workers. The attitude of the successive governments was to adapt immigration to the economic needs of the country. The government policy intends to focus on attracting highly added value activities focussed on new technologies (biomedicine and information as well as communication technologies – focusing on IT security), logistics and research. However, being one of the smallest countries in the European Union, Luxembourg has limited human resources to guarantee the growth not only of the financial sector but also of the new technologies sectors. The government introduced the highly qualified worker residence permit in the bill on free movement of persons and immigration approved by law of 29 August 2008 almost a year before of the enactment of the Blue Card Directive to facilitate the entry of third-country national highly qualified workers. However, this reform was isolated and incomplete and took place without making a real evaluation of the workforce demand of the different sectors of the economy. Even though until now Luxembourg has been relying on the workforce from the Greater Region, for some socio-economic and political stakeholders, highly qualified workforces began to become scarce in the Greater region. In addition to the cross-border workers, the lifting of restrictions to access all the sectors of the labour market for citizens of the new Member States (EU-8) can be considered as a mitigating factor for the need to make an evaluation of the workforce demand, because the high salaries paid in Luxembourg became a real pull factor for the highly qualified workers. As a consequence, the political authorities did not foresee a systematic plan on how to address labour shortages in specific sectors of the economy, because there has not been a significant need for doing so.

The global explosion of data traffic and the migration of essential services to “the cloud” are combining to push current data-center infrastructures to their limits. This applies in particular to communication networks within and between data centers (DC), which limit scalability of computing and storage already today. Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmission schemes are key to overcome these bottlenecks, increasing the throughput of inter-DC and intra-DC communication links by more than an order of magnitude. However, but there are currently no WDM systems in the market that fulfill the associated cost and performance requirements: Conventional systems based on discrete components such as SFP\ or CFP transceivers are far too bulky and too expensive, while monolithic photonic integration remains technologically challenging and constrained in performance. The fundamental question remains: How to flexibly combine photonic components of a variety of material systems to create cost- and performance-optimized solutions for data centers? The answer to this question will unlock multi-billion-Euro market opportunities connected with cloud networks. HYPHEN aims at exploring and verifying the commercial potential of a novel class of optical WDM engines that combine the benefits of a large-scale photonic integration with the design flexibility of discrete systems. The optical engines are based on hybrid multi-chip integration and exploit the technique of photonic wire bonding, which was established and elaborated in the framework of the ERC Stating Grant EnTeraPIC. HYPHEN comprises an in-depth analysis of market opportunities and competitive boundary conditions, the specification of technical product concepts that are geared towards the most important technology gap, as well as the associated IP strategy and risk analysis. The project shall result in a comprehensive business plan that allows to raise funds for the next phase of commercialization.