Walk the talk

When ADC Krone talks the talk, it’s not just talking about quality and being environmentally responsible. It’s actually doing it and being able to demonstrate that it walks the talk, as Mike Hanahoe *, director, Global Connectivity Solutions Asia-Pacific, explains.

Just take the Australian manufacturing plant on NSW’s Central Coast at Berkeley Vale. There is a research and development team on site that actually designs many of the complex machines that make the structured cabling products the company sells in the region. The R&D team is also responsible for designing the 2000 products that are manufactured there, all under the stringent ISO standard.

ADC Krone has joined the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) to help engineer a greener property industry. As a member of the GBCA, ADC Krone will be promoting environmentally responsible technologies, design practices and operations, and helping customers attain the GBCA’s coveted six-star environmental rating.

Data centre infrastructure requires specialised design, greater reliability and manageability, and higher density than in other applications. ADC Krone offers innovative products and solutions that support modern data centre implementation while also helping resolve environmental and power issues that affect the enterprise.

Effective design and installation of passive network infrastructure can help reduce the cooling requirements and energy consumption of a data centre. We are pleased to be working with the Green Building Council of Australia to help designers and installers build and support more energy-efficient enterprises.

Selecting the right network components can also prove critical in reducing power consumption and costs.

We intend to seek out and work with partners in the data centre management industry as well as in intelligent building systems where we believe the future lies. For example, New Zealand’s first green building built by Meridian Energy when it relocated to its Wellington office to a brand new building uses ADC Krone’s TrueNet category 6 HighBand Patch-by-Exception structured cabling systems.

We operate our business under the guidance of what we define as the ADC way with our actions driven by commitments to customers, quality, teamwork, integrity and innovation. These are foundations on which our products and services are designed; they drive the actions of our team and our organisation.

The company challenges its employees to think big and dream beyond our normal boundaries. Identifying solutions to fill the gaps in the market or working with customers to solve their problems often provides the inspiration.

Innovation has always been a hallmark of ADC Krone. Over 30 years ago, the IDC contact was released to the market. With billions of contacts deployed worldwide, it remains the highest performing design in the market. We have leveraged this principle into carrier solutions, structured cable connectivity and even power distribution products.

Our patch-by-exception technology incorporates incremental innovative features designed to save the customer in both their capital and operational expenditures. Enterprises globally are focusing on data centre design and redundant systems with global multinational financial institutions such as HSBC, Barclays Bank and Citibank deploying systems using our technology. As capex and opex costs increase for data centres, energy costs are increasing all the time so the patch-by-exception system provides better cable management. Global enterprises appreciate the fact of being able to get products with consistency wherever they are globally.

9/11 created a huge demand for redundant data centres when so many data centres were destroyed. Another factor propelling the growth of data centres is the fact that they are growing ever larger. The ADC Krone global objective is to be number one in the fibre connectivity market. With our constant drive for innovation and quality providing a way of differentiation in our products that enable our customers to differentiate their services, we believe we will meet our stated goal.

* Mike Hanahoe is the director for ADC Krone’s Global Connectivity Business Unit in Asia-Pacific. He leads the Asia-Pacific product management and engineering teams responsible for establishing ADC Krone regional strategy and developing the product portfolio. Additionally, Hanahoe is the local managing director of ADC Krone Australia, located in Berkeley Vale, NSW. He recently led the introduction of the company’s fibre-to-the-home initiative in Australia which supports the fibre infrastructure to deliver residential broadband services. He has a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, and an MBA from the University of Minnesota.