How CANCOM Austria moved 1,800 people onto deskbird across four countries

CANCOM Austria AG is a digital business provider and AI enabler, headquartered in Vienna and part of the CANCOM group based in Germany. It guides companies, organizations and the public sector into the digital future, with a range that covers traditional IT system integration alongside data-driven digital solutions, managed services and cloud services.

Around 1,800 office-based people work across fifteen locations in Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Romania. Most spend two to three days a week in an office, which makes the question of who is in where a daily one rather than an occasional one.

That scale is part of what makes CANCOM Austria a particular kind of customer. As an IT services business, it advises its own clients on technology decisions for a living, so any tool it adopts internally has to clear the same bar it would apply on a client project. Enterprise architecture, the CISO, data protection and data residency all get a say. A workplace tool at CANCOM Austria is not a facilities purchase with an IT review attached. It is an IT decision with facilities in the room.

CANCOM Austria did not go looking for a new workplace tool. The contract with its previous provider came to an end, and a replacement had to be in place wherever the old system had been in use.

That set the terms of the whole project. There was no opportunity to run a small pilot in one building, learn from it, and roll out from there. Fifteen locations across four countries had to go live, and around 1,800 people needed somewhere to book a desk.

The harder problem turned out to be the buildings themselves. Floor plans arrived in every possible state, from architect files carrying 250 layers to building outlines with workspaces sketched in by hand. Before anything could be mapped into deskbird, someone had to establish whether what was drawn on the plan matched what was actually in the room.

Facility Management assessed the functional side first. The shortlist then went through enterprise architecture management, the CISO and data protection before anything was signed. ServiceNow was compared, along with the successor product to the incumbent tool and one further option. A developing partnership between deskbird and CANCOM Germany on customer projects was a factor, though a minor one next to the compliance requirements.

Two capabilities were treated as non-negotiable: single sign-on, and the Microsoft Teams integration that would put booking where people already worked.

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Rollout started with the Austrian buildings, but every employee was added from the beginning, whether or not they would be using deskbird straight away. Other sites followed. Alongside central Facility Management in Vienna, each building had a local manager working on the project, mainly on the conditions specific to their own plans. From project mandate to first rollout took roughly two to three months, and the state of those plans was the main reason it took that long rather than less.

Two things complicated the work beyond the drawings. Some departments and individuals had workspaces that were not meant to be generally bookable, and a process was needed for requesting a fixed desk. Today 151 of the 1,218 desks are dedicated rather than shared.

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1,219 people registered, 742 in the office every month

Since going live in October 2025, 1,219 people have been registered on deskbird and 742 use it in a given month. Of those monthly users, 64% come back every single week. Across the fifteen sites there are now 1,218 bookable desks, 1,067 of them shared and 151 dedicated, and 44,292 desk bookings have been made since go-live, around 212 on an average working day. In the last thirty days, 230 people booked from inside Microsoft Teams.

For a rollout that reached over 1,200 people across fifteen sites in four countries inside a year, and did it without a pilot phase, that is an unusually high rate of return.

Tuesday is the peak, Friday is a different office

The week has a clear shape. Tuesday runs at around 265 desk bookings and Friday at around 94. Attendance peaks midweek and drops away sharply at the end of the week, and the difference between the busiest and quietest sites is enormous. That is exactly the kind of insight that stays invisible without measurement and becomes obvious once the data is there.

From tracking attendance to deciding what to change

With deskbird Intelligence, CANCOM Austria is moving beyond tracking attendance to making decisions on it: which sites are well used, which are underused, and where the portfolio needs adjusting.

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