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. Everything after that was a technology review, run by the same people who sign off what CANCOM Austria puts in front of its own clients.

Rollout started in the Austrian buildings and spread from there, with every employee added from the beginning whether or not they would use deskbird straight away. From project mandate to first rollout took two to three months. The floor plans set that pace, and getting them right is what made everything after it possible.

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

Since going live in October 2025, 64% of those monthly users come back every single week. For a rollout that reached fifteen sites in four countries inside a year, without a pilot, that is unusually high.

Tuesday is the peak, Friday is a different office

Tuesday runs at around 265 desk bookings and Friday at around 94. Attendance peaks midweek and falls away sharply at the end of it, and the gap between the busiest and quietest sites is enormous.

Those are bookings, which show intent. deskbird Dock reads presence from the monitors and network already in the buildings, so what people actually do with the space is measured too, with no sensors installed and no hardware bought. None of it was visible before it was measured.

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.

That portfolio is not standing still. Branch offices in Romania are going live, and one Vienna location is consolidating into headquarters where a floor is being refurbished to create more workspaces. The decisions stay where they always were, with the people who own the estate. What has changed is the evidence underneath them.