It’s spring 2017, and the Innovation Award crew and I are on our way to The Netherlands, land of tulips and windmills. It’s also the land of more than 280 miles of coastline along the North Sea, and fully half the country lies below sea level.

That means that for many decades, the Dutch people have been fairly ingenious with managing the movement of water across land and they are very good at it. If you’ve ever been to The Netherlands, you know that much of its charm can be found in its canals, irrigated farmlands maritime culture.

Boskalis, one of our Innovation Award finalists for 2017, has built a global business around dredging, maritime infrastructure, and maritime services. The Netherlands-based company has a versatile fleet of more than 900 vessels and floating equipment, and 11,700 employees, including associated companies. Boskalis operates in 90 countries across six continents, and recently made a strategic decision to offer IT services using a Citrix-Microsoft Azure cloud solution.

We arrived in early April to capture their story on video. It was wet and rainy during our springtime visit, but we grabbed the opportunity to film as much of the Boskalis story about the big project of managing water and land resources as we could. Beyond the windmills, we hired a water taxi and cruised through the enormous port of Rotterdam, the largest in Europe.  We saw several large Boskalis vessels in the port, as well as several of their projects from the sea and on land. The work they do is large scale, complex, and it’s fascinating to know that with Citrix, Boskalis can deliver flexible, secure access to apps and data anytime and anywhere their employees need to travel to do their work.

Check out our Behind the Scenes videos to see what a trooper I was (on a boat, in the harbor, with a bad cold) and find out more about Boskalis…

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