Raxio Group is Africa’s leading carrier-neutral data center operator, delivering Tier III facilities to underserved markets where digital innovation can provide the greatest impact.

The group is expanding rapidly, with six data centers built in the past three years and a seventh breaking ground soon in Tanzania. Headquartered in Amsterdam, the team runs operations from regional hubs in Nairobi and Dubai, with staffed sales and operations teams across Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, DRC, Ivory Coast, and Angola.

Frank Kotrus, Group VP of Technical Operations, leads a team responsible for keeping client IT assets secure, resilient, and always online.

“At Raxio, digital-driven operational excellence isn’t just a goal, it’s fundamental to who we are,” Kotrus explains. “We’re not simply building and operating Tier III data centres across Africa. We’re enabling digital transformation in the communities we serve. By pushing beyond industry standards and embracing advanced tools and platforms, we deliver not just infrastructure, but impact."

Challenge: Paper logs slowed visibility and operations

Raxio data centers receive employees, suppliers, various authorities, and clients daily—with strict security requirements for every visit.

While Raxio’s pen-and-paper visitor logs met Tier III requirements, they didn’t align with the company’s digital-first culture. Gaining visibility into visitor activity required scanning logbooks, trading emails, and manually compiling data—a process that took hours or days each week.

“Time to insight is vital,” Kotrus said. “It wasn’t a sustainable way of operating.”

The onsite experience also fell short. Identity verification, entry terms, and safety reviews took 60–90 seconds per visitor. With each site running its own process, experiences were inconsistent, and growth became harder to manage.

Working with Envoy to modernize visitor management

Raxio needed a unified, scalable system that delivered consistent, secure experiences across every location—whether a visitor walked into a site in Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, or Mozambique. Building in-house wasn’t cost-effective, so the team explored other options. 

Several factors made Envoy the clear choice:

• Continuous product evolution signaling long-term reliability
• A trusted partnership approach: “honest people who don’t oversell,” shared Kotrus
• Flexibility to adapt to Raxio’s unique data center needs and willingness to collaborate
• GDPR-compliant EU data storage
• Strong user adoption and buy-in: “If digital technology doesn’t enable users to do a better job, it’s not going to help,” Kotrus noted

Envoy worked closely with Raxio on deployment, finalizing configurations a month ahead of schedule.

With Envoy Visitors, Raxio standardized six visitor types across all sites—from employees to prospective clients. Every visitor now requests access through one system and reviews terms and conditions in advance. Integrations with  Microsoft Entra ID, Teams, and Outlook further streamline scheduling and coordination across global teams.

Results: 99.9% faster insights across the globe

Going fully digital has transformed Raxio’s operations. Automated reporting cut “time to insight” by 99.9%, turning days of manual work into instant, actionable data.

“I have visibility of what’s going on at all of our data centers globally,” Kotrus said. What once took days now takes seconds, or a few clicks.

Visitor sign-ins and sign-outs are now handled through QR codes at kiosks, delivering a consistent and professional experience across all sites.

Pre-registration makes hosting clients easier, with employees instantly notified when their guests arrive. Raxio plans to expand integrations further to automate even more workflows.

“It’s a big difference for us—not just for me as Group VP, interested in the overall insights, but also for my colleagues at each data center,” Kotrus said.

Scaling to new sites will also be simple. Now, Raxio operates with a single platform and approach, making deploying to each new location straightforward.

Kotrus praised Envoy’s partnership mindset. Envoy worked closely with Raxio to optimize its setup while gathering feedback that benefits other customers, too. “I consider them an extended part of our team,” Kotrus shared.