Informatica India chose Interface products again for its latest office interior.
As a progressive world-leading cloud data management company, Informatica is fully committed to taking ambitious action to reduce its carbon emissions. For suppliers hoping to work with Informatica, this means their procurement process only selects the most environmentally friendly manufacturers. That’s why we are so proud that Informatica has chosen to work with Interface again and again. In India alone, we have completed four separate projects for Informatica over the last three years, including their newly constructed offices in Bangalore.
Here, sustainability isn’t just ticking boxes on a list of product specs; it’s intrinsic to the operation. Informatica offers incentives to employees who reduce their carbon footprint and encourages the use of public transport or car pools. Their offices are “binless”, which reduces overall waste, and they only allow companies with proper recycling capabilities to handle their office waste. For Informatica, it’s a big plus point that all Interface products are carbon neutral at no extra cost to the customer – an industry first.
For their new office in the east of Bangalore at Bagmane Tech Park, Informatica wanted to create a modern and flexible workspace where their most important company value “act as one team” could thrive. The final design includes a range of collaborative areas that provide space for formal meetings and informal discussions. To boost employee well-being, Informatica invested in advanced ergonomic chairs and height-adjustable tables that allow employees to sit or stand, and installed self-watering “green walls” with air filtering plants.
The green credentials of their new office were further enhanced by choosing to install Interface Carbon Neutral Floors. This allowed Informatica to offset 19 tonnes of carbon emissions – that’s the same emissions as a car travelling roughly 74,000 km or twice around the circumference of the earth.
Carbon Neutral Floors come as standard on all our products globally, which is only possible because we’ve been leading the way on reducing carbon emissions for more than two decades. We’ve moved beyond reducing the carbon produced by manufacturing alone; we now minimise emissions across the entire product lifecycle, from raw material extraction down to installation, removal and end of life stewardship. We’ve reduced the carbon footprint of our products by over 60% – the lowest levels in the industry based on publicly available data. Product carbon neutrality is then achieved by offsetting the remaining carbon emissions with investment in verified emission reduction projects all over the world.
It’s no secret that we look forward to working with Informatica, because they always choose our latest, most advanced products in their signature vibrant colours. Repeat business from climate-conscious clients like Informatica is also confirmation that our quest for reversing global warming and our behind the scenes work perfecting recycling processes are truly appreciated.
For their new offices in Bangalore, Informatica again embraced one of our latest product ranges: Luxury Vinyl Tiles (LVT). A range of hard floor coverings that mimic traditional wood, stone and metallic flooring, designed to integrate seamlessly with our modular carpet tile system without transition strips. LVT tiles are the exact same size and depth, so they can be used to create unique patterns, irregular transitions, or as with this project, seamless joins between hardwearing, durable pathways and softer workspaces and meeting areas. Additionally, all our LVT designs come with our superior Sound Choice™ backing, so even hard floors can minimise noise and amplify concentration and focus.
As senior director of real estate & workplace solutions at Informatica, it’s Suresh Rao’s job to keep current employees happy and create a work culture that helps to attract the best talent. His biggest challenge in recent years has been “dealing with the change from traditional offices to a collaborative open-plan office culture”. For Suresh, “space that helps foster collaboration between cross-functional teams is incredibly important.”
It’s in these collaborative areas where we can see the seamless integration of hard LVT flooring and soft modular carpet tiles. The joins are created without the use of transition strips, so there is no interruption in the surface when moving from one area to another. The soft carpeted areas help to encourage spontaneous group huddles and form the boundary of the collaborative space, while the hard wood grain LVT tiles installed in pathways and connecting corridors add warmth and sophistication without the problems associated with real wooden floors. If an area becomes worn or damaged, it’s easy to just lift up the tiles and replace them.
Suresh and his team chose the Net Effect™ collection as the floor covering for the main work areas. “Nature and the ocean were the inspiration for our office design,” he explained. “We wanted a lively, collaborative space; a free-FLOWing organic carpet design like Net Effect was a perfect choice.” Net Effect is a unique range of carpet tiles that is both inspired by the ocean and helps to remove plastic waste from precious coastline habitats. The collection includes a sequence of patterned tiles that echo the movement of waves breaking against the shore.
Net Effect is constructed using ECONYL® yarn, which is made entirely from recycled materials. This includes discarded fishing nets reclaimed through Net-Works™, an innovative business model established with the Zoological Society of London in 2012. Net-Works empowers people of coastal communities in the Philippines, Cameroon and Indonesia to collect and sell discarded nylon fishing nets, which removes them from the ocean where they harm marine life. So far, 224,000 kilograms of nets have been collected through Net-Works, which has allowed us to provide more than 2,200 families with access to financial support and helped to create a cleaner, healthier marine environment for over 64,000 villagers.
Informatica’s vibrant blue and orange brand colours always take centre stage in their office interiors – another reason why they keep coming back to Interface. Suresh was clear on the importance of colour: “The materials selected had to complement our brand colours and logo,” not just for the floor coverings, but also for the acoustic wall panels used extensively to dampen sound in meeting rooms and collaborative spaces. Interface products come in a vast range of textures and colours, and if a specific brand colour is required we also offer a custom colour service.
Suresh was also keen to point out that Interface account manager Vinay Kumar was a big factor in their decision to work with Interface again. Working with a partner who is fully committed to timelines was very important to Suresh and his team: “Interface is well known for their ability to execute projects within agreed timelines. Even so, Vinay ensured that we didn’t have to worry about delivery or execution. This meant we could fully focus on the other priorities for this project.”
As always, our product design team is hard at work developing new floor coverings that push the boundaries of innovation, design and utility – and help our customers take concrete steps to help to reverse global warming. We hope to see them featured in Informatica’s next climate-focused office interior.
