“Where connectivity comes, economic prosperity follows”. This bold statement was made during the IoT Experts Conference held at CeBIT 2017 when “old-fashioned” titans from the mobile industry clashed with the market makers of the new millennium. It was a very mind-alerting and thought provocative discussion when the founders of Lora and Ubuntu challenged the Vodafone Ambassador, claiming the industry itself uses lobbying and other leverage tools to keep sluggish, less-effective and outdated business models still in use – just for one simple reason: massive cash flows and lack of willingness for innovation. The other side stated “Let’s meet again in 5 years time and see whether your innovation models will be somewhere near to where you claim them to be expected to be”.
This is the atmosphere of CeBIT 2017. FRENUS attended the global conference which was officially opened by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
And if we zoom into some of CeBIT topics. Cyber crime for example. Over 51 billion euros is the estimated damage caused annually by hacker attacks and data theft in Germany alone. No company is 100 percent protected against such a threat and the more data there is available the higher the potential of such activities becomes.
Another major topic, Cloud solutions, was widely discussed during the event. The Chinese enterprise giant Huawei spoke about how even the most traditional of industries can boost the quality, productivity and efficiency of their businesses using big data and machine learning technologies. Which on the other hand provokes questions on the latter paragraph.
AI was on the centre of the spotlights as well. Mitsubishi Electric (represented well as Japan was an official partnering country) announced that it has developed technologies for automated mapping and extraction of transitions in mapping landscape based exactly on that super hot topic (AI) and further explained the company’s own Mobile Mapping System (MMS) for highly precise three-dimensional maps that provide static information of roads and surrounding objects holds plans to form the basis for dynamic maps indispensable for autonomous driving.
We have to put the accent of this year’s CeBIT 2017 edition on one of the most significantly represented topics within the business world and innovation industries. IoT – the internet of things. Big transatlantic corporations like IBM, HPE, Huawei, Telefonica, T-Systems and many others showcased extremely revolutionary and visionary examples of their products being aligned with the IoT concepts. Huawei for example, presented it’s Intelligent Operations Centre for smart cities, which tracks people and vehicles and monitors the whole city operations. Through complex data mining and analytics software, this system facilitates faster response times for emergency services, optimises routes for public transport and increases public safety throughout the city.
