Softengi about CeBIT 2015 in Hannover
Viktor Bezhenar, Softengi’s Product and Project Manager, offers to have a look at CeBIT 2015, the largest IT exhibition in the world, with his eyes.
The exhibition was held from March 16 to March 20 in Hannover, Germany.
In a review you will find many pictures and information about halls, exhibitors and trends. It will help to make your own opinion about CeBIT and may motivate you to visit CeBIT 2016.
Hannover
Hannover is quite cozy city in the northwestern Germany with around 500 thousand citizens. Visiting the main attractions may take around half a day, the rest of your time can be spent in calm walking and observing.
Life in Hannover is relatively quiet – it’s not a metropolis, but a really nice place to live.
Some encyclopedic data. CeBIT (from Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik in German – The center of office and information technology) – the world’s largest international exhibition of digital, telecommunications and IT solutions.
Recent years, the organizers of the exhibition tend to devote it to a certain country with the Official Partner title.
The fact that China was the official partner country became clear already in the plane Munich – Hannover, where more than a half of the passengers represented China. Last year, by the way, the official partner was the United Kingdom.
It is also worth noting that CeBIT exhibition is not for consumers, its main landmark is business, the bigger – the better. China was represented at the exhibition with more than 600 enterprises.
Seeing the excitement around Hannover it was clear that everybody and everything was moving heaven and earth with the exhibition.
An incredible amount of banners at the streets, flyers or posters in every shop and restaurant. It seems that after March 20 the city will exhale, take a breath and will be getting ready for the next big exhibition. They are held regularly in the city, due to the Hannover Exhibition Grounds exhibition center.
The next big event — Indian outsourcers of everything
And finally, before we fast forward to the halls of the exhibition center I will share a little advice.
In Hannover the situation with the public Internet is very bad. Hotels sell it for 5 euros a day, in most places it does not exist, in the few remaining it is paid.
The only right decision – sim card from the operator with 3G. A week for 20 euros with Internet – the best solution in this city (and I suppose in the country), where free WiFi is a rare thing.
Hannover Exhibition Grounds
Main entrance to the exhibition
CeBIT is an exhibition, not a conference. Do not be lured by the famous names of the speakers and speeches in each lobby.
You may find dozens of speakers in a huge lounge area in the tens of thousands square meters somewhere in the corner or elsewhere. Therefore, though in each hall there were speeches, almost no one listened – you could not hear well, could not see well, most of them were in German.
I, as a Projects and Product Manager in Softengi, came to CeBIT with my own business objectives. But, regardless of the pre-scheduled meetings in Hannover or their absence, CeBIT is still very interesting to attend.
You see there recognized leaders, learn industry trends, speak to those who build our digital future.
It is impossible to explain how huge is this show. On the first day, after spending the entire day walking, I managed to see only half of the halls, where I stopped near two or three booths.
Nothing more. And the whole day passed.
It may look quite small, but the area of these halls is 450 000 m2
Hall 2, 4 — Digital Business Solutions
Hall 2
At the entrance to the Hall 2 you see two huge booths of IBM, which exhibited so many different IBM software solutions, that I decided to run away from there – they were already rich.
I stopped only by the famous IBM Watson to see how this tool determines diagnoses. Interesting technology, which is incredibly expensive (like everything in IBM).
There were also huge booths of Huawei, Cisco, Oracle and other industry monsters.
They demonstrate the whole range of solutions, but we did not discuss purchasing or partnership – Softengi is already a partner of the vendors.
IBM solutions. Dozens of similar employees engage new customers. Feel the power
Similarly, Hall 4 was completely divided between four giant corporations: SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft and T-Mobile.
Microsoft showed the whole range of its software solutions for business, kindly advised on the issues with Microsoft Dynamics, presented Windows 10.
In addition, Microsoft showed all their hardware solutions and was selling them. In Hall 4 there was also a shop where I saw how the Chinese bought the MS Surface!
I did not believe it, looked again – yes, he gave the money to the cashier…
T-Mobile, as well as Vodafone, invested really lots of money in this exhibition. It was obvious that the telecom giants earn more than anyone in the industry.
Vodafone offered a ride on a branded Porshche 911, demonstrating similarities of this car speed with the speed of their 4G internet.
T-Mobile booth. No picture will explain the size of this booth. Somewhere inside you could find a huge stage where jazz was played in breaks and a lounge zone
T-Mobile security-system – something between SIEM and DLP, monitoring the traffic and network channels of the huge infrastructure. Simply wonderful interface!
I also had a chance to see the SalesForce presentation. I was impressed with this software so far, and was not surprised why their CRM on average ten times was more expensive than their competitors.
It is ten times cooler. And these guys have progressed more than others in the so-called «cloudgame», taking more and more corporate customers to their cloud.
SalesForce – cool thing! Allows to plan and monitor everything in your sales/marketing/support departments. And what a wonderful dashboards they build!
One can also talk a long time about SAP solutions presented. Our company is a SAP partner, so we already know the possibilities of major mainstream solutions such as their new SAP HANA database.
But I was impressed with the digital farming solution – sensors collect data from the field and the farmer gets a dashboard with the information on temperature, the need for fertilizers, light intensity, and soil moisture.
Directly from the field. As a result, the system determines the optimal harvest time.
Real-time statistical analysis of a football game
Hall 3 – ECM Input/Output Solutions
This hall offered a document management system, and everything around that topic.
There were guys like Baramundi with cool business applications, and forgotten, but rising from the ashes, pillars of another industry – Conica Minolta and Kodak.
I was surprised when the men from the two companies admitting that they already 5 years as fully turned in the enterprise software sector and had no idea about films and cameras.
Conica employee even said that he was tired from the visitors, asking him about cameras.
The company turned 180 degrees and made enterprise solutions (quite mediocre in my opinion – Conica, for example, offered a desktop workflow manager built on Java with Outlook 2007 interface).
Halls 5,6 – ERP, CRM, BI, HR & Commerce
Hall 5. People sitting on the right side of the picture are listening to the conference
Many different products presented and not very interesting for an average visitor. Companies told about their products on their huge booths, introduced the market state of their business solution.
For me, these Halls 3, 5, 6 were the most interesting from a business perspective. This is where you can find partners, customers can get a good recommendation and give good advice.
I represented a company focused on business solutions, respectively, I was focused here on enterprise solutions.
Many German companies do not hide the fact that they are interested only in German customers, and they do not plan to expand their business abroad. Perhaps most say this up to date.
Imagine that we arrange an international exhibition in Kyiv and invite there the whole world.
And all the booths and advertisements would be described in Ukrainian language, answering foreign visitors that we are interested only in Ukrainian customers and partners. I wish at some point we could reach this level!
Hall 6 – Business Security, Global Business IT, International Business Area
A big Chinese quadrocopter. Very noisy
Hall 6 was divided between different industries, but it was interesting. There were five Ukrainian companies at the exhibition. And five Russian.
There were presented some outsourcing companies from Bangladesh, Romania, Colombia, and even Albania! Talked with the Albanians – this country is a pot of gold! Do you know which rate they offer for developers?
Security block was filled with a variety of interesting and not so interesting vendors.
I did not see a technological revolution there, the companies offered standard solutions covering a particular market demand.
I like everything related to the monitoring and management of network infrastructure, so I learned everything about security solutions that have been exhibited.
Outsourcers, as they honestly admit, had nothing to do at CeBIT. Making a booth on the development services looks absolutely hopeless.
Hall 7 — Public Sector Park
Not clear what this cart was doing at the booth with Digital. Innovativ motto
Smart solutions for urban infrastructure and public sector institutions were presented here. Everything was solely in German.
There were many interesting things to find for the representatives of governments, town halls and similar institutions.
Hall 8 – Conference
At the CeBIT exhibition you may also attend a conference.
You need a separate ticket to get to the CeBIT Global Conferences and listen to trendy people like Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba, president of Microsoft International, or Edward Snowden.
It costs 850 euros per day. However, I accidentally read my ticket and saw the little footnote granting me admission to the CeBIT Global Conferences (always read small letters on your ticket!). But I was disappointed.
What bosses of Fortune 500 were talking about? The speakers of CeBIT Global Conferences talked about lofty matters: quite in theory about zero-margin society, big data rules the world, e-government, Internet of Things and other marketing trends.
Since the exhibition was devoted to China, they talked a lot about how the state affects the freedom of the Internet. Things like BigData, IoT, clouds and e-government are more like a bubble of information about which everyone is talking, but no one knows anything, and has not tried it yet.
I recalled the joke about BigData (applicable to all the above-mentioned, except for the clouds). BigData is like sex of adolescents.
Everybody tells each other that they have it, but in fact … I attended several speeches and did not find anything useful. For example, I was on the marketing presentation from the Dropbox President.
Nobody is arguing that Dropbox is cool. But their president was repeating it over and over again, and again told about their friendship with Microsoft
For those who love practical and useful reports it is better not to visit CeBIT Global Conferences.
There were extremely inspirational speeches in the TED style. At the Alibaba booth I watched the speech of Jack Ma, the richest Chinese.
He said that he would not be the richest Chinese without his team, but he did not want to be rich – the most important for him was to give a platform for medium and small businesses to exchange goods.
He demonstrated a new Alibaba feature, allowing to make a purchase in a single click using your selfie.
The technology is following: find the goods, press purchase button, turn on your front camera, it recognizes you as the buyer and that’s all – money is successfully withdrawn from your account.
Also the live video message from Edward Snowden from Moscow was quite interesting.
Hee warned us all, IT specialists, that soon we would be in troubles.
According to him, every system administrator who has access to user data now is followed by a Federal Security Service of Russia, which will soon catch this admin and force him to leak all the data.
Hall 9 – Research & Innovation
Very cute VolksWagen model!
Many German universities presented their developments in this hall. There were very friendly guys from the University of Karlsruhe, who shared with me their experience.
Interestingly, the work on projects is done by PhD graduates and students. Investor for the project is the state.
We discussed their projects – particularly I was surprised by the real-time translation system which they already use in their university – not all students know German, and the translation tool translates every word uttered by the lecturer.
I found there an interesting solution of smart electricity meters. They are integrated with the Web application and show detailed information on the use of electricity per unit.
Energy vendors are delighted with the solution and attack the guys to sell it. But while the issue of the users’ personal dataprotection is not resolved, the commercial launch of the project is impossible.
Indeed, I would not want to know that the company is aware when I turn on the TV, how much time I warm up my food in the microwave, and so on.
With these data it is very easy to determine when a person is at home, all the habits, lifestyle.
Of course MS Azure is there, Dropbox for business is presented and somewhere must have been Amazon WebServices presented!
Hall 11 – Startups and Developers world
A mirror allowing to try the cloths from an online store. Very entertaining, especially for ladies
Various startups in need of sales or investments were presented in this hall.
Not related to the Internet of Things. In the hall there were presented a lot of German and German-speaking startups and booths.
So people with their only English did not understand how to start a conversation.
There were a lot of solutions for smart cities and various cloud services to develop.
A colleague from IBM offered everyone to subscribe to a set of services for start-ups from IBM – a pure clone of Microsoft Bizpark.
But this hall was the place where I found a lot of companies in need of support, partnership and a variety of services that Ukrainian companies can kindly provide them.
There were platforms for developers, tools for developers and points of interest for developers.
After hard work you could try a massage (and mental!) wellness chair. I tried it myself – good thing to have in your office. 10 minutes to recharge yourself is enough. Except massaging feature it offers visual relaxation and mind-blowing sound. However, 6 500 Euro per unit will not allow you to make an impulse buying
Hall 12, 13 – Data Center Dynamics and Communication & Network
Work with the hardware, supporting IT-infrastructure, is not within the scope of my professional responsibilities and interests, so I slipped these halls just to write about them in this review.
The crowd enjoying Tesla
The most attractive booth in the Hall 13 had ZTE, a Chinese company. They presented their solutions for business, various hardware and of course Android smartphones
Hall 14,15, 16 – Global Reseller
The hall is only available for official resellers. To get into this hall you are kindly requested to take an additional confirmation from the company on admission there.
Hall 17 – Global Sourcing Area
In case somebody attends an IT exhibition to check accessories and bags
This hall was completely given over to the Chinese, where they presented their innovative products such as covers for iPhone, 32-inch flat screens, “smart watches” and GoPro parodies.
Chinese industry as it is — hardware software derelopment
Code_n hall
Here it was indeed very interesting! 50 start-ups on the ground floor and innovative companies on the balcony of the second floor – all of them were located in this stylish lobby.
It is interesting that all startups and partners, such as Google and Accenture, were organized by GFT, a German outsourcing company (could be in the top 3 with its 3,500 employees).
They grow actively own partner network and encourage their partners for various activities. Softengi is now also a friend of GFT.
All 50 startups are devoted exclusively to the super-trend of our time – the Internet of Things.
All of them fall under the category of gadgets communicating with each other through the ipv6 protocol and managed by smartphone.
Smart sockets, cameras and other things connected to Internet
General impressions
The exhibition is so enormous that I even do not pretend to be objective in this review.
CeBIT is worth to visit for the self-development, to see who is doing what and to realize the industry trends, and find new business partners.
The last point is your homework. It makes no sense just to exchange business cards and do not fulfill any obligations.
A lot of creative and active communication is expecting us.
I should say that 5 days of the show is way too much. Three, maximum – four days is more than enough.
On the fourth day a colleague talking about ServiceDesk decision asked to do this while sitting, because he felt awful pain in his feet after four days of the exhibition.
Is it worth going to the CeBIT with a booth? Yes, but with a unique product or service.
Representatives of the outsourcing services in search of hot lead may do it with a booth with the same success as just walking around and talking.
You will get much more from the exhibition if you are prepared properly: analyze several thousand participants, learn about their business, think what you may tell them and why you can be interesting and useful, and pre-arrange a meeting.
In any case I recommend to visit CeBIT to all IT industry representatives. Expanding horizons is incredibly important.
Where it is not possible to sell the service, you can catch the idea of a new feature for your product.
See you in Hannover next year!
Source: Softengi
