I’ve been on the road a lot in the past few weeks, particularly spending time at some of the largest wireless and technology conferences on this side of the Atlantic. Both Mobile World Congress and CeBIT were great conferences and shows we participated in with some of our leading partners – IBM and Huawei.
MWC keeps getting bigger and better, packed with great technology, cool ideas and super smart people – estimates suggest that 72,000 delegates attended this year.
The new venue was a vast improvement on recent years. Admittedly the spectacular back drop was has gone but the venue afforded modern, spacious, clean and well organised accommodation with plenty of flexible seating to conduct meetings, although some would argue a tad soulless.
Neither Microsoft, Google, nor Blackberry had a stand this time and, as usual, Apple declined to participate. The vacuum left by these organisations was impressively filled by organisations like Airwatch (MDM vendor) who, on the back of a $200m funding round, set about spending some of their newly acquired cash on a stand the size of Wales.
I must admit there seemed to be more of an Enterprise feel to the show this year. Of course consumer technology hunters were not disappointed but the increased attendance from software vendors, systems integrators and consultancy firms definitely pointed to a substantial focus on the Enterprise customer.
Above all though it was the year of the API. It was apparently obligatory for every single delegate to mutter the word API in every single conversation. Jokes aside, the true innovators seem to be assembling technologies like Lego blocks in order to extend, improve and differentiate their product offerings.
My assessment is that API’s will continue to be the currency that drives innovation – Progressive software companies will increasingly expand their offerings by plugging in complimentary solutions from other ISV’s or publically available components. Large companies will reveal their valuable assets as API’s so that they can capture new revenue streams made possible by the collision of cloud, social, data and especially mobile. Organisations that fail to reveal their assets as API’s will be over taken. The cocktail of cloud, social, big data and mobile seems to be lubricating the API arms race. Plug and play technologies that augment each other are being made available through the cloud so that customers and/or developers can leverage these assets without having to assemble them themselves.
In some ways plugging the blocks together is the easy bit (spoken like someone who does not have the responsibility for engineering). The challenge is identifying those API’s that truly advance your proposition, are valued by your customers and have sensible commercial models that don’t detract from your overall value proposition.
I think this is an exciting development that will drive the mobile app market from its current position of functionally poor ‘skinny apps’ to one of genuinely rich ‘deep rooted’ apps that drive real value revealing new and exciting business models along the way.
Meanwhile, it was an all things digital fest at CeBIT, and it made for an interesting opportunity to reflect on the transformation of the digital world and how it has changed our lives. If this lifestyle change over the past century can be summarised, it’s an unprecedented era of communication, entertainment and productivity, all driven by the exchange of bits and bytes, and of electrons that form an electrical network that power our gadgets that we consume everyday. It has opened the door to amazing things in the digital world – and there is no larger showcase and display of it than at CeBIT.
Home of one of the world’s largest exhibition spaces at 5.3M square feet, Hannover was host again to a digital convention that reaches 300,000 attendees. In an era where everything is digitised, when we use email or social networks instead of direct interaction, it seems ironic that one of the world’s largest conventions is the digital show – where people actually have to get together and… can you imagine… speak to each other.
The show was great – one of the key reasons we chose to announce our partnership with Huawei and their BYOD Mobility Solution and showcase it in their booth. We’re quite excited about an opportunity to drive mobile applications across devices and enterprise network equipment provided by Huawei. Everything at CeBIT is Digital. Digital. Digital.
I can’t help but think of what the founders of electricity, from Ben Franklin to James Maxwell to Thomas Edison, would feel if they attended CeBIT and saw how much our lives revolve around all-things-digital. It’s quite impressive to see how much has changed in a relatively short time frame in our history.
So while the physics community celebrates the potential discovery of the so-called “God particle”, my favourite particle will remain the electron responsible for electricity and for the gadgets we have today. Without it, we wouldn’t have this digital lifestyle. Without it, we wouldn’t have CeBIT or MWC. Without it, I would not have been able to write this blog.
