Viva de Barcelona or how it was at IoT Solutions World Congress

Ruslan Matuzau, VP of Business Development, Softarex Technologies, Inc.

Hello from IoT Solutions World Congress!

My colleagues — Alexander Lipanov, CEO of the company, Alex Chelombitko, Head of Healthcare and Mobile Department, and I just recently came back from IoT Solutions World Congress 2016, that this year took place in sunny and hospitable Barcelona from 25 to 27 of October. It was the first time we were taking part in IoT Solutions World Congress, and now we are pretty satisfied with our visit.

A brief digression into the event: the IoTSWC is the first global event dedicated exclusively to joining IoT providers with industry to help the latter increase productivity via this disruptive technology. This year IoT Solutions World Congress offered a highly international environment with more than 8,000 visitors and was focused on IoT solutions in six dedicated areas: Manufacturing, Healthcare, Energy & Utilities, Transportation & Logistics, Innovation, and Technology.

The event was organized by Fira de Barcelona in partnership with the Industrial Internet Consortium and the Industrial IoT organization. The main goal of this cooperation was to bring together organizations and technology with the goal of accelerating the growth, adoption, and widespread use of industrial IoT.

What is more, it was a big trade show area where all the companies that bought Sponsorship were able to showcase the latest IoT innovations in their industry. What we really liked, that this show included prototypes, live demonstrations (including those of Testbeds — will explain below a bit later), projects, and real-life applications. The list of main Sponsors and Exhibitors included such names as Accenture, Deloitte, EMC, Everis, GE, HPE, IBM, Intel, Kaspersky, Microsoft, SAP, and Telefónica.

Speakers of IoT Solutions World Congress

The list of speakers was admired, and we definitely were trying not to miss any of them. To make things clear this list included representatives from such companies as Accenture, Cisco, Microsoft, SAP, Telefonica, Huawei, Bosch, Nokia, Toshiba, HCL, etc. All in all the 2016 speaker list features more than 160 key players from industry, academia, and technology solution providers.

Testbeds

As I mentioned before, IoT Solutions World Congress had a product-oriented Testbed Area. And this area made this event absolutely unique because all the participants were able to experience in person the most advanced and innovative solutions for the benefit of their organizations. There were top 10 testbeds in action.

Which one we have liked most:

• Remote Patient Monitoring (Healthcare sphere) that was presented by Microsoft and Cognizant;
• Smart Airline Baggage Management (Transportation and Logistics sphere) presented by GE, Altoros, M2MI, Oracle, Infosys;
• Transformation of business operations through the IoT-enabled edge to cloud video, sensors, and advanced analytics (Business transformation sphere) presented by MICROSOFT, Brierley+Partners, Express, Inc., NEC Corporation.

Business before pleasure

In our case, Cerveza after the trade show 😉 Forgot to mention the IoT Solutions Awards Gala — dinner with more than 350 industry leaders will meet to celebrate the second edition of the event. We liked it.

In conclusion, I would like to note the high organization of the event, open-hearted people and of course all the beauty of this amazing city. Not to forget about the big minus — Wi-Fi. For such an event like IoT Solutions World Congress, the Internet was pretty bad, and we were losing the connection pretty often, which was a bit disappointing during our presentation to participants. Are we going to this event again? Who will refuse to visit this beautiful city again and to talk with representatives of different companies and professionals in their field? Right now we can say that we liked it and hope to visit it next year.

We will continue to share our own and world’s best practices and are wide open to learn something new, so if you have any questions or ideas — feel free to write to us. Let’s develop the world together!