ARC Advisory Group attended the IOT Solutions World Conference (IoTSWC) on the grounds of the FIRA Barcelona last October and we were very impressed. The venue is modern and in contrast to automation fairs, there was an atmosphere of quiet and calm, that favored concentration and quality conversations. With over 300 companies and record attendance of over 16000 visitors this may seem counterintuitive, but that was our impression. The growth of both exhibitors by more than 40 percent and visitor numbers by 25 percent is impressive. Even though this was just the fourth edition of the event, the size was one of a grown-up world-scale fair.

IoTSWC is developing into a platform for the dissemination of new standards and technologies to accelerate the deployment of IoT solutions worldwide and help companies transform their business and gain a competitive edge. IoTSWC incorporated the Blockchain Solutions World, a specific seminar on crypto-economics as well as the AI & Cognitive Systems Forum focusing on new developments in artificial intelligence.

IoT Solutions World Congress and Exhibition

The congress and the exhibition were located in the same hall, making it convenient and fast to attend selected lectures and to return to the exhibition. The congress offers five sector-oriented tracks (manufacturing, energy & utilities, connected transport, buildings & infrastructure, healthcare, open industry) and one cross-cutting track: enabling IoT. All presentations were related to practical applications. We attended a lecture by Ulrich Ahle, CEO of FIWARE, who reported on the recent progress the organization made with the overall aim to provide open source, free-of-charge tools to build IoT solutions across sectors, and making those more interoperable. Amongst others, the alignment with International Data Spaces is notable and the implementation of IDS Data Sovereignty using FIWARE is a great asset for companies who want to exchange data in an efficient and secure manner while staying in full control of their intellectual property. A practical application was presented by the provider of milling equipment, Georg Fischer and Innovalia Metrology, a company providing measurements enabling predictive maintenance of the equipment. The information exchanged provides a combined service to the owner-operator of a plant, while controlling what the partners do with the provided information using the above-mentioned connector. The video recordings of the conference are available here. A great chance to catch up!

ARC at IoTSWC

ARC had conversations with the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), FIWARE, OrbiterChain, a certified member of IDSA, and the Fira Barcelona to mutually support and promote each other, amongst others during the upcoming ARC European Forum in Sitges in May 2019. Note also the IIC’s upcoming building intelligent infrastructure conference in February 2019. ARC also met with Zahra Khani, CEO of Firmalyzer a cyber security company specializing in IoT device security, Optimal+ an analytics firm specialized in semiconductor and electronics, and providing clean, actionable production and quality information from disparate manufacturing sources, with Real-Time Innovations, whose standard DDS middle-ware solutions play a key role in the Open Group’s pilot implementations of open automation. Furthermore we talked to Sensing & Control systems, Uptake and Zyfra, all providers of innovative connected manufacturing solutions. Surprisingly, we noticed that only one major process automation vendor, ABB, was present with a booth.

Next IoT World Solutions Conference is planned for October 29-31, 2019, and we recommend you to consider the conference if you want access to a multitude of players and learn about recently applied IoT concepts and technologies in a time-efficient way.