We stopped by the ICT trade fair in Hanover, Germany, and are wondering if it was worth it. We saw many interesting things, made contacts and got inspiration, but CeBIT is not what it used to be.
This is what you will find in all the reviews of this fair. 5 years ago everyone was at the fair, it was impossible to walk through the huge masses of people, the whole area was bursting at the seams. This time everything was different – a third of the venue was empty, many big companies and technologies were completely missing, people were a tenth. The organizers tried to save it with pavilions with games, multimedia and music, but ICT experts are not interested in that. We had originally booked up to 3 days for the fair, but by the afternoon of the first day we had done everything and were bored.
Of course, we mostly looked at technologies for data centers – racks, cable management, active network elements, optical elements, cooling, power supply, etc. Smaller equipment and cabling systems were mostly available – you could choose from big European brands, but also from Asian ones. After all, China, Taiwan, Korea and others may have been outnumbered by European and American companies.
Unfortunately, we lacked “larger scale technologies”. The choice of racks was large, but there were very few air conditioners and UPS, no diesel generators (with one exception – a hybrid generator combined with a rotating UPS).
Most were seen e.g. Intel (separate hall for computer games), T-Mobile, Microsoft and others. For most of them, unfortunately, we did not understand what they were actually exhibiting. Maybe it wasn’t the exhibitions, but the space to meet their important customers. Also SAP was very visible – 1 own hall and many other stands around the premises – so we can see why their software must be so overpriced.
