Hannover Messe Industrial Exhibit

Seeq participated for the first time in the Industrial Exhibit in Hannover Germany

May 16, 2017

This year, Seeq participated for the first time in the Industrial Exhibit in Hannover Germany, which is one of the largest such trade shows in the world. With over 6,800 exhibitors, 225,000 visitors, and 8 million square feet, I knew this was going to be big. I didn’t realize in advance I would walk 7 miles per day, but in hindsight I think I got off easy.

The main themes for the show were Industrial Internet of Things, Predictive Maintenance, Industry 4.0, Cobots, and Digital Twin. Seeq had a natural fit with all of them, but especially so with the first three, and the IIoT theme was nearly ubiquitous. The fair itself was organized differently, with our attention on Industrial Automation (Siemens, Schneider Electric, ABB, …) and the Digital Factory (Microsoft, AWS, Accenture…). The purpose of my trip was to join our Siemens and Schneider Electric partners as they showcased our software.

Siemens had an extremely large main booth (perhaps 70k sqft), and other smaller booths elsewhere at the event. MindSphere had their own premium location upstairs in the main booth, with a 360° animation of data, robots, and industrial images (see picture). MindSphere is Siemens’ Open Internet of Things Platform, where vendors integrate their solutions to better serve customers in a collaborative cloud-based ecosystem. MindSphere partners provided non-stop presentations on center stage, extolling the power of the platform and their MindSphere-enabled solutions. The sessions were well attended and engaging.

Seeq attended the trade show at the invitation of Siemen’s “Rocket Club Accelerator Program.” The Rocket Club is designed to facilitate the on-boarding of new partners, demonstrate multiple company’s products working together for more complete solutions, and promote faster adoption by end users. To that end, Seeq and Bluvision worked together to demonstrate a compelling use case for monitoring rotating equipment in the context of an industrial process, which we co-presented to large audiences on five separate occasions.

In the Schneider Electric booth, they took “electric” seriously, with a vibrant green and white space, which invitingly accentuated their message about the EcoStruxure Platform. EcoStruxure is “The digital backbone connecting best-in-class OT solutions with the latest in IT technology to unlock trapped value in your operations and tap into the true potential of the Internet of Things.” Profit Advisor, powered by Seeq, is a member application proudly compliant with the branding. The Profit Advisor team had their own station, close to the center of the picture shown.

Profit Advisor itself is an impressive application, based on Schneider Electric’s patented methodology for creating real time business metrics tied directly to process data. While that has been a goal of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and financial reporting systems for decades, the combination of Schneider’s approach and Seeq’s Workbench makes it look almost too easy. Both Schneider and Seeq are looking forward to good business growth, seizing on new opportunities that emerged from the continuous stream of customer discussions.

Given the magnitude of the show, I was pleased to see that our partners’ booths in particular were so well attended, and that the customers took the time for meaningful discussions about their objectives and initiatives. That being said, my favorite booth was probably the cobots fighting with light sabers to Star Wars music. Sorry, didn’t get a picture.