Documens Boss

Germany is a country renowned for its large and successful business exhibitions, which are popular with global exhibitors and their clients alike. Events such as ‘DMS’, held annually in Cologne and ‘Systems’ in Munich, still attract a large proportion of ECM/BPM and document processing vendors. CeBIT in Hannover, however, is still regarded as by far the most important event.
 
Despite this, I was quite dubious as to whether spending several days at CeBIT would prove to be value for money. However, on studying the statistics, I discovered that a total of more than 1,000 companies, involved in document related technologies, would be presenting at CeBIT, - and that was excluding companies involved in Web Based solutions. Of course, there is overlap in the different sub-segments and the total number might, in fact, be a little lower, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that I spent my time very productively, engaged in a number of meetings, scheduled ahead of my arrival at the exhibition. I also encountered some totally new companies in our sector.
 
With a total of more than 4,000 companies from 68 countries presenting, it was, of course, impossible to capture it all. Companies not present at the show should bear in mind that more than 80% of the visitors regard themselves as professionals in the ICT sector.
 
One of the key items at the show was mobile computing. I wasn’t quite sure how this will impact the ECM and BPM industry. I guess we have all tried to read PDF’s and other documents on our PDA’s without a great deal of success (using a Nokia E71).  It was striking however, that several solutions in the BPM sector were demonstrated in a mobile version - most notably in the insurance sector. One good example came from Inubit, with a claims business process fully executed on mobile devices. It began with taking pictures of the damage on site along with the completion of a short form, client data submitted for validation and approval, then sent back to the client on his/her mobile, with approval of the claim by return. The beauty was in its simplicity and being a really practical function to be deployed within the Insurance industry.
 
The CeBIT organization claims to have had a successful show and, having asked several companies present with their ECM/BPM solutions, I can only confirm that practically everyone will be back next year.
 
Personally, I regard CeBIT as a great networking event. When considering Green Computing, how about Green Networking? I met 36 companies in two and a half days. Think how much time I would have spent, travelling to meet all these companies individually - not to mention the large carbon footprint it would have created…
 
I guess this clearly highlights, from a number of perspectives, the importance of such events and the need to have top executives present.
 
Geert Kruiter
 
VP Continental Europe – Document Boss