By Kim Yoo-chul
CeBIT, finding itself falling behind other consumer electronics exhibitions such as CES, MWC and IFA, is now trying to adopt new strategies in order to regain its lost fame.
A senior executive of the CeBIT division at Deutsche Messe said that next year’s exhibition will focus more on the leading edge of telecommunication such as cloud computing.
CeBIT is one of the world’s trade fairs showcasing digital information & technology (IT) and telecommunications devices for the home and work places.
Next year’s CeBIT will be held in Hannover, Germany, from March 1 to 5 with tech majors such as Samsung Electronics, IBM, Siemens, Intel, Google, Microsoft and Dell.
``The 2011 CeBIT will make the participants more excited,’’ said Frank Porschmann, a senior vice president at Deutsche Messe, in a news conference in Seoul, last week.
This year, the show will be divided into CeBIT pro, CeBIT gov, CeBIT life and CeBIT lab.
The executive said CeBIT is geared for advanced ICT solutions for business operations, while CeBIT gov targets the public sector. CeBIT life is consumers-oriented and CeBIT lab will be customized for colleges and research institutes.
During the session, Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, Matthew Key, chairman of Telefonica Europe and Mark A. Floyd, chief executive at SafeNet will discuss pending issues.
Porschmann said the CeBIT exhibition is transforming itself into the industry’s most trusted ICT fair and expects the show to further raise its presence with more Asian technology companies.
``A lot of Asians are participating. We expect a 20 increase in participants from Asia,’’ he said.
Cloud computing is expected to be the top phrase at the fair amid the blurring lines between mobile and telecom technologies.
Cloud computing is a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided as a service to customers using Internet technologies.