Conference raised awareness of IoT

994 people, consisting of 736 business attendees and 258 participating exhibitors, sponsors and speakers, gathered for the launch of IoT Impact, Australia’s largest Internet of Things (IoT) conference and exhibition.

Presented by IoT Alliance Australia (IoTAA) and held at the University of Technology Sydney last month, the event raised awareness of IoT among Australian businesses, with specific content produced for the key industry sectors of energy, smart cities, connected automated vehicles, agrifood, water and manufacturing.

The Chair of the IoTAA board, Gavin Smith, President of Bosch Australia, emphasised the need for Australia to “seize the IoT opportunity” in his welcome address.

The impressive line-up of overseas speakers — including Christopher O’Connor from IBM (USA), Clayton Fernandez from Microsoft (USA), Stefan Ferber from Bosch Software Innovations (Germany) and Lutz Heuser from [ui!] Group (Germany) — provided an international perspective of where things are in the adoption of IoT.

Harry Debney, CEO of Costa, detailed how his company, Australia’s largest horticultural company, considered itself to be more like a technology company than a food grower. IBM’s John MacLeod shared how artificial intelligence and IoT can help cut through the data avalanche and Terri Benson from South East Water spoke about the digitalisation of their daily operations and meeting their customer priorities. Austrade CEO Dr Stephanie Fahey urged the audience to embrace technology and to promote Australian IoT businesses, while Ed Santow, the Australian Human Rights Commissioner, provided the keynote broadening the data discussion beyond privacy into data ethics leading to a highly engaged panel session.

The event also featured the IoTAA IoT Awards held at the grand opening of the state-of-the-art UTS Tech Lab in Botany. The winners were: Ambassador for 2018 — Catherine Caruana McManus; IoT Enablement — Reekoh; IoT Industry — The Yield; and IoT Innovation — Successful Endeavours.

Following its successful 2018 launch, Frank Zeichner, Chief Executive of IoTAA, said, “We plan to run IoT Impact in 2019 and our objective is to attract even more business people from the industries that stand to really benefit from the IoT.”

IoT Impact 2018 was supported by major companies such as IBM, Bosch, Telstra and Microsoft.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/photon_photo