CeBIT 2009: a Turning Point?

The impact of the economic downturn was clearly visible at CeBIT this year. While visitor numbers once reached half a million, the 2009 version at times left a rather depressing image with some halls only filled for 50 % and many booths desperately reaching out to the sparse visitors passing by.

 

It was no different in Hall 14 which was dedicated to telematics and navigation. Part of this hall was left unused due to major brands such as TomTom being absent. However, Germany-based Navigon, Clarion, and Garmin had big booths and navigation software vendors such as Sygic, NGN, Mireo, Horizon Navigation, and ALK were prominently present. Less well known brands such as Mobile Devices and Portugal-based NDRIVE showcased interesting PND product ranges. 

 

The presence of a large number of companies from the vehicle tracking and fleet management segment such as DigiCore and Pointer Telocation and a large number of less well known companies from Asia confirmed commercial telematics is still very much a focus area. Further evidence for this trend was provided by deCarta’s announcement to move into the fleet management market and u-blox launching combined GPS/GSM modules. The new automotive infotainment consortium Genivi led by Intel and Windriver proudly announced that OEMs and Tier1s BMW, Delphi, General Motors, Magneti Marelli, PSA Peugeot Citroen, and Visteon are working on a shared open source Linux-based software architecture and platform to decrease design cycles and reduce costs in order to compete with consumer devices, driven by the emergencies of the current economic situation.

 

US companies were represented by Garmin showcasing its new pedestrian oriented PND range and deCarta announcing the launch of its connected navigation platform targeting the European market. The US promoted California with governor Schwarzenegger as one of the keynote celebrities.

 

Some interesting trends in Outdoor GPS navigation could also be noticed. CompeGPS’s TwoNav and Giove’s MyNav solution combine road-based and off-road navigation including routable topographic maps: another example of convergence and welcome competition for Garmin’s dominant position in this GPS market segment.

 

The Navigation Day @ CeBIT 2009 conference was well attended confirming Telematics Update’s leading positioning in this space. However, the event did somewhat suffer from cancellations of some of the speakers due to travel restrictions and/or redundancies.
 

However, the word’s biggest ICT fair urgently needs to rethink its future. It needs to make up its mind whether to target professionals or consumers. This has been a problem since many years prompting many B2B oriented companies to stay away. Rumors were heard CeBIT might be reserved to professional visitors in the future. CeBIT also increasingly suffers from a positioning which is too broad targeting the whole range of ICT areas from enterprise software to consumer electronics, hardware, accessories, software, computing, fixed and mobile networks. Recent attempts to focus conferences and halls around major themes such as Navigation and Open Source do not seem to have solved this positioning issue. CeBIT also continues to hesitate between a global and a more regional approach aimed at German governmental projects and HR related initiatives. All of these aspects were exacerbated by the economic downturn.