CeBIT has come a long way since its origins as the mere computing part of the Hanover Fair. Now companies travel from far and wide to showcase their latest products and services. CBR rounds up a few of the announcements on Industry 4.0, a big focus of the conference this year.

1. Huawei and SAP

Huawei has been big on promoting the potential of Industry 4.0, and at CeBIT this year the Chinese electronics company also signed a memorandum of understanding with SAP. The collaboration will focus on building co-innovation labs, aimed to research and produce systems to aid with smart manufacturing and connecting machinery.

""In the context of Industry 4.0, intelligent devices talk to each other, delivering decision-critical data, and react to instructions in real time," commented Lida Yan, President of Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group. "For the Industrial Internet of Things, the devices we need to connect are in the hundreds of billions."

2. Deutsche Telekom

The German telecoms giant presented a starter kit for industry, with new platforms co-developed with partners that aim to enhance the IoT and M2M applications. The Industry 4.0 package enables SMEs to easily network equipment and monitor production conditions. Included in the kit are hardware, a SIM card and access to the Cloud of Things platform, which is hosted in high-security data centres in Germany.

3. Samsung

Samsung used the German IT fair to launch Samsung Business, an umbrella brand focused on developing an enterprise-based IoT ecosystem. The solutions are sector-specific, catering to retail, education, hospitality, healthcare and transport. For example, Samsung SMART signage will be deployed for real-time flight information displays.

Hong Won-pyo, president and chief marketing officer of Samsung Electronics, commented, "As more and more businesses adopt the IoT, we have a great opportunity to enhance customer value with increased productivity and profit. In order to accelerate IoT adoption in businesses, it is urgent to overcome the challenges of platform compatibility, data analysis, and security."

4. Telefónica

The German wing of the international telco presented a new service for automatic communication between machines. The cooperation with Software AG produced the new M2M Object Monitoring service, which aims to lower costs and increase flexibility. Business customers will also get support during conceptualisation and configuration of the solution. More than 500 enterprises now rely on Telefonica’s Smart m2m solution worldwide.