2. Blogs

Co-innovation and cooperation at Hello!World Barcelona 2019

April 30, 2019 Glenn Le Santo , News

One of the core themes of the annual Orange Business Hello!World event this year was co-innovation. In the spirit of co-innovation, I’m going to use social media updates to present this roundup of the three days at the Sofia Hotel in Barcelona where the event took place.

In the days before the event, the Orange Business social media accounts were of course posting pre-event teasers. However, the official messages were bolstered by a chorus of posts from Orange people posting from their own accounts on Twitter, such as these posts by Pier Giuseppe Dal Farra and Alex Rigaldo, who used our social media advocacy tool, Sociabble, to easily share our official pre-event updates.

Orange Business CEO Helmut Reisinger opened the show in a variety of languages and gave his own angle on the motto of the local soccer superstars, FC Barcelona. "We’re more than a club," said Helmut, describing the strong spirit of cooperation that exists both at Orange Business and between them and their customers.

Charles Nastorg enjoyed the football team analogy from his CEO:

Our own Vincent Brunet was among the first to live tweet from the opening plenary presentation by Orange Business CEO Helmut Reisinger.

Data was already at the forefront of the storyline, and it would stay there throughout the event.

The first guest presenter, Mary Chew from APL Logistics, had data right at the heart of her presentation. She was in no doubt about the value of data to APL Logistics: “We use data to predict the arrival of a shipment.” This data-driven forward view brings efficiencies, as it allows APL Logistics to plan ahead and organize their resources precisely.

Hello!World’s focus on data continued when Ada Sekirin, CEO at Business & Decision, stepped up and presented her keynote. “Data is the new oil!” she asserted, as part of her convincing and strong presentation on the value of data. Ada has built a very successful business on data analytics and so, even without her very convincing keynote, it’s hard to argue with her assertions on the value of data to business.

Just a few keynotes into the event and the message was already very clear: the innovative utilization of data produces opportunities that are probably limited only by our own imagination.

If you get the opportunity to chat with Ada Sekirin, you’ll soon realize that she’s done a lot of thinking about data. Ada has Big Data figured out, with a set of rules she calls her Five Vs of Big Data. Veracity is one of Ada’s Five Vs of Big Data because data veracity matters, especially in applications where safety depends on the ability to collect and analyze data instantly, such as with self-driving cars and surgery.

Of course, the action at Hello!World doesn’t all take place in the main auditorium. There are also valuable exchanges going on in the various breakout sessions. Fredrik Ohlsen, CEO of Basefarm, and Cédric Parent from Orange Cloud for Business were on hand in their breakout to discuss cloud and the value of data.

There was plenty of activity outside of the auditoriums and meeting rooms at Hello!World. The Partner Lounge hummed to that familiar sound of networking, no doubt fueled in part by the excellent tapas that were periodically served up by the attentive hotel staff, who were always ensuring that the delegates felt very well looked after.

Meanwhile, those who weren’t lucky enough to attend in person were able to join the conversation by following the #HelloWorld19 hashtag on social media. Even if you’re far away in Finland, you can still be part of the Barcelona conversation – as Maria Lehtman (from Finland) proved:

Towards the end of the show, we were treated to a very entertaining and inspiring keynote with Bask Iyer from Dell Technologies, a customer and co-innovation partner of Orange Business.

We all enjoyed Bask’s sense of humor and insight. He made some thought-provoking observations about where we really are now with technology by citing some real-world examples like his car’s recalcitrant voice recognition system. He also discussed something far out – the Mars rover, "Opportunity," and how it relied on computing at the edge because cloud at that distance has too much latency. Bask pointed out that the Mars vehicle is an autonomous car that happily operated at the extreme, outlasting its planned service window:

Helmut Reisinger thanked everyone who attended and supported Hello!World, including all those who had worked so hard to make it such a great success.

While most of the updates above showed up on our radar during the event, it’s always worth watching out for post-event activity, and I found some interesting posts when researching for this article:

Glenn Le Santo
Glenn Le Santo

Editor in Chief, International, at Orange Business. I'm in charge of our International website and the English language blogs at Orange Business. In my spare time I'm literally captain of my own ship, spending my time on the wonderful rivers and canals of England.