XCHANGE 2016

HIGHLIGHTS

Milan

• BIG DATA
  & Advanced
  Analytics

  Big data technologies are a game-changing enabler in the area of advanced analytical processes. Stabilising big data and artificial intelligence technologies may ultimately help the business world to take better decisions. Furthermore, machine learning is becoming a reliable and scalable technological area that can be applied in many business sectors to provide a means of automating processes and making applications more intelligent. A close integration between business and IT is the real engine in being efficiently business- and client-driven.

• Cloud
  & INTERNET OF THINGS

  The evolution of cloud technologies and associated vendor offerings has been rapid. The implementation of agile-style concepts together with an appropriate approach to design could therefore enable businesses to seize new opportunities. Today’s new services can provide the market with fertile ground on which to build added-value solutions for customers. If all objects could interact with one another, learning people’s habits and supporting them, data would thereby become available from billions of sensors, objects and devices. The real challenge lies in connecting a myriad of heterogeneous objects and making them speak, interact and engage in dialogue in real time.

• COMMERCE
  & Digital Retail

  The removal of the need for physical spaces in commerce has substantially changed the customer-retailer relationship model, making it ever more demand-sensitive and intermediated by digital technologies. Digital transformation affects a business’s very structure and the metrics it uses to assess its operations, enlivening both its physical and digital presence. User experience is also changing as a result of modifications to company strategies, user behaviour and in the evolution of devices. The shop of the future is a place that is both physical and virtual, where customers search for and select products to purchase, use a secure method of payment and decide on the specific time of collection, whether from the store or by means of delivery to their homes.

• DIGITAL
  Experience

  What does becoming digital mean to a brand? Ideally in the transformation process, the listening, analysis and searching phases are necessary preconditions for defining a strategy and a digital identity. A business can then outline a personalised customer journey and initiate a relationship with its customers that is ever closer. But what actual possibilities, successes, technologies and project approaches can allow brands to try out solutions right now that will very soon become reality? The answer: complete and captivating experiences that involve augmented and virtual reality projects in support of the business, together with the production of multimedia content and the 3D digitalisation of products via a real-time configuration platform.

• FINANCIAL
  institutions

  What are the technological innovations and new business models that are designed to create value and increase competition for financial institutions? Over the last few years, blockchain has shown itself to be a revolutionary Internet technology, with the potential to bring about a paradigm shift in the concepts of trust, ownership and exchange. The disruptive power of blockchain protocols lies in the opportunities they create for cutting out the middleman in virtually any guarantor-regulated trading process. But that’s not all. We are also observing the development of robot advisers and hybrid digital-human interface models, as well as exploiting the opportunities for creating value from big data and from machine learning.

• INDUSTRY
  4.0

  The Industry 4.0 paradigm, characterised by its fusion of the real and virtual worlds that arises from the Internet of Things and big data, depicts a hybrid system involving a complex network of machines, physical assets, virtual objects, data, and communication devices. Connected systems, 3D printing and nanotechnologies, machines that learn and reason in a distributed way – what will the smart factory of the future look like? What changes will we see in the ways of working and responding to the increasing demand for personalisation? And what new distribution, production and logistical paradigms will come into being? But most of all, what is possible right now in manufacturing and the supply chain as a result of the introduction of the new-generation applications?

• TELCO
  New Customer
  Experience

  The speed of the digital revolution in the telco and media sectors requires new tools that can allow businesses to manage the evolution of their offerings and processes in a structured way, so as to create value and build engagement with their customers. Media companies today have to compete in a market dominated by an abundance of supply. The collapse in production costs and the availability of free digital distribution platforms has multiplied the number of producers and swept away barriers to entry. Identifying new product and service paradigms is also required of telco companies, which are continuing to invest in the development of services that combine communication and entertainment, while also facing the greater challenge of remaining relevant in their customers’ digital lives.