Wirepas Mesh Ecosystem came together at Wirepas Go 2018
More than 100% growth in many metrics – was a statement made by Teppo Hemiä, Wirepas CEO in his opening speech. When looking around the statement was easy to understand. There were Wirepas partners and customers from all over the world, ranging from large corporations to aspiring young IoT companies.
Wirepas organized their ecosystem get-together – Wirepas Go – for the second time now at Clarion Helsinki. Hardly ever has there been such a well organized event where the program ran well and was full of interesting meetings, panel discussions and keynote speeches. Quite often it was hard to decide which sessions to participate as there were lots of interesting topics for #IoTHeads like us. The event was invitation only and stricly involved companies an people in Wirepas ecosystem.
Myself, Pertti Kujala and Tom Lindgren participated from our team and what a busy three days it became.
Day One – Networking around Wirepas Mesh
The event took off with a networking reception at the hotel lobby bar. There was food and drinks served at a relaxing setting, allowing for people to get introduced and discuss Wirepas Mesh and Iot related matters. It was a good opportunity to catch up with our customers, Wirepas team and also meet new people working on Wirepas Mesh based solutions.
Just before bed time we also visited briefly the Sky Bar on the 16th floor of Clarion. Definitely a place to visit to get good views over buzzing Helsinki.
Day Two – Wirepas Go is on!
Day two kicked off with a hearty breakfast at the hotel, quickly followed with the opening speeches at the big ballroom. Teppo Hemiä opened the event with an overview how the ecosystem had developed over the last 12 months. On all metrics it seems that Wirepas Mesh is gaining a lot of good momentum in the IoT connectivity space- especially inmassive Scale IoT applications. Richard Kinder from Wirepas spoke how the market and customers are moving from prototypes and pilots to full scale production. It is a trend we are also witnessing.
A very good new launch from developer point of view was to give Wirepas Network Tool for free to all Ecosystem licensees.
Second session was about the connectivity space developing in general, how eg. 5G rollout will happen and what regional differences there are. Very interesting Keynote by Northstream.
After a good lunch break the event took of three streams of break-out sessions where I participated as a panelist on IoT asset management discussion and Tom Lindgren our VP of Digital solutions gave some examples of sensing at the Edge, how smart edge devices and solutions help organizations in digitalization. I also visited on Smart lighting stream for one discussion and it is a very interesting proposition as a component of Smart building architecture.
After the official program there was time reserved for partner to partner meetings and we spent a good couple of hours discussing with various companies to initiate new IoT projects together.
At 6pm Admiral Teppo Hemiä and first officer Sebastian Linko invited all participants to a boat ride on Wirepas Go boat to the island of Lonna. At Lonna, a former military base, they now offer various services for Helsinki visitors. Wirepas had reserved the restaurant area for the event and we enjoyed a good dinner and drinks, playing some team activities and listening to live music. Definitely a great opportunity to further network and discuss Wirepas and other Internet of things related topics with like-minded people.
Day Three – Wirepas Mesh Keynotes and Wrap Up
Day three continued where day two left off. The Program started with a keynote by Signify and continued with last breakout sessions. Teppo opened an important discussion on singularity and the opportunity to build solutions more easily with multi-vendor offering. Fujitsu gave a keynote speech on their company and the IoT collaboration with Wirepas and how they use Wirepas Mesh on their solutions.
After lunch Wirepas product marketing team brought up all the event highlights
The day ended with Wirepas´s own Mario (Jani Vehkalahti) and Luigi (Youssef Kamel) wrapping up the event with customer success stories and a nice video created during the event.