CEBIT 2015 REVIEW BY SOFTENGI 

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The exhibition was held from March 16 to March 20, 2015 in Hannover, Germany. In Softengi's review below you will find many pictures and information about halls, exhibitors and trends for 2015. It will help to make your own opinion about CeBIT and may motivate you to visit CeBIT 2016.
Hannover

Hannover is a cozy city in the northwestern Germany with around 500 thousand citizens. Life in Hannover is relatively quiet - it's not a metropolis, but a really nice place to live. 
CeBIT (from Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik in German) - the world's largest international exhibition of digital, telecommunications and IT solutions. CeBIT exhibition is not for consumers, its main landmark is business, the bigger - the better. Recent years, the organizers devote it to a country with the Official Partner title. In 2015 it was China, represented with more than 600 enterprises.

Hannover Exhibition Grounds

It may look small, but the area of these halls is 450 000 m2

CeBIT is an exhibition, not a conference. Do not be lured by the famous names of the speakers in each lobby - most of them speak only German and you can hardly hear them.  
Regardless of the pre-scheduled meetings in Hannover, CeBIT is still very interesting to attend. You see there recognized leaders, learn industry trends, speak to those who build our digital future. 

Hall 2, 4 — Digital Business Solutions

At the entrance to the Hall 2 you see two huge booths of IBM with many different IBM software solutions. There were also huge booths of Huawei, Cisco, Oracle and other industry monsters.
Similarly, Hall 4 was completely divided between four giant corporations: SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft and T-Mobile. Microsoft showed the whole range of its software solutions for business, kindly advised on the issues with Microsoft Dynamics, presented Windows 10 as well as presented their hardware solutions.  
Seeing T-Mobile and Vodafone booths it was obvious that telecom giants earn more than anyone in the industry. Vodafone offered a ride on a branded Porshche 911, demonstrating similarities of this car speed with the speed of their 4G internet.

T-Mobile security-system – something between SIEM and DLP, monitoring the traffic and network channels of the infrastructure. Simply wonderful interface!

SAP impressed with the digital farming solution - sensors collect data from the field and the farmer gets a dashboard with the information on temperature, the need for fertilizers, light intensity, and soil moisture. Directly from the field. As a result, the system determines the optimal harvest time.

Hall 3 – ECM Input/Output Solutions
This hall offered document management systems. There were guys like Baramundi with cool business applications, and forgotten, but rising from the ashes, pillars of another industry - Conica Minolta and Kodak. Both men from the two companies admitted that they already 5 years as fully turned in the enterprise software sector and had no idea about films and cameras. The company turned 180 degrees to enterprise solutions (quite mediocre in my opinion - Conica, for example, offered a desktop workflow manager built on Java with Outlook 2007 interface.

Halls 5,6 – ERP, CRM, BI, HR & Commerce

These halls were the most interesting from a business perspective. This is where you can find partners, customers can get a good recommendation and give a good advice.
Many German companies do not hide the fact that they are interested only in German customers, and they do not plan to expand their business abroad. Perhaps most say this up to date. 

Hall 6 – Business Security, Global Business IT, International Business Area
Hall 6 was divided between different industries. There were five Ukrainian companies at the exhibition. It also united five Russian companies and outsourcers from Bangladesh, Romania, Colombia, and even Albania.
Security block was filled with a variety of vendors. The companies offered standard solutions covering a particular market demand. Outsourcers, as they honestly admit, had nothing to do at CeBIT. Making a booth dedicated to the development services looked absolutely hopeless.

Hall 9 – Research & Innovation

Wonderful VolksWagen

Many German universities presented their developments in this hall. Students from the University of Karlsruhe shared their real-time translation system which they already use in their university - not all students know German, and the translation tool translates every word uttered by the lecturer. 
Another interesting solution was the smart electricity meter. Meters are integrated with the Web application and show detailed information on the use of electricity per unit. Energy vendors are delighted with the solution and attack the guys to sell it. But the issue of the users' personal data protection is not resolved, and the commercial launch of the project is impossible so far. 

Hall 11 – Startups and Developers' World

A mirror allowing to try the cloths from an online store 

Various startups in need of sales or investments were presented in this hall. Not related to the Internet of Things. In the hall there were presented a lot of German and German-speaking startups and booths. So visitors speaking only English were having hard times. 
There were a lot of solutions for smart cities and various cloud services. There were platforms for developers, tools for developers and points of interest for developers.

Code_n hall

Smart sockets, cameras and other things connected to the Internet 

50 start-ups on the ground floor and innovative companies on the balcony of the second floor - all of them were located in this stylish lobby. It is interesting that all startups and partners, such as Google and Accenture, were organized by GFT, a German outsourcing company. 
All 50 startups were devoted exclusively to the super-trend of our time - the Internet of Things. All of them fall under the category of gadgets communicating with each other through the ipv6 protocol and managed by smartphone.

General Impressions 
CeBIT is worth visiting at least for the self-development, to see who is doing what, learn about industry trends, and find new business partners. The last point is your homework. It makes no sense just to exchange business cards and do not fulfill any obligations. 
Is it worth going to the CeBIT with a booth? Yes, but with a unique product or service. Representatives of the outsourcing services looking for a hot lead may do it at a booth with the same success as just walking around and talking. 
You will get much more from the exhibition if you are prepared properly: analyze several thousand participants, learn about their business, think what you may tell them and why you can be interesting and useful, and pre-arrange a meeting. 
In any case I recommend to visit CeBIT to all IT industry representatives. Expanding horizons is incredibly important. See you in Hannover next year!