- Day one of TechEx Europe wraps up.
- Speakers and exhibitors from Europe, Asia, and the US.
- Six stages, hundreds of exhibitors, on European leg of tech event tour.
At the time of writing, the first day of TechEx Europe is approaching its close, with audiences still listening to the final speakers of the day on the six stages, and the show floor still buzzing with crowds of local and international visitors.
TechEx Europe is one of three technology events held annually under the TechEx banner, with sister events in London and San Francisco. There has been a distinctive European flavour on this, the first day of the two-day event, with exhibitors and speakers drawn from the continent and the UK alongside some of the big names in tech from all over the world. Visitors have heard from the likes of Siemens and KLM on stage, and been able to network and chat to Thales, IBM, Dell, Snowflake, and Cloudflare.
European data centre specialisations
Like all the events in the TechEx series, TechEx Europe follows discrete tracks. AI & Big Data figure prominently, as you might imagine, as do Cybersecurity & Cloud, and IoT Tech. The Data Centres Expo track’s dedicated stage saw speakers from Xylem (Lowarra in the US) and CyrusOne, with Svein Atle Hagaseth from Norwegian DC provider Green Mountain. He spoke about environmental concerns around data centres in general, and how Norway – with its 100% renewable energy – is stepping up to provide clean, powreful data centres that support multi-functional workloads.
Svein told the audience that in Europe, 90% of data centres can offer users latency of less than 4ms, and said that flexibility in infrastructure design means operators can provide the different types of compute required for the varying demands of AI production: raw power (with zero carbon impact) during intensive learning phases, through to low-latency responsiveness at the point of inference.
Unlike the US, where single, ‘mega-sites’ con offer gigawatt-scale resources, Norway’s DCs tend to provide the same capability in terms of raw data-crunching, but using smart clustering of multiple sites that may be spread geographically.
Cybersecurity lessons from the financial sector
On the Cyber Security stage next door, Rini Icent, Head of Information Protection at ABN Amro bank spoke to a diverse audience about organisational strategy around data loss. She detailed the three main causes of data loss, which are, unfortunately, a reality for any online business. As someone who started their career in cybersecurity at the sharp end (protecting against bad actor attacks), she acknowledged that it insider threats and human error are omnipresent for every company, and are more problematic to address than the third data loss vector: outsider or hacking threats.
Icent detailed some of the ways that human error and gaps in technical protections can be addressed, with relatively simple first steps like data classification (documents labelled ‘public’, ‘internal’, ‘classified’) can form the basis for measures like granular access control. Just making staff aware that specific documents are sensitive, she said, can stop them blithely yet innocently copying information to consumer cloud accounts.
IBM on agentic AI challenges
IBM’s Parul Mishra’s keynote ‘Propelling the Next Wave of AI Productivity with AI Agents Multi Orchestration’ on the AI & Big Data stage formed the basis of an interview later in the day with the TechForge team (watch this space0. We discussed local, cloud, or hybrid AI models, and the different ways that organisations can utilise the latest agentic AIs to increase productivity. Parul said that business processes and data sanitisation are mandatory elements of any AI deployment, and where agents are part of the mix, governance and human oversight need to become a standard part of operations even after AI-powered systems enter production.
Until tomorrow…
Day two of the TechEx Europe event starts at 09:00 Central European Time at RAI Amsterdam. Speakers and discussion panel members on stage include representatives from OutSystems, eBay, HelloFresh, and the European Central Bank – all before 10:00! It’s shaping up to be an exciting day both on the expo floor and at the event’s six stages. Attend if you can, but if that’s not possible, watch this space for more reports, round-ups, and exclusive interviews with speakers and exhibitors.
(Images source: TechEx. Main image, Ranya Bellouki, Snowflake)
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