A Day of Innovation in Prague

Lanner’s Oliver Bird shares his experience presenting at last month’s technology.future 2016 conference in Prague.

I recently had the opportunity to present alongside Andrew Aitken at the technology.future 2016 conference in picturesque Prague, organised by our good friends at Dynamic Future. The most striking aspect of this innovation day was the contrast between the cutting edge technology topics being discussed and the fantastic splendour of the 300 year old monastery in which the presentations took place.

The day was full of varied and fascinating talks on innovative use cases of cutting edge IT. It was a great opportunity to meet and network with other inventive organisations, and appreciate that although we operate in many different fields of IT, common themes were apparent –decision makers will be needing to make more decisions, over shorter timeframes, in more areas of their business world, resulting in a need to connect such business problem owners directly with advanced predictive analytics to help them make decisions with maximum confidence.

Virtual Reality featured heavily at the event, and there was consensus that now is the time for VR to come out of the ‘techie’ gaming world and into everyday use as a core principle within a “digital factory” strategy. We demonstrated our unique capability to provide immersive, stereoscopic flythroughs of WITNESS dynamic simulations within the industry leading Visionary Render environment from Virtalis.

Lanner presented our latest WITNESS Horizon software and developments in enabling deployment of dynamic simulation assets on the cloud, and highlighted how predictive simulation will become an even more critical activity due to the significant increases in complexity, connectedness and volatility resulting from big organisational changes through initiatives like Industry 4.0 and IIOT. Click here to read a recent blog from Andrew on this.

There were many presentations including those on geo-navigation, BI, Industry 4.0, the future of lean, 3D printing, big data, augmented reality and ERP optimization. Over the day it was impressive to see that the pace of change in technology is higher than ever before, and reassuring to validate that within that context Lanner’s vision of the role of dynamic simulation overlays precisely on such a demand for technological and organisational change.