Published: May 9th, 2017

Last week between May 1st – 2nd, CENGN attended the 2017 Wavefront Summit in Toronto, Ontario.
The summit was held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, with over 445 people registered for the event, including government representatives, procurement specialists, small to medium enterprises (SMEs), startups, and media. Many CENGN members attended the event, including Rogers, Invest Ottawa, Juniper Networks, Cisco, and TELUS. The summit focused on increasing enterprise competitiveness and relevance in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Digital Transformation industry. The schedule was jam-packed with talks from keynote speakers like Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Executive Director of the Privacy and Big Data Institute, Nitin Kawale, President of Rogers’ Enterprise Business unit, and Amanda Lang, Anchor for Bloomberg TV Canada and bestselling Author of The Power of Why. The two-day event covered top of mind topics in Canada’s emerging technology sector, such as smart cities, privacy issues, and IoT adoption through explorative panel discussions. The Wavefront Summit also included the B2B Meeting Program, where facilitated one-on-one meetings matched enterprises and government with IoT providers. A pitch competition showcased cutting edge IoT companies, and the innovation showcase featured businesses offering innovative IoT solutions. Finally, a networking reception was held to connect peers, partners, customers, and thought leaders.

CENGN was proud to sponsor the event and become as involved as possible with all the Summit had to offer. Ritch Dusome, CENGN’s President and CEO, spoke in a panel called NextGen Communications Technologies: What’s New, What’s Necessary, about trending technology and next generation networks (NGN). Sierra Wireless, Orange, and eleven-x, a newly made partner of CENGN, also contributed to the panel as key commentators. Richard Waterhouse, Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, also attended the event where he participated as a judge in the pitch competition, and Esha Abrol, Business Development Manager, met with Canadian SMEs and other organizations in attendance. Making the sponsorship that much sweeter, CENGN was able to bring along Expeto and Pilot Things, two SMEs that attended the summit to gain company exposure, and connect with other industry leaders.

Expeto is an affiliate member of CENGN that offers the entire LTE core network stack in a platform as a service model. In the past, CENGN and Expeto have collaborated on different projects, like the deployment of Scalable Virtual EPC, a proof of concept (PoC) demonstrating a new method of rapidly deploying and managing end-to-end, cloud-based LTE core networks. Pilot Things specializes in providing IoT and VPN services to easily display, explore and create business processes. We are currently collaborating with Pilot Things on a project using their private network software, and are excited to see where our results can take the company.

 
Overall, it was great seeing so many competitors coming together for the common goal of sharing telecommunications and IoT advancements. CENGN is all about encouraging an environment of co-opetition where organizations can come together to share their knowledge and technology, to promote the commercialization and growth of the information and communications industry in Canada. We love getting to put this mantra into practice at events like Wavefront’s 2017 Summit, where industry leaders collaborate with one another to share ideas, connect, and innovate.

 
We’d like to extend a big thanks to Wavefront for hosting such an awesome summit, allowing us and our affiliate SMEs to showcase cutting edge technology, connect with other business leaders, and expand our knowledge about the NGN and IoT industry.

About the Author

CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, drives technology innovation and industry growth through our testbed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem. Through our projects, CENGN enables small and medium Canadian Enterprises to test and validate promising technologies, removing barriers to product commercialization and accelerating market growth.

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