2013 Advantech World Partner Conference (WPC) was grandly held in Suzhou China on November 21~23, 2013 with more than 500 partners attending this event. During the three days of activities themed on "Partnering for Smart City & IoT Solutions", Advantech clearly delivered the messages that how the new era of IoT will bring new opportunities to the traditional embedded market and how the company will strive for the next phase of significant growth.
During his keynote speech titled "Leadership in Integrated Embedded Computing Solutions" KC Liu, CEO of Advantech, shared with the audience about the transformation of embedded business development and Advantech's strategies to address this evolution.
Smart City & IoT to Drive Huge Opportunities
This year is Advantech's thirty-year anniversary, and the company has also achieved USD 1 billion of revenue this year. "For the past thirty years, Advantech has become one of the global leaders in embedded computing," said KC Liu. "When asked about the future of Advantech's next thirty years, I think the answer is clear: smart city and IoT solutions."
According to IDC, there will be 25B IoT devices installed by 2020 to enable smart city, and it is estimated that the market size of Smart city and IoT will reach USD 10 trillion in 2030.
"I believe that in the coming 30 years, most cities in the world will become smart cities, enabled by technologies of IoT, sensors, iConnectivity, industrial cloud, embedded computing, and many integrated vertical solutions. With a huge number of things will be connected intelligently, there are great opportunities in front of us."
The industry is just at the beginning of this great revolution, and it still takes time for each solution to get matured. But with the firm believe that smart city solutions will be able to change the world and people's lives, KC Liu emphasized, "It's our job to make it happen."
"In response to the mega trend, the smart city industry will take a paradigm shift from horizontally-integrated PC era to segmented vertical solutions provided by domain focused system integrators. The winner in the smart city era will be B2B SI-oriented players like most of us."
"Embedded computer and intelligent systems are the building blocks for smart city and IoT solutions, which are also the two main focuses of this conference. I'd like to make every partner aware that Advantech does not only selling computing boards, but also the leading provider of the core building blocks for upcoming new era."
Initiating Sector-Lead Business Transformation
As the industry is moving towards the new IoT era, the traditional business model will also need to be adapted. KC stated that, Advantech is making transformation from previous product-lead business structure to Sector-lead business structure.
Under this structure, Advantech will grow its global sales forces in iAutomation, Embedded Market and iService market respectively. Also, the company will pursue IoT evolution with i-Cloud and intelligent systems, covering intelligent video, network security, industrial cloud, equipment builder, and intelligent transportation.
At the same time, In order to upgrade Advantech's offerings, it is evolving embedded business model from General platform, to application ready platform (ARP), and further to service ready platform/package (SRP).
KC Liu explained that for the past years, Advantech has successfully transformed from general embedded platform providers to application ready platform (ARP) providers, focusing on building domain dedicated system platforms for a wide range of applications, including medical computing, POS, KIOSK, and digital signage, etc.
In the next phase, Advantech will evolve itself again to SRP, covering domain focused integration services, ARP hardware, software solution, and industrial cloud, with the aim to realizing the vision of iRetail, iHospital, iBuilding, intelligent video and more. By doing so, Advantech will be able off SRP to its SI customers and make their jobs much easier.
Chaney Ho, President of Advantech, echoed KC's statement. Ho pointed out that Advantech will change its business model from product selling to application and solutions selling and from regional sales to global integrated sector sales.
In addition to this, Advantech is also setting up Local Growth Team (LGT), aiming to connect headquarter resources and then develop China needed products, so as to distribute them globally with competitive prices.
Under this transformation, Ho is very optimistic about Advantech's future growth, saying, "We have taken 30 years to achieve USD 1B revenue. But with three key factors, including smart city and IoT era, sector-lead transformation, and collaborate with global partners, I believe we will be able to reach USD 2B revenue by 2018, only 5 years from now."
In the end, Liu stressed that through collaborating, Advantech and partners can develop integrated and innovated solutions together to realize the vision of smart city. "The opportunity to change the world is in front of us," he said.
2013 Advantech World Partner Conference (WPC) was grandly held in Suzhou China on November 21~23, 2013 with more than 500 partners attending this event.
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