The 2017 European Technology Showcase, run by Ntegra Greenside and Bird & Bird took place in Helsinki on Thursday 26th to Friday 27th October. Aimed at VCs, CIOs, CTOs and other senior technology leaders, this was the latest instalment of the showcase which has visited key Bird & Bird locations in Copenhagen, Madrid, Munich and Prague in recent years.
The showcase provides a platform for innovative technology companies to present their products and services to an audience of international c-level technology decision makers, demonstrating how their products deliver significant value by driving innovation and disruption in their markets. While for the c-level technology professionals it provides a great opportunity to develop a better understanding of the products being developed by some of most prominent start-ups and SMES in the region.
Thursday 26th October – Bird & Bird Helsinki
The showcase, hosted at Bird & Bird's office in central Helsinki, opened with a welcome from Ntegra Greenside. Bird & Bird corporate partner Maria Carlsson introduced Nordic Venture Capital company Inventure who presented on the competitiveness of the Nordic Tech-start-up eco system, while addressing the correlation between the slowdown of investment in the US with activity across the Nordics.
The second presentation came from Enreach, a SaaS (Software as a Service) data analytics tool which fuses behavioural and semantic online data with market research data to create audience profiles and enables targeted advertising to selected audiences.
San Francisco based Anaplan presented their cloud planning platform which helps organisations to run planning process by connecting data, people and plans throughout a business. Anaplan invited local Finnish logistics client Posti to jointly present a case study on how connected planning can be achieved across an organisation to improve efficiencies and collaboration.
HoxHunt, a Finnish cybersecurity and gaming company, discussed how they work with organisations to simulate phishing attacks via an intelligent game engine which creates challenges for users in the form of phishing emails and text messages. Employees start identifying and reporting the attacks and HoxHunts's Artificial Intelligence handles all the data inflow, providing real time conflict status and management for the organisation.
Kompozure claim to be the only company in Finland specialising in Microsoft Azure, offering reliable and scalable backend solutions. Kompozure help start-ups, software vendors and enterprises design, build, migrate or re-engineer custom applications on Microsoft Azure PaaS (Platform as a Service). As well as consulting on cloud strategy, governance, security, deployment, migration, application audits, application modernisation and new applications.
The Curious AI Company is a research organisation developing advanced artificial intelligence (AI), by focusing on semi-supervised and unsupervised machine learning, which takes the human brain as its model. The Curious AI Company gave a thought provoking presentation on using unsupervised machine learning to create the digital co-workers of the future.
Cloud hosting company UpCloud presented the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offering it supplies from multiple data centres around the world. UpCloud was recently ranked by the "Fast 50" program as the third fastest growing technology company Finland.
Another US company Pivotal demonstrated how they enable companies to transform with a modern approach focused on building, rather than buying, software. Overcoming challenges associated with lengthy enterprise IT cycles by accelerating application delivery.
The final presentation came from LeadDesk, a scalable cloud-based software solution designed for multiple sites, teams and campaigns focused on telesales.
Day one closed with a brief presentation by Sakari Halonen head of Bird & Bird's Tech & Comms group in Finland. Sakari discussed data and the value chain of information, and how organisations need to effectively use contracts to manage, define, agree and enrich data.
In addition to Sakari and Maria, Helsinki partners Kimmo Reina and Ella Mikkola also contributed to a number of the discussions held throughout the day.
Friday 27th October - M-Files
The second day of the showcase moved to a new location, the Technopolis business park in the city of Espoo, west of Helsinki.
M-Files were hosts for the day and showcased how their Enterprise Management Solution can improve and simplify how businesses manage documents and other information to improve productivity and efficiency throughout the organisation.
The next presentation came from Finnish company Tosibox who demonstrated their hardware based remote access solution which creates a fully secure remote connection between devices. Designed for ease of set up and simple management of devices and user groups.
Flashnode presented their one-stop service for business app connections which automates a variety of manual tasks by transferring data between payment and point of sale systems, accounting software and online store systems.
Kontena from Helsinki discussed their open source container platform for orchestrating applications that are run on docker containers. It simplifies deploying and running containerised applications on any infrastructure.
Aves Netsec was another Finnish cyber security platform which focused on internal threats. Acting as a deceptive security system for enterprises who want to capture, observe and mitigate bad actors in their internal network. By drawing intelligence from cyber attackers the Aves solution enables enterprises to understand attacker motives, build risk profiles and quantify attack impacts and subsequently improve their security posture.
Founded by ex-Nokia employees, Haltian is one of the most successful and globally acknowledged Nokia spin-offs. Haltian demonstrated products which fuse IoT (Internet of Things) expertise with Nordic design. Providing high quality devices and robust data layer services to support the creation of new IoT business solutions.
RiiSK a Risk Management consulting company provided a high level overview of the impact of GPDR.
The final presentation came from mobile software solutions company Pajat Solutions demonstrating Poimapper a mobile cloud solution that helps field teams work more efficiently, in areas such as industrial inspection/mapping, retail execution, market research, environmental services, rural healthcare & development program monitoring.
London partners Roger Bickerstaff and Howard Rubin attended the full two days and commented:
"This is our 5th European Showcase partnering with VGC client Ntegra. Not only is it a great way for our offices to show off their capabilities to their local VC's and tech companies but is a superb way of showing the depth of our network to senior management of clients and potential clients who joined from England, Scotland and Norway." Howard Rubin
"Through running the Showcase on a regular basis with Ntegra we are further developing Bird & Bird's profile in this important area. The attendees are asking about future events and, as Howard has said, it is a great way of spending time with C-suite executives over an extended period." Roger Bickerstaff
Helsinki partner Sakari Halonen added: "From the Finnish and Nordic perspective, we were delighted to host the event in Helsinki this year. This was a great opportunity for us to network with the senior technology leaders and to provide the local tech companies with the opportunity to showcase their solutions, services and future opportunities."
