...the newly formed Alcatel Lucent, which merged earlier this year. She will talk about the rationale behind the move and where she sees the telecoms industry going.
But CeBIT will also be branching out into new areas of information provision. First, it will launch CeBIT Next, a portal to enable attendees to network, share ideas and rate each other's suggestions. The portal was jointly designed and implemented by IBM and Deutsche Messe, the exhibition company that owns CeBIT, and will be divided into three key areas — Future Fair, Future Work/Life and Future Health.
The second initiative is CeBIT TV, a web TV initiative that will be broadcast all year round and offers three channels. Create will be aimed at IT professionals, Trade will be targeted at resellers and Use will focus on IT users who are interested in industry developments from both a professional and personal point of view.
This is all a far cry from 1986, when CeBIT first came into being as an offshoot of the Hanover Export Fair. The latter was set up in 1947 by Deutsche Messe AG, an organisation that was created at the instigation of British occupying forces in Hanover in consultation with the commander-in-chief of the American zone.
The aim of the fair was to try and restart Germany's export trade in order to make her economically self-reliant again, after the devastation of the Second World War. As a result, the profile of Hermes, the god of trade, was chosen as the show's logo, and is still used as the Hanover Fair's moniker today.
Prüser explains the rationale: "The military government decided to do a trade fair to try and kick start the German economy and it was one of the most successful ideas that any British government has had. In fact, Prince Andrew once said that the only thing he wasn't satisfied with was that 'we handed the Hanover Messe over to the Germans'."
By 1950, however, the Hanover Fair had been renamed the German Industrial Fair or Deutsche Industrie-Messe and office equipment — as high tech kit was then known — was the third largest exhibitor group.
But by 1970, the category had risen in importance to such an extent that Deutsche Messe AG opened Hall One, which later found its way into the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest single-storey exhibition space.
With the inauguration of the new hall, the decision was taken to re-brand the high-tech exhibition as the Centre for Office and Information Technology, or CeBIT (Centrum fuer Buero und Informationstechnik). But the number of exhibitors and attendees continued to expand in line with the growth of the sector and by 1986, it was decided to spin it off as a separate trade show, to be followed a month later by the original Hanover Fair.
The organisers now claim that CeBIT is the largest IT trade show in the world, and they even host various satellite shows in different regions of the world such as Shanghai, Istanbul and Sydney.
"CeBIT's main differentiator is that it looks at a broad range of topics. There are lots of specialist shows, but CeBIT is the only one to combine different areas, all of which have a synergy between them," concludes Prüser.
