Catalan companies display their products at Europe’s largest digital industry trade fair in Hannover

Hannover (ACN).- Catalan software is present at the digital industry’s main trade fair in Europe, CeBIT, which is taking place in the German city of Hannover between March  6^th and March 10^th. Catalan companies will showcase a broad range of products such as virtual desks made by FlexxibleIT, an automatic cash point by ICG Software, a new packaging line for mobile phone accessories by Atlantis Internacional, and consulting services on innovation offered by Bax & Willems, originally a Dutch company that moved its headquarters to Barcelona.

Sebastià Prat, CEO of Flexxible IT, believes that “ internationalisation is the key element for growth”. He ensured his company’s presence in CeBIT “reaffirms the strategy of being present in new markets”. In a similar line, Andreu Pi, President of ICG Sofware, believes his business is mainly successful for the clients it has abroad.

Catalan products in Hannover

CeBIT is “the most important trade fair in Europe” for ICT companies, stated Lazlo Bax, Director of the consulting firm Bax & Willems. “There are large and small companies” and “it is the ideal place” to present the sector’s new products, he explained. Bax & Willems is a company born 15 years ago in the Netherlands that then moved its headquarters to Barcelona, since they thought “it would make sense” to cover “the South of Europe” from the Catalan capital. They also keep an office in Amsterdam.

They are presenting a service they have developed together with a Catalan consulting firm GFT Consulting. It is “a methodology to innovate with a client”, Bax explained. “Cooperation between companies and clients is fostered to find possibilities for innovation”, especially regarding banks and insurance companies.

Another Catalan company in Hannover’s CeBIT is Atlantis Internacional, based in Greater Barcelona, in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. The company, which produces mobile phone accessories, was also present at the Mobile World Congress, the world’s main trade fair on mobile phones and related technologies and services that takes place in Barcelona every year at the end of February. “Hannover is more about new technologies, not so much about applications and new ways of using mobile phones” as Barcelona is about, explained Andrés Alvarez, member of Atlantis’ Internacional’s Marketing department.

At this year’s CeBIT, Atlantis Internacional presents a new packaging and mobile accessories product line. According to Alvarez, “it is radically different” to the sector trends, based on phone cases with colours and photos. He explained that this new line was “a great success” at the Mobile World Congress”.

The Lleida-based company ICG Software presents a completely different range of products. ICG Software has been in the business for the past 27 years. Several years ago they presented cash points that allow a supermarket client to pay for the products “without the clerk having to touch the money”, explained the company’s President Andreu Pi. This year in Hannover they are presenting three new versions of the product: a basic system, another that includes a printer and a scanner and allows for self-purchase, and a system with an anti-vandalism device, which might be installed in facilities without surveillance, such as petrol stations. It is “the exit of the company” since this “smart money-holding drawer, the CashDro, allows the company’s cash points to always tally their numbers in the evening, always have the amount of money it has been sold, there is never a deviation of the sold amount”, ensures Pi.

Another of the Catalan companies present is Flexxible IT, based in Terassa, in Greater Barcelona. They will showcase “the last novelty in virtual desks, in cloud computing”, a product that will begin to be distributed in April. This product is mainly designed “for large companies and companies from the Ibex-35”, explained Pi. The software allows the desk of a company to be available online, and it answers a demand from the sector. “They preferred this alternative to their own cloud installed in a Data Centre”, Flexxible IT explained.