Hannover Messe 2018 took place from April 23rd through April 27th at the Hannover Fairground in Hannover, Germany, and was held in conjuction with CeMAT 2018, a trade fair centering on intralogistics and supply chain management. This year’s show drew approximately 210,000 attendees and featured 5,000 exhibitors from 75 countries including the 2018 official partner country, Mexico. Though attendance was down from last year’s record 225,000 visitors, the fairground’s five million square feet of exhibition space remained jam-packed from open to close each day.

The official theme of Hannover Messe 2018, Integrated Industry—Connect & Collaborate, was evident throughout each exhibition hall, with companies of all sizes touting the progress and accomplishments enabled by customers, technology partners, consortia, and other third-party relationships. With IoT platforms once again top of mind for attendees and exhibitors alike, the theme of connectivity and collaboration was perhaps best exemplified by the EdgeX Foundry. EdgeX is an open source project backed by the Linux Foundation that has built a vendor-neutral framework for IoT edge computing. Announced a year ago at Hannover Messe 2017, EdgeX now has more than 70 member organizations working together to create a technology agnostic open source platform, each contributing its own piece of the puzzle.

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