We just came back from a week of wonders in Las Vegas. And what a week it was!
This was the first we've attended CES since pre-Covid and you can definitely say that CES is BACK! Last year at Kognic we set sail at geographical presence expansion and Go-to-Market acceleration. Since then, we have not only massively strengthened our presence in Europe but also opened up US and Japanese markets (more on that next week!)
Part of that is also focused participation at key industry events and I must say that CES turned out to be perfect for Kognic. Our existing, and, hopefully, future customers were there. We had a very busy and successful week filled with meetings and discussions about what is happening at the market and where things are going.
Based on discussions with OEM’s, Tier 1’s and Tier 2’s, I can draw two main conclusions:
- In-house developed solutions reach their limit - In any new enterprise software market there is a trend that large enterprises fall into - this trend is “let’s build it on our own”. It comes from the fact that at the beginning (in the case of ADAS/AD it was 2017/2018), there is never a mature enough tech and there are no right ways of doing it. It’s exploration by trial. As the market matures, so do the in-house solutions until the moment where their complexity reaches the point where they require significant resources to advance. Many enterprises realize/make a decision then that, since building these in-house solutions is not their core business, they should look for something outside. We had many meetings where this was confirmed and it looks like we are at the inflection point. The Automotive industry is clearly looking companies in the ADAS/AD field, with experience in sensor-fusion and dataset management, for potential partnership. Lucky for us Kognic is the leader here! The challenges we see, are the problems we solve...
- Centralized data management platform - In the ADAS/AD world, data is flowing from many different sources. That also means many different vendors. It used to be the case that each vendor has been delivering their own software platform and datafeeds, catering for their specific type of data. Aggregating that input and making sense out of it has been a daunting task for the automotive companies, often leading to the in-house development decision. My discussions have indicated that simplifying that process has a tremendous value to our market's customers. Not only having one source of truth for your datasets would solve the complexity, but also make all datasets, regardless of the source, universally available to the engineering, development and product teams, drastically increasing the overall velocity of the projects they run. Some time ago we made a strategic decision to go exactly that route and enable our customers to manage their sensor fusion datasets seamlessly.
To conclude, CES was a great experience. and I’m humbled by the amount of the positive feedback we’ve got on our ability to support the industry with our platform, people and expertise.
We are already gearing up for CES in 2025!