This year's CES will be all virtual as with all pandemic events. Last year they brought in more than 171,000 guests, 6500 press and media, and had almost 3 million net square feet of exhibits with 4419 exhibiting companies. As one of the largest industry networking events and conferences, it will be massively different virtual. While we can expect more attendees, past virtual events have shown how burn out and the lack of networking leads to less screen time and minimal impact.
Given Microsoft's outsized presence as a technology partner for CES, the logins, the virtual event studio, and other technologies are taking advantage of the partnership. In fact, the Microsoft Studios houses four sound stages in Redmond that include the massive 60 foot by 40 foot sound stage to smaller 22 foot by 22 foot insert stages. There's some serious equipment there and two identical video control rooms with post production facilities and state of the art off-line editing. The production team is top notch so the broadcast quality and show flow will be pretty smooth.
The technology themes for this year seem to fall into a few buckets with AI, 5G,Internet of Things, and Extended reality technologies weaved into the narratives. With digital transformation accelerated five years in five months of the pandemic, major consumer trends and themes that cross into the enterprise for 2021 include healthcare, autonomous and electric vehicles, display technology advancements, smart buildings and connected devices, and eSports and virtual worlds.
A quick scan of the major announcements and sessions for this year's CES shows the seven major trends for the enterprise:
The pandemic has accelerated a lot of telehealth innovations, home monitoring, virtual health, connected areas. Omron, Philips, and Verizon are putting a lot of announcements from new products to new service offerings.
As many states and countries start the draconian shift to eliminate ICE internal combustion engines and gas cars, a lot of work is out there on electric and autonomous vehicles.
It can't be a CES without innovations in Display technologies. The big manufacturers are all pushing towards 8K and that future, we still need broadcast for that, but it's getting good along with the flexible displays that were on the show floor last year.
Constellation's seeing a rash of new smart devices that bring the home, commercial buildings, and IOT closer and easier together.
Mixed reality and extended reality continue to take place. These applications are powering remote work, training, field service applications, and even new types of experiential sales environments.
At the dawn of 2021, all across the world, compressed digital transformation is accelerating cloud adoption, digital commerce, cyber security, automation and AI. These are key technologies for 2021 and the team will be keeping a close eye on the leaders in these spaces. CES showcases the innovations for 2021 in the consumer space. So far, nothing breakthrough, however, the rapid adoption in the consumer world always paves the way for enterprise adoption. Add massive security requirements, enterprise class scale, and an understanding of adoption paths, and these trends will pervasively emerge in the enterprise leader's priority list.