PAC analysts participated at the ZF High-Tech Innovation Summit in Bucharest, along with Microsoft, Ericsson, Vodafone, ING, and many others.
Last Friday, September 29, 2023, Iulia Sandut and Eugen Schwab-Chesaru participated in the ZF High-Tech Innovation Summit in Bucharest. The event was focused on the innovation areas of the IT industry in Romania, the impact of the high-speed adoption of AI tools, the increasing added value of the services provided by the IT teams based in Romania, and the overall digital transformation of the Romanian economy and competitive landscape in the context of the major challenges of the labor market and the general literacy of the population of the country.
Together with IT market top executives such as Bogdan Putinica, the Country Manager of Microsoft for Romania, Eugen Schwab-Chesaru was invited to be a speaker at the ZF High-Tech Innovation Summit in Bucharest, participating in the first panel called “Infrastructure for Innovation: From Education to Communication Networks.”.
He has underlined that the digital transformation and the accelerated adoption of innovative solutions strongly depend on three main pillars: the availability of the technology itself, the digital education and openness of the people, and the availability of the capital needed for investing in research and development, but also on transforming the way companies and state bodies work and interact today.
Eugen has also mentioned the positive impact of the delivery centers developed in Romania by large global IT providers, as they offered Romanian IT specialists the opportunity to stay in the country and work on projects for some of the largest and most complex organizations worldwide.
The number of R&D centers based in Romania and the number of software products (with local or international IP) developed in Romania are on a positive trend and influence the overall perception of the local IT industry.
However, local IT spending remains one of the smallest and least mature in the region, with a high growth potential but largely dependent on the trend set by the government and state-controlled institutions and companies, together with the high trust of investors (local and international) in the country’s social, political, and fiscal stability for healthy economic growth.
When discussing the IoT demand in Romania, Eugen also mentioned that the local market needs to catch up to the more mature ones in Eastern Europe, such as Poland or the Czech Republic.