After an insightful conference session during the IT One Gala 2020, organised by the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce and the Farvest group on Tuesday 1 December in the context of Digital ICT Week, with several keynote speakers sharing their expertise, many digital participants gathered to attend the online ceremony of the Luxembourg ICT Awards which was moderated by Lisa Burke.
Patrick Laurent (Partner, ACG Leader & Innovation Leader, Deloitte Luxembourg) officially opened the ceremony and stated: “I remember attending the first edition back in 2007, competing for the CIO of the Year award and making many friends. Every year, the whole community meets and connects. The role of the CIO is pivotal in shaping the future of our organisations. At the dawn of 2021, we need to stay ahead of the curve and adopt new trends and set Luxembourg as an innovative hub in Europe. The role of tech within organisations has evolved; it is just a not support function anymore but the language of business strategy. The road will be long and full of surprises but we are ready for it”.
The first prize of the evening, “Outstanding Business Federator” was presented by Kamel Amroune to Carlo Thelen (CEO / Director General, Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce). The CEO of the Chamber of Commerce added: “our main goal is to offer the best possible help to businesses. We launched several initiatives and provided tailor made advice to SME so that they can survive and bounce back. We also worked, along with the House of Entrepreneurship, on setting up a COVID helpline, and focused on providing online training sessions, etc.”
Kamel Amroune stayed on the virtual stage and awarded the Inspirational ICT Personality of the Year award to Jerome Grandidier, a well-known entrepreneur and seasoned start-upper in Luxembourg, who recently passed away. He was the president of LuxFactory and the Luxembourg Start-up Federation, the founder of MySardines, and had been leading the Luxembourg delegation at the CES in Las Vegas for several years. Julien Dussot (CEO of Telecom Luxembourg International) joined Kamel and added: “Jerome would have loved winning such a prize. He was a great entrepreneur with thousands of ideas, and was always there to help companies with his precious pieces of advice”.
POST was named Telecom Company of the Year. The jury members notably highlighted the introduction of several new products to guarantee more flexibility and security to customers. Moreover, POST adapted the format and content of its annual IoT event to COVID's situation19 "Space Management, reinventing the working environment”.
The Best use of AI & Data prize was awarded to Deloitte Luxembourg. Deloitte’s AI lab has developed relevant products within the field of Visual Intelligence. Its Visual Intelligence solutions are based on advanced AI techniques with underlying Neural Networks. Providers can connect with fully trained AI models through an API connection.
Deloitte Luxembourg won a second prize in a row: it was named Digital Transformation Project of the Year. The company was recognized for assisting Enovos in its digital transition to improve the customer experience and develop new technological offers. Deloitte notably enabled the implementation of a Cloud Salesforce Service, which allowed agents to track customer demand across multiple channels for easy follow-up.
Telindus was named Cloud Innovation Provider of the Year. The company developed a set of automatisms and tools, able to provide in a few minutes virtual desktop infrastructures based on Windows virtual desktop technology. The automation enabled by Telindus drastically reduces the cost of the infrastructure, for the benefit of the customer.
The title of ICT Security Provider of the Year was then awarded to Excellium Services. Its CSIRT team develops tools and services to go after malicious activities (monitoring of sensitive forums and phishing activities, tracking of hacking groups, deploying automatic tools to block attacks…). Over the last 12 months, it engaged on 58 customer incidents in 5 countries and 2 continents.
NTT Ltd. Luxembourg won the ICT Business Partner of the Year Award. NTT believes that the digitisation of healthcare holds the key to responding to some of the urgent questions of today. Back in March, the company worked with Laboratoires Réunis on a multi-cloud solution that ensures that clinical information is securely stored on Laboratoires Réunis’s private cloud, with the AWS cloud providing the scalability needed for the rest of the solution, in a secure manner.
The prize of ICT Strategic Advisor of the Year was awarded to PwC Luxembourg. The company was able to provide the expertise that allowed its clients to re-think, optimize, source, and control their IT to deliver the modern day demands of the business. It notably provided assistance to one of its clients to boost the overall efficiency by introducing new technologies and enabling Agile/Lean/DevOps way of working.
EBRC was named ICT Outsourcing Services Provider of the Year, for its collaboration with i-Hub and BGL BNP Paribas in the deployment of an innovative and secure KYC utility made in Luxembourg. By picking EBRC’s Managed Services, i-Hub inherited a ready-to-use performant ICT environment natively compatible with the finance Industry compliance/security requirements as PFS, ISO27001–22301.
This year’s special prize, focusing on efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, the “Extraordinary IT Support” award was given to NTT Ltd. Luxembourg for its collaboration with Laboratoires Réunis, the Luxembourg government and the National Institute of Health, in the creation of the mass scale testing project. This multi-cloud solution allows 20,000 tests per day to be carried out with total visibility on the status of the tests and their delivery.
Then, the ICT Team of the Year prize was awarded to Creos. The team was notably rewarded for the successful implementation and integration of a Workforce Management solution with mobile capabilities, enabling to fully digitize the field service workforce. They also set up a highly secured daily meter data transmission (100+ millions load curves) to all Luxembourg Energy Market Partners within the timeframes set by the regulator.
The event ended with Patrick Laurent virtually handing over the CIO of the Year award to Philipp Jäggi (CIO, Laboratoires Réunis). Along with his team, he transformed the IT Department of Laboratoires Réunis from a cost centre to an innovation powerhouse. Moreover, the jury members highlighted the implementation of the large-scale testing project.
