SGS opens new global IoT Competence Center

SGS recently announced the opening of an Internet of Things (IoT) Competence Center in Madrid, partnering with Swisscom, Vodafone and Microsoft. The center will develop innovative solutions to digitalize testing, inspection and certification (TIC) services using IoT technology.

The digitalization of TIC services is rapidly expanding as the IoT market is growing at a compound annual rate of 20%. To accelerate the digitalization of its services, SGS has partnered with Swisscom, Vodafone and Microsoft to open a global IoT Competence Center in Madrid, Spain.

The new center will focus on the development of innovative services to offer real-time and round-the-clock monitoring systems. One example of a solution currently in development, is an IoT service to control the quality of agricultural goods when stored in a warehouse.

“At SGS, we have a strong culture of innovation as we are constantly looking for new ways to deliver high quality services to our customers. In this new center, we will develop cutting-edge inspection technology tailored to our needs and those of our customers”, said Fred Herren, Senior Vice President Digital and Innovation at SGS.

“The IoT Competence Center in Madrid will attract many international experts from a wide range of disciplines to work together and look at future challenges from new angles”, says Marianne Janik, General Manager of Microsoft Switzerland. “This is exactly the kind of collaboration needed to build truly new and customer-focused solutions for the future.”

"IoT needs a mature ecosystem. We are proud to deliver within this ecosystem global, secure and dedicated IoT network solutions, thus enabling SGS to focus fully on their use case," says Julian Dömer, Head of IoT at Swisscom. The collected data will be stored and analyzed using Microsoft technology and Cloud services running on Azure.

Beyond agricultural goods, the IoT Competence Center is developing IoT inspection technology for the public, health, industrial manufacturing, mining and energy sectors. By doing so, the company will contribute to building smart cities and environments for a more sustainable society.