Smart Nation Expo returns to the Malaysia International Trade and Exhibition Centre in Kuala Lumpur, opening on the seventeenth of November and running for three days. The event is organised by Invest Selangor and is positioned as a national digital transformation and smart city exhibition with a procurement focus.
The programme is organised into zones covering smart infrastructure, smart properties and developments, smart security, smart banking and smart agriculture. The audience is public sector procurement teams, state agencies, telecommunications operators and systems integrators, which is a narrower and more transactional group than a general technology exhibition attracts. The previous edition was held at the same venue and was covered by the national press, so the series is established rather than new.
Smart city programmes in Southeast Asia have tended to founder on integration rather than on technology selection. Individual deployments in lighting, traffic management, utilities metering and public safety are mature and widely available; what is scarce is the procurement capability to specify systems that talk to each other and the governance to decide who owns the resulting data. An exhibition aimed at procurement officers rather than at chief technology officers is addressing that gap directly.
The Selangor sponsorship is worth noting for anyone assessing the commercial value of attending. State level investment promotion agencies in Malaysia have been the practical route to market for infrastructure technology vendors, because the states hold many of the relevant service responsibilities and let many of the relevant contracts. A vendor meeting state agencies at a single venue is compressing a long business development cycle.
