MWC Barcelona 2020 Coming Under Dark Clouds of Coronavirus

Amdocs and Accedian become the latest vendors to withdraw their MWC Barcelona plans for this year

Over the past many years - Mobile World Congress, Barcelona has been a marquee event for the telecoms space and everybody who is anybody in the telecom and communications sphere, has attended it at least once in their career.

Dark clouds of Coronavirus outbreak, happened in China's Wuhan - is changing this pretty fast as two more major vendors operating in the telecom space have announced that they are backing out from the event because of the hightened risk of global outbreak.

On the other side, GSMA, the telecoms body driving MWC, quite successfully for many years has issued its set of increased precautionary measures and guidelines. So far this does not seem to be working as a number of vendor are thinking on the lines that 'precaution is always better than prevention'.

In the latest news, Amdocs and Accedian - both have announced that they will not be participating at MWC Barcelona 2020. They join an increasing list of globally strong vendors such as Ericsson, Sony and Amazon who have already shelved their plans to showcase their innovations at this years event.

Amdocs Not Attending MWC Barcelona 2020

Amdocs, a global provider of software and services to communications and media companies, has announced that it is prioritizing the health and safety of its employees, customers and partners and will not attend the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2020 in Barcelona.

“In the face of the public health concern from the novel coronavirus, we are placing the highest priority on protecting the health of our employees, customers and partners. While we appreciate the precautionary measures put into place by the GSMA, we believe the safest option is not to attend MWC 2020 in Barcelona,” said Shuky Sheffer, president and chief executive officer, Amdocs.

Amdocs intends to hold business meetings and workshops at our customers’ offices to showcase the amdocsONE portfolio, including new 5G, cloud, monetization and media solutions.

Accedian withdraws from MWC20

Accedian, a global player in performance analytics and end user experience solutions, has decided to withdraw from the Mobile World Congress event being held in Barcelona, Spain on Feb. 24-27, due to concerns regarding the recent outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

“After careful consideration, we have taken the decision to withdraw from MWC 2020. This was not a decision taken lightly. We’ve been extensively following the development of the virus and the recommendations of the WHO, and we have come to the conclusion that we must take the necessary precautions to protect our most cherished and valued assets: our employees,” said Dion Joannou, CEO, Accedian.

As a staple of MWC, Accedian was fully prepared to showcase demonstrations of its industry leading network performance and end user experience solutions within 5G and edge computing environments.

Accedian will connect with customers, partners and prospects in the coming weeks to demonstrate these technologies and other innovations within the Company’s portfolio.

vivo withdraws from MWC Barcelona 2020

Chinese smartphone player - vivo is the latest one to announce its withdrawl from the upcoming Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2020.

In a statement issued to media organisations, the brand has mentioned that it not going to participate at this year's MWC Barcelona due to the ongoing developments in Coronavirus outbreak.

"vivo has been closely monitoring the Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia (NCP) outbreak and continuously evaluating planned activities. The health and safety of our employees and the public are our top priority. Based on the present situation, we have decided to withdraw from our debut at MWC 2020 and other related events later this month in Barcelona, Spain.

We will soon introduce the APEX 2020 concept phone which we had originally planned to showcase at MWC. We will share more updates in due course," vivo said in the statement.

The story is last updated on 02/11/2020 at 02:40 PM IST