By Emmanuel Oluebube, Correspondent UK

European trailblazers in the fields of AI, analytics, and data management were celebrated on June 7 in a special awards webcast hosted by IDC. Category winners and runners-up showcased some of the most impressive and impactful technology projects across the continent.

Despite the challenges of the past 12 months, many nominees demonstrated incredible strategic agility as they used data-related innovation to respond to the challenges brought by pandemic.

Nominations were open to organizations based in Europe, and recognize excellence across three categories:

Innovation with AI. Here, the IDC judges were looking for enterprise initiatives and projects that leverage AI (based on machine learning or deep learning) techniques and technologies to deliver new products or services or radically transform a business process.   Four organizations were shortlisted in this category: Aksigorta, HSBC, Zopa, and NHSBSA. The overall winner was Aksigorta, for its market-beating AI-driven insurance pricing model.

“Aksigorta is a game changer by injecting AI into underwriting excellence.”

Data-powered business. In this category, the IDC judges were looking for enterprises that have used first-, second-, or third-party data to create new business insights that lead to exemplary material business impacts (for example, a significant change in business or customer focus, a new product or service opportunity, an operational efficiency improvement or risk reduction).

Four organizations were shortlisted in this category: Lloyds of London, Molslinjen, Castor, and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (WWL). The overall winner was Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for its innovative data-powered hospital capacity forecasting system.

“The award is a fantastic achievement for WWL and symbolizes the hard work across the organization in recording and using data to make the right clinical, operational, and strategic decisions for the Trust, but most importantly for our patients.” (WWL)

Data management excellence. Nominations in this category were from enterprises that could demonstrate significant advances in their ability to effectively and efficiently manage data at scale, for business advantage.

Three organizations were shortlisted in this category: United Group, Commerzbank, and ENGIE. The overall winner was ENGIE, for a truly modernized approach to data architecture.

“ENGIE’s Common Data Hub is a data collaboration space to share data and to develop at scale analytics use cases in order to enable a data-driven company.” (ENGIE)

IDC assembled a highly experienced team of expert judges for these awards:

• AVP, European Software Group, Philip Carnelley
• Research director, European Services, Ewa Zborowska
• Research director, EMEA Telecoms and Networking, James Eibisch
• Programme manager, European Software, Edyta Kosowska
• Research director, European Intelligent Application Services, John O’Brien
• Associate research director, Cloud Data Management, Archana Venkatraman
• Senior research analyst, European AI Strategies, Jack Vernon
• VP, Intelligent Business Execution Practice, Europe, Neil Ward-Dutton

“Since the inaugural awards in 2020, the awards have gone from strength to strength, with the team receiving more than double the nominations than last year, and with a standard of competition which made it incredibly difficult to pick a winner in any of the categories.” (IDC)