Experts in the ICT Market: There Are Serious Intentions to Dominate the Global Scene

On the list of the most innovative companies in the world for 2024, according to Fast Company magazine, is Infobip, the first Croatian unicorn, globally known for its cloud communication platform through which various industries communicate with users. It develops advanced communication solutions enabling companies to communicate on every channel and device at any time, regardless of where they are in the world. Last year, it launched Experiences, a new AI-based tool that helps companies create chatbots for communicating with users. With this tool, any company can design its own chatbot that functions similarly to ChatGPT. Experiences simplifies communication between companies and customers, encourages their digital transformation and business growth, and guarantees Infobip’s position as a leading global communication platform. Although it is the most influential Croatian company on the global ICT scene, it is not the only one.

Monetizing Technology

According to the Financial Times’ ranking of the thousand fastest-growing companies in Europe, the Osijek startup Orqa is in 209th place. In addition to it, there are six other Croatian companies on that list. Orqa is a world leader in the production of glasses for managing drones, and it also manufactures video transmission systems, remote control, and flight computers with autopilot. For four consecutive years, the startup Agrivi has been on the prestigious ‘FoodTech 500’ list as the best farm management company whose software helps farmers in one hundred and fifty countries control costs and optimize production to save up to thirty percent of resources. Agrivi works with the largest American agricultural companies and generates ninety percent of its revenue in foreign markets, and its founder Matija Žulj is one of twenty ambassadors globally for the OECD-FAO Advisory Group for Responsible Agriculture Supply Chains. Although Photomath is no longer Croatian since its founder Damir Sabol sold it to Google for 550 million dollars last year, it has become globally known for its application for solving mathematical problems. It has been downloaded over three hundred million times worldwide, and in the American market, it has outperformed similar applications from Microsoft and other companies, which prompted Google to acquire it.

The financial technology platform airt from the startup Airt Technologies is used worldwide.

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Davor Runje

photo Dražen Lapić

— Users are organizations that use online streaming protocols such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, and Redis to build their services. The number of downloads is continuously growing and is currently the most popular tool of its kind globally for several network protocols. Users are from all over the world; according to documentation access statistics, we have visits from over 140 countries, says serial entrepreneur and co-owner of Airt Technologies Davor Runje.

According to him, they are currently working on monetizing this technology as part of a new service that allows both large and small clients to create their own AI assistants integrated into their internal IT systems, and the platform will be monetized through a subscription system.

Strategic Product

On the list of Croatian companies whose products rank highly in the global market for new technologies are Gideon, Factory, Microblink, Devot… Most of them are startups that have conquered the global ICT market with original and high-value technological products, but there are also centenarians in Croatia that are successful in this. An example is Končar‘s offspring Končar – Digital and its product Proza Station, the first SCADA solution in the world compliant with the international standard for cybersecurity IEC 62351. The certification body TÜV Nord awarded the company a certificate of compliance with the requirements of the latest international standards for cybersecurity in critical infrastructure management systems. PROZA Station was developed based on knowledge and 40 years of experience in developing SCADA products at Končar. Development began five years ago and was led by engineers with long-standing experience.

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Stjepan Sučić

— The PROZA Station system is primarily intended for critical infrastructure systems in the electricity sector, e.g., facilities for the production, transmission, and distribution of electricity, but also in other areas such as the oil and gas industry, water management, and drainage, monitoring and managing heating and cooling systems. The solution provides better insight into the system’s status in real-time and faster user response to any potential problems. Thus, we facilitate digital transformation for our partners. It is also important to highlight that the user improves the transformation of their business towards carbon neutrality with this solution, says Stjepan Sučić, a member of the Management Board of Končar – Digital, emphasizing that an important feature of this solution is the possibility of application in private cloud computing.

This increases efficiency in the implementation and maintenance of data centers and allows for the introduction of additional digital redundancy to increase the resilience of critical infrastructure systems.

Such a solution enables the rapid development of advanced energy networks through the application of digital management at distribution transformer stations of lower voltage levels, explains Sučić, adding that PROZA Station is a strategic product, on one hand, an evolutionary continuation of products for the energy sector in which Končar has been successful for years, but also a foundation for advanced and cyber-secure systems in other domains and new technologies.

It is also a basis for a new generation of Končar‘s IoT platform and a series of products that are upgrades of these platforms, for example, in data centers and smart cities. Končar has serious intentions to become the largest IT company in the broader region, and achieving such exceptional accomplishments is a significant step in realizing that goal, Sučić concludes.

Developed at Home

One of the few companies in the world that produces radar sensors for water level, speed, and flow is Geolux from Samobor, which sells its products in over sixty countries worldwide, covering about 15 percent of the global market. Its sales have been growing by about thirty percent in recent years.

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Tomislav Grubeša

photo Ratko Mavar

— Geolux‘s radars are entirely developed in the company, from radar microwave circuitry and antennas to processing circuitry and device mechanics, as well as complete software. The instruments have been developed from the beginning for application in hydrology and real environments, are extremely durable and reliable, and have various hardware and software elements built into subsystems to enhance reliability and accuracy of measurements in real environments. Therefore, the measurements from our sensors in real working conditions are the most accurate and reliable on the market. Sensors in competitive devices generally mismeasure and/or have large oscillations in measurement accuracy when the angle at which the sun illuminates the water causes reflections that then reflect into the sensor, resulting in saturation of the radar’s input circuitry. In Geolux‘s devices, this well-known problem is solved by a combination of smart radar antenna design and the use of software filters to minimize this effect, says Tomislav Grubeša, who founded the company with his colleague Nikša Orlić.

According to Grubeša, Geolux‘s most common clients are system integrators who use these devices in larger systems for flood defense, irrigation, wastewater treatment, and similar applications. The company has started offering complete systems in recent years. Customers are most often government agencies or local services and energy companies that use systems to measure the amount of water in reservoirs or snow and its water equivalent.

Currently, we are working on new products: a new logger device specific to hydrometeorological systems, a software module for calculating the equivalence of water volume in the radar for measuring snow depth, which is the holy grail in that area, and no one has contactless technology for such measurements, as well as a radar rain gauge that should replace mechanical sensors, so-called buckets, for very precise measurements of rainfall amounts, but also for classifying the type of precipitation, says Grubeša, emphasizing that in addition to these large projects, they are also developing several smaller ones.

The company King ICT provides implementation and configuration services in the field of cybersecurity for NATO, but according to a confidentiality agreement, it cannot disclose any information about that work to the public.