Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 51 | Page 53

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// FEATURE: SOFTWARE That was the starting point and not the endpoint. There have been a lot of innovations in expanding the platform innovating deep and wide within that same platform but in essence, what we do is still the same. We help organisations transform themselves by adopting a technology-based platform. We help them make more value from the data because that comes part and parcel with adopting such a platform. We have also launched Alfabet which is our business and technology transformation platform. We have launched an Alfabet accelerator globally. The Alfabet accelerator allows organisations to adopt a powerful technology service in a matter of days and weeks, rather than months and years as it has been the case because it is built with Artificial Intelligence with wizard based technology that allows organisations through a series of answering questions to actually build the model that they need to use Alfabet. This is a major innovation from a product perspective. Software AG has formed a strategic partnership with Smart Dubai collaboration between Germany and the UAE. At the moment, Germany is working on the final touches of its pavilion for Expo 2020. We are involved in these discussions and that will form part of our participation in Expo 2020. One of the things I mentioned is around continuous growth. The overall technology spend in the region is not growing as much as previously. We believe it’s growing between the three to five percentage mark year on year – at present we are growing at a much faster pace than that. Are there any new major products that you’ve introduced to the market? The nature of IT budgets is changing, year on year we see that very clearly. What does that mean? We see a lot of the traditional IT spend being shifted into spend that’s more associated with innovation with transformation, with digitalisation. www.intelligentcio.com Infrastructure spend or spend on applications into these new areas have been coming to the forefront in the past five years and this is exactly the area we play in. So it’s this dynamic of shifting IT budgets, which is actually driving our business forward and naturally in order to do that we continue to innovate on where we started from. Where we started from was what we call the world’s first digital business platform over a decade ago. So we unveiled to the world what was at that time a very cutting edge topic with the world’s first digital business platform. We have also launched two cloud solutions. One is the Alfabet FastLane which is our IT portfolio management in the cloud environment and the other one is the webMethods.io integration to connect your SaaS applications. Alfabet FastLane allows organisations to generate dashboards and reports quickly even in the most complex IT architectures without configuration and implementation time. Also over the past 12 months we’ve globally announced a series of major partnerships, and I’ll mention three of them. We’ve announced a partnership with Microsoft which will help all Microsoft customers around the world to migrate to cloud on the benefits of Microsoft Azure. That’s a very big and hopefully impactful partnership. We’ve also announced a partnership with Adobe and a partnership around using IoT on the Edge with Dell EMC. n THE NATURE OF IT BUDGETS IS CHANGING, YEAR ON YEAR WE SEE THAT VERY CLEARLY. INTELLIGENTCIO 53