FINAL WORD
“
WE’VE GOT VERY PEAKY
WORKLOADS WHERE THE DEMAND
IS UNSURE, YET THERE IS HUGE
VALUE TO BE DERIVED FROM THAT.
Marc Waters, Managing Director UK, Ireland,
Middle East and Africa, HPE
I think very down grid where you just need
lots and lots of scale-up compute capacity –
these workloads sit particularly nicely.
So, organisations that understand their
environment mix and their applications and
make smart choices are the ones that have
been very successful at locking in the value.
Some other organisations have said they’re
going to move everything they do to the
public cloud and they believe they could
probably get by on the fact that they can
shut their data centre.
I’ve seen a lot of organisations fail to do that
because it’s quite complex and it doesn’t
make sense for everything to go in one
direction and then you don’t end up shutting
your data centre. The way I think about it
is by using the example of the screwdriver
– just because somebody invented the
screwdriver – an incredible tool – it doesn’t
mean you no longer need a hammer.
You need to start thinking about the
right mix of your environment to take
full advantage of the technologies. An
overwhelming point I would make is
that the value is in the data. As you think
about data management and about
the cloud, public clouds can do some
really fantastic compute processing on
demand when you need it with some
nice microservices – this is a really
important part of your hybrid mix and
everyone should have that within there.
My own personal recommendation to
any CIO reading this would be to think
very carefully about where you are
putting your data and keep in control
of it because once you pay to entrust
your data into somebody else’s cloud
where you’re renting space, you’re
going to have to pay a significant uplift
to take your data back. So I’d suggest
understanding why you’re doing that,
what the cost is of doing that and why it
makes sense for your business.
What plans do you have in place
moving forward and what trends do
you expect to see evolving?
We have plans to continue to grow. In
terms of our market plans, we could
think about the domains of our business:
redefining collected experiences at the Edge
which involves security, connectivity and
analytics; optimising our customers’ hybrid
environment in terms of the balance of
helping people understand how best to take
advantage of public cloud technologies –
one of the big trends there is the embedding
of technology and embedding intelligence
within technology.
Most of the demand that’s being driven
around data centre capacity is, in my
opinion, around AI and Big Data outcomes.
The data sets are becoming so different
and there’s an opportunity to look at how
technology is architected, particularly
when you want to move things in and out
of the cloud and protect your data. I think
containerisation is transformative – in a Big
Data world, this is massively disruptive.
Do you think that the demand for
technology innovation will ever slow
in pace?
Humankind is incredible and what’s
been achieved over many years on this
planet with innovators and with passionate
people driving transformation forward will
never be diminished. Humans will always
want to push the boundaries of research
and innovation.
That will continue and so it should.
Ultimately, the purpose of our company is
to bring together really smart people with
incredible technology to advance the way
that we all live and work. I truly believe in
that purpose.
The power of technology is huge in solving
some of the greatest problems on the
planet. Nothing will stop humankind
continuing to move forward and in terms of
whether robotics will replace workers and
take jobs – I think this has been said many
times before about many technologies and I
think all of it is additive to humankind, rather
than negative.
How do modern technology
developments differ in the UAE
compared to Saudi Arabia?
The technology is the same so it’s essentially
all about the application of the technology
and what people are looking to achieve.
So, if you look at Saudi, there’s a lot of
focus on how you can use data and highperformance
compute from a security
perspective which is a very important area
within the economy.
If you look at Dubai or Abu Dhabi – they’re
using the same technology to deliver
slightly different outcomes, in Abu Dhabi,
we recently signed an MOU with Abu Dhabi
Digital Authority to build a data federation
platform for it which builds on an initial MOU
we signed earlier in the year to look at using
data to transform citizen experience.
This is a massive focus in Abu Dhabi. So,
I think the underlying technologies are
the same, it’s the application that’s most
important to a particular economy, county,
region, company, vertical sector – and this
can vary. •
84 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com