Going digital during the fourth industrial revolution

Midha: The last 15 years compared to the next 15 years.

Amit Midha, President, APJ, Dell EMC, began his keynote with a description of the fourth industrial revolution. "What we see today as a system is changing and it's changing very rapidly," he said.

According to Midha, the revolution is fuelled by three drivers, one of which is the availability of cheap devices. "The cost of making something is approaching zero. You can take any device and make it Wi-Fi-enabled and make it smart; it can generate new experiences, everything can be managed with software using new digital technologies," he said.

Secondly, Dell EMC believes that by 2031, there will be 200 billion connected nodes and smart devices globally. "That creates a very different kind of world with a different set of data, a different set of opportunities and experiences," he said.

Third, technology is becoming more powerful every five years, which will drive significant change in our lives, Midha said, pointing out that the sixties was the age of mainframes, and the eighties the time of PCs. The noughties were focused on browsers, and the tens on mobile phones; today it is about evolving web architectures. 

An infographic of the software-defined data centre concept at the Dell EMC booth.

All of these trends are coming together to cause widespread digital disruption, and Asian businesses know it. A Dell EMC survey on digital transformation in Asia has found that 83% of Asian respondents believe that non-traditional startups pose a threat totheir businesses, Midha shared.

"These new startups have a lot of capital, a lot of talent; they are creating new experiences that could be disruptive to (respondents') businesses. Fifty-two percent are concerned about becoming obsolete, and 28% are able to innovate company-wide, industry-wide. This kind of puts the stage for the background to the disruption. Disruption is here, and disruption is accelerating, with technology becoming more powerful every year," he said.

The difference between the last 15 years and the next 15 will be wide, Midha added. From "lock the doors, don't let anybody in, don't let anybody out," the ethos has become business-centric. IT will have to move from maintaining "systems of record", just enabling the Internet, interactivity and communication to business outcomes, or maintaining "systems of engagement & insight". "The focus still has to be on users of technology, but the deliverable has to be business outcomes," Midha explained.

The vBlock from VCE at the Dell EMC booth.

"IT leaders have to understand the business, understand the competition and they also have to create new experiences, new business models and new capabilities."

IT architecture and the culture in organisations will have to change in response. Midha noted that customers are moving from private to hybrid cloud architectures and cloud-native apps, and from transactional data and reporting to analytics. The Internet is also expanding from human-to-machine communication to include machine-to-machine communication.

The imperative is to create new business models that can ensure businesses continue to thrive in the new digital era, and technology is key to enabling the models, Midha said.

"Change the way you look at technology – it is going to drive how your company succeeds," he said.

Talent and a focus on innovation will also be important, Midha said.

Hybrid cloud accelerates digital business said, fostering agility with speed of deployment, the ability fo run applications faster, and minimising risk with technologies such as microsegmentation. "Efficiency only comes when you have a private-public cloud scenario, where you can use whichever infrastructure is cheaper for this task, for this time," he said. "Customers are showing the way on what is possible."

Dell EMC's cloud customers include GE, which has moved from selling engine parts and infrastructure to selling insights on how to make customers' infrastructure better for them. "They are betting their entire company on software," Midha said.

DBS has adopted Pivotal technology to build cloud-native apps for user experiences and transaction processing, while Saensuk has developed real-time information streams to respond faster to emergency situations, using private, public and hybrid clouds.

"What offering do you have today that will lead to dramatic change, what portion of your industry today is being disrupted by a startup?" Midha asked, advising businesses to consider how they can become industry pioneers themselves through modernising data centre infrastructure, automating IT processes, and transforming their organisational and operating models.

Dell Technologies is the new company formed after the merger of Dell and EMC, and includes seven brands under its umbrella, including Dell EMC. All seven brands provide essential infrastructure for organisations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their information.

Interested?

Browse the Slideshare of Midha's presentation at Cloud Expo Asia

View the infographic showing how Dell EMC and other Dell Technologies companies support GE

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