Said Akar, District Manager, EMC, declared a ‘business war cry’ at today’s EMC Day 2012 event, urging enterprises to prepare for the exponential growth of big data.
“Big data will transform IT. Never has IT business been more important than it is today – enterprises need to be ready for the transformation,” Akar said at the event.
Akar presented the opening keynote speech highlighting the criticalness of investing in new products as a way to prepare for a sustainable future.
“People here in the Middle East are finally on board with cloud computing. Now the next step is to get on board with utilising big data, but we cannot do that with the current technology we have,” Akar stated.
Following Akar’s opening keynote, Zaher Haydar, EMC Regional Pre-Sales Manager, Turkey, Emerging Africa and Middle East, used his keynote to highlight how various organisations have highly virtualised IT but have yet to re-architect processes to efficiently deliver IT-as-a-Service.
This discussion addressed the changes necessary to move to a new model that requires IT to transform to an internal service provider, shifting focus from infrastructure cost to business agility.
Haydar said that the growth of data and the demand for data is very high but that solutions are readily available.
“Until the year 2000 we had generated two exabytes of data globally. Today we generate five exabytes of data each day – that’s the reality of the growth,” he said.
“It was costing us, for example, $20 per GB a few years ago when moving data. Now we pay $2 per GB. This is a great reason to start deploying flash drives – these technologies are affordable and available now,” he added.
Panel speakers claimed that people need to realise that IT is now about business and not boxes and wires. “IT departments have now become the back bone of organisations, without them they would fail,” said David Horton, Head of IT Strategy, Mashreq Bank.
Horton said he believes that big data growth will demand dedicated strategy teams to deal with the ever changing business landscape.
“It doesn’t make sense to make a three to five year plan, because in one year it will probably be inaccurate. IT will then demand dedicated strategy teams that focus on supplying and updating strategies in real-time,” he said.
Akar claimed that these events are a great way of highlighting the business forecast and being able to present customers and vendors with ideas and solutions that will set them up for a sustainable future.
