Predictions 2017: Mohammed Amin, Dell EMC SVP and regional manager

2016 has been a landmark year for us. The long-awaited merger of Dell EMC finally concluded, creating a $74bn market leader – Dell Technologies.

Consolidating two industry titans means Dell Technologies is now the largest, privately held technology company in the world, serving 98 per cent of the Fortune 500 across 180 countries.

This bodes well for our customers in the Middle East, as the new entity boasts the most comprehensive set of capabilities for organisations to thrive in a new digital era. Our sole purpose is to create technologies that enable digital transformation and human progress. We are witnessing an incredibly interesting time. It’s the dawn of the Internet of Everything – what many call the next industrial revolution that will fundamentally alter the way every business in every industry operates. And at Dell Technologies we believe that this change is rich with opportunity.

Today, businesses need to invest in transformation to leverage this industrial revolution. We see ourselves as the transformational catalyst for our customers. We recognise that we’re not the only ones claiming to play this role – but we are the best. We have the right vision, and leading technologies to empower customers at every step of their digital journey. However, in order to free up funds to invest in this transformation, often IT has to transform first.

Most CIOs agree on a three-step strategy beginning with modernising the infrastructure to deliver maximum performance and availability. This is done using flash-based and converged technologies. Step two involves automating service delivery. Everything in the data centre must be self-service to make the environment reliable. This turns IT environments into an ‘IT-as-a-service’ platform, providing a public cloud-like experience inside the data centre. Finally, the entire organisational structure of IT must transform to ensure transparency in costs and services levels are well defined.

But transforming IT environments is only half the story. For workforces of the 21st century, it is imperative to modernise user experiences, empower new ways of working and innovative decision making with intuitive applications and data insight. In addition, shifting this status quo to empower a mobile and interconnected workforce necessitates the need to adopt security solutions that drive business value.

CIOs face big challenges to make this a reality. They need to allocate resources not only towards IT, workforce and security transformation but also provision their transformation efforts with adequate support and supplement the traditional applications that run the business today. In short, they must bridge the gap between these two worlds. We believe that we are uniquely positioned to help our customers address these challenges.

At a time of economic uncertainty, the key is to find new ways to thrive. At Dell EMC, we provide the essential infrastructure for customers to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset – information.