Intelligent Data Centres Issue 13 | Page 42

EXPERT OPINION 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. 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. ◊ Do you think that the demand for technology innovation will ever slow in pace? Marc Waters, Managing Director UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa, HPE 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 42 Issue 13 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. WE’VE GOT VERY PEAKY WORKLOADS WHERE THE DEMAND IS UNSURE, YET THERE IS HUGE VALUE TO BE DERIVED FROM THAT. 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 high-performance 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. www.intelligentdatacentres.com