Transforming the WAY WE WORK

Digital transformation is more relevant than it ever was in the region, says Wang Di, president of Huawei Digital Power in the Middle East

The Covid-19 pandemic has completely disrupted the business landscape. It has forced office closures and social distancing, which in turn has led to job losses, market volatility, and supply chain disruption.

For the technology industry, it also had the effect of bringing forward a decade’s worth of innovation, as enterprises utilised technology to achieve business resilience and look for new competitive advantages. As noted in a McKinsey report from June: “In our recent survey, more than 90 per cent of the executives said they expect the fallout from Covid-19 to fundamentally change the way they do business over the next five years, with almost as many asserting that the crisis will have a lasting impact on their customers’ needs.”

A big part of that change is digital transformation.

Digital transformation (DX) is slated to accelerate significantly in the coming years, a December 2020 report by IDC found. Direct DX investment will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.5 per cent from 2020 to 2023 and is expected to approach $6.8 trillion globally as companies build on existing strategies and investments. The report also predicts that by 2023, 75 per cent of organisations will have comprehensive DX implementation roadmaps, up from 27 per cent in 2020.

Meanwhile by 2025, driven by volatile global conditions, 75 per cent of business leaders will leverage digital platforms and ecosystem capabilities to adapt their value chains to new markets, industries, and ecosystems, it added.

To achieve this transformation and deliver an innovative, agile, and resilient environment, many organisations are taking a renewed look at their data centre frameworks.

Transformation projects have been challenging in the past five to 10 years. The rapid acceleration of data accumulation and analysis, in addition to the increasing complexity of data centre and cloud environments, and the need for greater capacity, power, and speed, has created multi-faceted challenges for enterprises.

Huawei is looking to address this via the Smart Data Centre solution, which works on a collaborative approach to meet enterprises’ needs, while at the same time lowering costs and building scalability.

Meanwhile, another challenge that organisations face is growing power consumption by the data centre. With greater social responsibility, enterprises need to have a renewed focus on sustainability. In fact, according to the IDC report, by 2022, most companies will realise greater value by combining digital and sustainability, giving rise to digitally-driven and sustainably-enabled projects as the de-facto standard.

In the GCC, where public entities as well as private sector companies are engaged in transforming into digital economies, it is essential that they deploy solutions that also match with their sustainability goals. Hence it is key to deploy solutions that offer a low carbon footprint and reduce energy bills.

Deploying scalable and sustainable solutions such as Huawei’s modular data centre solutions will help organisations prepare their environments for the next decade of innovation.

With greater social responsibility, enterprises need to have a renewed focus on sustainability