The Connected City Presents an Attractive Opportunity for Improving the Quality of Life

Arabian Reseller speaks to Mohammed Amin, the Senior Vice President for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Dell EMC, about the company’s plans for GITEX this year

Which products and solutions do you plan to showcase at GITEX Technology Week this year?
Dell Technologies offers a wide range of solutions that offer businesses the essential infrastructure to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset, information. We also offer products and solutions to digital businesses in terms of IT transformation, by bringing together strong capabilities in the fastest-growing areas of the industry.

These include hybrid cloud, software-defined data centre, converged infrastructure, platform-as-a-service, data analytics, mobility and cybersecurity. These solutions and more will be showcased at GITEX Technology Week this year. Dell Technologies has a portfolio of sales and R&D teams across four technology franchises, such as servers, storage, virtualization and PCs.

Dell Technologies will focus on its family of businesses including Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream and VMware.

What is your reason for exhibiting at GITEX and what do you aim to achieve at the show?
Given the pace of progress in the Middle East with organizations preparing to enter this next era of human and machine partnerships, we believe that there is an immense possibility on the horizon. It is a crucial time for businesses to either grasp the mantle, transform their IT, workforce and security, and play a defining role in the future or be left behind. GITEX brings these critical conversations to the forefront and this year we will be demonstrating the unparalleled strength of Dell Technologies in enabling and shaping organizations in the UAE and the whole of Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) region to lead the frontlines of innovation.

How does an event such as GITEX fit into your company’s overall regional strategies?
According to recent research by Dell Technologies, only 27% of regional businesses believe they are ingraining digital in all they do while nearly half (45%) don’t know whether they’ll be able to compete over the next decade, and the majority (68%) of businesses are struggling to keep up with the pace of change. In this pivotal time, Dell Technologies partners with businesses to provide capabilities spanning strategy development, consultative services and solution deployment and support to help customers and partners drive the digital transformation of their businesses.

With an attentive and relevant audience, GITEX is the perfect opportunity to share our latest news and plans for the near-term and the longer-term future, around products, solutions, initiatives, partnerships, and much more. By 2050, the world population will reach 10 billion people, compared to 7.6 billion today. This demographic boom comes with big challenges that could lead to chaos.

The Connected City presents the attractive opportunity of improving quality of life and facilitating a continuously innovative environment which not only caters to residents’ needs but is also able to predict their future requirements and demands. Today, future urbanism is not only a topic of interest but one of increasing relevance. Dell Technologies is committed to creating technologies that drive human progress and we look forward to the opportunities GITEX presents for collaboration and innovation towards future development.

Tell us about your regional contract wins or other success stories?
Digital transformation is a priority for businesses in the region and we have witnessed an increased adoption of technology to tackle challenges and drive human progress. In alignment with the vision of leadership, Dell EMC recently collaborated with pioneering public organizations like Dubai Municipality and Abu Dhabi Monitoring and Control Centre (ADMCC) to advance the nation’s innovation agenda and facilitate the development of smart cities.

With the aim to embrace digital transformation to interconnect public and private services, increase innovation and efficiency, and provide credible measures to enhance safety and security of the citizens of the capital through surveillance cameras, ADMCC collaborated with Dell EMC to build an advanced control centre. The transformational project includes the deployment of industry-leading, highly available and space efficient solutions to build an advanced control centre and manage mission-critical applications, which can monitor and analyze video streams from surveillance cameras.

Leveraging Dell EMC ViPR Controller, storage automation software, to optimize the control centre will reduce human error and the number of staff focusing on managing the infrastructure, compared to the existing setup. In addition, these scalable, secure and highly available solutions will enable ADMCC to meet their surveillance data needs and simplify management of unstructured data. This move comes in the light of enabling government agencies to better pre-empt and respond to emergencies and safeguard the city’s inhabitants.

Dell EMC also announced a strategic collaboration with Dubai Municipality to create an integrated and agile technology foundation. This landmark project aims at driving the city’s advancing innovation agenda and contributing to the overarching goal of transforming Dubai into the world’s smartest sustainable city by 2020, by offering digitally enabled services. With a mandate to transform the IT foundation, Dubai Municipality worked with Dell EMC to implement their strategy and enable virtualization capabilities using software defined scale-out infrastructure. In addition to helping the entity in reducing the complexity of managing the IT infrastructure, the growing number of smart services and the resulting data, this solution also allows the IT staff to focus more on innovative projects, rather than maintain the infrastructure.

Together with Dell EMC, Dubai Municipality has created a truly advanced and agile platform to transform its position as a broker of smart services and add real value to the way citizens live their lives.