EMC recently organized the EMC CIO Connect Summit 2015 for Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East in Prague, Czech Republic. The event brought together IT leaders from prominent organizations across the region together with senior executives from EMC to highlight emerging opportunities for IT in the era of the third platform.

The summit was designed to help CIOs identify and leverage new opportunities as enterprises across the region continue to invest in third platform technologies to drive innovation and competitive advantage for business.

In his opening remarks, Mohammed Amin, Senior Vice President, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa & Middle East, EMC started with a presentation highlighting the opportunities ahead for IT leaders to transition into the role of strategic CIOs so as to provide an agile and contemporary mix of services. The presentation shed light on EMC’s objective to help IT leaders seize these opportunities, redefine their IT agendas to meet business objectives and enable their transformation journeys to become genuinely software-defined enterprises, leading to greater business agility and efficiency.

“As enterprises continue to turn to their IT organizations to better leverage the converging trends of cloud, social, mobile and big data to redefine business performance, CIOs and Line of Business (LOB) executives acknowledge the need to work closely together to enhance enterprise value and achieve strategic business objectives. It is apparent from our conversations with customers that the heavy “consumerization” of IT has driven the demand for IT departments to revamp their approach and perception, and 72% of IT departments need to start acting as in-house providers of on-demand services.”

Moreover, he stressed the fact that IT is no longer looked at as a business enabler since it is shifting to become the business itself. He also affirmed that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the key to go forward.

“The business industry is changing and EMC is helping businesses to have a faster time to market through technology,” he said. New CIOs are getting involved in business decisions as they are coordinating with CEOs to develop the best business models further, he added.

EMC is asking customers to move to new agile apps and new platforms while most of them are using the second generation platform, affirmed Mohammed. He also explained that the 2.5 platform, which is applying the third platform capabilities to the second platform applications, is the best way for organizations to run their business today as it allows them to save costs and constitutes the first step towards moving their business to the third platform.

“We look forward to working with our customers across the region to aid this transition in the role of IT to deliver greater value to business,” he continued.

Held under the theme “Redefine Possible”, the event hosted an audience of over 100 visionary CIOs and senior IT professionals from key industry verticals across the region as IT roles and responsibilities continue to evolve to unlock greater enterprise value.

A global study of 10,451 IT business decision-makers across 33 countries, conducted by Vanson Bourne, reported that while IT today is no doubt considered a business enabler, 47% of respondents in the EMEA region believe that spending is fast moving out of the IT department’s control. As Line of Business executives continue to play an increasingly active role in the procurement of third platform technologies, the remit of CIOs today is transforming to focus on more strategic market-driven initiatives. These are then supported by a mix of internal and brokered IT services aimed at driving competitive advantage, enhancing shareholder value, simplifying the business, and winning and retaining customers.

Following this message, speakers at the event showcased best practices on the application and deployment of the Software-Defined Data Center, and of Cloud, Flash and Big Data technologies within a range of industries – all enabling IT to achieve the agility, scalability and efficiency that the business needs today.

In his presentation, John O’Callaghan, Senior Director, Executive Briefing Programs, EMEA EMC talked about the changes in the world of IT and business going forward. He said, “Capacity is changing, applications architectures are changing and companies are moving to complicated applications development. Subsequently, we are changing the organizational model to meet this demand and move from the traditional IT operations.”

He continued, “People want to change, become more competitive and closer to their customers. They want to change the way of doing business, and they want to do this quickly. This is what the third platform and mobile applications are all about.”

Representing Intel at the opening ceremony, Kennedy Brown, EMEA Director Enterprise Marketing, Intel talked about the new centre of possibilities. “Devices are connected to data centres that allow businesses to deliver digital services,” he said. “This also creates a virtual cycle that drives the need for new devices and services. Data centres are actually at the middle of all that and are the ones that make it faster,” he continued. 

Kennedy also mentioned the two emerging trends with analytics. “Today, we see two trends emerging. The first is scalable analytics, which is taking most of the data and trying to use it on the actual platform; the second is related to scale-out analytics.” Furthermore, he affirmed that analytics will help businesses meet their customers’ needs and be more competitive.

The summit also featured a session on the need for scalable innovations in the establishment of smart cities to enable smarter, safer service infrastructure to cater to the demands of constantly connected communities.

For two days, and through a variety of interactive presentations, panel discussions and workshops, the EMC CIO Connect Summit 2015 was a platform for IT leaders to exchange insights and expertise as they seek to redefine the IT agenda and business processes, and to drive competitive differentiation and performance enhancements.

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver I.T. as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping I.T. departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com