Kathy Gibson at Fujitsu Forum, Munich — No-one doubts today that businesses must embrace digitalisation in order to survive, but this means business and IT need to work together to make technology the core of the organisational strategy.
Digitalisation could be seen as an iceberg — you can see the obvious part that’s above the water, which represents the need to digitalise; but the part beneath the water is a lot bigger, and represents what you need to do to achieve digitalisation.
“Digital transformation plays a major role for all of us,” says Marcel Schuster, product marketing manager at Fujitsu Technology Solutions. “We need to make sure we don’t crash into the iceberg and sink.”
There are so many faces of digital transformation, he adds. Companies have to grapple with challenges that include a need to cut costs while investing for growth, coupled with the requirement to collaborate and find new value chains.
“Plus, everything needs to be future-proof, so companies need to scale in a meaningful way, and to run their data centre solutions efficiently.”
Companies also need to unlock the value in their traditional IT systems and, at the same time, drive human-centric innovation.
This is not an easy ask for any organisation.
Fujitsu conducted a survey on digital transformation, and found that technology is at the heart of every organisation today.
A massive 73% of companies see technology at the heart of their ability to thrive, and 71% say they have to innovate faster in order to stay relevant.
Meanwhile, 52% believe business won’t exist in its current form in just five years’ time — and 67% say that partnering with technology experts is essential for the future.
Currently, 37% of business are transforming their business processes.
So what is the impact of this on ICT infrastructures? asks Suzanne Brugelmann, senior product marketing manager at Fujitsu Technology Solutions.
She says organisations need to employ certain key technologis.
These start with data analytics, where the ability to collect and store data efficiently is key.
Predictive analytics will help to draw insights from data, which needs to be leveraged across boundaries.
In the SAP environment, infrastructure automation and standardisation should be a priority, along with migration to cloud, all based on a clear definition of the data centre of the future.
Virtualisation is about adaptive application provisioning, resiliency and security for every application, as well as the ability to deliver any workload anywhere.
The private cloud is all about an operating environment that deploys the core infrastructure, along with the ability to respond rapidly to business needs while maintaining enterprise-level compliance and security.
High performance computing is used for prototyping and artificial intelligence (AI), embracing machine learning and deep learning.
Fujitsu helps companies to meet all these needs, offering PrimeFlex solutions that are ready-to-run and reference architectures that cover various IT scenarios based on business-centric computing.