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Smart SMB Summit Spotlight / Keynotes
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FOR SMB ORGANIZATIONS Hani Al Hamli, Secretary General of the Dubai Competitiveness Office in DED set the tone for the discussions at the event with a keynote on ‘Digital Transformation for SMB organisations.’ He said the 21st century is shaping up to be the century of the digital and 4th industrial revolution. Al Hamli mentioned that the flagship event was taking place at the right time in Dubai. Referring to Dubai’s bid to take its businesses past a milestone in digital transformation, Al Hamli said the question is whether local SMBs are prepared to adapt to global technology changes. He emphasized the importance of the SMB sector in Dubai. “SMBs are growing fast and spreading their wings, diversifying the economy and contributing significantly to the GDP and labour force. Supporting these businesses to be digital and more sophisticated would therefore secure efficiency; boost decision making; improve customer satisfaction and profitability, and thus secure sustainability.”
BEST STRATEGIC BLUEPRINT FOR DRIVING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Samer Semaan, Value-Add Distribution Manager, UAE & Gulf, Dell EMC from Dell EMC was the 2nd keynote speaker of the day and in his keynote, he highlighted the various parts of transformation. These he mentioned are digital transformation, IT transformation, workforce transformation and security transformation. He highlighted the role of data as critical asset across each of these and the need to leverage insights from data across as key requirements for better decision making in business and creating better products and services. The data he mentioned was delivered by the IT infrastructure and therefore the need to have agile and scalable infrastructure that automated the data collection and which in turn is leveraged for digital transformation insights. The flexibility for the workforce to access data and leverage the insights from anywhere should be one of the key requirements of the transformation journey. This improves the workforce efficiencies.Since data has value, transformation initiatives must address the need to ensure data is secured and continuously adheres to regulatory compliance. Samer opined that it was key to look at buying solutions where the security is embedded in the server, in the network, in storage, in client devices so that they complement each other and communicate better with each other.
SMART SMB | OCTOBER 2018