Lee Miles, the General Manager for Middle East and Africa at Red Hat speaks about his company’s participation at GITEX 2016
What is the primary focus of your participation at this year’s GITEX?
Making true digital transformation is difficult unless organizations in the Middle East embrace central themes such as software-defined everything, hyperscale, containers and hybrid cloud. Proprietary technology will no longer exist as a viable innovation model. Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, will participate in GITEX Technology Week where its focus will be on demonstrating how the company’s open source technologies are helping accelerate business transformation by enabling all these trends.
What is the relevance of this show to your business in the region?
The Middle East IT industry is on a healthy growth curve as enterprises leverage technology to enable their businesses. As the region’s largest ICT trade show, GITEX gives us direct exposure to some of the industry’s most influential business decision makers.
What kind of products and solutions are you showcasing at the event?
Hybrid cloud remains a focal point for Red Hat at GITEX. Hybrid clouds deliver strategic advantages to the business by redirecting resources from lights-on to innovation. They enable faster business service development and deployment and help organizations respond more quickly to opportunities and threats. Hybrid clouds reduce risk by allowing ongoing compliance and runtime management.
For this, interoperability is key and this means taking a hybrid approach to managing a cloud, as enabled by open source software, open standards, open application programming interfaces (APIs), and other aspects of openness. Red Hat’s entire cloud portfolio is built around this open hybrid cloud management approach.
The company will highlight the cornerstones of its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions portfolio, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat CloudForms, and Red Hat Ceph Storage. For organizations looking to efficiently develop, deploy and run applications in hybrid cloud environments, Red Hat will showcase its container and application development portfolio consisting of Red Hat OpenShift Container Portfolio, Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio, and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.
How does GITEX help you connect with your customers and partners?
As mentioned Gitex is the region’s last ICT event which draws trade visitors, partners and customers from regions across and beyond the Middle East. As such it’s a great venue to connect with our associates and current and potential customers.
What kind of IT trends do you see impacting the regional ICT industry in the next two years?
The Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2016 revealed several key findings on important initiatives and priorities, cloud deployment strategies, and the adoption of emerging technologies like containers. Some of the findings speak to new areas of strategic focus, while others highlight continued need for IT to do more with less, even as the role of IT becomes more relevant and strategic to the organization’s success.
Hereresults from the Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2016 showed:
- IT investments will be focused on creating more secure, modernized workloads, but we’ll also see big jumps in private cloud, DevOps, big data, mobile and IoT initiatives.
- Cutting costs is IT’s top challenge in 2016, next to improving security and automation. Other challenges represent a mix of modernizing and accelerating existing IT while delivering innovation and new apps and deploying new cloud services.
- It’s a hybrid IT world, and will be even more so in the future. Survey responses revealed that a hybrid mix of both traditional and cloud environments is the reality.
- Private cloud deployments will outpace public cloud by 6x.
- OpenStack POCs and deployments are expected to accelerate. With cloud deployment strategies trending toward private clouds and OpenStack maturing, according to survey results, a lot of organizations plan to implement OpenStack proof of concepts (POCs) or production deployments this year which will gain momentum in the next few years.
- Containers are moving beyond hype to deployment.
- Virtualization remains both an investment and migration focus.
- Enterprises need to manage and secure petabytes of data.
