Business and IT leaders looking to stay ahead in turbulent and unpredictable times need to look at five major 'imperatives' shaping the industry.
In his keynote during VMworld 2015 Europe in Barcelona this morning, CEO Pat Gelsinger discussed five imperatives for digital businesses to stay relevant and thrive.
Firstly, asymmetry in business. He said pervasive mobile-cloud technology is allowing innovators to have quick and easy access to a global network of shared online resources, such as talent, capital, and a marketplace of three billion connected people globally.
At the same time, big, established companies must recognise that the benefits of incumbency are decreasing, and businesses wishing to thrive must innovate like a start-up, but deliver like an enterprise, he said.
Next he cited the professional era of cloud, and said that while cloud is a major driver of the asymmetrical business world of today, the cloud market is shifting quickly. He said the cloud industry is disjointed and disconnected with two sides. On the one side, he cited on-premises private-cloud tower, where governance is strong but app delivery is just too slow, and on the other side, you have off-premises public-cloud tower, where app delivery is fast, but governance is not strong enough.
It is his view that we need to shift to a more connected, compatible and unified hybrid cloud era.
The next imperative, Gelsinger said, is the security challenge of connecting people, apps and data. There's a vast amount of security innovation happening today, yet breaches continue to litter the headlines. What is missing, is a common, ubiquitous architecture that allows IT teams to align security controls to protect what they care about most. What has been missing is security that is truly "architected in".
He says this is where the virtualisation layer comes in. "For the first time, this later is offering a critical translation layer between the IT infrastructure sitting below and the apps and data that reside above."
A renaissance in security has begun, and IT leaders should seize the moment, said Gelsinger.
The fourth imperative, is a proactive model of technology. "Despite
all the amazing innovations at our fingertips today, technology remains fundamentally 'reactive', meaning it's waiting for us to tell it what to do. We are on a cusp of a 'proactive' model of technology, where software is clever enough to act for us, and cope with everything from everyday tasks to life-saving medical procedures executed by microscopic 'milli-robots' travelling through a person's bloodstream."
He says this proactive model will centre around intelligent automation, meaning we can automate everything and predict almost anything.
Gelsinger also said there will be a major impact wrought by all this tech-driven change. "Within the next decade, 40% of the S&P 500 will be no more, meaning that four out of 10 of today's industry-leading businesses will be merged, changed, or extinct by 2025."
In the tech sector, the change will be even more profound, he said. "Half of the firms on today's Tech 100 list will be gone within the next decade. Ten years. Gelsinger said this leads to the final imperative, that businesses of all sizes need to break out in order to stay relevant, and that inaction is the biggest danger today.
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