Saudi Gazette In spite of the unstable rainy weather and thunderstorm, the number of attendees at EMC Forum and Exhibition "Redefine Next" exceeded 800 audience of senior IT decision makers and professionals to highlight the strategic role of IT departments to help organizations effectively meet the demands of an ever competitive and changing business environment in Jeddah at Hilton Hotel. EMC "Redefine Next" aimed at helping IT departments leverage the powers of third platform technologies, cloud, mobile, social and big data, to drive new cost efficiencies, agility and performance. EMC Jeddah forum comes after a series of three successful editions in Riyadh, as the Kingdom's government continues to focus on enhancing economic diversification through key investments. According to a recent report by IDC, IT spending in the manufacturing sector in Saudi Arabia is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.5% over the 2013–2018 period. The opening keynote was by Brian Gallagher, president, Cloud Management Division at EMC on the benefits that organizations can avail from the effective deployment of a hybrid cloud model to broker services from private and public clouds, enabling visibility and control over the best location to run business applications. The announcement follows an EMC survey that revealed increasing cloud adoption among public sector entities in Saudi Arabia. Conducted by Dun & Bradstreet and based on responses from 50 IT decision makers from across public sector entities in Saudi Arabia, the study revealed that 44% of respondents have already implemented or plan to implement a cloud computing model and 28% slated to have plans to implement an Advanced Hybrid Cloud model to leverage the security, control and reliability of the private cloud model with the heightened scalability and cost effectiveness of the public cloud. Mohammed Talaat Vice President, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Libya, EMC said: "IT organizations are tasked with striking the perfect balance between innovation and cost efficiency. While they are the core for businesses to enable the real time, proactivity and agility that are required to cater to this new generation of connected customers, IT departments are also tasked with ‘doing more with less', enabling cost and resource optimization to achieve these objectives. We are proud to bring our flagship EMC Forum and Exhibition to Jeddah, to be closer to our customers and extend them the technologies, tools and learning resources required to ensure readiness to transition to the third platform of IT to drive competitive differentiation, enhance customer retention and boost business growth." Mohammed Amin, senior vice president TEEAM Region, said: "The combined forces of cloud, social, mobile and big data have led to the emergence of what we like to call the ‘Information Generation'. These digital citizens are always connected and engaged online, and have the world's information at their fingertips through their smartphones and other Internet enabled devices. These customers expect real time response, faster, more efficient services; their new way of living has completely re-set our expectations and put new demands on businesses. This necessitates the need for enterprises to revisit their IT investments and strategies to meet this massive shift in expectations, adapt and succeed in the future."
