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Chinenye Anuforo
Travers Nicholas is the General Manager Dell Technologies, an information technology firm helping businesses across the world to integrate their IT infrastructure for global competitveness.
He recently spoke to Daily Sun on how his organisation is helping Nigerian enterprises to deploy technology in the ever dynamic business world.
Excerpts
Objectives of Dell Technologies Forum
The forum plays an important role as a technology platform where we bring our subject matter experts together to discuss and share insights about the industry’s trends and updates. At Dell Technologies Forum, we highlight our four transformational pillars: Application transformation, IT transformation, workforce transformation and security transformation and how we can help our customers at each stage.
At Dell Technologies Forum, we celebrated our office’s 11th anniversary, here in Lagos. Additionally, the forum discussed the four transformation pillars that I have mentioned and how we can gain a deeper engagement with our customers and our partners to support them through their journeys. For instance, in the first session, we had a panel of industry experts talking about their experiences. We also had attendees from banking and telecommunications sectors who were on stage discussing their own experiences on how their organizations are going through their digital transformation in Nigeria. So, we’re witnessing an urge to transform digitally and increase the digital engagement across public and private sectors. To do this, we’re understand the local requirements and back them up with our services, solutions and products. Moreover, we’re organising sessions with Dell Technologies’ experts to educate our customers; in addition to building an exhibition centre, where our customers and partners can engage with us and experience the products themselves, such as virtual reality, augmented reality and more.
How Dell Technologies is driving business transformation
Basically, our approach to business transformation is centred around four key pillars, IT transformation, workforce transformation, security and application transformation.
IT transformation focuses on modernising the underlying technology infrastructure, operations, and delivery of services. It enables speed, efficiency, scale, and cost-effectiveness — automating manual tasks and streamlining operations to free up resources and fuel Digital Future initiatives.
In the case of workforce transformation, we are looking at simplifying the way businesses work. The future of work is one where there is flexibility to work anytime and anywhere and it is response to the growing demands of companies to have a seamless experience for their employees, and to allow IT teams to focus on matters requiring their expertise, that we introduced unified workspace.
On security, Dell Technologies partners with organisations to adopt a new mindset to manage security and risk. It is all about securing technology to continue to progress and innovate.
By application transformation, Dell Technologies focuses on providing organisations’ developers with the right tools and platforms to deliver apps in weeks rather than months.
Digital transformation in Africa
If you look at our business model, you’ll see that it supports the local business and the local economy. Why? Because it’s an indirect model. This means that our products, solutions and services are all purchased through local business partners, and companies. All these companies are equipped with professional teams that have a deep knowledge about our products, solutions and services.
How will AI, IT and Mmchine learning shake up Nigeria’s business industry?
Artificial intelligence and machine learning mean different things for different people. So, if I’m discussing machine learning with a representative from the banking sector, they would use data analytics to gather and analyse insights about their customer behaviours and what they’re doing, and then try to predict their next behaviour so that they can sell better and enhance their services. Another example from oil and gas, for example, will be completely different, they won’t necessarily be thinking too much about their customers but more about looking for the oil, how they can explore, how they can discover and assess based on information about land, geographical mapping and best places to drill.
So, different industries might end up with different solutions.
The second thing, is what IoT has created, not IoT in itself. It is the power of bringing advanced technology into either our hands, or our cars, or into other connected devices that are close to us. It has created this idea that computing doesn’t only happen inside the date centers but also at the edge. For example, Self-driving cars will need to make decisions that require computational power in the car. They can’t go to the data centre over a mobile phone line, make the decision in the data centre and then come back in the car and say turn left. They need to make that decision instantly and in the car.
So, what does it mean to us? It means the requirements of the industries are changing. It’s not just about concentrating computer power into a data center! There needs to be a coverage from the edge of computing, to the core and to the cloud. So IoT for us, is about many different things. It’s about devices, it’s about connecting those devices and allowing them to transmit the right information at the right speed with the right reliability.
Approach to data protection and security
At Dell Technologies, security is part of our DNA, we build our product in a secured way followed by a secured supply chain. We need to make sure that there is no way anyone can tamper with the devices prior to building and shipping them. One thing that the hackers do when breaking into a system is that they take-over the control of the bios. We have a mechanism that gives our customers peace of mind, knowing that they are using the same bios that we’ve provided. We do it by checking the bios in the actual device and make sure it’s the original one. So, it’s a strategy that we follow by building the security on our system, into our own methodology to protect our customers.
Dell Technologies for start-ups and SMEs
The portfolio is vast! We have products that suit home users, others that suit SMEs and those that suit large enterprises.
From an office small business perspective, we have the world’s leading end user devices, particularly our commercial series; OptiPlex and Latitude devices for end-users computing. The rate of returns due to support issues on these devices is one of the lowest in the industry.
Of course, we have small business servers and integrated bundles with a range of products for small and medium businesses. I think that the most important part is how we are helping them grow and use technology for their betterment. We work closely with our channel partners to help those small and medium businesses by creating bundles with our partners and customer such as end-to end office solution, productivity suits and many other packages that help businesses focus more on their business.
We also partner with the service department to help them offer affordable cloud services to the SMEs as well. We have a very attractive payment scheme to help them have to invest in the right areas.
