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By Doug Woolley, GM, Dell EMC South Africa

In the future, when historians look back at our age, I believe they will characterise it for its mix of progress and uncertainty. We are currently undergoing some of the greatest shifts in humanity’s story. From individual rights to new political ideas and ideals, it’s remarkable how every day our world seems less and less like the one we’ve experienced before.

Technology has always been a part of the conversation, but in the past few decades it’s accelerated our world in unbelievable ways. This has added to that uncertainty, but also to the potential and progress, creating a delicate balancing act for IT leaders inside their organisations.

The demands on IT

Technology is supposed to represent stability. Businesses do not like uncertainty, which they typically define as problems. Technology is often the way that problems can be solved or at least eased. Technology is meant to do things better and faster. But when they also introduce change, things can get tense.

You know that these uncertainties hold great potential if you can harness them. You are not alone: the world’s top companies all wrestle with this transition, some more successfully than others. It’s a matter of pride that I can say many of the success stories are relying on Dell EMC. But this isn’t a surprise, because the Dell Technologies family is built on the principle that these changes are happening and those who don’t embrace them will be the losers.

Our Chairman and CEO, Michael Dell, draws this insight right back to his childhood, when his father brought home a pocket calculator. The young Michael could scarcely believe what he saw: a small machine that took complex numbers and comfortably delivered simple answers. He thought it was magic and represented an overwhelming opportunity to amplify his skills and creativity.

Today that opportunity is now available to everyone, in particular companies. Business opinions reflect this: CEOs want their companies to be a technology company and business units want to be platforms. Agility is the focus, but the burden falls on technology leaders to find that balance.

Yet what to the business is magic comes down to very real technology. With that comes the need for IoT, cloud, workforce and security strategies. You have to focus on data and its tangible uses for the business. You have to realise your company’s digital future, and it is not a simple task. If it were, we’d not even need to have these conversations.

Striking a balance

Digital Transformation needs IT Transformation. You have a datacentre full of applications and infrastructure, carefully planned and deployed over the past few decades. Updating these into a cloud-native, platform-anchored and data-driven world is not easy. But with the right partners and strategies, your IT transformation can fund your company’s digital transformation.

Dell EMC has been walking this journey for a while and today many companies trust us with their transformation. Ninety percent of the top 20 IaaS providers, seventy percent of the top 100 cloud companies, all of the top 20 automotive retail and insurance companies, and the vast majority of the 100 fastest growing companies in the world use our services, insights and innovations to advance their futures.

Join us at the upcoming Dell EMC Forum event at Sandton Convention Centre on the 27^th March 2018 (Register Here) where we will be looking at the challenges and opportunities for IT leaders to get transformation going. Uncertainty is a fact of our age, but uncertainty also translates into potential. Like two people arguing over a glass being half full or empty, we believe the right conversations with the right people can shift a business to see the promise in uncertainty, made possible through technology.

It’s your place to realise the digital future, and ours to help you make that happen.