Speaking at VMworld 2016 in Barcelona today, keynotes Sanjay Poonen, GM end-user computing, head of global marketing, and Ray O’Farrell, executive vice-president and chief technology officer, both VMware, discussed how digital transformation has the ability to revolutionize the end-user workspace, but not without bringing about its own set of challenges for companies embarking on the journey.
“Digital transformation is changing the world,” said Poonen. “We think this is going to completely transform our lives. We’re in a place now where every possible thing can be digitalized,” citing the education and healthcare sectors as prime examples of industries reaping the benefits of digitization.
However, O’Farrell was quick to add that whilst digital transformation is key to business success; it also throws up some key challenges that need to be considered by the IT industry.
“Digital transformation is not without challenges,” he argued. “When you go through a digital transformation your organization has to deal, potentially, with an increasingly more complex environment. This drives a need to be more and more efficient, to have a focus on total ownership of that environment.
“Your whole industry, your whole company, is now based on this digital infrastructure which means you need to be extremely careful and focused on maintaining a great security stance and dealing with potential security threats.”
As you go through this transformation, he added, you also have to not only support the existing applications of today but you need to encompass the new, cloud-enabled applications too.
“You need a universal infrastructure that is able to support both the current apps and those new services.”
To meet the challenges you see with digital transformation, he concluded, you need some of the best infrastructure software in the world.