Digital Transformation and the Data Center

Michael Krigsman: We hear about digital transformation, and you talk about changes in IT, changes in the business; what are the impacts of digital transformation on the data center?

Dani Golan: I always compare it to our private life. If you look at how we consume data today, versus not long ago, take five years ago; how we consume and buy things online, how do we interact with each other, through rich experience; high definition video and photos in our favorite social media whether it’s professional or private. It’s unbelievable! The amount of data that we receive day-in, day-out in our private lives today is vastly different than just three, four, five years ago.

The same happened in corporations. In the digital transformation that we experience day-in, day-out, the corporation has to come up with unbelievable data growth; and how to deal with that is really at the heart of this transformation.

Michael Krigsman: So what are the challenges that this data growth presents? And also, I’m assuming that the growth of IoT; the Internet of Things; and Big Data just accelerates this data growth.

Dani Golan: Absolutely. You’re absolutely correct and Michael, when you look at 200 billion Internet of Things devices talking to each other without any human intervention by 2020; when you look at the fact that today, customers know how to utilize data to get insights, to truly understand through Big Data projects: understand their customers much better, understand their market much better - but it ends up in unbelievable data growth. The average corporation will double its data every year. More data was generated in the last 18 months than ever before in human history. So, if you think about that, and this dramatic growth really changes how we interact with data, how do we handle it? How do we manage it? And it’s really in the center of any strategy of any corporation of any vertical in any geography. It’s identical to when it comes to dealing with this massive, fast-growing data.

Michael Krigsman: So when you’re talking with your customers, tell us about the challenges - the data challenges - that your customers are explaining that they face, with this massive growth of data.

Dani Golan: So, as I mentioned, the picture is quite identical across the world with data explosion. And really what CIOs, CTOs in discussions are asking is “How can we deal with it?” And, in order to deal with it strategically, not tactically, customers are continuing to buy more storage to deal with data growth, but to just keep on buying and doing the same things will not help. You need to really adapt a different model. And, the way to explain it best - I’ll give you an analogy for how we did business and how we conducted ourselves a just few years back, versus today.

If you remember, customers would do 3-5 years of planning in terms of what they were going to do in terms of an organization. Today, you can throw it out the window. CIOs, CTOs are telling me that they cannot plan even a couple of quarters ahead. So, how can you build your next-generation data center strategy when you don’t know what you don’t know? You don’t know what the future demand for data is, you don’t know the behavior of a very dynamic customer base and very dynamic application needs. So, you need to be ready for everything. And, I think that is the difference, the dramatic difference in today’s challenges to any IT executive to a few years back.

Michael Krigsman: And what about the impact on the CIO? What are some of the solutions that CIOs need to consider to address these data challenges?

Dani Golan: So, when you look at the CIO, they need to absolutely think “mobile first, then cloud.” And it means that whatever they deliver to their customers, it needs to be delivered in a very agile and dynamic way because their customers are mobile, they can be anywhere in the world, and they need to face scalability in a very dynamic, ever-changing application environment with performance that they need to support. That is the key. Every CIO, CTO has to think scale, has to think growth in a much simpler way than they used to just a few years back.