Today, at Juniper Networks PoC Lab in Amsterdam, Nigel Oakley, EMEA director, Cloud-building Centre of Excellence, addressed the audience to talk digital transformation and the journey to business success.
Digital Transformation
Oakley told the audience: "Digital transformation is happening, is fascinating, is hitting at the enterprise and governmental level.
"Governments are starting to realise the way digital impacts, which is key to regional success. The impact digital transformation will have on productivity metrics is going to be absolutely crucial. It will impact all industries."
Digital Transformation is a process to optimise a business module by using data, with the aim to simplify and enhance the customer experience, according to Juniper.
Stating that "Data centres have been disrupted as much as the desktop has", Oakley proceeded to set out Digital transformation in three different dimensions: time, tenacity and leadership.
Oakley said: "Companies need to develop digital capabilities and to work differently, with the leadership capabilities required to set a vision and execute on it.
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"If we look at organisations, the CEO is not often a board member. The most fundamental technology foundation is a strong digital platform.
"Automation and orchestration are critical to deal with time to market expectations while ensuring robust service quality across multiple layers of complex."
"Employers expectations on IT have changed."
Oakley concluded: "I didn’t believe we would see so much transformation in the business to fully automated solutions."
Although, to achieve all this, Oakley emphasised that "we need to get commitment from C-suite execs."
The 3rd platform
Oakley introduced to the audience to the concept of the ‘third platform’ as the key driver for digital transformation.
Oakley stressed how mobility, cloud, big data, analytics and social business are the ‘third platforms’ that will fuel business transformation and reshape the enterprise network.
The first platform, Oakley explained, was based on a terminal mainframe. The second, which is still widely used, focuses on client server and LAN/internet.
The new phase for IT with mobility, cloud, big data, analytics and social business make the ‘third platform.’
With the business world on the "edge of turning to the third platform", Oakley explained that security is key to safeguard the success of this new model.
Oakley said: "Secure connectivity underpins the third platform. Juniper’s answer to that is a concept called MetaFabric architecture."
The MetaFabric solution architecture helps to build a coherent network within and between data centres, according to Juniper.
The EMEA director added that MetaFabric is "about end-to-end networking". It is multi-data centre, multi- cloud and essentially one network that offers an application that scales.
Oakley said: "Digital transformation we believe is using data to optimise the business, but a strong digital platform is needed to succeed. Our approach to provide that is MetaFabric."
To do this, Oakley urged organisations to follow some guiding principles for building agility, protecting investment and enabling innovation.
Things need to be simple, "easy to buy, deploy, operate and secure". Also, there is the need to be open, "embracing open standards, enable choice, alleviate lock-in and have standard APIs".
In the end, for the enterprise to become more agile they need smart solutions that can "self-heal, be proactive, event correlation and possess security intelligence".
