EMC, IDC event sheds insights on emerging challenges of ‘smart cities’

EMC Middle East, the regional division of American multinational EMC Corporation, in association with International Data Corporation (IDC), yesterday held a knowledge-sharing event in Doha, with over 150 Information and communications technology (ICT) leaders and professionals in attendance.
Held at the Marsa Malaz Kempinski, the one-day event titled “EMC Xchange Day” saw ICT leaders and experts share ideas and insights on how IT organisations in Qatar can best tackle emerging challenges in an era of smart cities and digital transformation.
Experts from EMC and IDC shed detailed insights on a whitepaper designed to empower governments to aid the transformation of urban centres into “smart cities”.
In line with the government’s growing focus on ICT investments and initiatives directed towards the realisation of Vision 2030, they presented detailed insights on the ICT ‘building blocks’ to create intelligent, data-driven communities.
“The time has come for businesses in the region to significantly reorient their thinking to help them stay ahead. A first in our dynamic region, the ‘EMC Xchange Day’ is a testament to our commitment to help ICT leaders across the region lead the transformation of ICT organisations from cost centres to true catalysts of change for their business,” said Habib Mahakian, vice-president for Gulf and Pakistan at EMC Corporation.
“Qatar’s transformation agenda has leapfrogged in terms of ICT development and e-governance to achieve the status of a digitally-transformed country that is conducive to economic growth, sustainability and efficiency.  While there are five distinct stages of maturity, cities need to aim to reach the ‘optimised’ stage, whereby a properly defined strategy allows them to achieve their goals and provision higher quality of services to their citizens,” said Megha Kumar, senior research manager, software, IDC Middle East, Africa and Turkey.
Samer Diya, country manager, Qatar, EMC Corporation, also attended the event.
The session extended an in-depth presentation on the EMC Federation Smart City Platform — an open, agile, software-designed and data-analytics-driven solution designed to deliver the speed, performance and scalability needed for hyper-connected data-driven cities.
Comprising three critical layers, the platform brings together best-of-breed technologies from EMCII, VMware, VCE, Pivotal, RSA and Virtustream to host applications to enable the development of Cloud Native applications.
Speakers also presented essential guidance to all stakeholders within the smart city ecosystem, outlining the benefits of the key ICT building blocks of a smart city and the significant role of ICT innovation.
The event also featured a series of workshops and sessions to direct the effective use of transformative technologies to uncover new areas of growth, reducing the costs of infrastructure applications.
With successful editions in the UK, France, Africa and Dubai, ‘EMC Xchange Doha’ also featured an exclusive ‘VLabs showcase’ area to extend first-hand demo of leading solutions, including the EMC Federtion Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, EMC Federation Business Data Lake, in addition to RSA Security Analytics and EMC’s leading Flash solutions portfolio.
IDC analysts report that companies spend roughly 70% of their annual IT budgets on maintaining and keeping existing infrastructure, running a cost that is in excess of $2,5tn globally.
Qatar was recently ranked among the top ten countries engaging ICT to achieve the governmnet’s vision of the future, in the World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Information Technology Report.