The HPE Digital Life Garage was officially launched in Dubai this year and is the first in a series of the company’s worldwide innovation centres from the company. Located in the heart of the Innovation Hub of Dubai, the multi-million-dollar HPE Digital Life Garage consists of four pillars: The Digital Innovation Showcase, the Digital Life Lab, the Digital Knowledge Centre and the HPE Global Network. Rebecca Wright, Director, Digital Life Garage Hewlett Packard Enterprise – Middle East, explains how the project will help companies realise their Digital Transformation strategies and how it will help customers turn their dreams into reality. Spiros Rafailovits, General Manager UAE & Gulf at Logicom, explains why Logicom decided to join the project.
The HPE Digital Life Garage will allow customers to take advantage of in-person and virtual development sessions that use advanced technology from a rich ecosystem of partners to develop their concept into an actionable proof of value and accelerate the idea-to-production lifecycle.
The Digital Innovation Showcase allows customers to collaborate with technology leaders and experts to plan their Digital Transformation and accelerate the idea-to-production lifecycle, while at the Digital Life Lab, companies can engage with industry leaders in interactive workshops to create innovative concepts and convert them into preproduction demonstrations.
Learn new technology, business and management competencies in a variety of platforms at the Digital Knowledge Centre and take advantage of access to HPE’s worldwide network of programmes, products and services through the HPE Global Network.
What challenges are organisations in the region facing with planning their Digital Transformation strategies right now?
Wright: Most of the Digital Transformation initiatives need to be linked with the business needs and in most cases, require significant investment. The main challenge is about how to measure the impact and the outcome for the different transformation initiatives ahead of time to validate the approach and mitigate the investment risk.
The HPE Digital Life Garage will help customers to translate their business aspirations into different digital innovations and will even support prototyping and the proof of value phase to make sure the outcomes are aligned with the expectation.
How do you believe technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), memory driven computing and the edge will fundamentally transform business value?
Wright: The transformation projects are meant to enhance customer experience, introduce new services and improve operations. The three goals need to leverage data and enhance new experiences. AI and memory driven computing will unlock the value of data to support businesses. And at the interaction point between the companies and customers, the edge will introduce a new range of capabilities and services.
What prompted the idea behind the innovation hub?
Wright: HPE’s aim is to advance the way people live and work and we are leveraging the different digital innovations to achieve that. The main idea was to build a place where ideas and innovations become a reality, to expedite the contribution to society and to add value to business. This matches with Dubai’s vision to become an innovation hub.
Tell us what will be happening at the innovation hub day-to-day?
Wright: Customers will be visiting the Digital Life Garage to share their vision and attend some ideation workshops that will help translate this into digital innovations. They will be accessing different use cases and solutions that were developed with similar industries, and they will be collaborating with different providers within the Digital Life Garage ecosystem to make these aspirations a reality.
How does the innovation hub align with the region’s wider goals?
Wright: Many countries in the region have big plans to leverage digital innovations to transform their services and improve their operations. At the same time, they have a vision to become an innovation hub and start exporting these locally developed innovations globally. The HPE Digital Life is aligned with this vision and enables the ecosystem to work towards achieving that.
How important are strategic partnerships for driving innovation?
Wright: Partnerships can expedite the innovation and can help in achieving better value for this new customer engagement model. As no single company owns the innovation, strategic collaboration will be the way to achieve customer goals. HPE has partnerships as part of its DNA, and we have been working with our partners for so many years to bring the right value to customers
How important is collaboration between vendors, partners and customers for achieving Digital Transformation goals?
Wright: In this innovation ecosystem within the HPE Digital Life Garage, each player has a major role to make sure the goals are met with full acceleration. Customers will bring the aspirations and share goals, vendors will bring expertise, solutions and technology, while local partners complement the efforts and the solutions within their own local expertise and alliances
Why did you decide to join the project as a partner?
Rafailovits: Logicom decided to join the project after seeing HPE’s plans for technology solution engagement and the partner ecosystem. Logicom is one of HPE’s leading distributors in the region and so, it made sense to work together to drive such an innovative approach in the market. Choosing Dubai as the first location also played a big role as Dubai is Logicom’s MENA headquarters and hosts the biggest technical and product-related resources, which can directly contribute to the success of engagement with HPE Digital Life Garage.
How are you helping partners to fast-track innovation, growth and success?
Rafailovits: Technology adoption is the first priority in the region and especially in UAE. Most of our partners are specialised in their own niche technology solutions and cater specifically to their end-users. We are trying to bring these partners and their solutions to a broader scale by offering a platform to create advanced solutions using HPE’s Digital Life Garage ecosystem.
What advice would you offer organisations which want to find innovative solutions to grow their business?
Wright: We invite them to leverage the Digital Life Garage as a business accelerator platform where we can explore together, with a proven methodology, how digital innovations can help to overcome business challenges and improve business excellence.
Rafailovits: Think beyond standard product approach and invest time and resources to build solutions based on new requirements in the market. Partner with innovators such as HPE Digital Life Garage, which is leading innovation by creating an ecosystem for research and testing infrastructure and to collaborate with end customers.