As organisations explore emerging technologies such as AI and IoT, it’s crucial that their storage strategy is aligned to enable them to fully embrace these new digital tools. Mohamed ElZomor, Senior Director – Storage Platform Solutions, CEEMETA at Dell Technologies, highlights how Dell is empowering organisations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) to address this through its enterprise storage portfolio.
How has Dell Technologies made strides in enabling storage rollout for customers in KSA?
With the evolution toward much more data-centric business models, businesses are constantly faced with the pressing demands of exponential data growth and management.
Organisations of all sizes are being challenged to meet higher performance, agility, availability and scalability requirements while staying within strict budgetary constraints. IT is also expected to respond faster to take advantage of changing market conditions and new business opportunities while enabling increasing use of Big Data and analytics, more personalised interaction with customers, around-the-clock operations and better use of innovation to drive competitive differentiation.
With this, organisations strive to modernise their servers, storage and data protection infrastructure to help streamline IT infrastructure while tackling these critical demands.
In response to these challenges, Dell is empowering businesses across KSA with its end-to-end enterprise storage portfolio to help them unlock the value of data as they undertake their transformation journeys. Whether it’s advancing security, improving operational efficiencies through cyber-resilience and multi-cloud flexibility, Dell strives to protect and maximise value through its modern storage experience.
Why is storage important for Digital Transformation and businesses?
Businesses are more reliant than ever on their data and are racing to adopt new data-hungry and data-generating technologies like AI and IoT, which hold the key to unlocking innovation and staying competitive in the market. However, as data continues to pile up and skilled IT talent become increasingly difficult to hire and retain, companies are finding themselves needing to do more with less.
In order to fully embrace the benefits of these emerging technologies, businesses require flexible data storage solutions that can manage modern data volume and complexity, providing timely access to insights. By investing in advanced storage solutions, businesses can position themselves for success in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. This is where Dell is helping customers rise to the challenge by enabling them to make the most of their IT investments with storage software innovation that is more energy efficient, boosts productivity and strengthens cyber-resiliency.
With the growing popularity of Gen AI, what role does storage play in Gen AI use cases?
AI and Gen AI are key technologies driving Digital Transformation. According to PwC, AI is expected to contribute over US$135.2 billion in 2030 to the KSA economy, equivalent to 12.4% of GDP.
However, to succeed in the AI race, organisations must ensure their storage solutions can handle the vast amounts of data required to build and train Gen AI models, as well as manage the data these models generate. Traditional storage systems are struggling to keep up with the volume and complexity of the unstructured data created by AI and Gen AI models.
Thus, organisations need to look to deploying scalable, secure and cost-effective data architectures. Investing in innovative storage technologies such as distributed storage, data compression and data indexing can help enhance performance, efficiency and cost-savings for Gen AI systems. Additionally, a multi-cloud by design approach can help offer a sustainable solution, providing management consistency across multiple public cloud environments.
Although sometimes overlooked, storage is a crucial foundation for successful Gen AI deployment. Organisations must prioritise building a solid storage foundation to maximise the benefits of AI technologies and drive greater business value in the future. At Dell, we have the world’s broadest Gen AI solutions portfolio from desktop to data centre to cloud, meeting organisations wherever they are in their Gen AI journey.
How has Dell’s storage portfolio helped customers meet the demands of the changing KSA business landscape?
Over recent years, we’ve announced enhancements across our industry-leading storage portfolio, driving increased intelligence, automation, cyber-resiliency and multi-cloud flexibility. The breadth of the portfolio, including Dell PowerStore, PowerMax, PowerFlex and PowerScale, offers platforms that cost-effectively meet the needs of small, medium-sized and large businesses alike while providing room for ample growth.
Moreover, we continue to see as-a-Service models gain momentum due to their simplicity and cost-effectiveness. Incorporating Storage-as-a-Service models helps provide simplicity, agility, payment flexibility and control, allowing businesses to optimise their data storage in accordance with evolving demands while focusing on delivering outcomes that align with overarching business goals. It is projected that by 2025, 70% of enterprise storage infrastructure will be software defined, up from about 20% in 2020 according to IDC.
The significant software innovations introduced across the Dell storage portfolio have helped businesses simplify IT operations, innovate securely and get more value from their data. This was evident in our performance, where according to IDCs Quarterly Storage Tracker for Q4CY23, Dell ranked #1 in Storage in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with 39.5% share. Dell’s performance in storage continues to reflect the company’s focus on innovation and its drive to empower customers in addressing changing business demands and excelling in the digital economy.