VMworld 2015: There are five imperatives for the digital economy, says VMware’s Gelsinger
He was speaking at a keynote session during day two of VMware’s VMworld 2015 event in San Francisco.
Gelsinger claimed mobile Cloud has connected more than three billion people across the world. In Q3 of 2019, he claimed this number will peak to half the population of the world.
“It is my aim to create a piece of technology that touches every human on earth. Maybe in the next five years, we’ll get halfway there. It’s a powerful time, for us as a technology company, to literally be changing the earth,” he said.
But Internet connectivity is not uniformly distributed across the world – the US has 9 out of 10 people connected, while Asia currently has one in three. In Africa, just one in four people are connected but A/NZ is one of the leading regions with 88 per cent connectivity.
“If you think about connectivity, there are benefits in terms of education, job creation, and health improvements. As we move to the mobile Web, we’re seeing emerging countries leap over entire generations of technology.”
And the mobile revolution is only expected to boom further. Gelsinger said in 2015, we’re averaging at about three devices per person, and the next five years will see this double again to about 5.9 devices in 2020.
“The app industry has become bigger than Hollywood. Ten years from now, it’s estimated that there will be five billion people connected online in 2025, and there will be 80 per cent connectivity across the planet in 2029/2030,” he mentioned.
This leads to huge economic impacts, transforming businesses. As such, Gelsinger highlighted five imperatives that businesses should look at for the digital economy.
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The first, is asymmetry in business. He claimed to win, businesses have to change the rules of the game and embrace new models of mobile Cloud technology. As a result of this, he indicated vertical industries such as health, technology, education, insurance, and custom manufacturing will change in the coming months.
“Every one of these are getting attacked by a new asymmetrical model. This might even cause the resurgence of some mature economies. Mobility should be at the center of business operations. We have to innovate like a start-up and deliver like an enterprise.”
The second is the professional era of the Cloud. According to Gelsinger, we’re leaving the experimental phase but there still is a disjointed picture of public and private Clouds. As such, he highlighted the need for a unified hybrid Cloud where applications are watched to the span, not to the silo.
“It’s not about the big beating the small, it’s the fast beating the slow. So, the most strategic way forward in this space is creating hybrid applications,” he added.
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The next imperative he mentioned is security. Gelsinger said the challenge lies in protecting people, apps, and data instead of protecting a server, router, or infrastructure component.
He said the security industry has been challenged and has been complicated, with businesses spending most of their dollars on products that don’t solve the problem and the only thing increasing more than the spend on security is the cost of security breaches.
“So virtualisation offers the fundamental basics for us to architect security. It allows alignment of the security functional services from the applications to the apps, data and users. It also allows for ubiquity.
“Some say security should be built in and not bolted on – it’s nonsense. We didn’t have a place to bolt it in. We were just patching it on. We need to put an end to that thinking and now architect in security. It lets us be twice as secure for half the cost,” Gelsinger added.
He also said the next wave of innovation is proactive technology. He said businesses need to move from being reactive to proactive, essentially changing human experiences.
“What we find invasive today might be invaluable tomorrow. And applications, Big Data and analytics are the building blocks of proactive technology. Rule one of ruling the Cloud is to automate everything and keep that data forever. That will help us predict almost everything going into the future.”
The last imperative he described is the decrease in S&P 500 companies. He claimed 40 per cent of S&P 500 companies would be no more in the coming years.
“You must break out to stay relevant in this future. Rattle the cage, be the entrepreneur and innovator for your business. It is time to lead the change,” he added.