Unified Tech Platforms set to Reshape Business Innovation
As technology continues to rapidly advance, businesses are having to confront an increasingly complex digital landscape.
Digital transformation remains a priority, with organisations shifting focus primarily towards artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing and data analytics. As they strive to harness these technologies to stay competitive and innovative, they are simultaneously faced with the need to successfully integrate disruptive technologies in an uncomplicated way.
With businesses striving to boost their digital competencies, Technology Magazine considers how business technology is shifting towards more centralised and integrated platforms. We gain insights into leading technology platforms, SAP BTP and the Dell AI Factory, which are designed to adapt and upscale for modern enterprise solutions and address current business challenges.
Technology platforms: A business evolution
It is clear that businesses are now starting to shift away from the more traditional linear models that are product-centric, towards platform-based models. Instead of focusing on creating and selling products, organisations are now eager to facilitate greater interactions between multiple participants.
As the development of AI and other new technologies continues to rapidly accelerate, so does the software required to run it. As far as managed technology platforms are concerned, these services are designed to work with each other to reduce time-to-market and deploy new applications.
In fact, according to Statista, worldwide IT spending is forecasted to increase by 8% between by the end of 2024, from 2023, reaching approximately US$5tn, with IT services spending alone expected to hit US$1.6tn by the end of 2024.
With this in mind, centralised technology platforms can work successfully to accelerate innovation and keep businesses competitive, particularly as far as AI and cloud computing are concerned.
In today’s digital landscape, a unified digital platform strategy is becoming increasingly popular for businesses so they can deploy workloads to accelerate innovation. Particularly as emerging technologies such as generative AI (Gen AI) continue to rise in popularity, unified technology platforms can accelerate adoption and business resiliency.
“Infrastructure and platforms must be defined in software as consistently as possible because complexity is the number one enemy of productivity,” comments Arash Ghazanfari, UK CTO at Dell Technologies. “By rationalising architectural diversity and removing operational silos, IT organisations can deliver seamless and consistent digital experiences, effectively becoming brokers of value-added services rather than being builders of complex, fragmented and brittle IT systems.”
Choosing the right technology platform
It can be hard for a business to choose a technology platform best suited to their needs, but selecting the right one is integral to the success of a business.
In order to choose the right route, businesses can take action in several ways, including assessing current business needs and evaluating scalability. This can enable company leaders to identify specific goals and challenges that the chosen platform can address, in addition to making sure that the platform is able to grow successfully to suit a specific business.
In this way, businesses can create accurate workforce plans and identify trends within their company to enable companies to drive more informed decision-making and strategic planning.
“Insights gained from combining product data, customer feedback, sales information, and marketing data can be used to create personalised customer experiences,” says SAP’s Head of Business Technology Platform UK&I, Georgia Tangalakie. “Data-driven planning and analysis allows businesses to better understand the financial implications of decisions through unifying data from multiple areas of the business.”
Equally important is the emphasis on security and compliance, particularly as the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve. As threats increase, companies must ensure that they meet clear security requirements and maintain customer trust.
Solutions at this scale can allow organisations to streamline operations, enhance collaboration and respond quickly to market demands. Moving forward, this will be essential for a business future-proofing itself and positioning itself for greater long-term success.
Both SAP and Dell Technologies boast clear data-centric approaches to their technology platform offerings, emphasising the critical role of data in driving business development.
SAP BTP: Staying ahead of the competition
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is a comprehensive cloud platform that provides a suite of integrated tools and services. They are ultimately designed to provide a suite of tools for businesses to extend and integrate applications.
The platform offers businesses the flexibility of choosing what services are necessary for a business without compromising on compatibility. As Georgia explains, SAP BTP “provides the foundations to work with the latest technology. It is far simpler and less costly for the overwhelming majority of businesses to use a managed technology platform like SAP BTP rather than attempt to manage a large number of disparate applications hosted on-premise.”
She adds: “In the event a business suddenly needs to increase its workload, SAP BTP can manage the corresponding increase in resource demand without needing to invest in new hardware. As SAP believes data is, and should be, at the heart of each innovation, the company focuses SAP BTP on ensuring the most authoritative business data is accessible in full context in one single place.
As a unified platform, SAP BTP aims to bring together a broad range of technologies and services under one umbrella. These include data management, analytics, AI, the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain.
Ultimately, the platform provides an opportunity for enterprises to become more driven by data, as Georgia explains: “It entails a data fabric approach that captures all business data and allows it to be accessible and compatible with data from other SAP or non-SAP applications. Relevant context clues for data are kept intact and are shared between different areas of the business, providing both the data itself along with what makes it meaningful.”
A centralised platform like SAP BTP is able to provide organisations with the infrastructure required to harness the latest developments in technology with minimal friction points.
“As all business applications and data reside on one platform, it also provides the foundations to find out how to improve the wider business through gathering insights from data that would not be possible to collect through using individual applications alone,” Georgia says.
Dell AI Factory: Boosting AI and cloud strategies
Decision-makers across essential businesses are currently facing a similar challenge: Confronting AI. As the digital landscape shifts to embrace AI and cloud solutions on a larger scale, Dell Technologies’ AI Factory with Nvidia speaks to this need to understand and better harness the opportunities.
Launched as a collaboration with leading chipmaker Nvidia, the AI Factory combines Dell hardware and software capabilities with Nvidia’s advanced AI infrastructure.
Arash Ghazanfari, UK CTO at Dell Technologies, describes the AI Factory as a scalable and extensible framework that is designed to “accelerate AI innovation across organisations of all sizes.”
The offering consists of multiple Dell AI-optimised solutions, products and services, in addition to offerings from the company’s partners. These can be utilised in different ways, depending on business requirements, such as buying, subscribing, or as-a-service.
“Its flexibility allows deployment in diverse environments, including clouds, data centres, workstations, AI-powered PCs for knowledge workers and edge locations,” Arash adds.
“The Dell AI Factory with Nvidia is a subset of the Dell AI Factory that includes Dell’s infrastructure and software with NVIDIA’s advanced AI infrastructure and software suite, all underpinned by a high-speed NVIDIA networking fabric.”
He adds: “Our goal is to help our customers accelerate time to insights and reduce the cost and complexity associated with bringing the desired business driven AI use cases to life.”
The Dell AI Factory is now positioned as a tool for enterprises aiming to accelerate their adoption of AI technologies. More broadly, the tech giant seeks to empower organisations to leverage AI to remain competitive, which is particularly significant as organisations confront the challenges associated with an extremely complex cloud landscape.
As businesses previously adopted a ‘cloud first’ mindsets, this has now led to greater complications, larger costs and resource fragmentation issues. On this, Arash says: “Organisations have learnt over the years that it may be easy to start in the cloud, but scaling in the cloud can be very costly. Without a cohesive strategy, this organic adoption of multiple cloud environments has made it hard to move fast or scale their digital capabilities quickly.
“We believe multi cloud adoption should be based on intentional business-driven decisions. Our customers are enjoying a simplified cloud experience with quick provisioning, rapid scaling and modern consumption while seamlessly aligning the right workload to the right platform to maximise the value they can generate from their digital investments.”
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