THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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Businesses must adapt to ‘4th industrial revolution’

Businesses must adapt to ‘4th industrial revolution’

Dell Technologies says it stands behind newest tech challenges 

US tech giant Dell Technologies has warned businesses they will become obsolete if they fail to adapt to the current “fourth industrial revolution”, and it voiced its readiness to help them get through this big challenge.
Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive of Dell Technologies, and other top company executives issued the warning during “Dell EMC World 2016” held recently in Austin, capital of the US state of Texas.
They expressed confidence that after the merger of Dell Corporation and EMC Corporation, they were now in a better position to help their customers survive the fast-changing landscape of this digital era.
Dell Technologies has advantages over its competitors thanks to its complete range of products from hardware and software to cloud-computing and data-centre solutions, its executives told the audience at the event’s opening ceremony.
The CEO claimed the merged company, Dell Technologies, was No 1 in many areas of the industry, including servers, storage, virtualisation, cloud software, security and data protection. 
Michael Dell said this strong position was mainly due to Dell Corp’s acquisition of EMC, a leading player in the areas of corporate servers and virtualisation solutions. He also said his company planned to invest US$4.5 billion (nearly Bt160 billion) annually in research and development, far more than any of its competitors.
In his keynote speech, Dell said a survey on some 4,000 executives on the Digital Transformation Index showed that 45 per cent feared that their businesses would be obsolete in three to five years, and 48 per cent said they had no idea what their industry would look like in three years.
He said a digital future in which the world is dominated by the Internet of Things, also known as “Internet of Everything”, would turn out to be a “digital disaster” for businesses that are not well prepared. In the digital future, there will be smart cities full of driverless cars, medical treatment with nano-robots, and postal delivery by drones.
“Internet of Everything is changing the world,” Dell said, noting that there are some 8 billion connected devices globally today and the number is expected to reach 200 billion in 15 years.
“Dell Technologies is here to be your best, most trusted partner, for your digital future,” the CEO told members of the audience, which included business partners, customers and journalists.
According to the World Economic Forum, the inexorable shift from simple digitisation of the “third industrial revolution” to innovation based on combinations of technologies in the so-called fourth revolution is forcing companies to re-examine the way they do business. 
Business leaders and senior executives need to understand their changing environment, challenge the assumptions of their operating teams, and relentlessly and continuously innovate, the WEF says.
At Dell EMC World 2016, Dell Technologies also announced a number of new products under the Dell EMC brand, including VxRail and VxRack storage servers.
Dell Technologies came into existence after Dell Corp’s acquisition of EMC in September in a $67-billion merger deal – the largest in the tech industry’s history. Before their merger, Dell was a leader in personal computers and servers while EMC was prominent in storage and related technologies for corporate customers. 
Dell Technologies’ family of businesses consists of Dell, Dell EMC, RSA, SecureWorks, VMware, Pivotal and VirtuStream.
This year’s Dell EMC World event was the first since the merger. About 8,000 people from around the world participated. It was held on the theme “Let the transformation begin.” 
Next year’s Dell EMC World is planned for Las Vegas, Nevada.
At a press conference after the event’s opening ceremony, Michael Dell said his company would focus on making PCs and offering software and services instead of becoming yet another smartphone company.
“By the way, I am really glad we are not doing smartphones. Needless to say, if you want to lose a lot of money quickly, go into smartphones.”
For Dell, PCs are not dead but in fact are still needed to “do real work” that smartphones cannot.
“Plenty of our customers say, ‘We love smartphones but we are not giving up on our PCs.’ We can’t do all our work on just smartphones,” he said during a roundtable meeting with a small group of journalists from the Asia-Pacific region.

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