Alex Rammal will be speaking at the
Cloud World Forum, taking place on 17-18 June 2014 in London. The Cloud World
Forum is EMEA's leading Cloud event welcoming 8000+ attendees and 250+
exhibitors over the two days. Visit http://www.cloudwf.com/ for your free delegate ticket. The 6th Annual show features
12 theatres led by Cloud end-users: more than 300 speakers from multinationals,
SMEs, public sector organisations, online players, regulators, telcos and
analysts take the floor in engaging, thought-provoking keynotes, hands-on labs,
brainstorming sessions and live demos over two days.
As we approach Cloud World Forum in
London this June Business Cloud News had the opportunity to
get a few minutes with one of the conference speakers, Alex Rammal,
Business Relationship Director, Information Technology of Jaguar Land Rover,
who shared his views on the biggest
challenges involved with moving IT estate over to the cloud.
Q. Can you give me a
sense of some of the unique attributes of your business or vertical, and how
they shape or impact your IT estate?
Jaguar Land Rover is
experiencing a tremendous period of growth based upon the launch of a
significant number of new vehicles and improved global sales - the volume and
complexity growth creates stresses on a number of our legacy infrastructure and
applications requiring us to continue to invest in the creation of a modern,
scalable and enterprise wide 21st century IT architecture.
Q. What do you think the
most disruptive elements of cloud computing and enterprise IT are currently?
The maturity of Cloud
computing, especially in the legal and compliance frameworks, appear
to be progressing allowing the further adoption of enterprise scale cloud
compute - Cloud in essence has moved IT away from providers of ‘boxes
and wires' to expecting a utility based model - this has freed up IT
departments to move up the value chain and start to focus on providing
competitively advantageous IT solutions that provide true business
value.
Q. In five years, what
do you think your organisation will look like and what kinds of technologies do
you think will be needed to support this vision?
The continuing technology
mega-trends are likely to have substantial impact on our enterprise IT
landscape, the realisation of IoT (Internet of Things) will open up a huge
amount of potential within the Automotive industry, already we are seeing more
and more progress in connected cars - other trends such as 3D/4D printing and
improving Artificial Intelligence are all areas of interest.
The IT Organisations will
continue to have to evolve to be flexible enough to keep up with the disruptive
nature of digital technologies - we have to focus more on how IT can
be harnessed to provide real tangible business benefit which will
require IT leaders who are more business leaders than IT technologists.
Q. What do you
think are some of the biggest challenges involved with moving your IT estate
over to the cloud?
We have to make sure
we understand the use-cases that we believe most suitable for the
various flavours of cloud to maximise the benefit whilst managing risk, there
are also still legal and compliance questions that need to be address,
especially when working in a global, highly mobile environment.
Q. What are you
most looking forward to a Cloud World Forum this year?
Seeing the innovative use cases
that other companies have addressed using cloud technologies, looking at the
future Cloud Trends and where the main technology providers see for the future
of cloud - hopefully moving away from the hype into real world solutions for
the enterprise.