Ahmed Auda, Vice President and GM, Middle East, Turkey and North Africa at VMware, tells us about the company’s involvement in this year’s GITEX.
What will make GITEX Technology Week 2022 an important event to attend this year?
GITEX is always a must-attend event and one that attracts a broad cross section of organisations from the UAE, the region and the world. It’s an excellent platform to showcase our latest innovations, meet with colleagues, partners, customers and prospects and generally feel the pulse of the region. The timing of the show is also perfect for VMware, coming just a couple of months after VMware Explore US, which took place in San Francisco on August 29 to September 1 and a month before the European edition of Explore, which takes place in Barcelona on November 7-10. As such, GITEX offers us a perfect opportunity to inform our partners and customers about all the exciting new innovations from VMware.
What are the reasons your company is exhibiting at GITEX and what do you aim to achieve at the show?
We’re excited to continue conversations with customers about what they can achieve by moving to the cloud and to understand that they should not have to compromise on innovation because of the complexity of their operations, technology, or regulations. The whole purpose of our cloud platform is to remove the complexity that accompanies cloud projects: such as achieving unified operations across different clouds; being able to build, deploy and manage apps from different clouds; and gaining visibility and control of your data.
We look forward to updating customers on the latest announcements at VMware Explore where we unveiled innovations, new offerings, services and expanded partnerships that further our commitment to help customers navigate and thrive in today’s multi-cloud world. As customers continue to evolve and digitise their businesses to innovate faster and better serve their own customers, VMware and its partner ecosystem are enabling businesses to select the right cloud for the right app.
The aim is to help customers reach the ultimate destination of a multi-cloud environment that empowers teams to accelerate their digital innovation. Many of our new capabilities are built on the VMware Cross-Cloud services introduced at VMworld 2021 and are designed to give organisations the strategic advantages of a cloud-smart approach.
As organisations increase the number of clouds they support to accelerate their business goals, they experience an increase in operational complexity. VMware Cross-Cloud services deliver a unified and simplified way to build, operate, access and better secure any application, on any cloud, from any device-across app platform, cloud management, cloud and edge infrastructure, networking and advanced security and anywhere workspace.
What will be your key message at this year’s show?
VMware is dedicated to helping organisations embrace a multi-cloud and app-centric approach that opens-up new levels of innovation, while enhancing security and increasing agility. This is especially important at the current time, as organisations seek to raise their game amid global challenges including inflation and supply chain issues. As such we will have a strong focus on customer innovation and will show attendees how to accelerate cloud transformation, secure and empower a hybrid workforce and connect and secure their apps, enabling them to innovate faster and drive their transformation plans.
Our stand will feature distinct zones representing our strategic priorities to scale cloud-native platform operations, accelerate enterprise cloud transformation and empower the hybrid workforce.
Furthermore, we will also have a presence at Global DevSlam, a transformational project by the UAE government to help coders become strategic enablers of the UAE digital economy, which will run alongside GITEX at Dubai World Trade Centre. At DevSlam, specialists from VMware will showcase our Tanzu portfolio, a modular, cloud-native application platform that enables vital DevSecOps outcomes in a multi-cloud world.
The Tanzu platform not only enables organisations to deploy and manage apps from the cloud, but also gives them far better visibility and analytics around applications. This is especially important in light of VMware’s recent State of Observability report, which shows that 89% of respondents agree that today’s applications are significantly more complex while 97% report challenges in their ability to monitor cloud application environments. Meanwhile, with 75% of organisations having made DEX a higher or top priority in the past couple of years, VMware will showcase its exceptional end-user experience for distributed teams, using its cloud services to demonstrate VMware Anywhere Workspace with security tools and governance in place.
During the show, we will also host various technology sessions on our stand including tech demos and a podcast series featuring top management and experts live from GITEX every day. These sessions will demonstrate VMware’s latest solutions and their use cases, including how multi-cloud and apps modernisation can help organisations develop and deploy software faster, run apps reliably at cloud scale, reduce risk and protect systems.