Do Colocation Facilities still have a strong role in the Enterprise?

Michael Vanderheeren, Product Manager, Clickshare Barco provides insight into the role of IT in the enterprise and show off their new wireless connectivity collaboration product.

In the fifth and final episode of the first series, Donna Burbank is joined by the Vice President of Global Big Data Consulting at Mastercard and a representative from Dell EMC. This episode explores how the digital economy is changing the way organisations do business around the world to such an unprecedented scale that it is now being called the next industrial revolution. There are plenty of tips on how to protect your most important asset - information! Whether you are a Chief Data Officer looking to understand what new technologies and methodologies are available or a businessperson trying to understand how to protect information, listen to this educational podcast to support your business transformation initiatives.

In the fourth episode of the series, Donna Burbank chairs a panel consisting of the CTO from DS Virgin Racing Formula E Team and also representatives from HPE and Cloudera. They discuss how new business models are emerging as data-driven technology provides opportunity for change. The also look at whether the CDO, traditionally a ‘back office’ role is now one of the most important roles within an organisation. Whether you are a Chief Data Officer looking to understand what new technologies and methodologies are available or a businessperson trying to understand the challenges, listen to this educational podcast to discover how important data can be to support your business transformation initiatives.

Colin Boyle, Product Marketing Specialist at Canon Europe spoke to EM360° in Amsterdam at ISE 2017 and provides insight into the future of AV & IT convergence for the enterprise and the main challenges Canon are seeing in the collaboration space.

This is the third episode of the series and Donna Burbank is joined by Erwin, Sandhill Consulting and Swisscom. The panel discuss innovative ways to increase revenue and reduce costs using data-driven digital technologies. Whether you are a Chief Data Officer looking to understand what new technologies and methodologies are available or a businessperson trying to understand the challenges around data quality, listen to this educational podcast to discover how data modelling can support your business transformation initiatives.

For the first episode in our Data Transforming Business series, Donna Burbank is joined by representatives of Barclays, Collibra and Trillium Software to discuss the ways organisations think about innovation and growth. The panel discuss how accurate, relevant and timely data is the key to success. Whether you are a Chief Data Officer looking to understand what new technologies and methodologies are available or a businessperson trying to understand the challenges around data quality, listen to this educational podcast to discover how data quality and data governance can support your business transformation initiatives.

This is the second episode of the series and here Donna Burbank is joined by representatives of Syncsort and Hortonworks. The panel discuss whether Hadoop augments the data warehouse or replaces it and conclude by looking at how business users and IT can work together in these ecosystems in the future. Whether you are a Chief Data Officer looking to understand what new technologies and methodologies are available or a businessperson trying to understand the challenges, listen to this educational podcast to discover how data quality and data governance can support your business transformation initiatives.

Mary Ann de Lares Norris, VP EMEA of Oblong Industries, discusses the future of work, collaboration and how to engage Millennials with EM360.

Raised in the digital age, Millennials anticipate instant connectivity, mobile interaction and seamless, collaborative technology as standard in their working environment. Businesses must ensure that their collaboration tools not only enable this approach to working, but are also sufficiently future-proofed so that as technology develops and ways of working continue to evolve, their systems are enhancing this development, rather than restricting it.

Ocado may be most well-known as an online grocer, but its plan is to become a technology company – both in hardware and software, which is probably more than twice as hard as only doing software.

Combining the two seems obvious for Ocado, since it runs a physical business rather than a virtual one – in that it has several huge warehouse across the country, all handling tens of thousands of individual grocery products and fulfilling hundreds of thousands of orders every month.

Managing such a complex business requires software as well as hardware, much of which Ocado bought in from outside companies when it first started in 2000.

Over time, Ocado found that it needed software and hardware that were not available on the market, so decided to develop the technology itself, which is what has led to this point where the company has a significant in-house tech team.

So significant in fact that the company has launched Ocado Technology and Ocado Engineering as two separate business units, in addition to its core grocery business, which is still called Ocado.

We spoke to Neira Jones, Independent Advisor in the FinTech and Cybersecurity industries, to discover what her predicted trends of the FinTech industry are.

"First of all, I will make the controversial statement that fintech is not a “revolution”, more of an “evolution”. In fact, innovation doesn’t happen in isolation (fintechs almost always reuse existing infrastructure & technology) and it doesn’t happen by discarding current technologies and reinventing the wheel (fintechs almost always look creatively at what exists today to create something better, faster or more appealing). Secondly, whilst some fintech organisations can help banks address fraud and security challenges (especially those in the fraud prevention, machine learning, threat intelligence, identity and authentication, and other regtech areas), I think that collaboration will be key and that banks can also help fintech organisations with fraud and security (after all, they have been doing it for a very very long time...). Conversely, fintech firms can undeniably help banks become closer to their customers and help them transition from a product centric to a customer centric strategy."

EM360°Tech spoke to the CTO & Founder of Mersive, Christopher Jaynes, at ISE 2017 in Amsterdam to find out all about what Mersive are doing in the wireless collaboration space with their custom-built enterprise software, Solstice. We also discussed the role of IT in current AV integration projects and the takeover of AV by IT, with "software eating hardware".

We interviewed Nigel Bolt about the current dilemma of IT Security skills shortage and he offered his insights on how automation could be key in the fight cybercrime in an increasingly complex threat landscape.

Michael Vanderheeren, Product Manager, Clickshare Barco provides insight into the role of IT in the enterprise and show off their new wireless connectivity collaboration product.

John Tracey, Director of Cloud, Starleaf Provides insight into integrating Skype for business and your current video conferencing deployment into one within the cloud.

What’s at the top of the UK CIO’s agenda? According to a recent study by Tableau, a large proportion of CIOs (75%) view data analytics as a key priority this year and are keen for the whole business to understand the value of data.

James Eiloart, SVP of EMEA at Tableau, talks through the results of Tableau’s recent findings – from the belief amongst CIOs that there is a lack of understanding in the wider business about data analytics, to the fact that senior management are eager to tackle this lack of understanding, and educate the entire workforce about data.

James discusses the importance of data within a company, sharing examples of how CIOs can drive the data transformation, including:

· Ensuring data is seen as a priority from the top down – the whole c-suite should be involved in “walking the walk”

· Encouraging IT to work with business users to understand how data can better inform and improve their work

· Training and coaching on data analytics tools to become more confident

· Identifying data champions – true fans of data!


With key customer examples, James shares how large enterprise companies use data analytics and visualisation tools across different departments to do everything from understanding customer behaviour, to marketing campaigns or engineering works.

James also outlines how data can become a crucial part of driving business success, once employees gain confidence to use it in their everyday decisions.

On December 8, 2016, Vodafone UK and the London School of Economics released a comprehensive report looking into the business productivity and how businesses of all sizes can unlock new growth. As a nation, we’re at a critical juncture as we strive to increase economic output and join the top productive G7 nations – and Dr Alexander Grous from the LSE has used data from over 20,000 interviews over ten years to address this problem. Alexander notes that the major block to organisations addressing the productivity puzzle is that firms either don’t even know there is a problem or don’t know how to address it constructively. In this video interview, Dr. Grous explains the three key components he has found during his research to help businesses unlock their productivity:

1) Good management practices - Dr. Grous calls this the lever; all productivity either thrives or fails at this level
2) The use of technology in the firm
3) Flexible workforce

Dr. Grous goes on to explain not only how to create a flexible workforce, but to nurture this as well, so that employees are motivated, happy, and most importantly, producing effective work. Through a solid understanding of the composition of the firm, and what ideal organisational output is, management can then begin to see what enables productivity, and how they can measure effectiveness.

In 2009, Vodafone UK introduced their Better Ways of Working project to enable their employees to work in a more flexible environment. This included an open plan environment – no office, no fixed desks, or landline phones – and introduced new technologies that made greater use of unified communications strategies and video conferencing. Employees want, and need, to work as a part of different teams at different times, and from different locations and Vodafone have seen enormous benefits through this project being put into place.

In this video interview, Phil Mottram, Director of Enterprise at Vodafone UK, discusses the key benefits to Vodafone’s Better Ways of Working strategy. With happier employees, better productivity, and reduced costs, all through flexible working, this shared way of working paved the way for Vodafone to have a holistic understanding of what benefits this deployment really brings to businesses big and small.

Phil also explains the tools that Vodafone provides for its customers in implementing these practices. With Vodafone’s advisory services function, customers are able to enjoy not only the technological aspects of flexible working, but the softer components as well, such as communicating and engaging with employees on how these changes will affect them. With Vodafone’s ‘Ready Business Indicator’ , customers have an easy, online tool that can help demonstrate where a business is with regards to performance, where there can be room for improvement, and help assess a business’s readiness to deal with change.

Phil also describes how to overcome the barrier of those who are resistant to change. To those who have made their desk their ‘home away from home’, this can be particularly challenging. See what Phil has to say about overcoming this challenge, and ensuring your business is making the most of what flexible working has to offer.

What is the number one driver of a great customer experience (CX)? According to Forrester, it's an emotional connection.

As part of its 2017 CX Trends Report, InMoment surveyed 10,000 brands and 20,000 consumers across the globe to get a better picture of which emotions consumers associate with positive and negative brand experiences.

InMoment's Simon Fraser, Sr. Director of Customer Success (EMEA), and Nan Russell, Head of Global Customer Excellence, give us a brief glimpse of what these emotions are and why they're critical for the relationships brands seek to build with their customers.