Techies must constantly upskill themselves: Sumir Bhatia, President — APAC, Lenovo ISG
As a result of Covid-19, the need for technological advancements has grown, but what does this mean for India’s IT industry?
As a result of Covid-19, the need for technological advancements has grown, but what does this mean for India’s IT industry? To have a deeper understanding of this, we chatted with Sumir Bhatia, president — APAC, Lenovo ISG.
Continue reading for his thoughts!
How is the year 2021 for the IT industry? What are some of the biggest revolutions we witnessed?
Consumers and businesses are becoming more aware of the importance of the environmental, social, and governance impact of their actions. For one, implementing ESG initiatives can help businesses ensure cost-efficient operations and guarantee profitability. A study by MSCI Research has shown that companies with high ESG scores experienced lower costs of capital, lower equity costs, and lower debt costs compared to companies with poor ESG scores. Particularly within the data centre industry, wastage elimination and energy consumption are top considerations for many businesses to help them achieve significant cost savings. Companies are leveraging innovative systems and software to push boundaries of availability, flexibility, performance, and sustainability of IT Infrastructure. Interventions like Lenovo Neptune™ are leading the revolution from energy-saving concepts to performance-enhancing and energy reuse reality. Lenovo reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 92% in FY19/20 and are on its way to meeting the 2030 goal of reducing direct emissions and emissions related to purchased electricity, steam, and cooling by 50%.
We also witnessed consumption-based models being in high demand by businesses. Take the retail industry, for example, they needed robust and agile IT infrastructure that delivers the same seamless experience to their customers whenever they are browsing through the website and apps. While they want improved software, hardware, and support, they also wanted a reduction in capacity costs and the ability to adjust the infrastructure as and when necessary to improve business outcomes. This led to the introduction and acceptance of pay-as-you-grow, consumption-based models that gave flexibility and convenience to either ramp up or scale down as per business needs.
While the pandemic accelerated digital transformation, a Zero Trust approach made secure digital transformation a reality. Implementing a zero-trust architecture in the era of hybrid/remote work, organizations and businesses ensured that their employees could easily access the resources they need and keep hackers out. Zero Trust Architecture can retain the benefits of digital transformation and protect what is of value to them. Lenovo’s ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile portfolio includes enterprise-class security features, leveraging Lenovo ThinkShield for a comprehensive approach to enhancing security end-to-end.
Finally, the Metaverse became a buzzword for mainstream conversations in 2021. Businesses and consumers alike are keen on participating in the next big thing in the tech world. Metaverse comes with a revolutionary promise of the same shared 3D space where multiple concurrent users can have new virtual experiences together. This is made possible with edge computing — in which compute, storage, security, and networking occur physically closer to the end-users and their devices — that will power the metaverse. Edge is a powerful concept and by adopting it, businesses can penetrate deeper into the market and improve response time to their customers, offering more personalized products and services.
What new technological domains were introduced?
With the proliferation of cloud requirements, leaders started to realize the actual implementation benefits. Now, organizations in their advanced stage of transformation journey are deploying hybrid cloud workloads to address specific industry challenges. They are now opting for vertical cloud offerings rather than having one general, all-purpose cloud offering. Vertical cloud also helps address vertical-specific compliance and security protocols as they already come pre-built with it. The largest adopter of the vertical cloud has been the BFSI sector worldwide and we can expect others such as healthcare, the Internet of Things (IoT), Self-Driving cars, to catch up soon.
The need of the hour in the pandemic saw the continued growing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) for healthcare in 2021. It demanded accelerated research for developing new patient care. Earlier, genomics workflows used to take 60 and up to 150 hours per sample, delaying time to scientific insights. Most organizations have no time or resources to develop an alternative workaround that could manage population-level analytics. That’s why we introduced Genomics Optimization and Scalability Tool (GOAST). This technology is equipped with GPUs which contain hundreds of processing units and can process a huge number of transactions per second — processing a single human genome is reduced from 150 hours to a record-breaking 48 minutes. Faster insights mean the faster discovery of vaccines whether for viral fever or Covid-19.
Increasingly, HPC & AI is being used in plant virology and plant genomics too. The University of Delhi is using GOAST to overcome some of the hardest challenges in omics at speed. Their work is helping them improve crop health and crop yield to reduce India’s dependencies on edible oil imports.
One piece of advice for techies to prepare well for 2022.
One learning over the past two years has been that change is the only constant. Hence, to ensure relevance in this dynamic tech landscape, techies must constantly upskill themselves. The most in-demand skills today are in the field of multi-cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), AI, and Edge Computing. Along with these tech skills, understanding the requirements of the customer and their direct business implications is beneficial, as the implementation of these technologies consists of many complicated moving parts with hard deadlines and benchmarks that have little room for compromise or failure. A technology professional who has both attributes, knowledge, as well as a deep understanding of what it means for the business, is valued by employers. Today, data is the new currency and IT decision-makers are the new bankers. For techies in 2022, aligning technology and IT operations with business strategies is essential for a promising career pathway.
Which tech job profiles would emerge in the coming years?
As digitalization and virtualization continue to gain momentum, we can expect more and more businesses to rely on technologies such as Edge Computing, HPC, AI, IoT, and Software-Defined Solutions. This means technology professionals with domain and product expertise will be in high demand. Additionally, exposure to project management and other business-related skills will go a long way to grow into leadership roles.
Furthermore, with the proliferation of 5G and the rise of IoT devices, data will continue to grow exponentially. In this data deluge, analytics is the key, and we will continue to need professionals to make sense of the newly generated data sets, for gathering meaningful insights, understand and work with these complex data sets. As the business focuses more on using data to gather better ROIs, this demand will only continue to evolve further.
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