International Data Corporation (IDC) hosted more than 160 senior ICT leaders on its industry-leading virtual platform for the 12th annual installment of its IDC South Africa CIO Summit, which ran under the theme ‘The Race to Reinvent: Connecting Leaders to Empower Digital Transformation’.
The digital event offered an unrivaled immersive experience for participants as they seamlessly engaged in content-rich presentations and panel discussions, connect with exhibitors via video chat, and interacted with IDC analysts and key industry players in designated networking zones. Expert speakers explored the latest trends in cloud, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, digital leadership, intelligent automation, next-generation resilience and continuity, and big data analytics, to name just a few.
“As South African businesses embrace today’s remote working reality, their desire to create new value and meet heightened commercial expectations are proving to be fundamental drivers of technology adoption and investment,” said Mark Walker, IDC’s associate vice president for Sub-Saharan Africa, as he opened the day’s proceedings. “Indeed, we are seeing an intense focus on the relevance, affordability, accessibility, and trustworthiness of ICT as an enabler of operational and customer excellence. Value creation works when technology strategies directly impact business expectations around the critical triumvirate of customer relationships, operational efficiency, and cost management.”
IDC’s global president, Crawford Del Prete, presented the event’s keynote address as he unveiled IDC’s new five-stage guide for helping organizations plan their recovery in the economic aftermath of COVID-19. In the session, titled ‘The Five Stages to Enterprise Recovery: Charting Your Course to the Next Normal’, Del Prete urged organizations in the country to focus on the imperatives of business continuity, cost optimization, business resiliency, and targeted investment as they strive to emerge as lean, dynamic, and innovation-fueled enterprises of the future.
The agenda incorporated a series of individually themed Best Practice Sessions and Technology Focus Groups that offered expert guidance on implementing next-generation enterprise IT, reshaping security through digital transformation, sustaining business continuity, preparing workspaces for the future of work, unleashing the full power of artificial intelligence, building hybrid clouds for the digital era, and everything in between. The delegates also received valuable end-user insights from respected industry peers such as:
- Reinhardt Gerber, Head of IT, Sea Harvest Corporation
- Luyanda Ntuane, CIO, MOTUS Car Rental Division
- Louise van der Bank, CIO, AfriSam
- Frans Cronje, CIO, Adcock Ingram Holdings
IDC would like to thank the following partners for their invaluable contribution to the success of the IDC South Africa CIO Summit 2020: Host Partner – Nokia; Summit Partners – Tech Mahindra, Trend Micro, Sophos, and Microsoft; Platinum Partners – SentinelOne, Fortinet, VMware, BeyondTrust, Kaspersky, OutSystems, Ivanti, and SAP; Technology Focus Group Partners – Oracle, BlackBerry, Splunk, ManageEngine / ITR Technology, Mimecast, Dropbox / CloudSmiths, KnowBe4, Infoblox, New Relic, OpenText, Rackspace Technology, and Lenovo / Intel; Strategic Partners – Dubai Internet City and The Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA).
