Business Review Europe - October 2017

NVIDIA +

ROCHE & ACCENTURE

O c tob e r 2017

www.businessrevieweurope.eu

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EXPLORING THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE SPACE

TOP 10 BUSIEST AIRports IN EUROPE

HOW GENERAL ELECTRIC IS

DIGITISING GLOBAL BRANDS GE DIGITAL EUROPE’S DEBOR AH SHERRY ON HOW THE COMPANY IS HELPING TR ANSFORM GLOBAL BR ANDS ACROSS ALL INDUSTRIES

Making societies more productive by helping our customers run their businesses.

Birlasoft, one of the Global Leaders in IT service delivery, is proud to be associated with Close Brothers for last three years in its journey to become a leading Modern Merchant Bank.

Birlasoft is a strategic partner of Close Brothers and supports its mission critical core banking application and Management Information System which puts it in a unique position to create value for next generation business transformations.

Birlasoft has successfully implemented: A Fraud Detection Solution which has saved Close Brothers a million pounds since inception. It has been awarded

‘Best vertical solution of year 2014’

by IT Europa - European IT and Software Excellence Award.

Close Brothers Premium Finance IT team has successfully delivered a very large Customer Service Program (CSP) by transforming the Banking Application for which Birlasoft was the partner of choice.

Founded in 1995, Birlasoft is a Global IT Services provider and part of 150 year old, multi-billion dollar CK Birla Group.

Birlasoft deploys a host of innovative solutions and service architectures across the globe in Banking, Financial, Insurance Services and Manufacturing industries.

Our core values lie in being a dependable service provider, with years of experience in managing mission critical systems for our esteemed customers. We achieve our mutual goals by engaging and integrating human capital across our people, customers and partners. Our expertise makes us unique as we challenge the status quo and strive for excellence.

Birlasoft (UK) Ltd. 53-54 Grosvenor Street, London, W1K 3HU www.birlasoft.com | birlasoftuksalesteam@birlasoft.com Tel: + 44-207-319 5700 | Fax: +44-208-711 5103

“Birlasoft have had a strong delivery track record for Close Brothers; what separates them from other vendors I’ve worked with is the level of partnership and flexibility the y consistently display” Chris Loake, CIO – Close Brothers Premium Finance

FOREWORD HI THERE, AND welcome to October’s edition of Business Review Europe.

Our cover feature this month is an exclusive chat with Deborah Sherry, who has a key role in GE Digital’s operation on the continent.

As General Manager & Chief Commercial Offer, she oversees a team that creates and manages software to deliver more efficient business models to companies across Europe.

Following that, Jess Shanahan looks at how businesses are looking to exploit the electric vehicle space, including one firm that has entered the market with an electric scooter.

Our Top 10 this month focusses on the busiest airports in Europe, with the likes of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol and London Gatwick part of the list.

Finally, our exclusive profiles feature interviews with Paddy Power Betfair, Roche & Accenture, NVIDIA, RISE SICS and Chassis Brakes International – all involving in-depth discussions with top executives and industry experts.

Enjoy the magazine, and join the conversation on Twitter: @BizReviewEurope

Enjoy the issue!

www.businessrevieweurope.eu www.bizclikmedia.com

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08 STEALTH & EFFICIENCY Digitising global brands TECHNOLOGY

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Plug in!

Exploring the electric vehicle space

INSIGHT

TOP 10

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Busiest airports in EUROPE

C O M PA N Y PROFILES

RISE SICS

CONSTRUCTION

Paddy Power Betfair TECHNOLOGY

76 48

NVIDIA

TECHNOLOGY

36 Roche & Accenture

66

TECHNOLOGY

Chassis Brakes International SUPPLY CHAIN

86 5

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Dive further intocentric customer centricity and more customer customer behaviors: Join the likes of Orange and GTT to better understand customer behavior and how to deliver a truly centric model KEYcustomer STATISTICS throughout your organization

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Tackle the ongoing issues of change management: Learn from TSTT and Cricket Wireless as they share their successes and mistakes made along their journey to become more customer centric European Countries Represented

Hours Dedicated Networking

Orange

Nataraj Rao, Vice President, Operations and Strategy, Cricket Wireless

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Daniel Herb, Director, GetT-Mobile in touch Internet of Things, #cemeurope Emmanuel Obiorah, Director Process Excellence Practitioner and Innovation, Verizon Attendees

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15+

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75%+ Practitioner Attendees

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l l e h s t u N a n i Designed for CEM professionals, by CEM professionals – following months of in-depth market research and direct feedback from the industry, we only cover the issues you really want to hear about

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Full of resultsdriven case studies and ‘how-to’ guides from the region’s customer experience experts – walk away with concrete examples of strategies that really work, and an action plan of how you can implement them straight away

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CONFERENCE DAY ONE Adapting to digital disruption and business transformation to enable customer centricity: Learn from a range of operators at different stages in their digitalization projects, such as Sprint, T-Mobile, Frontier and Nuevatel Bolivia and understand what they would do differently if they could start over again

CONFERENCE DAY TWO Building on a foundation of centricity, employee engagement, ROI & change management: A series of discussion groups, plenaries and challenges led by the likes of Orange, Cricket Wireless and TSTT will help you create tangible next steps to take back to the office

emtelecoms.iqpc.co.uk

STEALTH AND EFFICIENCY – digitising global brands

INSIGHT

How GE Digital – the digital arm of General Electric – is transforming global brands across all industries to achieve enormous savings that are benefiting the planet, as well as business…

Wr i t t e n b y : LEILA HAWKINS

INSIGHT GE DIGITAL IS the digital arm of the American multinational conglomerate General Electric.

Founded in 2015 to take advantage of the industrial internet, much like its parent did with the electrical revolution in the 20th century, GE Digital is creating new business models using connected software and applications to make companies work faster and more efficiently.

GE Digital works with many of the organisations General Electric has been engaged with over the years, across literally every major industry including telecoms, consumer goods, automotive, gas and power. Its aim is to drive digital transformation across all these sectors. However, digitising businesses isn’t just about computerising operations, it’s also about using renewable energy sources, which will lower costs while yielding higher financial gains; results that ultimately benefit the planet too.

Deborah Sherry, General Manager and Chief Commercial Officer at GE Digital Europe, explains how it’s helping the companies find these solutions. “We achieve all this by introducing equipment health asset performance management and by 10

October 2017

driving service delivery improvement through our field services software.

We are building incredible software which replicate people’s equipment, called the ‘digital twin’. We do all of this on the premises, on the client’s equipment or on the cloud, depending on the context or the need. We’ve built all this specifically to drive the next wave of productivity gain within the industry.”

“WE ARE BUILDING INCREDIBLE SOFTWARE WHICH REPLICATES PEOPLE’S EQUIPMENT, CALLED THE ‘DIGITAL TWIN’” – Deborah Sherry, General Manager and Chief Commercial Officer, GE Digital Europe Around eight years ago, GE Digital’s CEO and Chairman Jeffrey Immelt started looking at what big digital players like Google, Amazon and Microsoft were doing to work out where the next wave of productivity and gain would come from. “He became particularly interested in this because he noticed that other people were extracting data from

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INSIGHT our equipment,” Sherry says, “and helping our clients understand the data from that to better use our equipment than we were. We knew something was coming.

“He (Immelt) realised we needed to find a way to emulate what had happened in other spheres. You had a world where, like with Uber and Apple, 2.3mn applications are growing every week on their platforms and making billions from the application economy. He understood that we had to cease acting as an intermediate between us and our clients, and to find a way to make that digital transformation ourselves. To find the next wave of productivity.”

A result of this investigation, Immelt knew that the future was about scalable platforms; leveraging them to embrace new business models while building digital software skills and abilities, internally, to make it possible. Immelt also knew that they had to launch this project rapidly just as the software world does.

This is how GE Digital was born.

After hiring William Ruh from Cisco as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, they started to create what would become Predix.

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A project for Hannover Messe

BUILDING NEW SYSTEMS This operating software is designed by business, for business, with an open architecture making it possible for all users to develop whatever they require. “We built it because we wanted to run applications that were specifically designed to manage physical things and not just the digital assets; to marry digital software and intelligence

LIFE AT GE DIGITAL

Predix is the platform GE uses for industrial automation

with machinery. Nothing existed that could do that,” Sherry says.

Users can plug in all their existing software so they get one view of data from across all their sites of who may be deploying different types of software around the globe.

“We love to bring people along to Predix,” Sherry says, “but we’re also happy for them to build their own applications to work on them too.”

There are currently 31,000 developers using the system and the number is growing every week, as are the hundreds of apps that have already been written for it.

“Because it’s building blocks of code, like for Google or Apple, it enables rapid building and deployment of new applications,” explains Sherry. “It really shortens the cycle to deliver software that 13

INSIGHT can make a difference in a business.

And of course, we have a number of great software suites ourselves that sit on that, like our Asset Performance Management (APM) software, and our automation and service software that are key.”

The APM software makes it possible to monitor equipment and its “equipment health” as Sherry says. An example is Schindler, manufacturer of escalators and elevators, which deploys Prefix around the globe to monitor all of its lifts. It has a sensor on all equipment, that through dashboards with APM software, tells engineers what needs maintenance, and when, before it breaks down.

“Gone are the days of merely a rota of maintenance that might be unnecessary,” Sherry says. “Now it’s predictive maintenance. Once you predict what needs doing, wouldn’t it be great if you had people in the field with handheld devices and software to tell them exactly what they need to fix and when? That’s where Servicemax, our field service management software, enables engineers to have exactly the right data and information they need to service equipment most efficiently.”

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Bringing these types of software together means pretty much an instant diagnosis and a swift repair of any issues. Sherry uses the example of a car breaking down, with mechanics charging a substantial hourly rate just to find the problem and fix it. “By integrating them, we give you one wonderful value chain that brings it all together seamlessly,” she says.

FULL CIRCLE Predicting failures ahead of time ties in neatly with the model of the circular economy, which is based on wasting less while making best use of available resources. One example is with a client based in Paris which experienced a lot of wastage. By using this software, it was able complete the same process with much less waste, in a shorter timeframe, and at a lower cost.

“Renewables is a huge area for us,” Sherry says. “We can go help a company understand that it can deploy our software to decrease its energy consumption.”

One big focus is saving on jet aviation fuel. Every two seconds a GE jet takes off, and by making a

S T E A LT H A N D E F F I C I E N C Y - D I G I T I S I N G G L O B A L B R A N D S

‘A GLOBAL GAS-FIRED POWER PLANT FLEET COULD YIELD £50BN, JUST IN THAT FUEL CONSUMPTION SAVING’ – Deborah Sherry, General Manager and Chief Commercial Officer, GE Digital Europe saving of just 1% in fuel, over the next 15 years, GE will make a saving of £23mn. Aside from using less fuel and the cost savings involved, this also means less pollution.

“A global gas-fired power plant fleet could yield £50 billion, just in that fuel consumption saving. So, we do this across every industry, whether it’s for fuel, wastage in the product that you’re manufacturing, or whatever it may be,” Sherry says.

At its power circuit breaker plant in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, General Electric achieved all of these efficiencies by deploying this new software, leading to a gain of $35mn over three years.

THE FUTURE IS DIGITAL Business operations and people’s everyday lives are becoming ever more digitised. “It’s pretty mature these days,” Sherry says. “Ten years ago, you weren’t managing your life that way, but almost your entire life, certainly your kids’ lives, are digitally managed. Ten years from now, you’re going to see what we call the digital thread being how we manage the industry. From when you wake up in the morning and you’re checking what you need to do for the day, all the way through to programming your favourite shows in the evening, everything will be digital.”

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TECHNOLOGY

Plug in!

Exploring the electric vehicle space Wr i t t e n b y J E S S S H A N A H A N

It’s not just car manufacturers and batterymakers who are seeing the opportunities ahead. The electric vehicle space offers up scope to a whole range of developers and investors, looking to capture a slice of a rapidly-growing market‌

TECHNOLOGY BANS ON PETROL and diesel vehicles - set to come into place across Europe over the next decades - mean there’s more focus than ever on the electric vehicle market.

Not only does the ban present a lot of pressures and opportunities for electric vehicle manufacturers, but it’s spurring on other companies too – those seeking to explore numerous business opportunities within the electric vehicle space.

Within the space there are motor manufacturers, R&D labs for battery technology, chargingpoint installers, car tech companies and even those involved in motorsport spying opportunities.

The boom in the industry – 2016 saw a 41% increase in global sales (777,497 vehicles) – represents a huge opportunity for startups and established businesses alike to offer something new and exciting to this burgeoning automotive market. UBS expects that 14% of all cars sold globally by 2025 will be battery driven, and one in three cars sold in Europe will be an EV. Commercial electric vehicles Electric mobility goes far beyond 20

October 2017

passenger cars and the health risks associated with diesel vehicles as zero-emission policies push logistics and transport companies towards ever greener solutions.

Royal Mail recently announced it was partnering with electric truck company Arrival to trial nine e-HGVs. Denis Sverdlov, CEO of Arrival, says: “We are thrilled to partner with Royal Mail, who will be using our electric vehicles. Cities like London will benefit hugely from a switch to electric, in terms of both pollution and noise.

Most importantly, we are priced the same as diesel trucks thus removing the main barrier to go electric.”

Small and sustainable personal transport At the other end of the scale, when it comes to transport, is Bolt. This Netherlands-based company is leading the way when it comes to safe, scalable and environmentally-friendly alternatives to petrol and diesel vehicles. The AppScooter is a plug-in vehicle with full app integration, capable of 400km on a single charge.

CEO and co-founder of Bolt Mobility, Bart Jacobsz Rosier, saw the gap in the market for a

P L U G I N ! E X P L O R I N G T H E E L E C T R I C V E H I C L E S PA C E

“The boom in the industry – 2016 saw a 41% increase in global sales of 777,497 vehicles – represents a huge opportunity for startups and established businesses”

Bolt App-Scooters

desirable electric scooter and he says: “Small combustion engines are extremely harmful to the environment and have been largely unregulated in the scooter market.

“This holds especially true for two-stroke engines, which is what a large part of the scooter market still consists of. These engines emit up to 2700x as many pollutants as a modern van. Even newer fourstroke engines still emit up to 15x

more CO2 than a modern car.”

The company has just launched another funding round on Seedrs and is keen to move forward with production of the scooter as these small vehicles will have a huge role to play in the future.

Jacobsz Rosier explains: “By creating AppScooter, we are seeking to offer a new, completely sustainable alternative for those who currently drive polluting petrol vehicles.

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Schreder MK Dons Street Lamp

P L U G I N ! E X P L O R I N G T H E E L E C T R I C V E H I C L E S PA C E

“As congestion with cars is actually expected to rise to chronic levels in the coming years, smaller vehicles such as scooters have a role in offering residents of large cities a cost-effective, fast and environmentally-friendly form of personal transportation.”

For anyone involved in the electric vehicle space, Jacobsz Rosier’s predictions for the future look quite promising.

“In 10 years’ time electric vehicles, be it a car or a scooter, will make up 9% of total production globally. The technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that, in the next two years, it will become cheaper to build an electric vehicle than a petrol equivalent, as shown by the rise of Tesla.”

Smart infrastructure on the rise With the proliferation of electric vehicles, its recognized that there needs to be an improvement to the charging infrastructure in and around cities.

One such solution comes from the UK arm of Belgian company Schréder. The Shuffle is a smart street light that also includes an electric car charging point and Wi-Fi.

The drain on the National Grid is going to be significant as we get more electric cars on our roads, as Nick Cruse, operations director at Urbis Schréder, explains.

“This will increase energy demand from the UK’s national grid by around 10 percent – according to the latest research from Cambridge Econometrics,” he says.

However, without a unified charging network and only £100 million set aside for the installation of charging points, solving the chronic lack of infrastructure for EVs is a more pressing matter. Instead of implementing costly separate charging units, another solution is to build on the pre-existing lighting network.

“Smart LED lighting columns – such as the Shuffle – are more energyefficient than traditional streetlights (minimising the drain on the National Grid), and can declutter our streets while we transition to a sustainable transport network,” he adds.

“They also have the added benefit of helping improve internet connectivity and public safety.”

Not only will this contribute to the smart cities of the future - but will also help to increase 23

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infrastructure across Europe.

Cruse expanded: “The Shuffle is being rolled out across the UK – at sites including Stadium MK in Milton Keynes, and the Isle of Man. As Britain’s first Wi-Fi connected streetlight, the Shuffle will continue to be installed at a number of high-profile locations. As we continue to invest in developing the column for future-use cases, we hope to see the Shuffle installed throughout the UK and Europe.”

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Diversification for automotive tech companies Another business capitalising on the expanding EV market is German audio company HARMAN. While the company creates car audio systems for a range of manufacturers, it goes further and is singlehandedly creating something that will make EVs all the more appealing. Once you get practical concerns such as range and battery lifespan out of the way, one of the things that puts car

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HARMAN Halosonic exterior sound system provides combustion engine sounds lovers off an EV is the lack of noise.

The noise of a car not only known to contribute to the enjoyment of it, but also to safety. New standards are being rolled out that will require usually quiet electric cars to produce noise at low speeds. To this end, HARMAN has developed the Halosonic exterior sound system.

Its system has four sounds on offer; the first two were combustion engine sounds and while a good showcase of the technology, they

were not particularly relevant to the Model S. The final two were futuristic sounds that were perfectly in-keeping with the look of modern EVs. As we move closer to a world without new combustion engine vehicles, opportunities will continue to present themselves to technology companies and startups looking to contribute to this varied and rapidly expanding market.

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EU.CIOINSURANCESUMMIT.COM

TOP 10

Top 10 busiest airports in EUROPE We reveal the busiest airports in Europe based on passenger numbers‌ Edited by: ANDREW WOODS

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MUNICH AIRPORT Munich Airport handled more than 42mn passengers in 2016. In addition, it was the 15th-busiest airport in the world for serving international passengers. In 2016, the German airport also handled nearly 395,000 aircraft movements and 354,000 metric tonnes of cargo. It provides flights to 248 destinations, earning it the fifth-place spot in terms of number of destinations worldwide.Â

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LEONARDO DA VINCIFIUMICINO AIRPORT Located just outside Rome, Italy, the Leonardo de Vinci-Fiumicino Airport served 41.2mn passengers in 2016, a figure that represents an increase of more than 3% from 2015. The airport also facilitated 314,167 aircraft movements during the same year. 30

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BARCELONA EL PRAT AIRPORT Barcelona El Prat Airport experienced a record year in 2016 in terms of passenger traffic. During that year, the airport, located in Barcelona, Spain, handled more than 44.1mn passengers, an increase of 11.2% over 2015. It also recorded a 6.6% increase in aircraft movements with 307,864 in total for 2016.

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LONDONGATWICK AIRPORT Located in London, England, LondonGatwick Airport is the country’s second-largest airport and Europe’s eighth-largest in terms of passenger traffic. In 2016, the airport served 43,119,628 passengers, a figure that demonstrates an increase of more than 7% compared to 2015. Gatwick also tracked nearly 281,000 aircraft movements out of its 115 gates in 2016.

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ADOLFO SUÁREZMADRID BARAJAS AIRPORT Not only is the Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas Airport Spain’s country’s busiest and largest airport, the 50.4mn passengers it served in 2016 makes it Europe’s sixth busiest. The airport also handled more than 415,000 metric tonnes of cargo and directed over 378,000 aircraft movements.

The social and economic impact of the airport is nearly €13bn.

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ISTANBUL

ATATÜRK AIRPORT In 2016, the Istanbul Atatürk Airport, located in Istanbul, Turkey, served a total of 60,119,215 passengers.

Of that total, more than 41mn were international travellers. Flying to 273 destinations, according to data gathered in February 2017, Istanbul Atatürk Airport provides service to the most destinations worldwide, second only to Frankfurt Airport.

In terms of aircraft movements, number of passengers and destinations served, Istanbul is the country’s biggest and busiest.

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HEADLINE

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FRANKFURT AIRPORT As Germany’s fifth-largest city, Frankfurt is home to Europe’s fourthlargest airport by passenger traffic.

According to statistics, nearly 60.8mn passengers flew to and from Frankfurt Airport in 2016. Frankfurt Airport boasts the capacity to serve about 65mn passengers and is the busiest airport in the country. The airport also handled more than 2.1mn tonnes of cargo in 2016 and facilitated over 462,000 aircraft movements. Providing direct service to 293 destinations in the world, Frankfurt Airport leads the industry in providing the most nonstop flights. It provides an economic impact totalling more than €26bn.

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AMSTERDAM AIRPORT SCHIPHOL Situated in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is the primary international airport for both the Netherlands and Holland. In 2016, more than 63.6mn passengers flew with the airport as it processed 1.7mn tonnes of cargo and had 479,000 aircraft movements. Statistics place the economic and social impact of the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol at nearly €32bn after it experienced more than 9% growth in 2016.

Passengers can fly to one of 176 destinations served by the airport.

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CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT Located in Paris, France, Charles de Gaulle Airport handled nearly 66mn passengers in 2016, earning it the title of Europe’s second-busiest airport for passenger traffic. Additionally, the airport is the second busiest airport in Europe in terms of aircraft movements. London’s Heathrow Airport holds first place honours for this category as well. According to 2016 figures, the airport was the ninth busiest for cargo traffic with 2.08mn tonnes. The airport, also known as Roissy-Paris Airport, offers direct flights to about 256 cities worldwide.

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01

HEATHROW AIRPORT

London, England’s Heathrow Airport is Europe’s busiest according to passenger traffic volume. In 2016, Heathrow Airport handled 75.7mn passengers, a 1% increase over the previous year and a record for the airport. That same year, the airport handled more than 1.54mn metric tonnes of cargo and facilitated nearly 475,000 aircraft movements.

Heathrow Airport flies to more than 180 destinations, located in 90 countries. The busiest airport in the world is Atlanta’s Hartsfield–Jackson Airport, US, which catered for more than 104mn passengers in 2016

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Artificial intelligence, made simple Written by: Dale Benton Produced by: Danielle Harris

THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MARKET IS SET TO EXPLODE AND NVIDIA, ALONG WITH THE TECHNOLOGY ECOSYSTEM INCLUDING PURE STORAGE, HAS STRATEGICALLY POSITIONED ITSELF TO TAP INTO THIS HUGE MARKET GROWTH

A

fter decades in the doldrums, AI has recently exploded in a boom that has unleashed applications used by hundreds of millions of people every day. The impact of this technology has been likened to that of electricity 100 years ago: AI won’t be an industry, it will be part of every industry.

The rapid rise of AI has left many businesses scrambling to understand how they can benefit from a technology they don’t yet understand. An MIT Sloan Management Review found that 85% of executives surveyed believe AI will transform their company, yet only 39% report having a strategy for AI. One company has taken the lead in helping business decision makers evaluate, implement and monetise AI. NVIDIA cut its teeth on 3D graphics for gaming and professional design, but

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the graphics processing unit (GPU) NVIDIA invented back in the 1990s has revealed itself as a processing powerhouse, capable of tackling computing’s grandest challenges.

Richard Jackson, Vice President for the EMEA Partner Organisation at NVIDIA, reveals the story behind AI’s rapid rise from sci-fi gimmick to reality, and explores how businesses can take their first steps in this brave new world.

DEVELOPING DEEP LEARNING Founded in 1999, NVIDIA’s GPU sparked the growth of the PC gaming market. Now this same tiny piece of silicon is credited with unleashing the Intelligent Industrial Revolution.

Several years ago, researchers discovered that the same parallel architecture designed to handle the vast amount of data required for 3D

TECHNOLOGY

w w w. b u s i n e s s re v i e w e u ro p e . e u

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WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN AGE OF AI, POWERED BY THE MODERN DATA PLATFORM The fourth industrial revolution is upon us, powered by the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Every industry benefits from greater intelligence: the ability to transform data into intelligence is the new competitive currency. Some advances in industries include:

Driving autonomous vehicles

Aiding doctors for more accurate insights

Helping agents to serve customers better

The big bang of AI has been fueled by a perfect storm of three key technologies: deep learning (DL), Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) processors, and big data. NVIDIA is the world leader of deep learning technologies, providing the most advanced GPUs along with the NVIDIA GPU Cloud Deep Learning Stack: optimized versions of today’s most popular Deep Learning frameworks.

While deep learning algorithms and GPUs are massively parallel, delivering performance leaps every year, legacy storage systems were largely built on decades-old building blocks, designed in the serial era. And the performance gap between compute and storage continues to grow.

FlashBlade from Pure Storage is the industry’s first data platform purpose-built for AI and machine learning. Fast, big and simple, FlashBlade is massively parallel at its core, delivering unprecedented performance and simplicity for data scientists. Like a GPU-accelerated server, FlashBlade is architected to accelerate parallel workloads, delivering the performance of 10 racks of disk in a 4U size.

NVIDIA DGX-1 SERVER

PURE FLASHBLADE

Delivers Performance of 10 Racks of CPU Servers

Delivers Performance of 10 Racks of Disk

Unlock the full potential of your data with Pure Storage and NVIDIA; providing tera ops of performance and terabytes of storage in dense form factors that are significantly more efficient than alternative legacy solutions. Enabling you to put your data to work, with speed, with agility and with intelligence.

Today is The New Possible.

For more information, please visit purestorage.co.uk/FlashBlade

NVIDIA

graphics was also a perfect fit for the complex parallel computing required by deep learning. This form of artificial intelligence enables computers to learn from data and write software that is too complex for people to code.

NVIDIA recognised the opportunity presented by this affinity between deep learning and the GPU. Since then, it has been investing in a new computing model, GPU-accelerated deep learning, which is helping to create computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world.

“Although AI has been around for a long time, before now the processing power needed for it to succeed just wasn’t available,” explains Jackson. “Now, NVIDIA is working to democratise AI for all.”

Pure Storage also recognised data is the fuel to drive deep learning, and parallel architecture is the future.

It built a new data platform from the ground-up to keep pace with the innovation curve of GPUs. “Deep learning is unique among all learning algorithms in that it keeps getting better with more data,” says James Petter, VP EMEA

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Jensen Huang - NVIDIA CEO

at Pure Storage. “At Pure, we believe data should never be the bottleneck for data scientists.”

THE VOCABULARY OF AI The first step in realising the business benefits of AI is to understand a few fundamentals.

When we talk about AI, three terms tend to be used interchangeably: artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. Their relationship

TECHNOLOGY

“ALTHOUGH AI HAS BEEN AROUND FOR A LONG TIME, BEFORE NOW THE PROCESSING POWER NEEDED FOR IT TO SUCCEED JUST WASN’T AVAILABLE” – Richard Jackson, Vice President for the EMEA Partner Organisation at NVIDIA

is a bit like Russian dolls. AI is the overarching idea, within which machine learning and deep learning fit.

For a large part, the entertainment industry has molded what we think of when we think of intelligent machines and AI. In reality, what’s possible today is known as ‘Narrow AI’, as opposed to the ‘General AI’ displayed by C3PO and The Terminator. Narrow AI encompasses technologies that can perform specific tasks, such as image

classification or speech recognition, as well as or better than humans.

This human-like intelligence brings us to deep learning. It’s a fundamentally new software model where billions of software-neurons and trillions of connections are trained in parallel. The graphics processing unit emerged as the ideal processor to accelerate deep learning.

“GPUs, like artificial neural networks and the human brains on

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NVIDIA

1999

The year that NVIDIA invented the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

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TECHNOLOGY

which they’re modelled, process information in parallel, handling multiple tasks simultaneously,” says Jackson. “That’s why GPUs can now be found accelerating deep learning-based applications from movie recommendations to cancer detection and fraud detection to self-driving cars.”

will include efficiencies in existing processes, and insights based on data and predictive analysis that enable new classes of products and services.

“We see companies like SAP seizing an early-mover advantage by implementing GPU deep learning in their data centres to solve their customers’ most challenging problems.”

DEMOCRATISING AI The democratisation of AI brought about by GPU-accelerated deep learning is already finding its way into deployment across industries.

As this form of AI expands from research institutions and startups to implementation by large enterprise, new use cases for deep learning are emerging daily.

From intelligent assistants to smart homes to self-driving cars, it’s clear that this new computing model will infuse consumer technology as much as it will reinvent enterprise computing.

Jackson comments: “Those businesses looking to grab the competitive advantage offered by AI have a narrow window of opportunity.

For those who move quickly, rewards

PLUG AND PLAY AI Thanks to the rapid development of the AI industry, this technology is available in many flavours and at varying scales. For those looking to dip a toe in the water, cloud service providers like Microsoft and AWS offer GPU deep learning cycles on demand.

NVIDIA has also developed an offering aimed at companies seeking a combination of unprecedented computing power with security and support.

Last year, NVIDIA launched the DGX-1. It’s essentially an AI supercomputer in a box, purpose-built for deep learning. Instead of building its AI data centre from the ground up, the DGX-1 integrates everything data

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NVIDIA

Richard Jackson

“THE DGX-1 REPRESENTS A REAL BREAKTHROUGH IN TECHNOLOGY BUILT FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”

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scientists need to get started building, training and running powerful and sophisticated deep neural networks.

But all of this data needs to be stored somewhere. Traditional storage systems were largely built on decades-old, building blocks burdened with serial bottlenecks, and have been proven to lag behind the performance curve needed to keep GPUs busy with data.

However, Pure Storage supports NVIDIA’s efforts to democratise AI by enabling companies to store and process vast quantities of data at significant speeds. Pure Storage’s FlashBlade is an ideal match for NVIDIA’s DGX and complements

TECHNOLOGY

NVIDIA gives back to communities through Project Inspire

its deep learning performance.

AI pushes beyond the limits of what’s possible with traditional storage technologies. The velocity in which DGX-1 consumes data is unprecedented. The level of parallelism required by deep neural networks and GPUs continues to grow rapidly. A new class of data system was needed.

FlashBlade is industry’s first data platform purpose-built for AI and deep learning, engineered with a massively parallel architecture from end-to-end.

“By using Pure Storages’ FlashBlade with NVIDIA’s DGX-1, data scientists can enjoy the performance they need when working on AI,” explains Petter. “We designed FlashBlade

specifically for AI and machine learning applications – and it shows.”

Combining the FlashBlade system with DGX-1 means that the GPUs can be continuously and efficiently fed with the large amount of data they need in order to build smarter AI solutions.

“The DGX-1 represents a real breakthrough in technology built for artificial intelligence,” states Jackson. “As we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible, we’ll continue creating tools which bring AI to the enterprise in ways that enable innovation and drive growth.”

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Powering forward with new technology Written by: Fran Roberts Produced by: Danielle Harris

PADDY POWER BETFAIR, ONE OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST ONLINE GAMBLING COMPANIES, HAS INVESTED STRONGLY IN TECHNOLOGY SINCE THE COMPANY’S FORMATION LAST YEAR – INCLUDING MOVING TWO DATA CENTRES ACROSS THE IRISH SEA

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echnology certainly looks set to play an integral role in the future success of Paddy Power Betfair, one of the world’s largest online gambling company.

“Our company’s performing well, we’ve got strong year-on-year growth. Alongside the technology, our greatest development is probably our i2 platform and ensuring that we are head and shoulders above our competition,” states Peter Giles, Senior Data Centre Manager.

“If we’re not innovating, we are effectively standing still. That’s just not an option for our business,” notes Giles. “We always like to ensure our place at the top of the queue for the latest and greatest technologies, and to see how we can integrate that into our estate, and products.” i2 stands for Infrastructure 2 and is Paddy Power Betfair’s

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Inside Paddy Power Betfair’s data centre

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ENABLING USERS AND THEIR BUSINESS IN A DIGITAL WORLD Computacenter is Europe’s leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services, enabling users and their business. We advise organisations on IT strategy, implement the most appropriate technology, optimise its performance, and manage our customers’ infrastructures. In doing this we help CIOs and IT departments in enterprise and corporate organisations maximise productivity and the business value of IT for internal and external users.

DISCOVER HOW COMPUTACENTER MAKES DIGITAL WORK Computacenter helps establish flexible foundations for the future with physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure solutions. From software-defined and hyperconverged, to information, analytics, network and security solutions, we understand the platforms and the processes needed to maximise agility for IT and the business.

We bring together existing and emerging technologies to establish stable and sustainable infrastructure foundations in the datacenter and beyond, by combining best-ofbreed technologies with expert advice and seamless services. We future-proof your Digital Gateway (infrastructure) to support mobile work styles, big data analytics, the Internet of Things, cloud and virtualised workloads.

With our end-to-end expertise and vendor relationships, we help organisations bring together the best solutions and deliver the best outcomes.

Computacenter will expand and open an office premises in the centre of Dublin Computacenter is excited to announce that we are opening an office in the heart of Dublin. It is a decision that we have considered for some time and we now feel that time is absolutely perfect; it will give us closer proximity to our long standing existing customers who are based in Ireland whilst also allowing us to expand our offerings and services to new customers. In recent years, Ireland, and the city of Dublin in particular, has established itself as a popular European base for large technology companies like salesforce.com, Google, Facebook and Twitter. Computacenter’s view

is that Ireland understands the current and future value of the technology and web industry and is wholeheartedly embracing it.

This, coupled with Computacenter’s core values of ‘putting our customers first’, ‘inspiring success’ and ‘always considering the long term’; presents us with a new and exciting journey ahead.

Computacenter’s focus on the Technology & eGaming sector Computacenter supports many technology and eGaming companies throughout the business and IT consolidation process.

We take a holistic approach to rationalising, transforming and optimising IT, driving better value for the business and better outcomes for users. We consolidate datacenters. We upgrade networks. And we transform licensed retail offices.

Maximising business agility We help eGaming companies unlock financial and efficiency savings from their datacenter operations following a merger or acquisition. Our independent assessments and industrialised processes enable CIOs to build the infrastructure foundations needed to maximise agility and availability. We identify technologies that need to retired or replaced, and advise on consolidation and standardisation strategies for both systems and suppliers. From storage arrays and networking environments to server farms and private clouds, we help CIOs achieve an optimal balance between cost, performance and risk.

Safeguarding customer data Computacenter brings expertise

to every stage of the security cycle - from protection and detection to reaction and prevention. By taking a holistic approach across the workplace, the network, the datacenter and the cloud, we help to strengthen and simplify security following a merger or acquisition. From deploying next-generation defences and integrating existing monitoring tools to assessing vulnerabilities and managing system patching, we help to mitigate security risks before, during and after consolidation initiatives.

Enabling users From a licensed betting office to a company’s headquarters, we source and deploy the workplace technologies needed to deliver a compelling and consistent eGaming experience. Following a merger or acquisition, we help CIOs map the right IT devices and services to the right user workstyles. We also review and renegotiate software agreements to prevent under- or over-utilisation.

Our expertise spans the entire hardware and software portfolio – from collaboration and print solutions to virtual and mobile client devices. We benchmark.

We configure. And we maintain.

Unlocking business insights Computacenter helps e-gaming companies extract more value from their data so they can drive greater competitive advantage and make smarter decisions.

As a trusted advisor, we help to evaluate and implement analytics solutions, such as data visualisation and data lakes, as well as lay the infrastructure foundations needed to detect, capture and analyse customers’ data.

For more information please visit: www.computacenter.com/uk/egaming

PA D D Y P O W E R B E T FA I R

“THIS WAS REVOLUTIONARY, NOBODY WAS REALLY DOING IT IN THE MARKET AND CERTAINLY NOBODY WAS DOING IT AS WELL AS BETFAIR WERE DOING IT” – Peter Giles, Senior Data Centre Manager

Brian Cullen

Head of Infrastructure

“I love technology and I’ve had a career in several technical leadership roles, primarily in banks prior to joining Paddy Power Betfair five years ago. During my 18 years in the banks I’ve gathered a deep technical expertise across various disciplines – especially data centres, networking, virtualisation, storage and infrastructure design and with that delivering large-scale migrations in mission critical environments.

In 2012 I wanted a change of scene and joined Paddy Power. During the last five years I have had the following roles: Senior Engineering Design Lead, Head of Networking and Head of Infrastructure prior to the Paddy Power and Betfair merger and post-merger continued with the role of Head of Infrastructure in the new combined organisation.”

TECHNOLOGY

next generation infrastructure platform, which is comprised of a private cloud and a continuous delivery pipeline used to deploy the company’s software to that cloud.

“The i2 cloud works pretty much like any publicly available cloud operator but is entirely hosted by Paddy Power Betfair,” observes Brian Cullen, Head of Infrastructure. “It gives developers the ability to write applications and deliver it all the way through the pipeline to production for

our customers. The single customer platform is a common platform we’re building as part of hosting multiple brands. Paddy Power and Betfair branded applications are going to run on this platform. The single customer platform runs on i2 and it is the largest project for our technology team for 2017.”

REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY Despite being a household name, Paddy Power Betfair is a relatively

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new entity – the organisation was formed in 2016 following the merger of Paddy Power Plc and Betfair Plc. “Paddy Power Betfair is one of the world’s leading sports betting and gaming operators,” advises Giles.

“We operate four main brands – Paddy Power, Betfair, Sportsbet – a major sporting operator in Australia – and TVG, a major operator in the United States. Worldwide we have about four million customers.”

Paddy Power was formed in 1988 through the merger of three Irish bookmakers. In 2000, the company established its online presence with the launch of paddypower.com. In the same year, Betfair was launched.

“It was one of the first online gaming marketplaces for punters to bet against each other on sporting and cultural events around the world.

This was revolutionary, nobody was really doing it in the market and certainly nobody was doing it as well as Betfair,” comments Giles.

Over the years, the two companies expanded their respective online footprints with the introduction of online poker, mobile betting

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and online casinos. As the rival companies expanded, so did the amount of business being processed.

“In 2010, Betfair’s exchange was processing more transactions than all of the European stock exchanges combined in a single day,” advises Giles. In November 2011, Paddy Power was the largest bookmaker in Europe by total share value.

The merger of the two companies created one of the world’s biggest online gambling companies, making it a FTSE 100 company. Paddy Power Betfair has over 7,000 employees and over 600 bookmaking shops. “We operate on five real core values and they are – collaboration, integrity, agility, low ego and a relentless will to win,” Giles observes.

GIANTS OF ONLINE GAMBLING Of course, merging two giants of online gambling has required a number of consolidation activities.

One of the largest was the migration of data centres from the Isle of Man to Dublin. “As part of the merger, we decided for operational and regulatory reasons to migrate two

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Peter Giles

Senior Data Centre Manager “My responsibility and accountability is to ensure the delivery, implementation and support of Paddy Power Betfair’s Data Centre and corporate hosting estate. Working closely with strategic projects and program delivering against road-maps, strategy and investment plans created and owned by the team. All while ensuring alignment to the overarching IT and Business strategy. I am a strongly experienced in manager, maintaining and supporting 24x7 Data Centre critical operational environments. Responsible for managing a team of engineers, their performance, workload and development, with a passion for operational prudence, transparency, simplicity and team engagement, while managing key stakeholders ensuring expectations are clearly set and managed.”

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TRUST AND CONFIDENCE DELIVERED Tech Move Solutions provides Trusted, Specialist Logistics and Value Added Solutions for the Safe & Secure movement of High Value I.T Equipment Globally Some of the services we offer include White Glove Deliveries, Datacentre Relocations, Site Surveys, Project Management, RAMS, Reverse Logistics, Rack / Server Builds, Certified Electronic Waste Disposal, Asset Collections / Management / Refurbishment, Specialist Packaging

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TECHNOLOGY

THE ORGANISATION WAS FORMED IN 2016 FOLLOWING THE MERGER OF PADDY POWER PLC AND BETFAIR PLC

Paddy Power data centres from the Isle of Man to Dublin. The project started in May 2016 and scheduled to be finished by October of that year. Six months for any data centre move is aggressive, never mind two within two weeks of each other.

With excellent collaboration and pace displayed by the infrastructure team, the migration was completed on time,” advises Giles.

One of the main reasons for the move was to be able to regulate the Paddy Power business through the same regulatory authority as Betfair. “Essentially, it was part of a consolidation of regulatory authorities which necessitated moving data centres,” comments Cullen.

The move was very ambitious and was designed to minimise disruption

to customers as much as possible.

“The migration was to be completed within a two-week window,” Giles continues. “We’re talking about downing two live production sites, moving one, bringing it back online in Dublin, and two weeks later downing the other data centre in the Isle of Man, moving it to Dublin, and bringing it back online.

All of this with little or no impact to our customers.” Such a short turnaround helped to motivate the staff, as Cullen illustrates: “There’s nothing like an unmovable deadline to focus the hearts and minds of the team.”

UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGES Short timeframes were not the only challenge posed by the project.

“Having come from the heritage Betfair organisation, the greatest challenge for me,” explains Giles “was understanding how I could consolidate one of the heritage Paddy Power data centres in Dublin, which I knew little or nothing about, into one of the heritage Betfair data

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centres, which I obviously knew a considerable amount about.”

In order to build an understanding of the legacy estate being inherited, a thorough audit was carried out.

“We carried out a complete audit of the Paddy Power data centres on the Isle of Man and in Dublin, so we could understand and work through what the pinch points were going to be. By doing that extensive audit we were able to understand where every cable started and stopped, and how the data centres were breathing.

That really gave us a great point to kick on from,” Giles advises.

HIGH-PACED NEEDS To achieve the move with minimal disruption, Paddy Power Betfair enlisted the help of a number of partners. “A considerable amount of the hardware that was in the Paddy Power heritage data centres, had not been powered off in years,” Giles explains. “We brought in technical support from all of our major vendors and manufacturers, and proceeded, under a tight change window, to power cycle the hardware during a

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www.businessrevieweurope.eu

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controlled period of time. By doing that, we were able to eliminate risks at all stages, that may have arisen during the actual migration itself.”

Such partners are invaluable to the operations of Paddy Power Betfair.

“We like to work with technology partners to help us deliver value with our projects. Logicalis helped us move the two data centres from the Isle of Man to Dublin, a project

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which was pretty much seamless for our customers and delivered with precision,” Cullen advises.

“Computacenter, who have been the partner behind the i2 project since its inception, has helped with the challenges across the journey.

Both have areas of expertise which we tap into. We also work with Evros Technology Group in satisfying our high-paced needs with keeping

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“There’s nothing like an unmovable deadline to focus the hearts and minds of the team”

– Brian Cullen, Head of Infrastructure

our data centres operational.”

Giles, too, is keen to praise the work of Paddy Power Betfair’s partners: “We have a close working relationship with Server Technology, who provide a bespoke power strip to suit our high-density rack requirements. A significant part of our success for this specific project comes from the very close support and commitment of our key vendors,” he comments.

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Yan Beynon Chief Digital Officer - RDC

Roche & Accenture

Pioneering solutions within diabetes management Written by: Catherine Sturman Produced by: Andrew Lloyd

Zeynep Waelchli Managing Director - Accenture

A pioneer in the development of blood glucose monitoring systems, Diabetes Care continues to be a global leader in diabetes management solutions and services

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he world is becoming increasingly dependent on digital services. With the challenges of ageing populations and rising healthcare costs, companies are looking to revolutionise the way patient care is delivered, developing new technologies to support the delivery of advanced medical treatment as well as healthcare professionals.

Over the last 10 years, the diabetes market has undergone considerable growth. A metabolic disorder which affects the pancreas’ ability to produce insulin, there are over 59mn people living with diabetes in the Europe alone, which is only set to rise. With over 415mn patients globally (source: IDF Diabetes Atlas), figures have been predicted to almost double within the next 25 years.

Today, approximately 10% of the healthcare costs are invested in the diabetes market. Increased obesity

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rates and sedentary lifestyles are leading factors in the increase in cases of Type 2 Diabetes. The exponentially increasing number of Type 2 Diabetes patients and the treatment of diabetes-related co-morbidities leads to increased spending, and highlights the need for new healthcare models to tackle such challenges head on. This will be through utilising digital health technologies in order to support the detection, diagnosis and therapy of this chronic condition, and provide continuous diabetes self-management support.

Roche Diabetes Care is one such company that seeks to create innovative products and solutions to drive and advance the provision of effective diabetes care. The company’s 40-year experience has led it to effectively empower both healthcare professionals and patients, and enabled it to demonstrate how

TECHNOLOGY

Yan Beynon

IT realignment and digitalisation of a Swiss government,

Chief Digital Officer - RDC

Transformed country based organisations into global shared service centers of a major airline catering and travel business (Gate Group),

Yan Beynon, 44-year-old Swiss born, has earned a Master in IT & Telecommunication and graduated from IMD Business School. In the first stage of his career, he led several large IT projects for market leaders such as: BMW, ICI, AT&T. In 2000, he became Managing Director of Urbanet, the first European start-up offering high speed Internet over Cable TV. After a successful sales development and integration of Urbanet within UPC Group (member of Liberty Global), Beynon led the build of its customer services organisation for its newly created B2B segment, including: pre-sales, customer support, pmo and billing.

For the last 16 years, he specialised in transformational CIO and CDO roles with country, regional and global scope, has successfully driven innovation, revenue growth and lead major transformations in various industries (telecommunications, government, manufacturing and logistics, Pharma and Medical devices), such as:

Led the transformation of Hoffman-la-Roche France and Belgium IT and business functions, Drove the transformation of Hoffmann-la-Roche global IT shared service center (500 FTE) in Madrid, Lead Roche Diabetes Care carving out and optimising a global medical devices business with presence in 100+ countries with 6,000+ employees, in a greenfield approach, lead design, implementation and run of a new global IT organization, new core systems and business processes to enable more autonomy, agility and deliver 170+ mio CHF yearly savings.

Yan is currently CDO and CIO, heading the digitalisation of Roche Diabetes Care aiming to create the leading Digital ecosystem in Diabetes management and generate top line growth by bringing to market new business models.

ROCHE/ACCENTURE

“Digital health is growing as the market is now shifting towards an outcome based, patient-centric model” – Zeynep Waelchli, Managing Director at Accenture

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the adoption of digital health solutions brought already a multitude of advantages to patients, healthcare professionals and healthcare systems.

With this in mind, Roche Diabetes Care’s decision to enter a five-year partnership with Accenture has signified its ambitions to build a new leading digital diabetes ecosystem, which will give the company the ability to analyse and categorise data through the use of algorithms that can be transformed into key insights that contribute to better and faster therapy adaptations. Such insights will not only encompass patient needs and behaviours, but also all relevant health parameters from various sources that are analysed and put into context in order to eventually improve therapy outcomes.

“We need to integrate a lot of information and a lot of data to ensure an optimal treatment of this complex chronic disease,” explains Roche Diabetes Care’s Chief Digital Officer Yan Beynon. “With this new platform, we aim for health data that will provide better insights, enable informed therapy decision making for people

with diabetes and their caregivers on a daily basis and deliver cost efficiencies for the healthcare systems.”

“Digital health is growing as the market is now shifting towards an outcome based, patient-centric model,” adds Zeynep Waelchli, Managing Director at Accenture.

Behind a large number of digital transformations and implementation of cloud solutions, she explains: “The best enabler is digital transformation, so we are making investments to support the digital growth of our clients and support health outcomes, in the delivery of patient care.”

Scalability Roche Diabetes Care plans to grow its digital diabetes ecosystem on a global scale, embedding Accenture’s modular and scalable Intelligent Patient Platform (IPP). Specifically designed to deliver exceptional digital health solutions, both parties will adopt an agile approach in order to respond to any potential changes which could impact the development of the platform. “The industry is changing rapidly and we cannot afford

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to stay monolithic,” adds Waelchli.

Accenture’s IPP is a fully cloud based solution, garnering access to a real-world data repository of over 50mn electronic medical records.

The new platform will therefore grow in line with Roche Diabetes Care’s vision, and give the company the ability to scale quickly. “This is one advantage which the IPP is bringing,” says Waelchli. “It is bringing scalability, because Roche Diabetes Care wants to support patients and caregivers 24-7, which is going to be enabled through our cloud based provisioning.

“Further, it is not only the patient who may need to access this information. This solutions also grants doctors greater and remote visibility so they can make more informed decisions and, as a result, consult better.”

“Speed will matter,” adds Beynon.

“Of course, when you pioneer things you need to be quick, which is why we chose Accenture, because we wish to be fast and scale quickly. I’m convinced that we are delivering the right thing for the patient and for society.

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“With Accenture, the company has the key enabler for the integration that we need immediately. We don’t need to build, we don’t need to buy, and it will completely enable our strategy of integrating, collecting and computing in this area.”

Technological delivery Beynon continues: “We want to create an open digital diabetes ecosystem, and become the largest leading digital ecosystem out there,” Beynon says.

TECHNOLOGY

“We aim for health data that will provide better insights, enable informed decision making and deliver cost efficiencies for payers” – Yan Beynon, RDC’s Chief Digital Officer

With plans to complete the project in phases, RDC’s data will first become integrated with the data surrounding its existing standalone solutions.

“In phase two, we will start to connect our partners and integrate further information, which will support the development of patient services.

So, the first step is implementation, but the second step will be to grow with the partnerships around the ecosystem,” Beynon adds.

To support this further, RDC has also recently acquired the company mySugr, offering the leading diabetes management app solution with more than 1mn users worldwide.

The acquisition enables Roche Diabetes Care to broaden essential access to innovative solutions to a large number of registered users who use the app to track their blood sugar levels, medication and activity levels. It will now effectively deliver the front-end of Roche Diabetes Care digital diabetes ecosystem, where sophisticated analytics will enable the company to gain essential insights to drive future innovations and support business growth.

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Such advances will encompass a multitude of benefits for healthcare professionals. With information readily available through this cloud based solution, it will reduce the time taken for professionals to source and analyse the required data, in order to make informed decisions. Data can be shared with medical professionals in real-time, enabling the ability for the delivery of better care outcomes, and will also increase engagement between medical professionals and patients, supporting positive outcomes.

However, with a number of healthcare organisations being subject to cyber-attacks, data security has become an increasing priority in the development of this new platform. Accenture has placed significant focus in this area, where its IPP architecture has been shaped to counteract such challenges. “It is a HYDRA certified environment, providing encrypted data which is a very important element for Roche and for the patient,� comments Waelchli.

The digital diabetes ecosystem will ensure compliance with all data

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security regulations, which will be consistently evaluated at Roche Diabetes Care to ensure it remains on top of all future requirements.

Future development This five-year partnership will enable both Roche Diabetes Care and Accenture to go on a journey together in the development of a

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digital health solution and support diabetes management on a global scale. “I think one important point is that Accenture is aligned with Roche Diabetes Care’s strategy and is duly committed to making this a success,” concludes Waelchli. “Both companies have embarked on this journey to create this digital ecosystem together and bring better solutions to the

entire digital health industry. From our point of view, we are looking forward to making this a reality.”

“We are pioneers in what we want to do here, specifically within the area of diabetes,” agrees Beynon. “Other industries might be different, but for diabetes, I don’t think anybody is doing what we are doing at the moment.”

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PHOTO CREDIT: PÄR BÄCKSTRÖM

ON THE RISE WRITTEN BY: FRAN ROBERTS PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

RISE SICS AB is the leading research institute for applied information and communication technology in Sweden. Tor Björn Minde, CEO of RISE SICS North, describes the Institute’s new research data centre, located in Luleå

R

ISE SICS North is a new subsidiary of RISE SICS, established in Luleå. “It’s like the Swedish Fraunhofer. There are other countries that also have their own research institute organisations,” notes Tor Björn Minde, CEO of RISE SICS North. “Here it’s called RISE – Research Institutes of Sweden.”

The SICS part of the Institute’s name stands for Swedish Institute of Computer Science, whilst the north references its location in Luleå, around an hour drive from the Arctic Circle.

Minde’s work at RISE SICS North is only part of what he does. “I work at Ericsson, the telecom company where I had my 30th anniversary last year. My current position is Head of Research Strategies. Part-time I’m loaned out to this organisation, which I’m running as a CEO,” he observes.

Originally focused on mobile audio, Minde transitioned into computing

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activities, which later facilitated his heading up of RISE SICS North. “The nascent activity in Ericsson is called Ericsson Labs and that took me over to more computer platforms and now data centres,” Minde comments.

“So, that’s the background of why I’m CEO of this research institute.”

Continuous expansion RISE SICS North was formed around the creation of a new research data centre in Luleå. “We have projects on cloud platforms, hardware and software for big data analytics. All of that we run in our two-modules-large data centre,” advises Minde. “We have 200KW installed right now and we are continuously expanding, so we will add another 150KW during this autumn.

“We call it ICE and ICE stands for infrastructure and cloud research environment. So, we cover both infrastructure and the software

Module 1 enclosure

PHOTO CREDIT: PÄR BÄCKSTRÖM

TECHNOLOGY

RISE SICS Module 2 Inauguration party in the

PHOTO CREDIT: PÄR BÄCKSTRÖM

ICE facility

Tor Bjorn Minde CEO

Tor Björn Minde is currently head of research strategy at Ericsson Research with 30 years’ experience in ICT research. He has research management experience leading industry research teams, sections and sector research areas. He holds an adjunct professorship at Lulea University of Technology in systems technology and has been involved in many academic research projects. He is part of LTU technology faculty board and also a board member of Norrbotten research council.

His main research interests are audio, geo, sensor, context aware, machine learning and data center technologies. He led the team behind Ericsson Labs with the objective to improve Ericsson ability in open innovation and network exposure. Ericsson Labs operated a server infrastructure with network functionality offering on-line experimental API's, Application Programming Interfaces.

Lately his main focus has been on cloud infrastructures for energy efficient operation. He has around 20 publications in various conferences and workshops and more than 40 filed patents in the field of signal processing and applications since 1989.

Tor Björn is currently CEO of RISE SICS North AB and working as the manager for the large-scale research infrastructure facility build-up project. He will lead the initiative and implement the vision of a large-scale data center facility to support Swedish industry and academia.

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“If you can have a selfdriving car, why can’t you have a selfdriving data centre?”

– Tor Bjorn Minde, CEO, RISE SICS North

application platforms.” At ICE, clients can test their innovations in a riskfree environment with the added service of being able to measure hundreds of environmental factors.

Pioneering projects Despite being established just 18 months ago, much progress has already been made by RISE SICS North. “We are now at €1.8mn a year in turnover and we have 11 persons right now that work here,” notes Minde. “Our scientific leader is Jon

Summers. He is from the University of Leeds – he started up Data Centre Alliance and is behind the Data Centre Transformation Conferences.”

At present the facility is working on four major projects. “There is one project on data centre automation. If you can have a self-driving car, why can’t you have a self-driving data centre?” Minde comments. “The machine learning algorithm already can perform lots of activities, complex identification problems much better than humans.

“The long-term mission is to come

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TECHNOLOGY

to autonomous data centres, but to that it’s beyond big data at an analytics get there you need to really measure level,” Minde explains. “We have some and model data centres correctly. pre-studies on heat reuse and liquid You need to have a data collection cooling and we hope to expand them. software tool chain and database We’re looking into drying wood and and you need to have all the tools in also liquid cooling. So that is what the place for the sensors. The project is data centre is used for – different types about trying to understand how to of projects to understand how you can make the data centre autonomous create better data centres in the future.” and how to optimise the holistic view Head in the cloud on automation – it’s The first module of the a very big project data centre, a room-inwith Ericsson and room module, has been ABB involved. running since February “We have one project 2016. “This first module about how to use is used for big data natural convection Number of analytics, it’s used for and draught in data Employees at RISE SICS North some cloud applications centres so you can and that is running in reduce the fan use. the servers. We have 200 servers there, It’s a real thermodynamic project,” some GPU [graphics processing unit] continues Minde. “The third project is accelerated,” Minde advises. “Then we to look into how a data centre can be use the data centre to do modelling.” a part of the smart grid in the future. A “The second module is more a data centre has lots of battery, it has lab and we have built it so we can a water tank for cooling and it has an intrinsic possibility to be a big battery. It do a slab floor or a raised floor. We can change equipment easily with can then be a load balancer in the grid. much bigger doors and we can “The fourth project is really about move equipment in and out. We can using analytics in new applications, so

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exchange coolers and racks, we can exchange lots of different equipment there. Module three, that we’re going to install this autumn, will be an open computer lab,” Minde explains.

Outside the modules the space will be used for smaller experiments in a wind tunnel, a cube for thermodynamics, a water tank, solar panels on the roof and renewable energy storage. All to be built during the autumn. On the roof there is also a cooling tower that will be used.

centre is being located just next door.

Facebook has donated equipment to the research data centre, and plans are in the making for setting up projects together,” explains Minde.

“Another important partner is the Luleå University of Technology. We have only been around for one and a half years, so we will expand the number of companies involved, but we have counted the companies we count as being part of our network, and it’s nearly 60-plus.”

A collaborative network

Increased integration

In order to work on such a number of projects, RISE SICS North is collaborating with several partners.

“The companies are Ericsson, of course, and ABB are involved.

Additionally, there is Vattenfall, the power company, and Swegon, the ventilation company,” advises Minde. “EON is another power company involved, alongside a number of smaller companies like Acon, Metria, Eitech, BnearIT, ArctosLabs, Netrounds.

“We also collaborate with Facebook, it’s first European data

Looking ahead, the holistic view of the data centre will become increasingly important for RISE SICS North. “The whole system needs to be much more integrated to make it optimised. It seems to me that some parts of the data centre industry are very conservative – they do what they always have done. If you need redundancy, you hit the solution with a diesel engine and that is not the future – we need to find other ways to do redundancy. That’s why we’re around, to challenge the way data centres are built,” acknowledges Minde.

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Control/ management works space in the data center w w w. b u s i n e s s re v i e w e u ro p e . e u PHOTO CREDIT: PÄR BÄCKSTRÖM

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MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION Written by: Catherine Sturman Produced by: Richard Durrant

Purchasing and Supply Chain Vice President Cyrille Naux and his team discuss how the company’s growth and move from a regional to a global company have led to the transformation of Chassis Brakes International’s procurement and supply chain services

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ith the projected level of car sales increasing year on year, the automotive industry has become an increasingly competitive sphere, with companies seeking to attract buyers after worldclass designs, builds and services.

Since its establishment in 2012, Chassis Brakes International has been working to transform its procurement and supply chain services to become the best in the business, with the aim to expand operations globally.

Manufacturing all forms of car braking systems with an international focus, Chassis Brakes International works in partnership with a large number of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in AsiaPacific, the Americas, India and Europe. “There is no OEM on the globe which we are not working with,”

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explains Cyrille Naux, Purchasing and Supply Chain Vice President. “We are everywhere where customers need us.” The company’s growth has enabled the establishment of manufacturing facilities in India, China, Thailand, Europe, America and Mexico, with engineering services which have adopted a global presence to cater to service demands.

With a global focus, Naux’s responsibilities incorporate the company’s buying, purchasing, procurement and supply chain operations. With three major roles within procurement and purchasing, Naux has appointed three directors: one for direct sourcing, one for indirect sourcing and one for procurement and digital activities.

These individuals work with global category managers who coordinate

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CYRILLE NAUX Purchasing and Supply Chain Vice President

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and develop a global strategy, as well “The backbone of the strategy has as make key decisions surrounding been a review of the systems across the company’s global sourcing. all of our plants,” he comments. “That “Each global category manager includes sales and operations planning, has a global category buyer located master production schedules, in the regions where we are,” explains execution and control and how we Naux. “For example, a global category implement those to manager will have a global standards casting buyer across all of our sites located in the in order to ensure Americas, in consistency across Asia-Pacific, in the entire supply chain.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES AT CHASSIS BRAKES India and in Europe, I have personally spent INTERNATIONAL and he will be driving at least a week at each all the decisions, of our 13 plants with one set up a strategy and team member to evaluate then they will organise current status and define a sourcing strategy and the action plan to close the various sourcing decisions.” gap with our best-in-class model previously defined. This Organisation transformation is ongoing and Since the beginning of 2016, the we can already see it benefitting company has spent considerable the business every single day.” time and effort implementing a new global supply chain strategy Integration made up of 28 separate initiatives, With an annual spend of £500mn according to Chassis Brakes in direct purchasing and £100mn in International’s Global Supply Chain indirect purchasing, Chassis Brakes Director, Wilfried Hermine.

International’s global operations

5,200

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have increased in volume yearon-year. To provide consistency in service, the company upholds positive relationships with suppliers, ensuring it remains aware of any changes within its procurement and supply chain operations.

Naux explains that the company invites its main suppliers to the Frankfurt Motor Show every two years, where it displays new products and shares the company strategy, enabling it to show suppliers how it can continue to create value. “We integrate them from the beginning,” he says.

VIDEO: The Chassis Brakes International corporate video

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“We have been very clear in saying that Chassis Brakes International will double its turnover and consequently we will also double the spend and its purchasing volumes.”

Going forward the company is looking to reduce the number of suppliers it maintains, but those who remain will have a far greater volume of business than they have had previously. By creating an open, direct stance surrounding company strategy, suppliers gain direct access to top management to discuss the strategy the company wishes to implement.

Optimisation While the Chassis Brakes International’s brand name has only been around for a few years, the history of the company goes back to the 1930s, existing under different banners until 2012 when its activities were sold to KPS Capital Partners, LP. While that history has afforded the company formidable experience and expertise in the purchasing space, it also left a legacy of fragmentation, with a number of strategies

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C H A S S I S B R A K E S I N T E R N AT I O N A L

“There is no OEM on the globe which we are not working with. We are everywhere where customers need us” CYRILLE NAUX Purchasing and Supply Chain Vice President

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implemented and then moth-balled as the business changed hands.

“It left us with a fragmented supplier base worldwide,” says Erwan Quemener, Director of Global Sourcing, “and no real rationalisation of the supplier base. So we decided to rationalise this. The number of suppliers managed by my buyers was not sensible, and was actually risky for the business. It is not typically your big supplies that you work with on a weekly or even daily basis that cause the problems, but rather those smaller companies that you don’t work closely with that can affect the whole supply chain in cases where they cannot meet your demands. So, in a bid to mitigate risk and implement operational excellence, we decided that our focus would be our main suppliers, thus removing the tier C suppliers.”

Chassis Brakes International parted ways with some 200 vendors - while that may seem hugely significant, the companies that were shed represented just 5% of the Group’s total spend, leaving the company’s small supply chain team to work

closely alongside the 15% of its suppliers that represent 80% of its spend. The plan is to employ a provider to deal with the myriad of manufacturers that make up the 5% of spend that had previously been so time consuming.

“We are beginning that process this year, and it will save our buyers a lot of time and money,” says Quemener.

Digital transformation Aligned with the company’s growth and expansion, Romain Laclaverie, Global Purchasing Digital Director, has been restructuring Chassis Brakes International’s procurement tools and services for the last two years. He is behind the set-up and the implementation of the company’s digital purchasing organisation and procurement centres.

Responsible for master data, he explains: “Our people are really dedicated in managing transactional activities, cleaning up and making sure that all data are good and can be analysed by buyers to ensure informed decisions. You cannot

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make good decisions on a sourcing issue if data are not correctly managed.” This has therefore enabled the company to price accurately and maintain quality service.

The company’s partnerships with major software companies such as SAP and IVALUA have enabled it to leverage the latest innovative solutions in terms of data management control and interactions with suppliers.

This mind-set allowed the group to master its supplier database by connecting themselves directly to the Supplier Relationship Management tool to exchange essential data, content, legal documentation and spend analysis. “We are also doing contract management and working with the suppliers on this, thanks to the tool,” adds Laclaverie.

In addition to this, Laclaverie is also behind the implementation of supplier scorecards. This tool, supported by BI solution QlikSense, imports information coming from various supports and sources to calculate a composite rating informing on supplier’s spend performance,

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quality management, supply chain and financial positions. Laclaverie explains: “Once we have compiled for one supplier all key performance information available into one tool, including last assessments, we are then able to make a rational decision about its future.”

Positive employee mindset Naux stresses that moving from a regional organisation, to one which is global has been no easy feat. The company has encountered a number of challenges, as Naux explains the main challenges surrounding change management and how employees understand how they can become more involved: “We spend a lot of time with people, understanding how far they are from target processes and the need to adjust current requirements with a global mindset.”

However, he adds confidently that, today, employees have a good understanding on how to remain connected, which is achieved through a number of workshops and trainings, with continuous improvement at the

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Chassis Brakes International employees have a good understanding on how to remain connected, which is achieved through a number of workshops and trainings, with continuous improvement at the forefront of all company operations w w w. b u s i n e s s re v i e w e u ro p e . e u

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“Within our company, agility and organisational excellence are really central to what we are doing everyday�

CYRILLE NAUX Purchasing and Supply Chain Vice President

Chassis Brakes International has been serving the automotive sector since the 1930s through different brand names

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forefront of all company operations.

Becoming a global organisation has no doubt been a rapid process for Chassis Brakes International, which Naux believes is the result of employee engagement, enabling the company to move towards key targets. “Within our company, agility and organisational excellence are really central to what we are doing everyday,” he says.

Although the company’s global expansion and digital transformation are key, it puts the individual in the middle of all the key decisions.

“We are a big company so need to adopt streamlined processes to ensure efficiency, which makes us faster with regards to customer requirements and an easy-to-workwith company. People like working with our Group due to this mindset.”

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78 NOVEMBER 2017

FRANCE  PARIS PORTE DE VERSAILLES  PAV. 4

Heading for a collaborative & digital supply chain

• EXHIBITION • BUSINESS MEETINGS • CONFERENCES www.supplychain-event.com

20-23 MARCH 2018

FRANCE  PARIS NORD VILLEPINTE  HALL 6

International Week of Transport and Logistics

• 40,500 PROFESSIONALS • 800 EXHIBITORS • 100 CONFERENCES • 8 HIGHLIGHTS • THE INNOVATION AWARDS • SMART HUB by SITL www.sitl.eu

20-23 MARCH 2018

FRANCE  PARIS NORD VILLEPINTE  HALL 6

Materials handling exhibition for industry and distribution

• 15,000 PROFESSIONALS • 150 EXHIBITORS • CONFERENCES • THE INTRALOGISTICS EQUIPMENT AWARD • SMART HUB by INTRALOGISTICS

www.intralogistics-europe.com