TECH TRANSFORMATION, DATA-DRIVEN RETAIL AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, ACCORDING TO
“My job is to drive the enterprise forwards"
MIKE KARASIK
Brad Dowden Founder
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technology works at its best, has the power to bring real change or transformation, when it has purpose. I appreciate it’s hardly a groundbreaking statement, but it’s one well worth remembering.
You only have to the look at the last year or so of COVID disruption – and our collective response to that disruption worldwide - to find plenty of valuable reminders, from the seismic shift to a new, hybrid way of working and all the complexities that come with it to the harnessing of some remarkable innovations to further the way we provide healthcare. Purpose can bring out the best in all of us.
It can also come in many forms. Take Mike Karasik, who graces the cover of
this issue discussing his transformative work at NetCost Market. Karasik opitimises tech with purpose. Ask him about his role and you won’t get a lengthy, techheavy response. You’ll hear a captivating story about business enablement, how innovation must serve the organisation and its strategic objectives and aims, and how we can use the latest digital tools to better serve people, improve experiences and add value.
There’s plenty of equally inspiring people and stories in the rest of this, the last edition of 2021. How about designer and scientist Virj Kan, who works at the intersection of materials, robotics, biology and chemistry to tackle sustainability, or BetaPort and its fascinating vision of future cities? We’ve even brought you the world’s first living, reproducing robots for good measure.
As always, read, enjoy and find some inspiration. Thanks to all our readers and contributors this year, here’s to the next.
Matt High Content Director Matt High Marketing Director Jack Pascall Managing Directors Charlotte Clarke James PepperStroud & Clarke is a multichannel creative agency that produces exceptional business and lifestyle content for brands, leaders and pioneers.
Creative Directors Daniel Crawford
Steve Shipley
Project Director
Manuel Navarro
News, views and tech insight
14 | INTERVIEW NETCOST MARKET
On technology transformation, data-driven retail and the importance of customer experience
28 | PORTFOLIO TECH YOU NEED
Innovations for work, leisure and the environmentally conscious
38 | ENTREPRENEUR VIRJ KAN
At the intersection of materials, robotics, biology and chemistry
40 |
Architecture, innovation and agility. Are you ready to embrace a composable strategy?
Tomorrow, there are no cities. There is smart, there is intelligent, there is BetaPort.
|
Forget rockets, space launch is never going to be the same again
56 | INTERVIEW TELKOM
On complexity, digital innovation and procurement as a driver of strategic value
78 | PERSPECTIVE BUILDING
Jon Russell on lessons learned from the AWS outage and the need for digital resilience
84 | DISRUPTOR
The world’s first living robots. And now they can reproduce
86 | CITY GUIDE
48 HRS: BARCELONA
Business and pleasure in the Catalan capital
94 | CALENDAR EVENTS
The best events for 2022
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has said that an automated process caused the 7 December outage that downed parts of its own services, as well as the third-party websites and online platforms that utilise AWS. A post on its own website said: “An automated activity to scale capacity of one of the AWS services hosted in the main AWS network triggered an unexpected behaviour from a large number of clients inside the internal network”. AWS added that this caused a large surge of connection activity that overwhelmed networking devices between the internal network and main AWS network.
It’s the ultimate self analysis. An AI – specifically, the Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model –has warned that AI will never be ethical. The model was invited to participate in an Oxford Union debate on the subject of the ethics of AI. It went on to say: “When I look at the way the tech world is going, I see a clear path to a future where AI is used to create something that is better than the best human beings.”
www.theconversation.com
“More should be done to assuage fears about how tech giants handle user data”
CEOs are strengthening their organisation’s digital advantage by building a more flexible future of work and balancing digital innovation. This, says KPMG’s 2021 CEO Outlook, sees leaders focusing on shared workspaces or hiring predominantly remote workers to expand their talent pool and investing in disruption detection and innovation processes. Digital growth tactics recognised include assessing company culture and values, partnering with third-party cloud technology providers, making products and services available online and joining industry groups or consortia dedicated to developing innovative technologies.
www.home.kpmg
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) provided support for a record 777 cyber incidents in 2021 which, it said, shows the increasing risk and potential damaging effects of ransomware attacks to businesses, councils and healthcare providers.
NCSC CEO Lindy Cameron said ransomware “is now the most immediate cyber security threat to UK businesses” and should be higher on the c-suite agenda.
www.ncsc.gov.uk
Gartner’s 12 top strategic technology trends for 2022 have been identified. They are:
> Data fabric
> Cybersecurity mesh
> Privacy-enhancing computation
> Cloud-native platforms
> Composable applications
> Decision intelligence
> Hyperautomation
> AI engineering
> Distributed enterprises
> Total experience
> Autonomic systems
> Generative AI
www.gartner.com
72%
of consumers surveyed expect companies they do busines with to understand how their needs and objectives have changed during times of disruption.
Accenture: Life Reimagined: Mapping the motivations that matter for today’s customers
Things are better in the virtual world. Right? Mark Zukerberg certainly seems to think so. So too, if you take the Porsche Vision Gran Turismo, does the German sports car manufacturer. You see, you’ll only ever be able to get your hands on this particular concept car in the soon-to-be-launched Gran Turismo 7 video game. Porsche teamed up with developers Polyphony Digital to demonstrate its visionary approach to car design and what it’s designers are capable of when freed from the shackles of the real world. That freedom gives you a top speed of 350 km/h and a 0-200 km/h time of 5.4 seconds.
www.newsroom.porsche.com
“Imagine a battery that’s maybe a little bit larger than a coin cell that you can grab in your hands, stretch to twice its length, twist and throw in a washing machine and it will still work,” said University of British Columbia professor John Madden on the work of he and his team. They’ve created a flexible and washable battery perfect for wearable devices that has, so far, survived 36 wash cycles.
www.cbc.ca
Smartphones will generate 146 million tons of CO 2 or equivalent emissions in 2022, according to research by Deloitte for its 2022 tech predictions. In it, it says the onus will be on making our smartphones – which generate an average of 85 kilograms in emissions in their first year of use – tougher, more durable and longer lasting, while also focusing on their refurbishment or reuse.
www2.deloitte.com
Volvo says it’s investigating a cybersecurity breach and theft of its research and development data.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ’s twitter account is ‘briefly compromised’ his office reports.
The Pentagon creates a new position, the Chief Digital and Artifical Intelligence Officer, to lead its AI work.
Deloitte outlines how the next generation of wifi will play a crucial role in allowing organisations and the enterprise to innovate with advanced networking.
Elon Musk is named as Time Magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year.
Aeroports de Paris announces that France will begin testing electric air taxis in real conditions at a hub outside of Paris in the next few months.
TECHNOLOGY
TRANSFORMATION, DATA-DRIVEN RETAIL AND THE IMPORTANCE OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
ACCORDING TO NETCOST MARKET’S MIKE KARASIK
Mike Karasik has ‘done’ technology for 35 years, he says rather modestly at the beginning of our conversation.
‘Done’ is, in this
instance, an understatement. Karasik is a highly experienced and respected technologist and leader, a veteran of industries including telco and finance, a previous hightech developer and leader of development and operations teams and, across his career, someone who has been instrumental in driving complex and strategically important
technology and digital transformation programmes for businesses.
Ask the man himself about his role and responsibilities, however, and there’s a chance technology may not be mentioned at all. That’s because, to Karasik, the role of the modern technology leader isn’t so much
about the technology they or their organisation is using as it is the value it can bring to the company and its customers. He calls this business enablement, a role that requires leveraging his experience and business acumen to guide organisations through their digital transformations and drive organic growth.
“Technology has changed,” says Karasik. “It’s evolved from a simple ‘address this problem’ or ‘measure this against that’-type solution to one that’s about understanding how we add value to our customers, about how we analyse and understand the data and information available to us, how we can monetise information and knowledge, and how we can maintain our competitive advantage. That’s why I talk about business enablement – technology itself is ubiquitous, it permeates every aspect of our professional and personal
lives and influences nearly everything we do. The real question is how you use that technology to reach the next level.
“Take the grocery industry as an example,” he continues, discussing his most recent role at US supermarket and online food shopping enterprise NetCost Market. “It’s not necessarily about the food at all; it’s a given that it has to be there and be of the highest quality. Really, our role is to use the technology and data at our disposal to ensure we are addressing the people who come to our stores and their experiences of that in the very best way.
“The focus becomes more ‘how do you serve the food to the customer in the best modality and in the most convenient way, then understand through data what else they may need or what other categories they may shop for even though they haven’t explicitly told us?’. Technology is very effective so long as you use it to enable a better customer experience and, often, that really depends on the type of partners you work with and the flexibility they bring to the table. We’ve been fortunate to work with Store.ai and Bringoz, which has allowed us to scale quickly and efficiently when we needed to the most. The technology always has to serve the business and its customers.”
Karasik joined New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania-based NetCost Market in October 2017. The business, born out of a shared vision between father and son team
“ IT’S NO LONGER TECHNOLOGY FOR THE SAKE OF TECHNOLOGY, IT’S US MONETISING THE KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION WE HAVE AT OUR DISPOSAL TO ADD VALUE TO OUR CUSTOMERS”
Sam and Eduard Shnayder provides the diverse ethnic mix of families surrounding its store and service locations with a local grocery experience, as well as access to unique and exclusive foods imported from aroundthe-world locations relevant to customers’ specific homelands.
Since becoming part of the NetCost family, Karasik has led digital transformation efforts across its grocery chain and food import businesses covering 12 stores and two import locations, has built and leads a data-driven marketing team and has integrated several third-party platforms to enhance the company’s B2B and B2C ecommerce capabilities. The result is an impressive 18% per annum revenue increase at NetCost from the time Karasik took the helm of the technology and organisational management functions.
“I originally came to the business as a consultant,” he expands. “I walked in for a nine month assignment to help steer it through deploying new ERP and point of sale (POS) systems; I realised pretty quickly it wasn’t going to be that simple, there were a lot of talented people at the business but they were firefighting at that point when it came to the new technology and there was a level of maturity that I felt we had to reach. I had discussions with the executive team members and they got it, they understood what I was proposing and why, and it ended in me taking a larger and more permanent role.
“At this point we’ve revamped the entire technology stack, and we’re a couple of months away from deploying SAP into our warehouses and stores,” continues Karasik. “We’re going to a full-stage ERP system that
The way the world shops is rapidly changing and every retailer should be able to provide unique, data-driven and innovative digital experiences to their customers that are owned and controlled by their brand.
Prepare your business for the continued growth of digital commerce with our AI-driven end-to-end solution for ecommerce, picking, and fulfillment. Our platform allows you to develop a seamless, unique and personalized customer experience both in-store and online including:
• Highly personalized digital marketing capabilities
• Product recommendations and substitutions powered by Ai
• Owning your customer data and brand experience
• Accurate stock management both in-store and online
• Live dashboards with real-time order management
• Eliminating third-party dependency
• Integration with ecommerce and other key systems
“I was skeptical that stor.ai could pull off what they promised, especially considering the climate we were operating in. COVID-19 could have dealt a fatal blow for us, instead, thanks to stor.ai, we kept our loyal customers happy and coming back by providing the experience and food they love, and feel ready to face whatever is thrown our way. stor.ai has truly transformed our business and helped us become recession proof.”
Mike Krasic CIO, Netcost
will enable us to make better and more informed decisions around products to promote, where to use resources for marketing and inventory management. So we’re now looking at a very different technology stack, a completely different set of capabilities across the business and, most importantly, a real shift in the mindset of everyone here in terms of understanding how and why we leverage technology and why it will make a difference to their work.”
Any leader driving a transformation programme understands the importance of that change
in mindset. Often in digitally evolving businesses, the new technology-focused culture that sits at the heart of the company can be a catalyst for further change, as Karasik has discovered at NetCost. “The expectations have changed, the inertia has shifted and all of a sudden we’re looking at a brand new horizon,” he says. “It’s absolutely not what it was before; the capabilities and the enablement open up possibilities for the future that didn’t exist.
“For me, that’s one of the most important points,” Karasik adds, “because being able to reach further, and to areas we couldn’t before
using the new technology, sourcing products from further away and comparing prices, or simply having the knowledge base from the business intelligence (BI) means we are able to compete more effectively, more efficiently and are better organised at the enterprise level. All these things are there now, which allows us to continue to move forward and focus on other areas like our marketing capabilities, merchandising and sales - all equally driven by technology.”
In the modern, digital world customer experience is king. Unsurprisingly, given the way in which it nurtures the local communities it
understand how the customer shops with you in a different way.
“I’ll give you a simple example,” he adds. “A customer who comes into one of our stores to buy their food also buys baby formula. We know that means they have a baby, but why aren’t they buying diapers with us? What does that mean, where are they buying them from and what are they basing that decision on? Using our technology, we’re now starting to consider our assortments and our categories in a different way, and questioning whether we’re selling the right products in the right locations. Think about that from an ecommerce
serves, that sentiment has always been front and centre at NetCost; it has been greatly improved as a result of the company’s technology transformation. In particular, the greater use and understanding of data around customer decision making when in store is essential in driving business strategy, says Karasik. “On the highest level, the grocery industry is about buying and selling food – where do you buy, where do you source, how much will you pay, they’re all the components of your basic strategy. When you throw technology into the mix, you’re beginning to mine your data and
“TECHNOLOGY IS UBIQUITOUS. THE REAL QUESTION IS HOW YOU USE IT TO REACH THE NEXT LEVEL”
Our delivery management platform enables companies to leverage an advanced suite of technologies to form an automated control tower with live driver management, dynamic consolidation, automated dispatch, and crowdsourced third party partners.
perspective and it gets even more interesting. Everything matters, from where you’re placing the products, what you’re placing next to them and upsell and cross-sell opportunities, right through to the bumpers and banners you’re using.
“No customer has a perfect memory and food isn’t something we overthink. Some create a list, but if the right product pops up in front of them when they’re in the store or online, they’ll buy it,” he continues. “Having that real-time information flow of data enables us to do that by knowing exactly what the customer did, what their shopping patterns are and what the likelihood of them reacting
fulfill. “Some people are foodies, they want to browse the shop, know their ingredients, get ideas while they’re in store and so on. They need choice. For some people the store is irrelevant, they want things clearly identified and to see we understand their journey. Then at the other end of the spectrum, there are those people who eat frozen dinners every day of the week; I need to serve them in the modality that works best for them.
“Every one of these experiences dictates how you design the store differently, the products you stock and where you source them from,” he continues. “The next step for us is to find a spot in the middle of that customer
to the right product in the right place is. That’s the level of business enablement we’re talking about. It’s no longer technology for the sake of technology, it’s us monetising the knowledge and information we have at our disposal to add value to our customers.”
Karasik intends to continue focusing on evolving the customer experience further as NetCost progresses. Key to doing so, he says, is understanding that every customer – whether shopping in store or online – has their own unique ‘experience’ they wish to
range. And that takes a lot of understanding your information about those customers. We’ve been researching this already and, statistically, we found that on average people shop at between seven and 11 stores. Our job is then to figure out what they are and why the customers are shopping there – is it a convenience store where they’re dropping in to buy some milk, are there ethnic issues where they’re buying certain products in one location? In terms of where we aim, it’s a business decision, but having the data to analyse and inform that decision is important. That’s the real value of enablement.”
“THE TECHNOLOGY ALWAYS HAS TO SERVE THE BUSINESS AND ITS CUSTOMERS”
Naturally, to drive such a significant technology transformation, Karasik and NetCost have worked with a number of key technology partners in areas such as data, ecommerce and logistics. One example is stor.ai, which provides world-class ecommerce, picking and fulfillment solutions specifically for the grocery industry and driven by a customer-first approach.
Says Karasik: “Stor.ai was an obvious choice because of their capabilities and the fact that they know grocery very well – it’s what they do day-in, day-out. They offer an end-to-end solution that integrates into our existing POS and ERP systems, has integrated into our delivery logistics very well and has given us a number of options on merchant services. We’ve also worked closely with Bringoz, a partner of stor.ai, to integrate their
SaaS-based delivery logistics platform. It’s a great logistics solution that has the ability to take orders from external sources and place them into a front-end system that then gives you the power to really manage your deliveries in the most effective way.”
If Karasik’s experience has taught him one thing, it’s that technology never stands still. The transformation journey at NetCost remains ongoing, particularly around areas such as BI and how it can drive marketing strategy, he says. “BI means you understand
“THE EXPECTATIONS HAVE CHANGED, THE INERTIA HAS SHIFTED AND ALL OF A SUDDEN WE’RE LOOKING AT A BRAND NEW HORIZON”
your enterprise, what it is doing and why, and that you’re using all the data you have available. But before simply understanding the data you have to know where it’s coming from, what does it mean and what does the compilation data look like? That first step is important – taking everything into a data warehouse and just saying ‘okay, we have all the information’ may be a first step for some, but in my opinion you have to have the evolution of understanding to go along with the data.
and decisions,” says Karasik. “That allows you to lead the executive team and the business with the best data knowledge and mining capabilities and build on it. First you’re looking at the customers, then the next tier is understanding how you’re sourcing products to better leverage your buying power, then you’re going beyond that to identify the trends and monitoring the evolution of tastes, the market and demographics. Really, it’s a never ending process because the picture and information always changes.”
Karasik’s key objective throughout that process remains the same: to enable the business to succeed. Over the last three years, he has guided significant and highly fruitful change at NetCost driven by this goal – a level of focus that will continue over the years to come. “I can’t be an impediment, and neither can technology,” he explains. “My job is to drive the enterprise forward. By that, I mean ensure there are solid foundations from which to take the next steps, which means knowing that we are strong enough from a technology perspective, that what we have put in place is stable, and that we have the capability to manage it effectively. My main job isn’t to look where we are today, but to make sure the next step tomorrow will be a sound and solid one. If I don’t do that, the business can’t grow.”
www.netcostmarket.com
“With that approach you can, at any given time, continue to monitor the pulse of the enterprise and make informed suggestions
I NNOVATIVE AND INSPIRED ITEMS FOR WOR k, LEISURE AND THE ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS
Why should grown-ups have all the fun? The train of thought –presumably – of Elon Musk when considering his next all-electric way of getting around. And here it is: the Cyberquad for Kids, a childfriendly EV inspired by Tesla’s space age Cybertruck design. The four-wheel all-terrain vehicle features a full steel frame, a cushioned seat, adjustable suspension and LED-lit handlebars. It’s powered by a lithium-ion battery that holds up to 15 miles of range and can carry anyone eight years and older along at a respectable 10 mph.
www.shop.tesla.com
I NNOVATIVE AND INSPIRED ITEMS FOR WOR k, LEISURE AND THE ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS
Calmness, wellbeing, serenity. Things that, if we’re honest, we all need. So why not take them to the virtual world? That’s what this gold-toned headset lets you do. Built for wellnes and mindful productivity on the go, it lets you meditate, game or relax as you see fit. If you’re working, VIVE Flow transforms wherever you are –coffee shop, kitchen, shed – into a distraction free VR workspace. If you’re not, hook it up to your phone via Bluetooth and listen to music, cast your phone apps onto any screen or play soothing, sleepinducing sounds.
www.vive.com
I NNOVATIVE AND INSPIRED ITEMS FOR WOR k, LEISURE AND THE ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS
“It’s amazing. It feels like you’re flying.” Nico Rosberg knows a thing or two about performance. With that in mind, if Australiabased Fliteboard’s range of all-electric eFoil boards are good enough for him, they’re okay by us. Fliteboards are born out of an ambition to accelerate the shift towards more environmentally friendly marine travel. Their electric hydrofoil design lets you carve through the water whilst riding above the waves, they use the smallest electric eFoil motor available and are powered by the world’s most advanced portable marine battery.
www.eu.flightboard.com
I NNOVATIVE AND INSPIRED ITEMS FOR WOR k, LEISURE AND THE ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS
Eight million tons of plastic end up in our oceans every year. A terrifying statistic that innovators like GOT BAG are determined to change. The company is an eco-friendly and social-first fashion brand dedicated to raising awareness and cleaning our oceans from plastic pollution. It does so by turning plastic waste into sustainable travel gear, including these backpacks. With each bag sold, GOT BAG collects as much as 5kg of plastic from the oceans. Backpacks are made from reprocessed plastic, which makes them durable, waterproof and ensures a closed material cycle that contributes to a sustainable, circular economy.
www.got-bag.com
I NNOVATIVE AND INSPIRED ITEMS FOR WOR k, LEISURE AND THE ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS
There’s getting away, and there’s really getting away. The latter is what Jupe’s star-gazing inspired flatpack dwelling unit is all about. Jupe needs no foundations, no platform and no electricity – you simply decide you need some time out, head into the wilderness and put it up yourself. Or, as Jupe [which consists of an LA-based team from SpaceX and Tesla] says: ‘no power grid, no problem. Just add land’. Baltic birch interiors are wrapped in high-quality and weather resistant canvas; it’s tech-packed too, including LED track lighting, solar power, USB charging stations and a continuous double-battery system.
www.jupe.com
Virj Kan works at the intersection of materials, robotics, biology and chemistry. A designer and scientist who, prior to her current work at Primitives Biodesign, has designed IoT and mobile computing products at Samsung and 3D humanrobotics interfaces at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, she builds interfaces that connect humans to social and environmental systems.
Kan is renowned for her work investigating new paradigms for interaction design and human ecology through research into topics including biodesign, wearables and stimuli-responsive
polymers. The latter is where Primitives Biodesign, the company she founded in 2019, comes in.
The biotech startup is pioneering innovative climate change action by reducing food waste and plastics pollution. It does so through the engineering of intelligent biomaterials with advanced sensing, display and biodegradation properties that allow them to sense and respond to their environment. In turn, this enables food packaging to monitor quality, improve safety and reduce environmental footprint. Now that’s smart.
www.primitives.io
COHAESUS’ RICHARD BUNDOCK DISCUSSES
COMPOSABLE ARCHITECTURE, INNOVATION AND AGILITY AND WHY TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION IS A STRATEGIC DECISION
To go composable or to not? An important decision for 2022 and beyond, should you heed the advice of any of the numerous ‘future technology trends’ articles that surface around this time each year. Composable architecture – using multiple smaller systems from multiple vendors that interoperate openly and are located in the cloud – can undoubtedly give a competitive edge to those businesses that apply the approach for the right reasons. But in reality, it’s a far more nuanced decision based on several business-wide factors. And one, according to Richard Bundock, that isn’t necessarily entrenched in technology at all.
“Composable isn’t an answer,” says Bundock, “it’s a thing that helps you get to the answer. The choice that businesses make between big box or monolith solutions – where you’re buying everything from one vendor and they take care of it for you – and composable is a business decision. Going composable is an enabler of strategy: if a business wants to innovate and be more agile then composable helps to fit that; if they want to be solid, reliable and have a service that never goes off, but where there’s an acceptance that less innovation is needed, then monolith may be the better choice.
“I’ll give you an example from one of our clients, National Grid,” he continues. “Do you want the national power system to be built on software that’s composable and built from solutions that come from many different vendors? Probably not, because there’ll be a potential reliability issue there. You want a monolithic solution that’s built, tried and tested and doesn’t change very much. It’s really about the business strategy and what it’s trying to achieve when considering the decision.”
That more businesses are considering a shift to composable is a reflection of the rapid pace of technology evolution, and not just in the enterprise, says Bundock. Rather, our own relationship with technology has placed an ever higher premium on the consideration of ‘experience’ for companies and their leaders; the
flexibility, agility and ability to rapidly innovate to meet that experience has seen a rise in the adoption of composable solutions.
Bundock understands this evolution well. Now Group CEO of Cohaesus Group, a group of agencies focused on digital marketing technology and helping clients make their technology work harder for them, he is a veteran of the tech industry, including experience as a consultant developer and system architect for organisations such as Aviva, Mars and BAE Systems. Go further back – to those early developer days where he was armed with a Sinclair ZX81 – and he recalls the burgeoning sentiment around customer and user experience, even then.
“We called it ‘friendliness’ - how ‘friendly’ something was,” he laughs, “but it’s the same thing and, for me, friendliness or experience has always been key to the adoption of any
technology, product or service. People experience it, it’s that simple. If you’re looking more broadly at technology change or evolution, then the biggest driver of change for me is mobile phones. They’ve made a big difference, both in terms of our understanding of experience, and in terms of how we interact with technology and our expectations of it.
“You’ve seen this notable evolution where people essentially have computers in their pockets; they can add their own apps to it, they can connect it to other services, products and devices, and suddenly, that’s the expectation for everyday life,” adds Bundock. “People now expect products and services to work as their phones do. It’s no different at work either. People who go into work in businesses are demanding more than the clunky, older systems that can sometimes be found because of what they’re used to with their phones and laptops. It’s a sentiment that’s changed across the business too. Gone are the days when you’d have people in the c-suite who didn’t understand computers, or thought they were someone else’s job. Now everyone has a machine.”
Proponents of composable, says Bundock, note that it’s ‘plug and play’ nature allows organisations to change the experience more easily – necessary because the way that people use products or services changes over time.
“I think there’s actually a lot of businesses out there that are using composable architecture
Composable isn’t an answer. It’s a thing that helps you get to the answer”
already in some way, they just don’t necessarily realise it,” he states. “Essentially, the definition of composability comes down to the ability to swap things out – if a business has a bunch of systems that connect together with APIs, that’s basically a composable architecture. More recently, that’s moved into putting more of a label on it and businesses making more strategic decisions around having many smaller systems from multiple vendors that interoperate openly are then located in the cloud. Peoples’ experiences change all the time. So having a composable architecture and strategic approach means companies can change and evolve far quicker with those changing
experiences. With a monolith approach, there’s an element of being handcuffed to the organisation or vendor that provides you the solution.”
Other drivers accelerating a shift towards composable architecture include a move towards more in-house teams, notes Bundock, as well as a shift in organisational mindset that sees services considered as products rather than projects. “This has really increased interest in composability,” he says. “Prior to this shift you’d typically see companies go through the process of needing some new technology or system, delegating a project manager and it would
get done that way. Now there’s a bigger focus on service; generally, most forward-thinking businesses have built teams that are dedicated to that particular service and who can drive the work, making things composable if it fits the wider business strategy,”
Strategy, Bundock reiterates, is key. As with all technology adoption or transformation programmes, composable should be viewed as an enabler of value, a tool that aligns with the wider objectives and ambitions of the organisation in question. “In 2005, Richard Nolan and F. Warren McFarlane published an article in the Harvard Business Review called ‘Information Technology and the Board of Directors’ putting forward a mechanism to more closely align how organisations’ budgets are spent – I think it’s something that every c-suite individual could benefit from reading. It’s essentially around how you consider technology as part of the overall organisational strategy, which technologies you should be using to move things forward and which you use to ensure things are reliable.
“I’ll give you a simple example,” he states. “You wouldn’t build an invoicing system, because it’s far easier and cheaper to find a vendor for this. You might build your own loyalty system because it’s probably a specialist case just for your organisation. With a composable architecture you can get there quicker by pulling in small parts of the system that have been created by smaller vendors. And you don’t need to worry about changing out one of the vendors if it doesn’t
work out. The overarching strategy is to choose the technology approach that enables you to do what you need to, and that’s what makes this a strategic problem rather than an IT one.
“One of my pet hates is when IT gets mixed up with technology innovation,” adds Bundock. “IT departments are great at business as usual - they showed that over the pandemic. But people get confused and think that anything technology is IT – it isn’t.
All areas of an organisation should have a strategy for digital and what it means to them. This is the innovation area and where composability is needed.”
Choose composability and the advantages are as already discussed: the ability to move more quickly, to be more agile as a business and to access a greater level of innovation. But there are challenges, Bundock explains, chiefly around people and cost. With regards to the former, a dedicated team is needed to research, test and implement the right mix of vendors and technologies that create a composable architecture, which can prove challenging for organisations.
“The biggest point that organisations need to take away is that composability is not the answer. It’s an enabler option if that is what they need. If you go down the monolithic path, it’s certainly difficult to have a competitive advantage - you can’t move as fast because you’re handcuffed to a big vendor and you have to remember that your competitors may be running exactly the same system; there’s no way to differentiate from them. If you need that competitive advantage, composability is an enabling option but, overall, organisations need to get far better at their strategy for digital because they constantly confuse technology itself for the answer to their challenges.”
“
People now expect products and services to work as their phones do”
Tomorrow there are no cities. Gone is the object centred, the static and the permanent. In its place is the humancentred environment: smart, agile, resilient and adaptable.
Here, the way in which we live – and where we live – is designed around human needs, and can react and grow with us as we evolve. This is a world of sustainable and futureproof homes and work spaces, of on-demand structures that anyone can create, and of circular, digitally driven design. This is BetaPort’s world.
And it’s built around the concept of ‘Building As a Service’ (BAaS) solutions, adaptive spaces that are flexible in use and follow an opensource mentality – BetaPort fosters the democratisation of construction through a ‘participatory, systemic’ approach. Or, more simply, the urban and sustainable landscapes of the future can be created by anyone and for any requirement.
To achieve that BetaPort uses intelligent building technologies like automation
and digital planning tools. The BAaS system is based around a highly flexible interior layout that can react to changes; the design workflow that BetaPort uses means the modular building blocks allow for scalability, are considerate of their social impact and can be tweaked and edited by stakeholders through a digital planning tool.
This uses machine learning and custom algorithms to let the design process be interactive and encourage participation. Or, as BetaPort puts it, ‘playful’. Playfulness aside, the use of advanced digital technologies also means that planning errors are all but eliminated and building costs can be anticipated in advance.
BetaPort’s creators, spatial innovation studio Urban Beta, believe in a sustainable architecture concept called ‘Impact through Empathy’. This dictates that architecture and project work revolves around spatial systems that are efficient in planning, yet beautiful.
In line with this, BetaPort uses locally sourced renewable materials and is planned
+ Intelligent building technology: BetaPort is digitally planned using automation and machine learning
“TOMORROW’S SPACES ARE DESIGNED AROUND HUMANS AND CAN REACT TO THEIR CHANGING NEEDS. THESE SPACES LIVE, BREATHE AND INTERACT WITH US”
“THIS IS A WORLD OF SUSTAINABLE AND FUTURE-PROOF HOMES AND WORK SPACES”
+ Impact through empathy: BetaPort uses locally sourced renewable materials and is planned for a circular economy
for a future circular and sustainable economy. The modular blocks are fully geared towards future electric urban mobility solutions, use material passports and are ‘designed for disassembly’. Betaport also uses upcycled and secondary materials in construction and intends for the buildings to act as carbon sinks or active material depots.
Says Anke Parson, a partner at Urban Beta: “New forms of mobility challenge today’s infrastructure and the planning of our cities. To guarantee the seamless integration of these new forms of mobility, we need to initiate sustainable planning techniques with long lasting socially just core values.”
www.urban-beta.de
“ARCHITECTURE REVOLVES AROUND SPATIAL SYSTEMS THAT ARE EFFICIENT IN PLANNING, YET BEAUTIFUL”
Rockets for space travel? Pfft, get with the times, man. Where we’re going, we don’t need rockets. We need a suborbital accelerator. Thankfully, there’s an innovative new space tech company that has just what we need: SpinLaunch.
In October of this year, the company’s suborbital accelerator came to life for the
first time. It’s the world’s first kinetic space launch system, meaning it forgoes rockets to get satellites and other spacebound objects into low earth orbit, instead using a ground-based, electric powered kinetic launching system that’s both less expensive and kinder to the environment.
SpinLaunch’s suborbital accelerator is designed to operate from 800 to 5,000 mph and is currently acting as a test-bed for
the company’s full Orbital Launch System. It consists of a low-pressure vacuum chamber 300ft wide, in which a hypersonic carbon fiber tether spins the spacecraft round before blasting it into space.
www.spinlaunch.com/#p1
“Space
will never be the same”
TRANSFORMATION, COMPLEXITY AND LEADING
SUSTAINABLE VALUE
ACCORDING TO TELKOM’S BEN VAN ZYL
Tell Ben Van Zyl that procurement is only about cost savings, governance, compliance or any of the other traditional aspects of the role and he’ll respectfully disagree. For a procurement and supply chain leader of Van Zyl’s experience those points are a given – they are the bread and butter of daily procurement. In today’s more complex and rapidly evolving world, the role of a high performing procurement function like the one he has led at South Africa’s Telkom since 2019 is about something far more crucial to overall strategic success: driving value.
That value, as Van Zyl goes on to explain, is multifaceted, encompassing several key areas that he insists must be embedded within the organisation and ultimately play a crucial role in delivering on the broader strategic objectives of the business.
Over the last years, he and his procurement colleagues have firmly practiced what he preaches, guiding the procurement business through a significant transformation programme that includes overhauling governance frameworks, focusing on cost control, technology adoption and delivering a new procurement structure and operating model. More recently new areas of focus, including developing a group-wide sustainability framework, cybersecurity risk, disruption and more have added to an increasingly complex procurement environment.
But that complexity is de rigueur for the modern procurement leader, says Van Zyl, outlining how the role – and the broader function – have changed over a 20-year career that has covered strategic sourcing, procurement and supply chain management for leading financial and telecommunications organisations. “The most obvious changes over that time are how the role of technology has vastly increased. For example, source to settle platforms that improved operational performance by driving automation, but also things like better market intelligence
and fantastic spend analytics and visualisation tools to give you greater reporting and insight to optimise spend and cash, and importantly, improve strategic decision making.
“But, more broadly, the typical view of procurement has evolved,” he continues.
“I think it’s less about facilitating a process and more about strategic relationships and thinking. That’s a reflection of how the procurement leader has had to change too. I love doing deals, it’s still my sweet spot, but really the leadership role today is about understanding business drivers, creating
value, using your experience to view the company more holistically and understanding that what you’re doing is assisting the business to achieve their strategy.
“At Telkom I’ve made sure that procurement has a seat around the table, it’s really important for that to happen in terms of being representative of how the business views procurement,” says Van Zyl. “A good leader still needs the commercial acumen to act as an advisor, but you have to be able to ‘sell’ procurement value to the business. You need to then back that up by delivering on that value promise or you will lose
trust. As an example, we’re currently developing a list that’s akin to procurement KPIs that are aligned to the business objectives – that’s my contract with the organisation, and me and the team have to deliver on it to succeed.”
And deliver they have. Van Zyl joined Telkom in 2014, originally as Managing Executive: Transformational Sourcing, before moving to Openserve, part of Telkom, in the role of Chief Procurement and Contracts Officer. “At the start of 2019, I was asked to head up procurement
contract management for the group –the role I currently hold,” he continues.
“I was stepping into a group role essentially overseeing procurement while also overseeing the supply chain businesses for Openserve and Consumer. There were a number of areas we had to address and focus on at that point, including establishing a centre of excellence model, building a strong analytical capability with an equally strong cross-functional team of subject matter experts, developing a new governance framework and doing a lot of work around risk management, including work with our partner Inoxico on risk vetting and conflict of
interest checks. Our diversified supply chain placed us in a strong position when COVID disruption struck.”
The transformation since 2019 has been significant, says Van Zyl, further detailing the key areas of work to date. “When I took the role, I think business was a little frustrated at the pace at which some procurement processes moved. At the same time, there were some areas of improvement highlighted in an audit findings around things like contract management and ineffective procurement processes.
As a result, my attention was largely on those areas of risk, governance and putting a new procurement structure and operating model in place, all to allow for
“THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY HAS VASTLY INCREASED. IT’S THE CATALYST AND ENABLER TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AND MOVE MORE QUICKLY”
more flexibility and agility whilst also maintaining the control.
“As part of that work I realised pretty quickly that my reporting was bad; I was getting different answers from different reports and just didn’t have the visibility to drive meaningful insights,” he continues. “With experience, you can trust your instinct to a degree, but you need to have good data and analytics to make effective decisions. We built a spend cube and made significant improvements to have
one single version of the truth; to progress it was really important to improve the reporting and analytics capabilities.”
Van Zyl makes no bones about being a facts-based leader, supporting his decision making with reliable and holistic information. In this regard, technology adoption has played an important role in the transformation work to date. “It is the catalyst and enabler to improve performance and move far more quickly,”
“THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE SHOULDN’T BE UNDERESTIMATED”
As the preferred partner of Telkom and 52 of the world’s leading service providers, Amdocs Operations brings a robust hybrid cloud management platform, extensive AI-driven automation and thousands of DevOps professionals, empowering IT organizations to lead successful digital transformation journeys and design innovative services that customers want.
“YOU HAVE TO HAVE GOOD DATA AND ANALYTICS TO MAKE EFFECTIVE DECISIONS”
he reveals. “We’ve implemented e-sourcing and e-procurement solutions, spend analysis, have automated the requisition to order process and we’re adopting contract management and supplier performance management solutions that will add tremendous value to the organisation. Further automation will remain a big focus area in procurement, similar to the drive for innovation and automation in our billing system with Amdocs.
“Specifically on supplier performance, we’re sweating the assets we have by using one of the Ariba modules to create a heat map of supplier performance,” says Van Zyl. “Being able to give that kind of detailed information to the business will help to ensure we’re putting in the right processes and improvement plans, but it will also drive the right behaviour from our suppliers. My goal is that, by the end of the year, we’ll have our first dashboards available for the senior team, and we’ll drive this forward from there.”
Innovations like this can go some way towards cutting through a procurement environment that, says Van Zyl, has become increasingly complex in recent years. “Just look at the last two years alone,” he notes, “there’s very different dynamics to the role as a result of several significant events like geopolitical risk between the US and China, cybersecurity issues like the big hacking
incident that we faced here at Telkom and, more recently, the supply chain disruption caused by COVID and the global chip shortage. All of these highlight the importance of having the right procurement and supply chain risk management processes in place. Working with key suppliers like ZTE to keep buffer stock on customer facing equipment shows how strategic partnerships can reduce the risk impact and serve our customers better.
“There’s other dynamics, too,” he continues. “Sustainability – driven by everyone from investors and shareholders to clients, partners and internal stakeholders – is becoming essential at a strategic level, as is improving diversity and inclusion initiatives both in our business and at our suppliers. All these issues are crucial and need to be embedded into your organisation – and not to the extent where you’re saying they’re a focus for the future, but so that you’re making real, measurable changes now that make a difference to people’s lives.”
Van Zyl is currently engaged in several of these key areas at a strategic level at Telkom. Developing and implementing a sustainable procurement strategy that aligns with the company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) objectives is at the top of the list, he says. “Our job is to add value across the organisation so we, as a procurement function, will play a big role in implementing the sustainability
framework. To do that, we have to ensure that purchasing reflects the broader goals linked to resource efficiency, climate change, social responsibility and economic resilience. We already have a supplier code of conduct in place and have had great buy-in from our partners; it’s extensive and covers data, privacy, protection of human rights, economic empowerment, anti-corruption, business continuity management and so on.
“If you then look at the wider ESG pillars for the business, you really have suppliers and supply chains across them all,” he adds. “In that respect, our approach is now to take this to the next level by working with the Telkom Group Exco to understand their ambition and get their guidance. Telkom doesn’t want to be just compliant and tick boxes, but wants to have a real differentiating strategy that identifies key areas of improvement, allocates the necessary resources and investment, and identifies collective actions and targets for the next five to ten years.”
Alongside sustainability, further enhancing supply chain resilience is a core focus for Van Zyl and his team. COVID, he explains, demonstrated the risks associated with global supply chains and the importance of having greater visibility across the supplier network. As a result, he and his colleagues have been collaborating closely with suppliers, understanding trade routes and working on ways to build further agility and resilience into the supply chain.
At Barloworld Logistics we believe in building sustainable partnerships that focus on unlocking value at each step in the supply chain process.
Today’s global interconnectedness demands competitive supply chains with advanced capabilities to deliver rewarding customer experiences.
Our secret to success lies in being able to connect the dots better and faster to deliver supply chain efficiencies.
By identifying and implementing efficiencies, our seven-year journey with Telkom has realised significant value and unlocked substantial savings.
THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT AND TOGETHER WE PUSH BOUNDARIES TO DEFY LIMITS WITH OUR CUTTING EDGE SOLUTIONS.
“THIS IS ABOUT WHETHER WE WANT TO BE COMPLIANT AND TICK BOXES, OR WHETHER WE WANT TO DO MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE”
“Risk management is linked closely with the work around supplier relationship management and contract management,” says Van Zyl. “We’re going to analyse every area, whether it’s legal risks, financial sustainability or operational risks, to ensure we have a proactive approach and that we’re not just on a tick-box exercise. We’ve already making great progress in this regard; we were able to react well to the challenges that COVID brought as a result of some of the strategic work we’d already implemented like redesigning products and processes with Huawei to remove complexity in our network build programme, or optimising the safety stock through our supply chain partner Barloworld and diversifying our supply base. So it’s about building on that.”
Hard work, strategic acumen and technology are undoubtedly crucial to delivering on this future ambition, but so too is effective leadership and the development of a workplace culture that enables change. Without the right team, says Van Zyl, you achieve nothing for the organisation. “The importance of culture shouldn’t be underestimated and is the key ingredient for successful change,” he says. “When there’s uncertainty around change or transformation, it can impact morale, behaviour and performance. My job as a leader is to create that culture and set the expectation of how we should behave and work together.
“I’ve always enjoyed building high performance teams. First you set a clear and
aligned purpose that everyone understands – people have to know why we’re doing what we’re doing, and they have to feel a sense of belonging to that purpose or mission. At the same time, you create a shared sense of achievement through trust and building close relationships within the team; communication is absolutely critical to do this. If you get this right, and we have to so we can drive these new operating models and changes, then you deliver for the organisation. There’s a lot happening and a lot to do, but it’s an exciting time.
www.telkom.co.za
ENDAVA’S JON RUSSELL DISCUSSES THE AWS OUTAGE, THE NEED FOR DIGITAL RESILIENCE, AND THE ROLE OF DIGITAL ACCELERATION
In early December Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a crippling service outage which took its own operations – alongside those of its customers – offline for five hours, throwing systems into chaos. Following the outage, AWS has taken the blame, explaining that its software was at fault as systems became overwhelmed with users and consumption.
However, this raises an important question. In a time where we’ve never been more reliant on cloud-based systems, how can we make sure that these types of ‘digital breakages’ don’t happen? Or more realistically, if they do, how can we recover more seamlessly?
Among other things, the recent AWS outage shows us that the cloud isn’t magic. Things still crash and fail, and there remains a need for traditional managed services to monitor and respond to events in real time.
Preventing and recovering from these ‘digital breakages’ – which occur when an operator or business doesn’t have the required digital infrastructure in place to service customers – is a critical consideration for any business looking to remain competitive today.
Incidents like these highlight quite publicly and painfully for IT providers and their customers that there’s a real lack of control if you’re relying on a third-party cloud provider. If these apps were on-premises, companies could throw resources at the problem, get regular updates, and prioritise recovery. Unfortunately, in the cloud, this control is lost and companies may find themselves at the mercy of the provider as they carry out their recovery processes with no real thought as to what is most important for the businesses using systems. But that doesn’t mean that businesses are helpless and there are some very clear steps they can take to protect themselves.
Over the past 20 years, companies have increasingly turned to new web, cloud and mobile technologies to address challenges and realise opportunities. As these organisations continued to innovate, scale and
“ THE RECENT AWS
US THAT THE CLOUD ISN’T MAGIC”
expand, many came to the stark realisation that the ‘do or die’ approach often succeeded in addressing immediate business challenges, but needed further refinement in order to meet the day to day needs of organisations. We saw the impact of this in the AWS outage.
One danger of thinking in terms of digital transformation is that a transformation implies an end point or finishing line. In fact, the process of improving and enhancing an organisation’s digital capabilities and technology is an ongoing process. As new technologies are introduced and improvements made, the digital state continues to
evolve and infrastructure must be constantly maintained in order to keep pace.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for a network that has millions of users, all with greatly varying needs and demands. This means that it’s of paramount importance that businesses re-examine, update and improve their technologies to continue to solve new and existing business challenges. At Endava, we call this ‘digital acceleration’. It’s not a one-and-done transformation but a continuing journey, allowing IT teams to plan and adjust course as needed along the way, allowing for more flexibility and resilience built into internal systems.
It’s all fine and well to talk about taking an accelerative approach, but how can businesses and IT teams apply this internally to protect their own systems – particularly those relying on the cloud? The answer is actually quite simple. Organisations should look to invest in automation. They should script everything and not allow users to edit and change things in the console.
Whatever your business, IT staff should have a robust backup policy and process in place. This means analysing the data needed for recovery in the event of a total loss, and ensuring it is backed up frequently and made available even in the event of a major failure. Automation can help hugely here, both in the backup and restore processes so you can script your recovery and deploy a disaster recovery instance by running a script rather than by having teams have to dig through everything manually in the middle of a disaster.
Furthermore, IT teams should consider designing fault tolerance and automatic recovery into the architecture. The AWS outage impacted multiple services in the US-EAST-1 region and highlighted the importance of a multi-region, or multi-cloud strategy for critical applications. These strategies can provide robust protection from failures but do require careful design and ongoing monitoring of implementation – an accelerative approach rather than a transformative one. Time spent now is time saved during a crisis.
“AS NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE INTRODUCED AND IMPROVEMENTS MADE, THE DIGITAL STATE CONTINUES TO EVOLVE AND INFRASTRUCTURE MUST BE CONSTANTLY MAINTAINED IN ORDER TO KEEP PACE”
The phrase ‘the cloud is just someone else’s computer’ comes to mind; it’s not magic but it does provide tools and services to make our lives easier.
As remote working continues to be prevalent into 2022, our reliance on the cloud will continue to grow. The disruption caused to your business by the AWS outage, and others that will follow it, can be preventable with the right technology and by taking the right approach to IT infrastructure.
Using the necessary services to build redundancy and fault tolerance into architecture
will be key as systems only become more and more overloaded with users. From a business perspective, ensuring applications are backed up thoroughly and constantly testing recovery procedures could save not just migraines, but money by providing a robust platform for scalability and fault tolerance. But simply having the right tech isn’t enough: leveraging digital acceleration that uses an agile and iterative framework for development means that it’s more likely that faults and issues will be caught early, accounted for, and adjusted along the way, mitigating risk of outages like the one earlier this month, and making recovery easier.
However, despite the headlines around the AWS incident, the place for business is still the cloud and that isn’t changing. If designed well, using best practices, apps can function much better in the cloud, with tighter controls over access, better scalability, and less bottlenecks, leading to better productivity. What’s important now is that organisations and their tech teams take the right approach to management – careful nurturing of their systems will improve resilience and cut down on headaches.
Jon RussellJon is Group Head of Managed Services at Endava, a software and technology company that provides technology and digital advice to clients.
“ Most people think of robots as made of metals and ceramics but it’s not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which is act on its own on behalf of people”
— Josh Bongard, Computer Science Professor and Robotics Expert, University Of Vermont
As headlines go, ‘world’s first living robots can now reproduce’ is up there. The robots in question are Xenobots, computer and AI-designed, hand assembled synthetic organisms less than a millimeter wide and formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog.
Scientists from the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering unveiled the Xenobots last year, demonstrating how they can move, self-heal and work together in groups. Now they have shown an entirely new form of biological reproduction that’s different from any animal or plant known to science.
This occurred after AI was used to develop and test different body shapes for the Xenobots - eventually settling on a Pac-Man like c-shape, which was able to move around a petri dish, gather stem cells independently and make new Xenobots. In the future, scientists say the mini Pac-Men could be used for tasks in the human body and natural world, including collecting microplastics from the oceans or regenerative medicine.
www.pnas.org
Welcome to Barcelona, a vibrant and alive city of culture, art and history. Visit for a relaxed pace, sunshine and great food, nightlife and, more recently, business. Over the years the Catalan capital has become a major hub for business meetings and conferences, and one of Europe’s best spots for startups and entrepreneurs. Here, Tropicfeel’s Alberto Espinós shows you around.
Head to Aticco , a well-known and cool co-working space in Barcelona. From conferences, individual workspace to gym services, it has different venues in the city but I would suggest you go to the one in Bogatell (Poblenou). The neighbourhood of Poblenou has become the epicentre of the entrepreneurial community. Traditionally industrial, it has been reborn as a place of reference for European startups that want to be in a city that leads innovation and offers a quality of (work) life. It’s just around the corner from us.
Betahaus is definitely one of the best co-working spaces in Barcelona. Its almost daily events will keep you ahead of the curve in all aspects of business and technology. Betahaus is located in Gràcia, one of the most iconic neighbourhoods of Barcelona, is open 24/7 and has a lot of outdoor spaces – you can enjoy sunny Barcelona and the beautiful views.
You should also try Espai Granada , an attic converted into an avant-garde loft at the top of a characteristic building in Poblenou. Its privileged location gives you an amazing 360-degree view of the city.
What can be said about Soho House Barcelona , known worldwide as the Hotel Hub of entrepreneurs and creatives, that hasn’t already been said? The one in Barcelona is set in an excellent location, next to the port and with unique views of the city – you’ll feel like you’re floating between an urban and Mediterranean climate.
Hotel Neri , in the heart of the Gothic Quarter, is perfect if you’re looking for a quiet place to stay. It’s an old Barcelones palace converted into a hotel, giving you a view into how the people of the time lived in the heart of the city. The restaurant is really worth it too.
A few meters from the Plaza de la Catedral and above the Mercado de Santa Caterina, in the heart of El Born is Edition Hotel .
All its rooms have something special, but the hotel’s common spaces are the most pleasant. With a rooftop pool and billiard room, it’s perfect for a cocktail after a long day in the city.
SOHO HOUSE
Alberto Espinós is founder and CEO of Tropicfeel. He began his career at Crowdcube, where he saw how important it is for companies to build ties with their communities to have a real impact. He is an avid traveller (with over 41 countries visited) who has demonstrated his entrepreneurial skills at the helm of the largest Kickstarter campaign by a shoe company, in which he raised €2.1m in just 51 days.
El Japones Escondido has just opened, but make sure you reserve a table before going. A mixture of Japanese cuisine with typical Catalan dishes, its open kitchen allows you to see how every dish is prepared.
A top place to go to eat is Bar Lobo . If you’re visiting during the week, I advise you to ask for their lunch menu and accompany it with some tapas. In the heart of Raval, and with a magnificent terrace, it’s perfect for weeknight meals to get away from work.
Nakashita offers a mix of Japanese and Brazilian cuisine. The chef is the most
peculiar and entertaining, let yourself enjoy his company and ask him for his recommendations. You could also try Isabella’s in the upper part of the city, which is perfect for group meals. They have a great variety of dishes and a very well decorated space.
The climbing scene in Barcelona is going strong and it’s so much fun! I recommend you to try Sharma climbing , where you can find all climbing styles and levels. We have a couple of real pros in the Tropicfeel team.
BAR LOBO
Paddle, sail or surf – when in Barcelona you have to take advantage of the fine weather and beachside city location. Visit Sea you Barcelona, located by Hotel W. This place can be your starting point for enjoying the Mediterranean sea breeze while learning or practicing one of the typical water activities popular in the city.
Arte Bar is an experience that has been gaining more and more traction, and it’s easy to understand why. This is an original Paint and Wine studio, offering easy step-by-step painting classes while you taste some nice wine and beer, listen to music and disconnect. I highly
recommend trying to combine these two top activities.
Lastly, La Caseta del Migdia is our bestkept secret at Tropicfeel! La Caseta is an alternative place for the most adventurous, located in the Mirador del Migdia in Montjuic. Expect exceptional views over the sea and the mountains, easy food, snacks, beers and wine while dancing to the sound of rumba. It’s also one of the few places in town where you can see the sunset in Barcelona.
LA CASETA
5-8 JANUARY 2022
Las Vegas, NV, USA & virtual Hundreds of thought leaders from around the world are ready to show you how tech has never been more important in our lives.
> VISIT WEBSITE
6-8 FEBRUARY 2022
Denver, CO, USA
The event that champions the coming together of geospatial technologies and the built environment.
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28 FEBRUARY-3 MARCH 2022
Barcelona, Spain
Where world-leading companies and trailblazers share the latest thought leadership about the progression and future of connectivity.
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2-3 MARCH 2022
London, UK
The world’s largest global gathering of data centre specialists, engineers, innovators and business leaders.
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15-16 MARCH 2022
New York, NY, USA
Bringing together the leading disruptors within financial services – be part of the discussions shaping the future of the financial market.
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