The DCD Zettastructure conference and exhibition is returning to Old Billingsgate on the 7-8 November and is expected to be attended by over 1,500 data centre and cloud infrastructure professionals. Featuring topics ranging from artificial intelligence to Brexit, the venue will host topical discussion on the challenges and key trends for the sector.
George Rockett, CEO and co-founder of DCD commented: “Colocation, cloud and managed service providers are jockeying for position in a fast changing market. They’re chewing up what’s left of the enterprise-owned assets and bringing a new meaning to what purpose-built means,” adds Rockett “Add GDPR and Brexit to the mix and it’s explosive.”
This year’s conference programme is designed to help the industry practitioners look to the future as well as get to grips with present day challenges in a record-breaking year for the European data centre sector.
“We’re going to explore the bleeding-edge of innovation from the prism of autonomous vehicles that stretches the notion of latency, the impact of AI and machine learning that’s set to become mainstream, to the future of energy supply,” said Merima Dzanic, Conference Producer at DCD.
While the demand for digital services, big data and IoT is spurring investments in mobility, automation and cloud technologies, IT operations and facilities teams are faced with the realities of managing legacy technology portfolios.
“Cloud is the new norm. However, for many large-scale enterprise IT organisations, especially in the financial services sector, migrating their on premise traditional systems that have been in use for many years, is not always feasible or cost-effective; the journey towards a digital world has to consider traditional and cloud native setups”, said Gunnar Menzel, chief architect at Capgemini, who will be speaking at the event.
How to optimise existing environments and to manage data centre upgrades and migrations as hybrid computing becomes more prevalent will be a hot discussion topic at this year’s conference.
Also speaking at the event, CBRE’s head of EMEA data centre research, Mitul Patel, commented that the London market will be looking for a strong 2017 to follow on from its record year in 2016 where it saw 49MW of colocation take-up, against a 5-year average of 22MW prior to 2016. Industry reports suggest that Brexit has had little negative impact on London. While demand for cloud services remains strong, benefitting both hyperscale and smaller cloud players, some business decisions are being delayed due to Brexit and GDPR uncertainties. However, the strong demand will most likely override these fears.
“We may get a clearer view of Brexit’s impact on decision-making towards the end of this year as details become clearer,” Patel commented.
For the latest information on the conference programme, visit: https://dcd.events/conferences/zettastructure
