THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: THE GREATEST ACT IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY

Datacenter Dynamics has told me that, as President of the DCD Awards Latam 2018 jury, I must prepare a short speech to welcome the attendees to the ceremony and give them my point of view of the momentum of the sector.

In these, I was documenting myself, when I came across a document generated at the 2017 Davos Forum in collaboration with Accenture, entitled “Digital Transformation Initiative. Unlocking $100 Trillion for Business and Society from Digital Transformation”, which frankly I found exciting. At the end of the post, I’ll leave you the link.

It was at the Davos Forum, in January 2016, that we first heard about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, what many now call Industry 4.0. As my post is titled, I believe it is the greatest performance in the history of humanity. Moreover, this time it is different, as Klaus Schwab, President of the Davos Forum says, “it will not only change how we do things” but also “it will change ourselves”.

Technologies such as robotics, drones, 3D printing, nanotechnology, autonomous cars, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc., are going to have an unprecedented impact on our lives. But there is also talk of the democratization of technology, the distribution of wealth, respect for the planet’s resources. This time, as Stewart Wallis of the New Economics Foundation says, it is about human welfare.

I highlight in the report some disruptive changes such as:
• Hyper-personalization of products and services
• The struggle to attract and retain talent
• Win-Win models between industry and society
• Impact on employment, loss of 2 billion jobs by 2030!

I don’t know about you, but I find it exciting to live such a moment in the history of humanity. But what are our children going to do for survive? It is very impressive to read statements such as those made by Yuval Noah Harari, one of my current leading authors, “humanity will be divided between a superelite of improved humans and a mass of “useless” people”, or “power is in the hands of those who control the algorithms”.

As far as our sector is concerned, all this must be supported by infrastructure. After reading the report, I think James Hamilton’s post, Architect at Amazon Web Services, (as he calls himself in his Linkedin profile, I think it’s much more), in April 2017, where he predicted that the worldwide needs for the Cloud industry is 100,000 medium/large data centers. Wow!

How Many Data Centers Needed World-Wide

This means that this is beginning. Yes, believe it or not, it seems that we are at the dawn of a new paradigm. It would explain the huge demand and pressure we receive in the sector, which leaves us all quite impressed and makes us think, is this a bubble?

I am more and more convinced that this is the good one and when you talk to the big Colocation operators, you realise that there is still so much to do. Madrid, to cite a clear example, is going to double the installed capacity in Colocation next year, in a process that started with projects in October 2017. The most optimists talk about quadrupling in 5 years, the installed power currently and I insist, I’m starting to believe it.

Many of you will think that the explanation to this phenomenon is due to the siren songs of the participants in the Cloud Wars (Amazon, Google and Microsoft), but what they tell me is that this is another thing. The increase in demand will be due to the start of the great migration in Spanish and European companies. My friend Robert Assink from Interxion, some days ago, gave me a data that left me in shock: “In Europe there are about 10,000,000 companies, of which, a company like Interxion, has only 1,000 customers”. What? that implies a potential of ten thousand times the current situation. I don’t care what reduction coefficient you want to put on it, we are in diapers. By the way, I take this opportunity to congratulate Interxion and DE-CIX for sponsoring the report made by Delfos “Madrid: a digital hub for southern Europe. Connected digital infrastructure”. We have a great opportunity and the Administration has the possibility of starting to make reality the mantra “Change of Economic Model” that appears in all the programmes before the elections.

However, if you read my post regularly, you will know that everything is changing, you have to reinvent yourself, reposition yourself or forge alliances with those best placed to participate in this tsunami..

Here are the links to a short video and the report, both from the Davos forum.

THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVE. UNLOCKING S100 TRILLION FOR BUSINESS AND SOCIETY FROM DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

http://reports.weforum.org/digital-transformation/wp-content/blogs.dir/94/mp/files/pages/files/dti-executive-summary-website-version.pdf

A big hug to everyone and thank you for sharing and/or recommending my posts.

Ricardo Abad, Quark Managing Director

This site uses third-party cookies to improve your browsing experience.