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Shaping the future of universities with a software defined strategy

Next up was a presentation from Bill McGloin of Computacenter UK, who were one of the sponsors of the event.

Bill noted the increasing need to be agile in response to the changes in our environment:  customer demands, new technology, people needing to learn on the move, large data sets, social media, analytics, etc.  Computacentre offer the software-defined data centre and hybrid cloud as an approach to this agility. The rise of commodity infrastructure allows us to put the intelligence into the data centre management software instead of the hardware controllers.

Bill described this as a journey.  Phase 1 offers capital savings from consolidation.  Phase 2 offers reliability through automation, environment management and monitoring. Phase 3 offers operation cost control and agility through IT as a service, with end-user virtual workspaces and self-service.

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