Over the last 20 months, Digital Transformation has become deeply part of our DNA at Dimension Data Luxembourg. This was also one of the core topics discussed at the latest ICT Cluster meeting hosted at EY’s beautiful facilities in Kirchberg. The event was organised for the first time together with the Automotive Cluster to facilitate interactions between the ICT and the Automotive worlds.

The motivation of this event was clearly to enhance the cooperation and business partnerships between the members of the ICT Cluster as well as to receive insights from a stakeholder presenting the challenges and opportunities of the automotive sector.

Dimension Data, like EY, became a member of the ICT Cluster last year. It was our first presentation at an ICT Cluster event and we clearly had the aim to highlight what value Dimension Data can bring to this network.

Michael Mossal, Digital Transformation Lead, first presented Dimension Data as a global technology integrator and managed services provider with more than 28,000 employees in 47 countries and as a member of the NTT Group employing more than 280,000 employees worldwide and representing a global turnover of USD 106 bn.

After highlighting the impacts of a globalised world, he presented Luxembourg as an independent country for Dimension Data and what this means in terms of local advantages. We celebrated our 25th anniversary in Luxembourg last year and truly ARE Luxembourg, heavily using the agile and innovative advantages to build new services and partnerships in Luxembourg and to expose them to Europe.

This represents a model that is today in line with the strategy of many CxOs in Luxembourg and that benefits from the agility and the short decision processes that only a small country like Luxembourg can offer.

The audience got a clear picture of our two Core Go-To-Market models represented by Digital Infrastructure and Digital Workplace, but also of our journey over the last two years to step up from a leading System Integrator to a real application services and APIs Integrator. In this new world, a Microservice Based Architecture is replacing monolithic applications over time. The analogy of networks on the infrastructure level and application networks visualises that transformation in practical terms. It allows to expose and consume services coming from monolithic backend systems, public cloud services and any kind of customer facing endpoints in a secure by design service architecture. Projects around these integration topics are currently representing Dimension Data across all verticals including the Financial Sector. This journey is represented by the new Go-To-Market models, called Digital Customer Experience and Digital Business Solutions.

As the focus of the event was clearly the cooperation and business partnerships, Michael Mossal also highlighted our strategy to engage with start-ups in Luxembourg. Many Enterprise companies – especially on their Digital Transformation journey – see the need to engage with specific talents, which are often running a startup these days. On the opposite side, it is not always easy for them because of compliancy or for scalability reasons. As a global partner of the Hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google or AWS, we are further able to engage with them on a totally different level. A meeting between the AWS worldwide product management team for IoT, Dimension Data and a local start-up, to jointly work on a bigger project is something we can easily facilitate.

Finally, another hot topic was the means to attract new talents in an early phase to come over to Luxembourg. Michael Mossal explained that internships at Dimension Data are very strategical to build-up new talents in Luxembourg from the very early beginning. In the new digital age, it is often more efficient to invest to build up talents instead of hiring mature people and convince them to transform their mindset that was built over years. To close the loop on the automotive industry, we created a very successful internship last year that resulted in an open platform, consolidating APIs coming from the different players in the automotive industry and exposing them to mobile applications. That platform works seamlessly with cars from BMW, Lexus, Tesla, VAG or GM. The internship had no commercial background. It purely had the aim to attract new talents. The side effect was obviously that we developed a set of skills that is potentially interesting for the automotive industry as well. A potential use case would for example be maintaining a carpark of connected leasing cars.