Please start by introducing yourself
Hi, I’m Per Overgaard, and I’m interviewing for the technology Express. I’m Europe, Middle East, and Africa Chief Technology Officer for Lenovo data center group.
Q. Throughout your long journey in digital infrastructure, can you point out the most important pillars for a robust base?
Yes. I think it’s remembering that we’re all on a journey. So I often talk to both my team and my customers about showing progress. I’m not talking about speed. I’m talking about moving forward. So that’s what innovation is all about. It’s the most important thing that you can talk about when you are at any level in a company. It’s something that involves the CEO, the CIO, the COO, or the CFO. And it’s a collaboration. That’s where you get innovation on all platforms, it is just that you get a full understanding and how the company can collaborate to become better and more competitive. This is how I see IT. IT is exactly that vehicle to become competitive, to innovate, and to move forward, both in company and in terms of how to use your solutions, but also how to present yourself for your customers.
Q. How do we exploit the value of all the data that we are constantly collecting?
That’s a very good question, especially here in the UAE. I see a lot of interest. I see a lot of appetite. And that appetite is very, very different from any other region that I work with throughout Europe and Middle East. It’s super nice to talk to people who understand innovation and the need to innovate. So, AI and Edge as a vehicle is going to do exactly that. exploit the data that we have. We have two very important assets in the companies. One is people, getting the right people should be essential for every company, because you get exactly what you’re paying for. Now, data is something that I think you should take very seriously. You own a goldmine, and we need to bring that goldmine forward with the technology that we have and the technology we’re going to have the next couple of years, bringing what we know forward to build super cool solutions. So it’s all about the data. It’s all about how we treat the data, how we use that data.
Q. What do you consider to be the biggest challenge in the journey to the cloud?
Exactly that, it’s data. There’s a lot of things around security. And there is a lot of things in terms of how we build that bridge. So ask yourself this question.
The data center you have today on premise, is that an optimal solution? Is that fully secure? Does it work the way you want it to and does it bring you to the next level? I questioned that. And because of that, we have to see innovation in a different way. We have to ensure that we don’t shift from A to B, just because the technology providers are telling you to do that. We only go to B if there is a really innovative advantage for the company that we’re working in. And I think you can only do that by bringing it out of context, maybe even by building a second company. And inside that second company, you build the innovative solutions that you need to become the best—the number one.
Q. What would be the biggest change that we would have to adapt to next year?
Again, the change here is all about how we get there. So how do we get to the next level? How do we get to the B?
And I think this is where you can use the cloud and cloud technologies as the vehicle.
But it’s only a vehicle. It’s back to the human capital. You need to ensure that you have the right skills in your CIO office and the right understanding for the remaining part of the leadership to bring you where you want to go, and that’s very difficult. First of all, it’s not easy to get that kind of skill inside your company. There are very few innovative people, and normally they’re very expensive. So let me give you an example. We’ve built our next level innovative city in the city of Barcelona.
We couldn’t have done that unless we collaborated with a lot of other companies. We are building a conglomerate. We’re building a new company and inside that company is even our competitors. I think that would have been an unthinkable thought just a couple of years ago. And now we are building it together because that is the only way that we can move forward. No company is able to build that idea themselves. No one can stand alone.
Q. What message do you have for our reader?
I met a really smart technology guy here during the weekend, when I was at a wedding in Barcelona. And the guy said that I need to read a lot. I need to update myself every day to get the edge on predicting next-generation solutions or the companies that we’re going to buy. So I do a lot of M&A for Lenovo, and the way that I get my knowledge is to talk to people and engage with people, and the media you have is super cool way of getting yourself on top of different topics and ensure that you are always staying curious and that you always go and ask the why. Ensure that you always go and interact with the people who are around you. This is how you become smarter, and this is how you create your own vision to build the next-generation IT transformation.
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