Further consolidation of the Maltese ICT industry is seen as necessary for it to grow further, according to a top HP executive in Europe.
“The Maltese ICT market is very active, seeking major steps forward in adapting the latest industry trends like cloud computing for example. However, further consolidation in the market will be needed to provide for sizeable players with the necessary breadth to support their customers on their diverse needs,” according to Herbert Rastbichler, HP vice president and managing director for Central and Eastern Europe.
I-Tech spoke to Mr Rastbichler at a recently-held HP conference on the latest ICT industry trends, such as converged systems, virtualisation and cloud sytems and their use in Malta.
Cloud systems are building on HP’s converged infrastructure and are packaged for any size of business for rapid deployment. The flexible and open approach from HP in any cloud implementation provides great benefit to businesses, no matter what size they are. Hybrid delivery combines all forms of cloud deployments for best performance results, the company said.
Asked about the impact of these technologies on Maltese small and medium-sized businesses, Mr Rastbichler said: “Benefiting from the converged infrastructure is not dependent on the size of a country or a business. It is a great architecture that accelerates deployment, reduces complexity and delivers significantly better performance to support any business.”
HP’s business partners, decision-makers and IT professionals from various business sectors in Malta, including telecoms, financial institutions, gaming companies, ministries and government entities, attended the conference. Supported by Intel Xeon processors, the conference helped customers learn more about the infrastructural choices and technologies and to make these technologies easier to manage and deploy.
Microsoft Malta country manager Adrianna Zammit addressed Microsoft’s alliance with HP.
“HP continues to increase the investment into the Maltese market by providing access to the latest technology developments through different programs like ongoing support to our local partners, like broad deployment through the university and college programmes we just launched. This will create more opportunities for Maltese players to access business overseas more easily and therefore have a much larger market at hand. We want to allow the young generation to benefit from great technological expertise and contribute to a well-recognised knowledge society in Malta,” concluded Mr Rastbichler.
www.hp.com/mt