YPO visit the Tech Show London

23 Mar 2023 11:55 AM

Making the right technological investments and taking the right turns for your organisation has never been more critical and YPO recently attend the Tech Show London 2023 to ensure we are enabled to support you with the your Tech procurement. Digital Transformation continues to be the focus for many organisations, looking to drive business efficiencies, whilst aiming to control (and where possible lower) costs and seek additional value from their infrastructure, systems, and Suppliers.

It’s imperative for YPO as a business and our internal IT department, but also across the ICT Services Procurement Category to understand how we continue to make the right technology investments and make such services and routes available for the wider public sector to gain access to this expanding, but exciting offering. Tech Show London was our first visitor event for the ICT category this year. Why did we go? To be part of the latest technology conversations, discover emerging solutions and engage with the supply base to ensure our provision continues to meet the needs of all our stakeholders.

Check out what our ICT team thought of the event:

“Across two days, myself and the ICT Buyers attended 25+ conferences, gaining knowledge and inspiration and building on our networking contacts, ready to be utilised in our upcoming framework creations. As a team, we are heavily invested in CSR and sustainable practices, so it was great to witness the focus on this topic throughout the show and reiterate the need for everyone to play their part.

“For me, it was also reassuring to hear a change of message from the Cloud first approach, towards a Cloud as appropriate policy, especially as so many organisations continue to host and process data in a variety of environments, some of which aren’t so easy to transition.”

Robyn Lamport-Rann
ICT Category Manager

“As a buyer in an ICT category its imperative to understand the market in real terms. The cloud first policy is a great example, and to hear that in practice most organisations haven’t achieved this yet and why? because not all requirements are fit for cloud, keeps our strategy up to date. More importantly organisations need to be understanding what is the best fit for their estates. There are some savings to be had in cloud but if not managed properly there’s also expense, so training and Fin Ops roles and services are crucial in understanding costs of what you are storing and accessing regularly can make a difference to your costs.

“We’ve heard about new solutions coming on line to create products that align with cloud but sit in fully managed purpose build colocation facilities to give and support customers with the choice they need in todays market. We need to be aware of such things, to ensure we enable this offering through our framework choice. Security was also an interesting topic and how simply lifting and shifting it from on premise to the cloud is not suitable along with todays challenges of endpoints sitting on WAN networks as opposed to previous LANs. It is my role now to ensure that our re-procurement of Cloud Services and Data Centre Solutions Framework meets not only todays, but the future requirements for our public sector customers.”

Zoe Morgan-Kriek
ICT Category Buyer

“Having being relatively new to the ICT world, attending the Tech Show London was a fantastic experience to understand how the industry is evolving in key areas such as cloud, cyber security and AI! Over the two days, I attended 11 seminars which provided key insight across the ICT industry covering areas from sustainability, IT’s role in the Net Zero journey, managing data and how technology is evolving.

“As a buyer is the public sector arena, it is key for me understand what suppliers in the market are doing to help customers on their journey to achieve their sustainability and environmental goals. One of the seminars I attended was about the debate between new and remanufactured hardware in network equipment, this seminar really put across the how much of an effect IT has on the carbon footprint. Circularity First, detailed how IT is the fasted growing waste stream and has higher emissions than the aviation industry, which was surprising. Another theme across the seminars I attended was that we need to be constantly on our toes to ensure our data stored on site and in cloud needs to be protected due to new and existing threats.

“One of my next procurement projects is to establish a framework that allows customers to procure sustainable hardware and attending the event was great to make new contacts, both suppliers and delegates, to see how YPO can collaborate further to establish a framework that is fit for purpose to help stakeholders achieve their sustainability goals when it comes to IT, not only purchasing but also how we handle and dispose of our IT waste responsibly. Attending the event was a fantastic opportunity and I cannot wait to attend next years event to see further developments.“

Joe Holland
ICT Category Buyer

To view our wide range of ICT solutions, click here.