Dell's opening address at Gitex highlights how IT can give organizations a competitive advantage

"The current global economic reality has made it imperative for companies to take a hard look at the efficiency of their current and future IT infrastructure and operations," said Mr. Murdoch.

"At the same time we are seeing the demand for anytime / anywhere access to information, the rapid growth in social media and the consumerization of IT leading to exponential demands on technology."

The convergence of these trends is forcing a sea-change in the way technology is deployed in the enterprise. This change will bring about huge opportunities for those who embrace it.

"This has been an interesting year to be a CIO. The scope of IT continues to expand, budgets are being cut, and in most organizations, too much of the IT spend is eaten up by running their existing systems rather than investing in innovation,"

said Mr. Murdoch.

He cited IT infrastructure and operational costs as the biggest opportunity to cut expenses. While new hardware can drive substantial power and cooling savings, organizations can drive virtualization and storage optimization to create more efficient and scalable platforms, while ideally positioning themselves to take advantage of future cloud-based offerings.

Mr. Murdoch also hosted a roundtable discussion with Middle East customers during which he described how Dell is applying these practices in its own IT environment by increasing compute capacity by more than 30% while using fewer servers and reducing power consumption by 30%.