Let me go ahead and start by introducing myself. My name is Man Anan and I'm the CEO of AFAN. We are a sales force consulting partner. Let me give you a brief history about myself.I was born and raised in Kuwait, a small country in Middle East and I moved to India for high school and higher education post, which I relocated to us. I've been in the US for about 20 years now. Now I'm a proud mom of two amazing boys. And when you're not working or studying, you're traveling to a new country, uh learning culture of that country. I just happened to stumble into this profession. My first job right after graduation, I used to work for a start up called slam dunk Networks. And Salesforce had just started to come uh into the news and uh my manager at the time was like, we need a subject matter expert on our team for this new application that we've purchased and she ended up picking me little. Did I know that it would actually become a profession on its own? And later when I asked her, why did you pick me? We, we were a group of five people and she said that it was because of your relationship with the sales people that they would come to you for everything. So you were the perfect candidate and that's what it's been for the last so many years.

And, and I've been a part of the CRM ecosystem and, uh for the last 18 years and have worked with sales force themselves and numerous customers of theirs. I'm multi certified and and experienced sales force professional who enjoys working as an architect and a project manager as a company. What I really value is integrity, understanding the unique needs of businesses and providing an individual experience to clients. So let's start talking about my topic today.

So hope you're all doing well in these unprecedented times. Why is this such an important question? You must be wondering, why did I start talking about the pandemic? Irrespective of how tough it's been, there has been a technological explosion around us, especially in the virtualization space where now more than ever we are getting pushed towards growing more virtual. The technology adoption that was expected to happen in the next three years has already happened in the last three months and here by virtualization, I mean, literally the meaning of the word of going word through and not really the technology, but we'll talk about that too.

So in my view, the biggest asset for every company is its data. That is of course after the employees of whatever the type of business, whether for profit or nonprofit technology is becoming an integral part of every human leading to the huge level of data creation. Do you realize how much data do we create on a given day? Let me give you an example. According to big data in the F Forbes article, every person generates approximately 1.7 megabytes per second. And no, I'm not joking. That's what it is. So how is this even connected to virtualization? A lot of us may remember several rooms like these, a good chunk of the company's budgets were allocated to the infrastructure related expenses like power hardware, air conditioning and virtualization has allowed us to reduce these to a fraction of the size, maybe even not need them.

So let's see how virtualization has evolved over the decades and moved from transactional to a more interactional model. So traditionally virtualization referred to running multiple operating systems on a computer simultaneously to the applications running on the top of the virtualized machine.

It appeared as if they were on their own dedicated machine. The meaning of virtualization began shifting in the 19 seventies and now describes the creation of a virtual machine that acts like a real computer and with a fully function functional operating system. The concept has evolved with the internet as businesses started to offer virtual private networks as a rentable service, the use of virtual computers became popular in the 19 nineties leading to the development of the modern cloud computing infrastructure. And this has led to the evolution of the definition of virtualization. Now, it means an act of creating a virtual version of something including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices and computer network resources. By the way, we all use some form of virtualization in our daily lives.

It's been a while since I'm sure a lot of you have rented a DVD. Don't be just log into Netflix, search for a movie, hit play and start watching it. And our neighbor might be watching the exact same movie and both of us experience it have an individual experience and we'll never even know that our neighbor watching the movie was only 15 minutes behind us. Do we still keep R for our business cards? Nah Most of us are now using icloud, for example. And on a professional uh space cr MS like salesforce where prospects and contacts are stored centrally in the cloud. When you want to learn something new, you have the option to go to youtube, search for a training and not realizing that there may be multiple other people watching the same video at the same time today. Location doesn't matter for business meetings or personal. We have zoom.

So you see how we're using this concept in our regular lives. So while you're still thinking about how this technology has really impacted your life, I'll go ahead and share some benefits, the flexibility that a business gets when they ch they choose and configure the applications that are needed by them. With the redundancy of hardware storage and backups, the services are more dependable than ever. Most of these companies guarantee an uptime of 99.9% inching towards 100% where the dime time is even communicated. Well, in advance the businesses, the business processes have become more agile and adaptive.

The licenses can be added as the business grows. So helps the businesses become more scalable and last but not the least. The cost savings to the company budgets don't have to be all about the real estate with the big server rooms, the hardware employees who manage these server rooms, cooling power software licenses, we could just hand them all over and it's a really big saving and all of this has made a big impact on us how just to state a few facts here on enterprise data transformation where you can trust your data and use it to make fast informed decisions with data governance and improved analytics.

Second, the customer experience is optimized by connecting with your customers through mobile applications, web portals, social engagement and CRM, which leads to it optimization by speeding up systems and it processes and lastly pro process optimization which enhances and automates your company's prostheses on the hook.

So we just spoke about another term. Besides virtualization a few minutes ago, cloud computing, these two words are not the same. In fact, virtualization is the foundation of cloud computing. There are different forms of virtualization today, storage application network data and many more.

And cloud computing is the delivery of these virtualized services, virtualized shared computing resources or data as a service and on demand through the internet. You know, according to computer today, this was an interesting fact in the 20 twenties, it's expected that 92% of the businesses will be using some form of virtualization globally. It's tough to predict too far out into the future. But in this current decade, what we see is the current trend will keep carrying on, but it will continuously become more intelligent by the use of these other new words that we keep hearing artificial intelligence, machine language, deep learning and from a single cloud, we are already juggling a multi cloud architecture and we are heading towards omic cloud across cloud strategy.

Security is going to be far more important than ever before as critical data gets transported from point A to B over the public network. Imagine this more users need seamless secure data access to cloud services from any device. Also a cloud architecture needs to learn to work in harmony with different clouds like private clouds and other public clouds. Why should we adapt to these new technologies virtualized? These virtualization definitely helps us focus on our core competencies and increase our efficiency and productivity which reduces the infrastructure expenses and the times of planning, that itself is a huge time saving and the burden lifted, outsourcing the infrastructure to companies that specialize in it have and they also have built in redundancy.

It reduces to it leads to reduced downtime and enhance resiliency. This way the businesses can grow their green footprint. Now that we've discussed about what, where, why the next step is to understand how to embark on this journey. On a high level. It is a four step process.

We start from centralizing data which leads to a push for better data quality. The next step is to align business processes, process flow to automation, content management and application experience. Third, as a company, you need an environment that encourages collaborative relationships and focuses on continuous improvement.

And the last step is technology where digital transformation brings with it. The opportunity to capitalize on configurable and extensible te technology, don't forget just like everything else. There are cons to this technology, technology platform too. Security is still the biggest challenge.

The technology is constantly evolving and it's complex to find resources and expertise is equally hard. The backend infrastructure does need governance and compliance. The businesses are now graduating to use multi multiple clouds performance cannot be compromised. Certain industries like government and health with their regulations, they do need their own private clouds and not to forget, migrations from old systems to the new platform, which is a big undertaking in itself. So circling back to where we started Um Circling back to where we started, data is very important. It's an import. It's one of the most important assets today, just like I said before, make this data work for you jump on that bandwagon to make sure your business is ready for this technological journey. And the reason why I even brought up this topic was since the COVID started, I've, I've come across so many smaller companies and nonprofits who have just been struggling to, you know, go about their business and their day to day lives of the uh of the business. And it's a matter of putting the initial investment and, you know, things like COVID and pandemics, which may happen in the future too. You know, it'll alleviate a certain amount of problems, you know, running your business.

So I just wanted to get this out there for companies and other organizations of all sizes to start adopting the latest technology. We can all agree that the new world is virtual where location doesn't matter and it does not stop us from running our business. It is becoming a world where we collaborate, more, share, more, save time and make faster decisions. And before I end, I would like to leave you with this quote from Mother Teresa. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin. Thank you so much. You can feel free to reach out to me on linkedin on my website. Um My handle on linkedin is M Anan one. Thank you. I'll open it up to questions if anyone has any looks like you're all good. Thank you, everyone for being a wonderful audience. Have a great day and enjoy the rest of the conference. I know I will be. Thank you.