Why are large organizations reluctant to move to the cloud, why must they make the move anyway, and how is artificial intelligence involved in this? Natti Nachmias, CEO of XacTech by ONE and Executive Board Member at ONE Technologies, explains in an interview with Calcalist
“The adoption of new technologies must be connected to business – and this is perhaps the most important thing about implementing innovation” says Natti Nachmias, Executive Board member at ONE and the CEO of XacTech by ONE. According to him, when technological innovation permeates only because of the ‘buzz’ created around it – organizations are in no hurry to adopt it, or at least do not do so in a substantial manner. When does technological innovation have a big impact? When the business entities inside the organization understand the business value it can bring to them. “Then you see a fundamental change in the market as a result of the innovation,” he states.
Natti Nachmias (Photographer: Oded Levi)
Over the years, many large organizations in the public and business sectors in Israel have postponed their transition to the cloud, and some are still hesitant to adopt cloud technologies. “We at ONE understood the problem several years ago: The failure of organizations to move to the cloud will make it difficult for them to adopt innovation. Today, all startups develop their innovative products based on the cloud. An organization that is not there – will not be able to exploit these developments”.
This insight led ONE in 2018 to establish CloudBuzz – a “company within a company” that conducts itself as a startup, with all the flexibility and agility which that entails. From day one, CloudBuzz goal was to connect Israeli large and medium organizations to the cloud – in both the business and public sectors. “We develop and provide every customer with the right cloud infrastructure for them, to enable the adoption of new technologies and the infusion of innovation into the organization at the business level,” says Nachmias. “For two years we have formulated, together with our customers, a method of operation that allows them to figure out their challenges in cloud adoption, and how to move to the cloud successfully and start gaining business value immediately.”
Just how challenging is the task?
“Thanks to the Government’s Nimbus project, designed to enable public cloud adoption to Governmental organizations and entities in Israel, we received a strong boost. In the past year, we have seen a trend in large organizations in the public and business sectors to start moving existing systems to the cloud and, thanks to the platform, also to adopt new cloud technologies. Ultimately, despite the concerns and reluctance – innovation is beckoning to organizations. They see the buzz around Nimbus and artificial intelligence tools and want to be there too. More and more organizations are currently exploring these areas – getting CTOs and CIOs inspired to realize the full potential of the cloud. Of course, this has significant consequences: Transition to the cloud requires a good and appropriate infrastructure, and data tools, and everything needs to be secured because organizations release sensitive data to external servers.”
How do you define the role of ONE in this process?
“Our job is to bring the best infrastructure, provide ideas and professional knowledge, and help organizations to speed up development, because in the end, Time to Market is the most important thing today. You don’t want your competitor to come up before you with the product you are working on.”
How To Move Forward Faster
Besides CloudBuzz, Natti Nachmias is responsible for several more business activities at ONE Technologies: ONE XacTech – the largest and leading SAP integration company in Israel; ONE Security division – the leader in the field of information security; ONE BI – the Group’s BI and analytics company; and Saban Digital Marketing – a strategic consulting company in the fields of digital marketing and Marketing Automation systems. This position provides Natti with a broad view of market trends and customer needs, allowing him to get interesting insights on the subject.
“In the coming years, the market will adopt technologies that will affect the daily lives of all of us,” he says. “We are already planning with insurance companies to build AI-based systems that will expand the capabilities of the actuaries. It will not replace them completely, as they will always lead and control the sector, but the AI will enhance their abilities to match personal actuary to each customer. We have retail customers that already run predictive analysis to forecast future market demands. Some of them operate in very challenging markets in this respect like the fashion market, for example, which is known to be difficult to predict. First, it is built on frequent seasonal changes and the T-shirts that are sold today are most likely not the ones that will be sold in a year’s time. Therefore, to predict fashion demand you must have plenty of computing power, and there is no way to do it without the cloud. Artificial intelligence must read large amounts of data, analyze it, extract insight – and all of this must be done in a robust and safe environment. Building such an environment requires many technological elements and expertise.”
Where else will AI change the rules?
“Take, for example, the Israeli start-up Cellotex. They are developing a platform that can write prescriptions that will be individually prepared for each patient, based on cross-referencing his personal medical data with general medical information. They started from medical cannabis prescriptions but working to get into other medicines as well. There, too, the capabilities of the cloud manifest themselves in a substantial manner – artificial intelligence, a great deal of data and good data security. We see this mechanism in almost every technological innovation – it always requires all those components to work all together.”
And this is why you are there?
“Yes, the ONE Divisions that I am responsible for have been doing this for years. We build for our customers, among them big names such as: Migdal, OPC and the University of Haifa, an infrastructure that allows them to advance and move forward faster. Soon, they find themselves with capabilities that allow businesses to produce rapid outputs, whether it is in data or marketing. From our experience, one of the things that works very well to open this door for them is a dedicated event, for example, a hackathon that allows employees to come up with ideas and quickly integrate their application into their daily work. At one company, we organized an AI technology adoption event, where each team chose an idea and implemented it within a few hours in the cloud. Such activity demonstrates how advanced technologies can be adopted quickly and bring high business value.
“In the end, we see the effect on ourselves as consumers. For example, Maccabi Health Services has integrated AI into its application to allow its customers/patients solve medical problems even without going to the doctor, even without leaving their home. Our job at ONE is to enable our customers to build the right infrastructure for this, one that will allow them to generate significant value for their customers – efficiently and quickly.”
Originally published in Hebrew in Calcalist