Manufacturing Magazine August 2018 | Page 50

KONTRON CANADA INC .
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Benoit Robert , Vice- President of Strategy & Marketing , and Steve Séguin , Vice President of Operations , discuss how Kontron Canada has leveraged new technologies to remain an industry leader

In a world that is increasingly defined by software and all things virtual , organisations across industries are reaping the benefits of migrating critical functionality away from onpremise and into the cloud .

Indeed , IDC predicts global spend on public cloud to hit $ 160bn this year , an increase of 23.2 % on 2017 . Offering cost efficiency , scalability and increasing reliability to its beneficiaries , it appears the software and cloud computing tide is gathering irreversible momentum .
However , hardware still has a critical role to play .
IT hardware spending continues to rise – Statista forecasts global spending to reach $ 1.12trn by 2019 , up from the $ 987bn spent in 2013 . For Kontron Canada Inc ., a globallyactive subsidiary of the Kontron Group , its mission statement is to design hardware fit for this software-defined world .
“ Our business model has had to change dramatically over the past five years ,” comments Benoit Robert , Vice-President of Strategy & Marketing . “ Where we used to selling the hardware to a customer who would then sell a complete solution to a service provider , however we now work directly with these service providers to expose them to what we ’ re doing .
“ We show them what integrated hardware and software can do and how this can fit into the new type of virtualised networks they ’ re trying to build .”
Kontron Canada ’ s portfolio includes best-of-breed OEM hardware and its SYMKLOUD open infrastructure platforms , built to help clients deploy virtual services using software-defined networking and network function virtualization .
Such clients predominantly operate in three core industries – telecoms , media ( video and broadcasting ) and cloud .
AUGUST 2018