Redington Limited, a technology ecosystem orchestrator, today announced Global NEXT 2026, its flagship, invitation-only leadership summit, taking place from 2–4 September 2026 in Singapore.

The three-day forum will bring together approximately 400 leaders representing global technology companies, channel partners, enterprise customers, independent software vendors, innovators and policymakers from across Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

More than a technology conference, Global NEXT is designed as a working ecosystem-connecting the organisations creating breakthrough technologies with the partners who can localise and implement them, the enterprises seeking measurable outcomes, and the leaders shaping the future of high-growth markets.

The summit comes at a pivotal moment for artificial intelligence. Enterprises, SMBs and Public Sector are moving beyond experimentation and asking a more consequential question: how can AI be deployed securely, governed responsibly and scaled to deliver meaningful business, economic and societal impact?

At the centre of the programme will be the Global NEXT AI Summit, addressing sovereign AI, national technology infrastructure, data governance, cybersecurity, enterprise adoption and the partnerships required to build locally relevant technology capabilities at scale.

From Fragmented Innovation to Orchestrated Outcomes

The next phase of AI adoption will require much more than access to individual technologies. Infrastructure, cloud, data, cybersecurity, applications, skills, services, financing and implementation capabilities must work together around clearly defined outcomes.

Redington’s role as a Technology Ecosystem Orchestrator is to make those connections work-linking global innovation with local market intelligence, specialised capabilities, partner reach and execution across more than 40 markets.

V.S. Hariharan, Managing Director and Group CEO, Redington Limited, said:

“The next chapter of technology will not be shaped by one product, one platform or one company. It will be built by ecosystems.

“Customers need infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity, software, data, skills and specialised partners to come together around the outcomes they want to achieve. Redington’s role is to orchestrate these capabilities-reducing complexity, connecting global innovation with local execution and creating a clearer path from possibility to adoption.

“This is especially important across high-growth markets, where ambition is immense but access to technology, capabilities and skills can remain fragmented. Global NEXT brings the ecosystem together to turn that ambition into secure, scalable and measurable progress.”

Participants will experience this orchestration model through technology demonstrations, enterprise use cases, leadership exchanges and visits to centres of excellence in Singapore, including the Redington AI Launchpad.

The programme will also showcase emerging technology companies and specialist ISVs across AI, cloud, cybersecurity, data infrastructure and enterprise applications. Redington’s wider ecosystem-including its AI Exchange, digital platforms, skilling capabilities and partner enablement programmes-will demonstrate how innovation can be discovered, evaluated, localised and taken to market more rapidly.

Creating New Pathways to Growth

For global technology companies, Global NEXT provides direct access to enterprise priorities, partner capability and growth opportunities across diverse markets.

For partners and ISVs, it creates pathways to new technologies, skills, use cases, customers and routes to market.

For enterprises and governments, it brings together an ecosystem through which complex technologies can be evaluated, secured, financed, implemented and scaled.

Puneet Chadha, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Redington Limited, said:

“Global NEXT is where global innovation meets local ambition. It puts the people shaping technology, building capability and solving real-world problems in the same room.

“The measure of this platform will not simply be the conversations it hosts, but the partnerships it starts, the use cases it advances and the opportunities it unlocks. We want participants to leave Singapore with more than inspiration-with new connections, actionable possibilities and a clearer path to what comes next.”

The Global NEXT programme will combine strategic conversations with practical engagement, including technology demonstrations, enterprise success stories, ecosystem panels, leadership exchanges and visits to technology centres of excellence.

Discussions will span artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud, cybersecurity, software-led business models, responsible technology adoption and the evolution of routes to market. Together, these sessions will explore how the technology industry can move from selling individual solutions to orchestrating integrated outcomes.

With operations across more than 40 markets, relationships with 450+ technology brands and a network of over 70,000 channel partners, Redington sits at the intersection of global technology innovation and local execution.

Through Global NEXT 2026, Redington aims to strengthen that intersection-creating a platform where technology providers, partners, innovators, enterprises and policymakers can collectively shape the next phase of technology adoption across Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

BY: Owais Mohammed, Regional Lead & Sales Director at WD for the Middle East, Africa, Turkey, and the Indian Subcontinent

The UAE’s ambition to become a global AI powerhouse is well established. Government investment is flowing, infrastructure is scaling, and organisations across every sector are accelerating their AI programs. But beneath the strategic announcements and the technology deployments, a fundamental question goes unanswered: is the data storage infrastructure underpinning all this built for what comes next?

For many organisations, the honest answer is: not yet. Storage is rarely the first conversation in an AI strategy discussion. It tends to be treated as a commodity decision made late in the planning cycle, long after the headline architecture choices like GPUs/CPUs have been made. That approach made sense in simpler times, but not in today’s data-driven AI economy.

The scale of what is coming

To understand why, organisations need to understand the sheer data volume that is coming their way. Global data creation is forecast to rise to 718.5 Zettabytes (ZB) through 2030 (IDC source: Market Forecast: IDC Global DataSphere Forecast, 2026-2030, June 2026, Doc #US53425426), more than tripling in five years.

AI is both a driver and a consumer of this growth. Every model trained, every inference run, every data pipeline operating continuously across a distributed architecture is generating and demanding access to data at a scale that earlier generations of infrastructure were not designed to support.

Businesses that will absorb this growth successfully are not those with the fastest individual components. They are those with architectures designed to handle volume, variety, and velocity simultaneously, at a cost that remains economically sustainable as scale increases. That is the storage strategy challenge that needs to be addressed upfront and not as an afterthought.

Why a single technology cannot solve it

A common mistake is to frame the storage decision as a technology choice: SSDs versus HDDs, flash versus spinning disk, performance versus capacity. The world’s most sophisticated storage operators, including hyperscalers and major cloud service providers, have already moved past this framing. They do not choose one technology. They deploy multiple of them, in a tiered architecture that places data on the medium best suited to its requirements.

The logic is straightforward. SSDs deliver the high IOPS and low latency that real-time, performance-critical applications demand. HDDs provide the massive capacity and cost efficiency required for the vast middle tier of active and warm data, and currently continue to represent approximately 63% of worldwide installed storage capacity through 2030. Tape generally handles archival, regulatory, and compliance workloads where retrieval times of hours or days are acceptable, representing just under 8% of worldwide installed cloud storage capacity in 2025.

These are not competing technologies. They are complementary ones, each serving a distinct purpose within a coherent architecture. The question is how each is deployed where it delivers the greatest value.

Making tiered architectures work in practice

Knowing that tiered storage is the right model and implementing it effectively are two different things. At the scale hyperscalers operate, where storage volumes are measured in hundreds of exabytes, manual allocation of data across tiers is neither practical nor efficient.  Nor can all data live on cost prohibitive flash. The mechanism that makes tiered architecture manageable is software-defined storage (SDS), which pools resources centrally and provisions capacity dynamically based on demand. Rather than pre-allocating fixed capacity to individual applications, SDS responds to where data needs to be, improving overall utilisation and reducing waste.

Together, tiered architecture and SDS provide the flexibility and economic efficiency that hyperscale environments depend on. But this model is not the exclusive preserve of the world’s largest operators. For emerging infrastructure providers, including Neoclouds that are expanding rapidly across the region, the same principles apply. Architecture decisions made today will determine whether future growth is economically sustainable or structurally constrained. The window to get this right is earlier than many organisations assume.

Innovation at the storage level

Architectural thinking also changes how storage technology itself must evolve. An organisation that understands its workloads, plans for data growth, and builds tiered infrastructure will eventually reach the limits of what current storage innovations can deliver. That is why, manufacturers like WD are approaching HDDs not only as a mature, reliable product but as a technology with significant headroom remaining to help increase capacity, lower power and cost effectively scale AI data. They are advancing recording technologies, exploring novel materials, and embedding intelligence at the drive level. The aim is not incremental improvement. It is expanding the boundary of what high-capacity storage can deliver for the architectures customers are building today and the workloads they will run tomorrow.

The leadership dimension

The organisations that navigate the AI era most effectively will not be those that simply procure the latest hardware. It will be those that understand the architectural decisions that determine long-term performance, cost and scale, ask better questions earlier in the planning process, and treat storage infrastructure strategy as a source of competitive advantage rather than a procurement exercise.

Storage sits at the foundation of every AI workload, every data pipeline, and every digital service an organisation delivers. Getting the architecture right is not a technical detail. It is a leadership decision. And in a market moving as quickly as the UAE’s, it is one that deserves to be made with the same rigour and strategic intent as any other.

Every year, Emirati Women’s Day offers a moment to pause and reflect on just how far Emirati women have come, and how much further their ambitions are taking them. Across artificial intelligence and technology, entrepreneurship, sustainability, industry and beyond, Emirati women are no longer simply entering these spaces, they are shaping them, leading critical decisions and setting new benchmarks for what is possible.

This progress has not happened by chance. It is the result of a national vision that has consistently placed women’s empowerment at the heart of the UAE’s development, widely regarded as the driving force behind the advancement of Emirati women. Together, these efforts have built an ecosystem of mentorship, opportunity and structural support that allows Emirati women to move beyond simply having a seat at the table to actively influencing the direction of entire industries.

This Emirati Women’s Day, we spoke to three Emirati women who are doing exactly that, each carving out space in fields as varied as AI infrastructure, entrepreneurship and industrial sustainability. Their stories reflect not only how far the journey has come, but also a shared sense of responsibility: to keep the doors open, and to inspire the next generation of Emirati women to walk through them with confidence.

Amal Almaamari, Program Director at Core42, (a G42 Company)

The UAE has created an environment where women are encouraged to pursue ambitious careers, take on meaningful responsibilities and contribute to sectors that are shaping the country’s future. As an Emirati woman working in AI, I see this opportunity firsthand. At Core42, I am able to contribute to the infrastructure and capabilities helping organizations adopt AI securely, at scale and with greater control over their data and technology.

What is particularly inspiring is seeing Emirati women increasingly take on roles across engineering, product development, strategy and leadership. The opportunities available today allow us not only to participate in the technology sector, but to build expertise, influence decisions and contribute to the UAE’s ambitions in AI and advanced technology.

Emirati Women’s Day is a celebration of that progress and the confidence the UAE continues to place in its women. It also reminds us of our responsibility to build on these opportunities and inspire the next generation of Emirati women to see technology as a field where they can grow, lead and make a lasting impact.

Amreen Iqbal, Founder and Creative Director of Piece of You

What stands out to me about building a business here is how much the UAE actively invests in women being part of its growth story. From mentorship networks to platforms that put Emirati entrepreneurs in front of the right audiences, the opportunities aren’t hypothetical, they’re structural. Piece of You exists because I had the confidence and support to take an idea and turn it into something real. On Emirati Women’s Day, I think about how many doors have opened for women in my generation that weren’t open before, and how many more are opening for the next one.

Hamda Al Shamsi, Admin Assistant at Geocycle Waste Recycling UAE at Holcim UAE

The UAE has created an environment where women are empowered to pursue their ambitions, develop their skills, and contribute meaningfully across every sector. Today, Emirati women are building careers in fields ranging from technology and engineering to sustainability, manufacturing, energy, and leadership.

As an Emirati woman and the only woman currently working at Geocycle UAE, I have personally experienced the importance of having the opportunity to step into a technical and industrial field and prove that there is a place for women in every sector.

For me, Emirati Women’s Day is a celebration of how far we have come, but also a reminder of the opportunities ahead. The support and vision of the UAE leadership, together with the efforts of Her Highness Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, have helped create a generation of Emirati women who are confident to pursue their goals and make a difference. I believe the next step is to continue encouraging young Emirati women to explore fields they may not traditionally consider. When women are given the opportunity to learn, lead, and contribute, they do not only build successful careers — they help build a stronger and more sustainable future for the UAE.