Mobility demand and its influence on Dell’s Technology Strategy

The Expected New Normal

comScore-Smartphone-Share-of-Mobile-Subscriber-Market-Oct2011-Nov2012-Jan2013

With the continued rapid adoption of smart phones by consumers to business users, and a growing dependence on social media, capturing and sharing images, email, navigation and other applications the net result is an unimaginable amount of data creation. Combined with the demand to access your data, or better still use data quickly, requires the telco and technology sector to build out the capability to support what has become – the expected new normal.

Mobility has become an unstoppable technology that is transforming society and changing civilization. Travel past-times such as Sudoku puzzles, card games or reading books are being replaced by smart phones, electronic readers, tablets and laptops.

How Mobility Allows Businesses Tap Into New Markets

Mobile consumer demand is now firmly felt by the business sector. Employees want access to company applications and data whilst on the move, as well as access the company network from any device and on any operating system. The buzz acronym for 2013 is all about ‘Bring Your Own Device’(BYOD) but, in reality that only plays a part of the total story.

Companies are increasingly realising that mobility also allows their own products and services to be adapted to meet customer demand or even tap into new markets that were previously not accessible or existed.

People’s access to mobility and the network now drives new opportunity. A good example of this is within the Healthcare sectorwhere patient data was previously only accessible at fixed line workstations, this has changed as healthcare workers increasingly access information via a tablet on the move, whilst attending to patients.

What’s Changed: New Generation of Technologies

Let’s be clear, the adoption of mobility by commercial business is not something new. For decades industry has used devices running on Microsoft Windows CE or other proprietary portable operating systems and devices. These products and applications are used for specific targeted functions such as logistics, warehouse inventory management or for issuing a parking ticket.  That all changed with the launch of a new generation of technologies in 2009 that enabled mobility to move into a different phase. The advent of true mobility now becomes even more valuable with the advancement in the speed of both Broadband and Wireless technology that allows ‘the cloud’ to be the connection to data and applications.

These changes have allowed telecommunication, government, education, healthcare and other sectors to re-think their strategy about how mobility can transform their business or service.

Dell’s End to End Mobility Ecosystem

Dell Latitude 10 tabletInvestment by Dell in mobility has become strategically pivotal as the PC client evolves. The Enterprise Class Intel + Microsoft Windows 8 Latitude 10 tablet range or the Dell Prosumer XPS 10 tablet or the XPS 12 hybrid tablet is testament to our direction.

However, an Enterprise class tablet without a hardware and software ecosystem is worthless unless you build out the environment to support it. The key tenants to focus on are the user, application, security and data. To address these four points Dell’s mobile strategyis supported by its ability to deliver an ‘end to end’ ecosystem made up of:  devices, consulting, application development services, mobile application management, application integration (Cloud based applications integrated to legacy applications), security (device to the data centre), mobile device management, Dell factory services and Dell’s global warranty and support services.

Dell’s mobile tenants form the building blocks of developing true application solutions to address the commercial market.

What’s Next

The changes and focus on mobility open up joint opportunities to investigate and explore how we can work towards new market solutions and ensure we influence users, technology partners and customers.  As mobility evolves, Machine to Machine (M2M) becomes the next chapter in how we begin to connect desperate devices to the networked society.  If you are interested in talking mobility, please contact me or my team.

About the Author: Anthony Sayers