According to research from Dell Technologies, 81 per cent of employees across Asia are prepared to work remotely for the long term. This has implications above and beyond the disruption caused by events of the past 18 months, with the statistic highlighting a change to the very thinking about work that will be a permanent part of business culture going forward.
As a result of that re-think, enterprises have gone through a period of rapid transformation, and this has delivered benefits that go well beyond resilience and allowing work to continue through lockdowns and social distancing. Enterprises that succeed with these transformations end up with environments years ahead in their ability to create digital or digitally-enhanced offerings. As a McKinsey report has found, the acceleration of digital has been as much as ten years for enterprises across Asia.
“In a very short time frame, everything changed,” Dell Technologies Senior Vice President, APJ and Greater China, Client Solutions Group, Jean-Guillaume Pons, said in an interview with Channel Asia. “The market changed, our personal and professional lives changed, and so from an industry perspective we’ve seen the pace of digital transformation really accelerate.
For more information on Dell Technologies end-user computing solutions, watch the full interview between Jean-Guillaume Pons and Channel Asia here.
“It would have taken many years to go through the transformation that we’ve seen in just the last year.”
Perhaps helping to drive the speed of change is the increased awareness among enterprises that COVID-19 won’t be the end. There will be another massively disruptive event at some stage, and events of the last 18 months have been a sharp reminder that resilience strategies need to be a lot more robust for a lot of businesses.
“When we’ve all got the vaccine, we still won’t be ready for what might come next,” Pons said. “Our customers want to be ready for that, and everyone recognises that increasing agility, creating new value with data, being able to secure everything from anywhere and being able to empower employees to work from anywhere is a critical asset to have.” In other words, those enterprises that do deliver transformation will be the ones ready for whatever their business – and society – faces next.
Dealing with the difficulty of transformation
The problem that many enterprises face is that true transformation remains incredibly difficult to achieve. BCG research suggests that, to this day, only 30 per cent of transformation projects meet or exceed their targets.
This is a big opportunity for the channel, in helping their customers navigate the challenges in transitioning to a hybrid work environment, and form there developing new digital competencies, products and solutions.
However, for now, the channel also needs to understand that a lot of the IT investment and opportunities sits with transactional business, Pons added. Dell Technologies has been the fastest growing workstation brand across Asia Pacific, and that has been because organisations have sought to fit out their staff with the right kind of technology solutions to work from home. In many cases it has not been ideal to adopt a BYOD approach to remote work, and so, delivering enterprise-ready endpoint technology has been a key priority for CIOs.
The modern channel partner wants to be a solutions and consulting partner to their customers, so that transactional business is the ideal pathway to begin the conversation with a customer. Once the enterprise has rolled out the workstations and other end-point devices, the next step will be in understanding how to manage this new environment, and that is when the opportunity for a bigger sale across all Dell Technologies comes in.
One of the key priorities with any transformation project needs to be vendor consolidation. There is a real risk that a proliferation of vendors for cloud, virtualisation, servers, software, security and devices can result in an environment that is unwieldy and faces compatibility issues. The channel partners selling Dell Technologies peripherals and workstations can pitch Dell Technologies as a whole-of-environment, digital transformation partner, as one of the few IT providers that can power holistic, whole-of-environment transformation solutions.
Finally, Dell Technologies itself offers a roadmap to enterprises to transform. Dell Technologies was an early pioneer in facilitating and encouraging remote work, and before the pandemic hit, already had over 65 per cent of its global workforce working in a flexible capacity. Channel organisations can use their engagement with customers around workstations and other Dell Technologies peripherals to start highlighting how Dell Technologies itself builds solutions around those devices.
Dell Technologies has invested significantly across its entire RWS range to deliver a true “productivity from anywhere” solution. With a focus on ease of use and efficiency, these products offer channel partners the opportunity to make their customer’s lives easier as they grapple with the big questions around transformation and ongoing productivity.
