Aging desktops cause problems for your business and its employees. Older technology can suffer from slower performance than newer, more powerful PCs.

Investing in advanced technology can be expensive, so you will want to make sure you invest in the right computers. But great desktops mean your workers can benefit from faster performance and increased productivity.

Promoting higher performance

Waiting on a slow PC can be painful. Tasks take longer and employees can become frustrated. But it doesn’t have to be this way. New, Intel processor-powered desktops with Microsoft Windows 10 can give your business a boost, outperforming legacy desktop towers on all key performance benchmarks.

A faster, more responsive desktop means your employees can finish the same tasks in less time, ultimately providing your employees with an opportunity to be more productive. Evidence suggests the impact can be considerable.

Research from Principled Technologies suggests modern PCs produce 145 per cent better system performance than legacy kit. That performance boost means your average employee could save almost 23 hours per year when moving from a legacy desktop tower to a modern PC.

A business replacing 10,000 legacy desktop towers with 10,000 new Intel-based desktops could see significant savings over four years – 5,923 minutes saved daily per employee would add up to over 900,000 total hours saved that employees could use for other tasks.

Keeping staff productive

A saving in time is not the only potential performance boost from new kit. Up-to-date PCs use out-of-band (OOB) management that allows IT staff to contact a device remotely when the OS is asleep or unavailable.

That contact can be crucial if malware infects systems. IT staff can use OOB to access the infected desktops while they are offline, and then correct the problem by reconfiguring the systems.

Rather than having to wait hours or even days for a repair, your remote management team can start tackling the problem in a matter of seconds. Estimates from Principled Technologies suggest efficient OOB management can reduce IT labour time by up to 97 per cent, keeping staff productive.

Making applications available at all times

Modern desktops also take advantage of the consumer revolution. Just like mobile workers can use applications to improve their working day, so your employees can use tools on their PCs to boost productivity.

Take Cortana, the smart virtual assistant than runs through Windows 10. Users can work with Cortana to become more productive, receiving reminders and assistance for search. Having a virtual assistant can help employees spend more time on the tasks that really matter to the business.

Modern workers are also mobile and will be using a collection of devices alongside their desktop PC. Windows 10 uses a universal application architecture, which means software can run across multiple form factors – such as phone, tablet or desktop PC – with minimal changes in code.

Such architecture means employees can stay productive and ready to work, regardless of location or device. The right desktop technology, in short, can allow employees to be more productive with faster and more reliable hardware.

Manek Dubash

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Tags: Business, Productivity

A services-led approach can help your business plan for the future with more certainty. In an age of constant change, that level of assurance is a great value-add – yet consultation with trusted experts can also boost staff productivity.

In an earlier article for Tech Page One, we detailed how a services-led approach can empower your business. In this article, we demonstrate how an engagement with the right consultancy partner can help your IT staff become change agents.

A services led-approach means your IT staff have more opportunity to focus on the strategic projects that can help drive innovation and which can give your organisation a competitive edge in the long term. Below, we outline five key ways to transform your staff into innovators.

1. Cut the tie to day-to-day operational tasks

IDC spent five years surveying how much time is spent on different IT tasks, and the answer is always the same: 80 per cent on routine day-to-day tasks, and only 20% on innovation. The researcher says an 80:20 time allocation impedes innovation that can lead to competitive advantage in a digital age.

IT decision makers must help their IT departments make a switch. By taking a services-led approach, CIOs can help their staff focus on tasks that really add value to the business. A good consultancy service will remove some of the strain and help your IT team move beyond operational concerns.

2. Switch from monitoring systems to engaging with people 

If your IT team spends too much time in the data centre, they will not be able to understand the real requirements of business users. Successful CIOs recognise that the delivery of valuable systems comes from business engagement.

An expert consultancy can deal with system monitoring and find ways to help your business automate and orchestrate its IT resources. With operations running more efficiently through a services-led approach, your technology team can focus on getting out of the data centre and into real business relationships.

3.

Your IT is using more systems and services than ever before. A IT leader who fails to provide the solutions that users need risks being circumnavigated, as line-of-business units use the cloud to purchase their own tools.

A services-led approach can help you get a grip on the large ecosystem of system and partners that any organisation will call upon in the modern era. From virtualisation to collaboration, a trusted external partner will give you enough time and capability to embrace new technology with confidence.

4. Move from troubleshooting problems to building experiences

New devices and services will continue to bombard the business. Think of the raft of mobility and collaboration tools that are already available, and the potential for further change due to the Internet of Things.

Your trusted partner can help your IT team to modernise – and potentially migrate – your systems as new technologies arise. With a services-led approach, your IT team can start to evaluate how apps and big data can be used to build more engaging customer experiences internally and externally.

5. Find new roles to embrace the future with confidence

The services-led approach can come as shock to IT professionals. Workers who have spent the majority of their careers tinkering with technology can find the move towards engagement and innovation represents a huge cultural shift.

As your business works to define this new model of working, you might need to find new roles for existing staff within the IT department. A services-led approach will help you to define these roles and ensure day-to-day operations are covered while new, creative solutions are embraced.

Find out more about how you can grow your business value through deployment services and how a services-led approach empowers your business

References

future-ready-enterprise-uk/services-led-approach-empowers-business/

Mark Samuels

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Tags: Future Ready Enterprise

Bimodal IT has evolved as a contemporary answer to the complexity of modern interconnected computing. As a practice or discipline, Bimodal IT provides firms with a feasible and coherent operational model where they can channel sta workloads down both a ‘slow’ lane and a ‘fast’ lane, while simultaneously running the business and hitting regular performance goals.

Adrian Bridgwater

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Tags: Future Ready Enterprise

Leading-edge hardware boosts productivity and delivers a great return on investment

Your company has access to great engineers and designers with some even better ideas. By harnessing the power of modern technology, you can help their concepts come to life.

Creative professionals, however, are only as capable as the hardware and software they are able to use everyday. And too many companies still constrain the potential of their designers by an over-reliance on out-dated and under-performing technology.

If your business is running professional applications on a standard PC, then you are not giving your designers the best tools for the job. There is another way – and by moving to a workstation platform, your employees can use technology to make the most of their capabilities.

Spending money to ensure a great return

You’ve spent a large amount training your engineers and designers. You wouldn’t cut corners acquiring the best talent and you can’t afford to save money on capital expenditure either.

Great design professionals need the best possible kit. Professional software licenses need to run on high-spec hardware. A single designer experiencing downtime of 1.6 hours a week could cost a business $10,000 a year, according to research from Dunn and Bradstreet.

In the end, the success of a hardware purchase – just like any capital asset – is related to the overall return on investment (ROI). Workstations score big positives in two key areas – first, the performance of the machine is higher than a traditional PC, so that workers are more productive at key times.

Second, the high quality technology in a workstation means your investment is likely to support high quality design for much longer than a PC. Powerful processing and graphics, plus high reliability, mean the total cost of ownership is far lower in workstation hardware.

Best of all, high-spec workstations prices are now comparable to standard – and much lower-performing – desktop PCs. Add in additional productivity features, such as those related to graphics, processing and optimisation – and it’s easy to see why workstations offer a much better ROI than a traditional desktop PC.

Focusing on the productivity benefits of a workstation

Professional graphics require a high performance computer, far in excess of the capabilities associated to consumer-grade desktop PCs. Top manufacturers will provide excellent graphics cards. A good rule of thumb is to look for a card that is capable of delivering more than 30 frames per second across key applications.

Processing power really matters, too. Dell Precision workstations, for example, support a wide array of processor options, including 6th Generation Intel Core processors and Intel Xeon processors, featuring Intel Turbo Boost Technology. Ally processing grunt to Reliable Memory Technology Pro, which is exclusive to Dell, and your business will be able to respond swiftly to memory errors.

There is no point spending time and money on a technology upgrade if you fail to match your investment with due care and attention to vendor selection. Strong partners come recommended by independent software vendors (ISVs). ISV certification ensures hardware and software combinations meet key performance and reliability criteria.

Finally, the best suppliers make great operations an on-going target. A specialist tool – like Dell Precision Optimiser, for example – can help your business fine tune performance for key areas such as CPU, graphics and operating systems. The tool automatically adjusts system configurations for critical applications, giving improved software performance of up to 121 per cent.

Mark Samuels

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Tags: CAD, graphics & design, Technology

You already know technology can help your organisation gain a competitive advantage. You are also very aware that executives around the company are taking more responsibility for IT purchasing decisions – but, in an age of digital disruption, how can you be sure theses are the right choices?

Help comes in the form of the Future Ready Index from researcher IDC. This specialist tool helps business decision makers like you to understand how your company is using its technology, how your competitors are taking advantage of disruptive innovation and how your organisation can stay ahead of the curve.

Your firm must have the agility and flexibility to grow in an unpredictable business landscape. Organisations in the Future Ready Index are Current Focused, Future Aware, Future Focused or Future Creators. So, how does your business compare and what do these catgeories mean? Let’s find out more.

Current Focused

These firms take an evolutionary approach to IT infrastructure. Terms like cloud, big data and convergence might resonate but many of the approaches being taken across the firm are ad-hoc and unintegrated. Strategy and planning come second to fulfilling immeditate technological requirements. In short, current priorities trump thoughts of disruptive innovation.

The good news is just 16 per cent of firms are Current Focused. Yet the Index also suggests executives should not be disheartened if their firm finds itself in the Current Focused category. Future readiness is an on-going journey. IDC suggests organisations can see significant improvements in business outcomes from increasing their future readiness regardless of their starting point.

Future Aware

IDC suggests about a third of firms (32 per cent) fall into this category. Future Aware organisations are beginning to dabble in service-based delivery. Cloud pilots are being completed and big data projects are being run, with some influence from business decision makers. IT transformation at Future Aware firms is a team sport with some interaction between technology and business.

However, that collaboration tends to be focused on key areas. While business units might inform the IT department about use of the cloud, there is no strong governance strategy. While most people in the firm understand the power of digital disruption, too many technology implementations are focused on spot solutions to short-term, 12-month targets.

Future Focused

Strategy in these firms is much more firmly focused on disruptive innovation. The IT team takes a revolutionary grip to service delivery and has well-defined cloud catalogues from which the business can pick its products on-demand and on a chargeback model. Business units understand the power of big data and executives are able to use information to make key decisions.

Future Focused firms are in a great position. IT and line-of-business managers are aligned across all menanigful activities. Yet there is still more to be done to make the most of disruptive innovation. IT transformation is still driven by the technology team, rather than the business itself. These firms, which represent a third of organisations, can still do more to create a brighter future.

Future Creators

These organisations outperform all other groups and significantly outperform Current Focused in all business metrics. Such companies take a true, business-driven approach to IT transformation. Technology teams help business colleagues make the most of digital disruption. Cloud use is secure, audited and balanced. Analytics, meanwhile, provides represents a business differentiator.

IDC reports just 18 per cent of companies fall into the Future Creators category. You might feel your organisation is a long way from this point. However, IDC says firms risky falling further behind if they do not embrace future-readiness. Future-ready firms have lower operational costs, higher productivity and happier customers. Future Creator must be an ideal state for all firms.

Conclusion

Remember that future readiness is an on-going journey. Organizations can see significant improvements in business outcomes from increasing their future readiness regardless of their starting point. Take the test now and see how you can start making steps in the right direction.

Take the future ready index quiz to find out what steps your business needs to take to stay ahead of the curve.

Mark Samuels

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Tags: Future Ready Enterprise

The development and, perhaps more importantly, the price-point accessibility of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) will now allow an increasing number of organisations to invest in implementations of both technologies.

In the industrial commercial space outside of its penetration is gaming and ‘leisure’, the impact of VR and AR will be felt more clearly than in the design industry, with its emphasis and particular proclivity for all things visual. Design methodologies and the design visualisation process are about to be changed forever.

Here we present five important ways design is about to change.

Factor #1: Visualisation goes beyond conceptualisation

VR’s aim, in the professional context, is to provide a 100% virtual world in which to design, evaluate and test a product. What this means for product (and to some extent service) development is that we are able to attain a new tangibility factor that goes way beyond the core stages of design conceptualisation. This testing stage can then virtuously tumble forward into user acceptance testing, product refinement and subsequent streams of product hardening and augmentation.

As a prime example, according to the Architectural Review’s latest survey… almost 20% of architects are now using VR.  One of the primary advantages workflow/operational these professionals are gaining is the ability to get early customer buy-in to designs and ensure any requirement changes are made early to prevent costly rework later.

Factor #2: Creating virtual teams

In its wider implementation, VR and AR will enable us to create virtualised teams of designers (and product specialists, software engineers and management etc.) who will be able to work on full 3D product models without necessarily being in the same physical location. Team members can use VR not only to explore their way around a product, they can also use VR combined with AR to walk their way around a shop or factory floor, as they finesse a product for real world implementation. But the key point here is that we as humans are native 3D creatures, so our ability to engage, feedback and collaborate will always be far higher when we’re working in our native 3D environment.

Factor #3: The digital showroom

VR has the potential to change how customers engage with the products they’re looking to purchase. As the technology itself becomes more mainstream and affordable, designers will be able to dovetail their creative process with implementations of VR and AR in virtual and/or augmented showrooms. As consumers and business users of products start to be able to react to prototype designs in environments where feedback can be captured and digitally structured, the entire design lifecycle becomes more connected, more personal and altogether more dynamic. As a perfect example here, car manufacturers are now beginning to allow customers to ‘drive’ their new cars virtually, long before the physical production models have even left the factory.

Factor #4: The human X-factor

Perhaps one of the most central reasons that VR and AR are about to change design so dramatically comes down to the individual readiness of the users themselves – and thus their readiness for the products that design will ultimately produce. The prevalence of high-powered smartphones equipped with GPS, motion sensors and cameras has meant that consumers are now used to the idea that information (in whatever form) can be overlaid on a view of the real world through their device’s camera.

Some vendors are already experimenting with augmented displays and combining them with manual interaction to create a new method of human-machine interfacing and input.

Factor #5: High-impact industrial product innovation

As we stand in 2016, both VR and AR are at a strategic inflexion point of development where implementation of both design principals are already extending outside consumer and commercial enterprise spheres into ‘high-impact’ areas such as military and medical training; specifically in regard to photorealistic visualisation tools that impact product development and production on an industrial scale. Further down the road we will see designers re-apply industrial product innovations back towards consumer products as well, as a kind of virtuous circle further develops.

The future for Virtual Reality centric design is ready to see, touch and feel. As major platform-level changes in information technology typically come about in roughly five- to ten-year cycles, our existing VR and AR capabilities are now moving towards more mainstream levels of adoption and refinement thus representing a platform progression in and of itself. Where we apply VR and AR design in another decade from now with enhanced machine learning ‘neural’ networks and quantum computing power is yet to be determined. But yes, it is the story we will be telling next.

To learn more about the latest developments in visualization and benefits to business, click here.

Adrian Bridgwater

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Tags: CAD, graphics & design, Technology

The modern era of web connected information consumption requires a high degree of creative content production professionals, with an increasingly diverse set of skills. As the creative workforce of tomorrow now aligns more sharply with the new digitally transformed media landscape, we find four key personas emerge in the shape of the digital photographer, the 3D artist, the video editor and the web designer. Each of these ‘characters’ will now demand more computer workstation power, speed and overall performance in an ever-increasing cycle, so what makes them tick?

Adrian Bridgwater

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Tags: CAD, graphics & design, Technology

After one or two developmental challenges and a wide ranging programme devoted to analysing user feedback across a massive range of use cases, Microsoft came forward with the Windows 10 operating system (OS) in July of 2015.

Since the official Release To Manufacturing (RTM) of Windows, we have seen a conscientious and dedicated effort among hardware and software vendors to produce a final user experience that is tuned towards ultimate productivity, compelling engagement and overall ease of use.

The final result is a combination of hardware, system software, web/cloud connectivity and applications that has never before been accessible to any industry.

Aesthetic satisfaction

According to web designer Tom Wittlin who is creative director at Folk the combination of technologies now on offer shows that the product developers have put a lot of time into thinking about how the aesthetics of the product impact and affect the whole experience of the user when creating web content.

By taking a ‘sophisticated yet simplistic’ approach to the way screen real estate is used, an operating system can successfully do more with the set of compute resources that it has available to it at any one time.

With features such as multiple screen support built into the core fabric of Windows 10 we can see that the designers have thought about how modern-day workers actually use technology in the workplace. Specific features in the Edge browser such as WebGL web graphics library work to make rendering interactive 3D computer graphics and 2D graphics within any compatible web browser so much easier without the use of plug-ins.

Users will also benefit from Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Grid support in the new ‘Edge’ Microsoft browser. This is very arguably one of the central validations that Microsoft has the aesthetics of web design at the heart of much of how the firm is now finessing Windows 10.

The fact that web designers can now work to annotate a web page directly on screen is further evidence of Microsoft building Windows 10 down a clear path that follows contemporary design, usage and functionality principals at the core of the operating system’s kernel.

Reflecting the truth of this suggestion, web designer Daniel Jenkins notes that screen size, capacity for resolution and overall processing performance are able to cope with some of the most demanding jobs today. Neat features like screen snapping to make split screen workloads easier to execute have also been carefully engineered into Windows 10.

Further in this regard we will also see web designers consider the way Microsoft will help facilitate search inside Windows 10 using Cortana for speech. While it may be comparatively early days since Windows 10 arrived, we do know that Microsoft is constantly updating and augmenting the operating system, so as Internet Explorer finally winds up its life, we should see web designers feel a gearshift in functionality and interoperability across the Windows 10 spectrum.

Laptops and workstations

What is also interesting to consider given the power of contemporary devices is that web designers and other professionals working with graphic-intensive and processing-intensive applications is that laptops today will deliver enough power for the job in hand.

Microsoft has paved the way for web designers and all types of graphic design professionals to use its Windows 10 operating system to the full of its potential. Dell has reflected the architectural improvements made at the software layer by engineering its workstations and laptops to take advantage of the data processing and presentation layer level technologies on offer.

From the chipset right the way up to the user interface, web designers now have a more powerful set of tools through which they can brings their inspirations and innovations to reality.

For more information on how to equip your creative workforce, head over to Dell’s CAD, graphics and design page here.

Adrian Bridgwater

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Tags: CAD, graphics & design, Technology

Contemporary 3D design professionals demand an exacting computing environment to support their demands. Over and above the need for processing power, data storage and overall device functionality, designers require an inherent level of integration that pervades throughout their computing system to ensure interconnectedness, compatibility and seamless operation.

Today’s 3D design professionals need workstations that are capable of extreme digital sculpting, polygonal modelling and graphical rendering. To ensure that these functions can be executed quickly (often in close proximity and succession to each other), desktop machines with carefully built (often custom-created) components need to provide the optimal set up for what is a highly demanding role.

Clocking in on clock speeds

As the central beating heart of the computer, Central Processing Unit (CPU) power is a crucial consideration for 3D design professionals. This type of working environment demands hardware that has often been specifically tuned and optimised to be suited to computing tasks that are inherent to the 3D pipeline.

Augmenting the power of the CPU with a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) and graphics accelerator card is supportively deployed RAM quality, which helps to create a machine that is altogether capable of these types of tasks.

3D design computer systems can be most productively used when the architecture of the machine itself has been specifically tuned to the job in hand. With 3D modelling and graphical rendering in mind — imagine if a graphics or animation based job is composed of what may be a ‘massively subdivide asset’ such that the machine has to look for data in various different systems very quickly.

Intelligent software based on highly performing hardware is the only sure-fire means of making these functions happen within a reasonable and acceptable amount of time.

While many users would consider 1920×1080 HD displays as being top of the pile, 3D designers are starting to demand 4K UHD displays with a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels. It is this kind of presentation layer technology that will ultimately help the designer to work at a precision level of detail — and, consequently, this precision will be carried forward into the final design if indeed, where a physical product is fabricated or manufactured.

Aspects of Windows 10 from Cortana speech recognition voice commands and onward to multi-touch support will also have a positive impact on the way workflows can be carried out. According to designer Paul Champion, “Windows 10 brings another layer of productivity [to my role] by offering native support for Thunderbolt 3. At 40 GB/s transfer speeds anyone transferring large amounts of data or footage such as animators and compositors will recognise the importance of faster rates.”

Photo-realistic models and the future

As we have discussed before on Tech Page One, high-end workstations can be used to provide immersive 3D modeling experiences for customers. Designers can also pair web servers with rack-based workstations and start to present photo-realistic models can then be displayed online, allowing customers to interact with their products.

As 3D imaging and design start to move outside of the engineering department of firms into marketing and other functions, the capabilities of these systems will start to become even more important.

To find out more about Dell’s creative solutions, click here.

Adrian Bridgwater

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Tags: CAD, graphics & design, Technology