TechTalk Optimal Performance for Hybrid Work& Video Collaboration
It may be the right time for organizations to re-evaluate device needs to accommodate hybrid workers.
By Insight Editor / 27 Jul 2023
By Insight Editor / 27 Jul 2023
Even if it’s a cliché, hybrid work is staying put according to Dhiren Patel, client technologist at Dell Technologies. Alongside Tareq Albadri, the senior manager of inside sales at Insight Canada, he discusses the proliferation of devices during the pandemic and how Dell specifically is addressing the needs of the new normal, where video collaboration is an everyday occurrence during the current mass migration to Microsoft® Windows 11. As he explains, with devices attracting talent more and more, now is the time to re-evaluate your organization’s user experience, including from security and sustainability perspectives.
To experience this week’s episode, listen on the player above, watch the conversation below or scroll down to read a complete transcript.
Transcript of audio:
[TAREQ]
All right, welcome everybody to another version of TechTalk. I am absolutely thrilled and excited to have Dhiren Patel from Dell joining us. Dhiren, welcome.
[DHIREN]
Thanks, Tareq. Super-excited to be here. I know it's been many months since our last TechTalk. I’m excited for the opportunity.
[TAREQ]
Well, we are absolutely super-excited to have you here, Dhiren. Dhiren, you are a client technologist. Is that correct?
[DHIREN]
That's correct. I am one of the client technologists here at Dell and have been in this awesome role for the last six years.
[TAREQ]
And you know what? I have to ask, because, you know when I hear that, I'm like what does a client technologist do and what do you take care of? Maybe you can tell us a little bit.
[DHIREN]
And funny you do ask that, right? And client technologist probably sounds like a big buzzword or some kind of formal title, but I'm an expert on our Client Solutions Group [CSG] portfolio, so all things CSG, which is really the endpoints, right? All of this, what you're probably using right now to watch this if you're not on the road or driving, but basically I get to work on the entire portfolio, showcase innovation and I have the pleasure of talking to customers across the country, really helping them be maniacally focused on that employee experience.
[TAREQ]
That's pretty cool actually, and so you're, in my eyes at least, a pretty important individual, because you pretty much have hands and feel exactly the experience that all of, you know all of us have to deal with in terms of how we deal with endpoints and so on, and I'm just thinking about, you know the crazy proliferation of devices through the pandemic, and, now as we sort of come out of it, you know what are you seeing from your perspective, you know what are the things that are most important now as we sort of emerge from that, you know that lull of the pandemic?
[DHIREN]
Yeah, and, you know it may sound cliché but hybrid work is here to stay, and, if you were watching this live or we were in a conference room, I'd probably do a survey and ask you to raise your hands, if you are working remote, you know. We could do a roundtable, say how many days are you in the office? Three days or are you 100% remote? And I think, you know the consensus is there's going to be this hybrid approach. So, key thing here is, no matter where you are, whether you're at home, whether you're on the road, hybrid or in the office, you want to stay as productive as possible.
Now, throughout the pandemic there was this big war on talent where we saw, you know devices potentially being used as a means to attract talent with the latest and greatest technology. You're seeing a lot of organizations invest in the employee experience now. You have aging devices, you know at the start of the pandemic. Flashback to 2020 where maybe you're raiding your closets, whatever you had on the desk and place them in the hands of your end users there. Now is the time where you have the ability to take a step back and re-evaluate the device story, look at user personas within your environment.
Security absolutely paramount. You're seeing security breaches absolutely rampant, ransomware attacks. You look at the recent oil and gas industry. Maybe you tried to fill up gas recently and you weren't able to, you were turned away, but there's definitely a lot of trends there, but hybrid work in summary is here to stay.
[TAREQ]
That's, I mean, truer words can’t be said, you know as you can see from my background, definitely living in, working in the hybrid space here. You mentioned, you know obviously how important the hybrid work is. What would be one feature that you would say is absolutely the most important if you had to sort of nail it down in anybody who is working in a hybrid environment?
[DHIREN]
Yeah, so I probably beg you to have two components to talk about, and the first is performance. You know, you want to use your device that's going to keep you productive, motivated, happy to do your work, and then the second would be collaboration, right? We are in an era now where our devices are the lifeline you know, whether it's Zoom, Teams, Webex. Whatever video collaboration software you're using, you want to be using a device that A, is going to be productive. So, you have your performance umbrella and then B, you know, the camera, the video conferencing, the audio equipment, all of that to really streamline that end-to-end employee experience there.
[TAREQ]
Yeah, I mean I guess it's so important, and I think we've all experienced, you know the little hiccups and so on and videos and all of that. So, the bandwidth that you need the performance just to keep it going, I guess becomes more and more prominent and more important as you're putting more through that, and then there's a big change that's coming on the horizon. There's that big Windows 11, that's sort of, you know I don't know if you want to say it's right at the horizon or if it's already here. I've already got Windows 11, but, you know tell us more about how Dell is preparing for that and bringing it on.
[DHIREN]
Yeah, so you know, we were all told at one point, hey, Windows 10 is going to be the last OS ever, but in this era of continued innovation, you know Windows 11 is here, right? You can get devices today with Windows 11. What we know is, from a Microsoft stance, Windows 10 is going to go end of support in October of 2025. So, now's the time to start piloting, getting devices with Windows 11 and going through the testing exercise that you may need. Now Tareq, you just mentioned, hey, you're on Windows 11. I too am on Windows 11. So, you know, we're ahead of the curve there. We've been shipping devices that are capable for Windows 11 deployments for a number of years now. So, Dell has been doing a lot in this space. Security still absolutely paramount to the hardware story.
Microsoft has mandated that, you know you do need a device that has TPM 2.0. Thankfully, if you do have a device that's been purchased in the last number of years, you'll already be at TPM 2.0. So, definitely, you know you're ahead of the curve there, but, from a CPU architecture standpoint, if we look at what Intel's done from the 13th generation hybrid, core architecture, you have this performance core, efficient core and then this thread director that's going to be doing this orchestrating of applications and tasks back and forth. If you're using Windows 11, you have thread director capabilities to really provide you with that optimal end-to-end experience there. So, you know when you look at the overall story, Dell has hardware that is capable of using Windows 11, and now's the time to revisit the refresh conversation.
[TAREQ]
That's pretty cool stuff. And Dhiren, I was just, one of my favourite events of the year is Dell Technologies World. I've been going for the last five years in a row and I missed this last iteration. What did I miss? What was announced? And, you know what came out from your standpoint in terms of cool stuff?
[DHIREN]
We'd probably need a longer conversation to go through everything, but obviously the client guy here is going to talk to you about what we're doing in the client space, but first and foremost to the viewers, right, our customers, our partners: Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to attend Dell Technologies World. It's a massive conference. You know, we couldn't do it without the attendance of all of you. Now, if I flashback to the main stage when we had Ed Ward, Chuck Whitton, Jeff Clarke, you know talk about the innovation in our portfolio, in my opinion this is, you know our portfolio has never been as strong as it is now, and we'll talk about some of the innovation.
So, if we go back to that first question that you asked me, where we talked about, you know the pandemic and I hinted at being laser-focused on performance and collaboration, we have now in our Latitude 9000 Series, and you're going to see that I am in a Zoom meeting right here, right, with myself because it's just fun to have meetings with myself, but you'll see that I have keys where now I can mute my mics, share my screen, you know start my video, bring up the chat. There's a ton of innovation with respect to collaboration and our Latitude 9000 Series, you know we have a 13-inch, 14-inch and 16-inch. We went down this path of ultralight. Now I'm throwing this up and down to hopefully give you the perception that hey, this device is super-light, and one of the activities that I love doing if we were face to face is to hand you this device and just watch for your feedback, your facial expressions, and oftentimes with our ultralight magnesium alloy chassis customers are blown away. They say, Wow, holy, this thing is super-light,” and I remember, you know last year when I got my first ultralight device in our previous generation device, I was just blown away and I didn't even pick up the device yet. It was just the box. So, a ton of innovation in our ultralight portfolio with regard to our Latitude 7000 Series.
Now, you know, precision, we are in an era of the power user, mobile workstations that give you optimal performance for video collaboration. Maybe you're doing Teams, Zoom, Power BI, large spreadsheets. We have our precision portfolio, and, last year at Dell Technologies World, we had celebrated our 25-year anniversary. This year we have for the first time ever our brand-new Precision 5680, which is a Precision 16-inch mobile workstation. We haven't had it. You're going to see a massive track pad, top firing speakers, wonderful screen, but not only that. From a performance standpoint we can go up to a 5,000 class in video GPU. So, device, this like performs a heck of a punch there.
The desktop is not dead. What I mean by that is our Dell OptiPlex line, we actually celebrated our 30-year anniversary. Some viewers out there may not even be 30 years old, but OptiPlex has been around for 30 years which is great to see. Security, you know absolutely paramount to the Dell story within the hardware lens. We did a TechTalk some months ago. Feel free to check it out, but you're seeing that continued innovation around safe BIOS, dedicated means to validate whether or not that BIOS is the same version that shipped from Dell factory and hit your end-user premises there. SafeID, secured component verification. There was a ton of things that we've done there. So, security is built into the device, built onto the device through the portfolio and built with, with respect to the supply chain, and, lastly, I can get pretty fired up talking about sustainability. We have been laser-focused on sustainability and, if we go to our 2030 moonshot goals, by 2030, for every product the customer buys, we will recycle or reuse a like product.
Not only that, 100% of packaging is going to be made from recycled or renewable material, and then over 50% of product content is going to be made from recycled or renewable material, and, if I fast-forward to today, 2023, well ahead of that 2030 target, over 90% of our portfolio from a client perspective is shipping with recycled, renewable materials. So, you take your box and you put it straight in the recycling bin. You don't have to worry about plastic baggies, cable wrap, you know the hunting down an X-ACTO knife to get into the packaging there.
At Dell Technologies World, I know you were asking specifically around Dell Technologies World, we had Concept Luna on display, and this is really a concept device that is showcasing sustainable design in how we're innovating there. So, if anyone's tried to take a device apart, not a Dell device of course, but you know there's a lot of screws and it could take some time. So, now with minimal screws, adhesives, we have, you know an integrated keystone. The keystone pops off. You can squish the keyboard up, pull out the speakers, the motherboard, the CPU and put it all back together. So, I'm sure with this recording there will be some additional links we can talk about Concept Luna, a couple blog posts and videos there, but, if you ever have a chance to check it out, we highly recommend that.
There was a lot more announcements there with regard to the Apex portfolio. We had a ton of innovation on the infrastructure side, a lot of advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, probably some buzzwords there, but definitely, you know there's a ton of things that we can talk about, but just there isn't enough time.
[TAREQ]
Well, that's quite a bit and thank you so much for sharing all of that with us, Dhiren. We really appreciate it. Hey, for those, you know, listening in on this and can't really fathom how strong you really are, can you give us, in terms of weight, in terms of pounds, how light that super-lightweight laptop was?
[DHIREN]
Yes. So, great call-out there. So, the ultralight, again, I'm going to do my best not to drop it, but I am throwing this around like a notebook. The 13-inch is sub-1 kg and the 14-inch is just a slightly tiny bit higher. So, definitely keep this in mind if you have any feedback from your end users that are saying, “Hey, my device is too heavy. I'm highly mobile.” Your magnesium alloy in this ultralight chassis is definitely something to keep in mind.
One other thing that I didn't necessarily touch on, but you are seeing a very broad push for the end-to-end experience. So, whether it's the displays, ensuring you have a parity of experience at home, at the office, peripherals, keyboards, mics, headsets, all of that plays a role, and now's the time to re-evaluate that to make sure that, you know we're putting the right devices in the hands of our end users, but definitely check out the ultralight. You know, if you do get your hands on this device maybe install Windows 11. You checkbox two things and you can hit the ground running and you're on your modern journey there.
[TAREQ]
There you go. Pretty cool stuff there, and thank you so much, and I also want to, you know give you kudos for doing your part to leave the planet a little bit better than how we get it. I think that's always extremely important in having those sustainable practices. So, wanted to just take a moment and say thank you again for joining us today and giving us a lot of wealth and knowledge here. Much appreciated.
[DHIREN]
Yeah, and thank you for the opportunity, and, to all the viewers out there, we certainly appreciate the support here at Dell and looking forward to doing that continued business there. Thank you so much.
[TAREQ]
Thank you.
Senior Manager of Inside Sales, Insight Canada
Tareq has served in his current role at Insight for three years, having worked his way up since joining the sales team over a decade ago. He made the move to Insight and IT from finance, where he had managed a hedge fund for seven years. Even then though, he focused his trading on tech companies, necessitating a deep understanding of IT, which has served him well at Insight — and made him an invaluable asset to the Solutions Integrator.
Client Technologist, Dell
Dhiren is a certified project management professional with a demonstrated history of working in the IT and financial-services industry over the last 15+ years. He is a board member on the Dell Technologies Sales Advisory and Client Innovation Advisory councils. Dhiren holds a University of Toronto Honours Bachelor of Science degree and currently lives north of Toronto, Ontario with his wife and daughter.
