Author: Charles King

Predictability is a business value largely ignored until unpredictability rears its head. That was a central lesson at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic as thousands of companies and millions of their employees struggled to find, learn and manage predictable solutions for working from home (WFH) and other remote locations. As the pandemic continues, many of those temporary options are becoming permanent parts of workers’ lives. How are vendors responding? In the case of Dell, the company recently launched five new monitors designed to simplify WFM and other mobile processes and applications. Following are my thoughts on the new Dell…

At this year’s virtual CES 2021, Dell caused quite a stir with the announcement of a slew of new hardware and software solutions it said were designed to “reimagine work.” Among these was the new Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD Monitor (U4021QW) which the company described as “the world’s first 40-inch ultrawide WUHD 5K2K monitor.” Dell recently offered to let me put an evaluation unit through its paces, and the experience made me consider and reconsider how a well-designed monitor can impact working and productivity. Following are a few thoughts on my experience. Form/Features/Functions The first thing that strikes you…

Successful commercial products don’t exist in a vacuum. The best ones incorporate the latest technologies and materials offerings, and either mirror or push the boundaries of contemporary design aesthetics. However, successfully evolving those products is more hit and miss. Product development teams break apart and re-form. What makes eminent sense to one generation of consumers is wasted on the next. Making long term bets on any technology is inherently risky. In other words, maintaining a clear vision and purpose developing a product that spans multiple generations is harder than it looks but it’s not impossible. In fact, Dell’s newest generation…

I recently attended the Dell Technologies Summit, a media and analyst event highlighting plans and strategies for what the company calls The Next Data Decade. In primary focus there was its new PowerONE platform and the attendant Technologies on Demand (ToD) services. Both were impressive and together they substantially raise Dell’s game in enterprise computing, multi-cloud and consumption-based IT services. Let’s take a closer look. On demand redux Stick around the tech industry long enough and nearly any announcement brings to mind things you heard and saw months, years or decades before. In this case, I was struck by how…

Enterprises are deeply experienced with and fully understand the challenges of managing and maintaining remote IT facilities and assets. That said, the growing momentum of Internet of Things initiatives and solutions at the edge of corporate networks is likely to stretch organizations’ assumptions about remote IT to the limits. Why so? Because IoT assets, like edge gateway systems are designed to be deployed and function in isolation. Sophisticated tools and autonomous features can help ease IT’s management burden but they do little, if anything, to secure devices against tampering or theft. Additionally, the pre-configured features and settings that enable IoT…

Many consider internet of things (IoT) edge computing to be a single entity but it is far more diverse and complex. A large portion of edge computing offerings leverage gateway systems that collect, coalesce and analyze IoT sensor data before sending it on to central data centers for further analysis and decision making. But increasingly sophisticated processors and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and software are transforming edge computing for both businesses and consumers. A good example is the recently announced partnership between AI accelerator chip and technology provider Gyrfalcon Technology Inc. (GTI) and AI solution provider Sensory to deliver low…

It’s easy to forget how limited mobile (or portable) PCs once were. The Osbourne 1 was a hefty (25+ pounds) beast packed into a briefcase-sized enclosure making its portability nominal, at best. What changed things, of course, was the evolution and miniaturization of PC components, including CPUs, storage, memory, battery and displays. As a result, PC vendors have been able to pack more compute power, greater energy efficiency and better image quality into ever slimmer and lighter mobile PCs. Like most such advances, these developments first appear in high margin business-focused products, including mobile workstations and ruggedized notebooks and tablets…

Chief Data Officer (CDO) positions have become increasingly commonplace in enterprises and other organizations during the past 17 years. Capital One and Yahoo! both appointed CDOs around 2002. A 2013 Gartner study found that over 100 companies employed CDOs—more than double the number in 2012, and in a recent update to the study 257 CDOs and other high-level data and analytics leaders shared their thoughts with Gartner. What is driving this trend? Primarily, the growing, critical importance of data analytics to businesses, industries and government agencies of every kind. That, in turn, has led organizations to recognize the need to…

OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) occupy such central roles in the tech industry that’s it’s easy to think you understand all there is to know about them. People mostly associate IT OEM functions and processes with the vendors that make hardware products running popular commercial operating systems, like Microsoft Windows and Windows Server, as well as thousands of business and consumer applications, toolsets, apps and utilities. That’s a reasonable view but one that ignores the OEM services that many hardware vendors offer customers, from tiny start-ups to multi-national enterprises. In essence, those vendors provide the computing “brains” that power everything from…

Predictability is a great virtue when it comes to business, especially when it comes to evolving or upgrading existing products. That’s one of the reasons that the “tick-tock” of Moore’s Law-derived innovations played so long and so well to Intel’s benefit. Knowing that that Intel (and, less frequently, AMD) had their backs when it came to improving silicon performance, system vendors could focus their attention and investments on enhancing server designs, operational functions and facilities issues. But what happens when the “tick-tock” of predictable improvements begins to wind down due to material limitations? What can Intel do then to continue…