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Mobile vs. PC - Traditional PC Still Device of Choice in Business

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

While business investments in smartphones and tablets are growing in some cases, the vast majority of employees still use laptops and desktops as their primary work device, and organizations aren’t planning to shift investments away from traditional PCs in the foreseeable future, according to The Future of the PC, a new study by Spiceworks.

Among organizations surveyed, an average of 60 percent of employees currently use desktops as their primary work device. Laptops are used by 27 percent of employees as their primary device, followed by thin clients (5 percent), tablets (3 percent), smartphones (2 percent), and 2-in-1s (2 percent).

In terms of future business investments, the results indicate that while desktop investments are expected to be relatively flat in the next 12 months, 43 percent of businesses expect to increase their laptop investments. Mobile devices, such as tablets (25 percent), smartphones (16 percent), and 2-in-1s (18 percent) are expected to see about half the growth of laptops.

“Although many predict the popularity of mobile devices will lead to the ‘death of the PC,’ this prophecy won’t become a reality anytime soon in the corporate world,” said Peter Tsai, Senior Technology Analyst at Spiceworks. “It’s true that desktop PCs will become less prevalent in the near future, giving way to laptops, but tablets and smartphones still face usability challenges that prevent them from enabling key tasks in the workplace. So for the foreseeable future, traditional PCs will remain dominant while tablets and smartphones serve as complementary devices.”

Among IT professionals who influence the purchase decisions of end user devices at their organization, 53 percent believe most employees will not use a mobile device as their primary device in the foreseeable future. Respondents who think it could happen believe a mobile-dominated workplace is at least three to five years off.

As to why organizations are sticking with laptops and desktops, the research shows IT professionals believe mobile devices are adequate for browsing the web and viewing documents, but more limited when it comes to other business functions, such as inputting data, and creating, editing, and saving documents.

Spiceworks also examined what factors IT professionals deem most important when choosing the PC brands to buy for their organization. The results show computer reliability is the most important factor.

87 percent of IT professionals said reliability is very to extremely important in the decision-making process, followed by performance (68 percent), security (62 percent), and cost (54 percent). Other factors, such as manageability (48 percent), user-friendliness (42 percent), and ease of repair (37 percent), were considered slightly less important, but innovative features (9 percent) and style (4 percent) were considered the least important factors.

Methodology: The survey was conducted in July 2017 and included 998 IT professionals across the US, Canada, and the UK who influence the purchase decisions of end user devices at their organization. Respondents represent a variety of company sizes, including small- to-medium-sized businesses and enterprises. Respondents also come from a variety of industries including manufacturing, healthcare, nonprofits, education, retail, government, and finance.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Mobile vs. PC - Traditional PC Still Device of Choice in Business

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

While business investments in smartphones and tablets are growing in some cases, the vast majority of employees still use laptops and desktops as their primary work device, and organizations aren’t planning to shift investments away from traditional PCs in the foreseeable future, according to The Future of the PC, a new study by Spiceworks.

Among organizations surveyed, an average of 60 percent of employees currently use desktops as their primary work device. Laptops are used by 27 percent of employees as their primary device, followed by thin clients (5 percent), tablets (3 percent), smartphones (2 percent), and 2-in-1s (2 percent).

In terms of future business investments, the results indicate that while desktop investments are expected to be relatively flat in the next 12 months, 43 percent of businesses expect to increase their laptop investments. Mobile devices, such as tablets (25 percent), smartphones (16 percent), and 2-in-1s (18 percent) are expected to see about half the growth of laptops.

“Although many predict the popularity of mobile devices will lead to the ‘death of the PC,’ this prophecy won’t become a reality anytime soon in the corporate world,” said Peter Tsai, Senior Technology Analyst at Spiceworks. “It’s true that desktop PCs will become less prevalent in the near future, giving way to laptops, but tablets and smartphones still face usability challenges that prevent them from enabling key tasks in the workplace. So for the foreseeable future, traditional PCs will remain dominant while tablets and smartphones serve as complementary devices.”

Among IT professionals who influence the purchase decisions of end user devices at their organization, 53 percent believe most employees will not use a mobile device as their primary device in the foreseeable future. Respondents who think it could happen believe a mobile-dominated workplace is at least three to five years off.

As to why organizations are sticking with laptops and desktops, the research shows IT professionals believe mobile devices are adequate for browsing the web and viewing documents, but more limited when it comes to other business functions, such as inputting data, and creating, editing, and saving documents.

Spiceworks also examined what factors IT professionals deem most important when choosing the PC brands to buy for their organization. The results show computer reliability is the most important factor.

87 percent of IT professionals said reliability is very to extremely important in the decision-making process, followed by performance (68 percent), security (62 percent), and cost (54 percent). Other factors, such as manageability (48 percent), user-friendliness (42 percent), and ease of repair (37 percent), were considered slightly less important, but innovative features (9 percent) and style (4 percent) were considered the least important factors.

Methodology: The survey was conducted in July 2017 and included 998 IT professionals across the US, Canada, and the UK who influence the purchase decisions of end user devices at their organization. Respondents represent a variety of company sizes, including small- to-medium-sized businesses and enterprises. Respondents also come from a variety of industries including manufacturing, healthcare, nonprofits, education, retail, government, and finance.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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