Anyone working at a company is unlikely to be knocked off their swivel chair by this piece of news. In fact, most members of staff are still provided with a desktop computer by their employers.
This is reported by the market research and consulting experts at Gartner, who surveyed around 10,000 employees in the US, Great Britain and Australia this summer for their “2016 Personal Technologies Study”. 80 Percent of the participants stated that they were provided with one or more devices by their employers. More than half of them were given a desktop, while approximately 36 percent received a laptop (including convertibles).
The proliferation of convertible notebooks such Microsoft‘s “Surface Pro 4” as a work device is still relatively modest, according to the experts. However, they do expect this category of device to be on the rise over the next three years, partly due to the fresh approach of Windows 10, which has been able to improve the user experience for touch devices. If desktops and laptops are taken together, then knowledge workers in mature markets can be said to receive at least one kind of PC as a working device.
Mobile devices, on the other hand, are issued to far fewer employees by comparison. Most workers are still using their private smartphones in the office – only 23 percent are given a company smartphone. “In fact, more than half of employees who used smartphones at work rely solely on their personally owned smartphones,” confirms Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa. Tablet use is even further behind – a mere 21 percent of recipients use a tablet device in the work environment at all. Nevertheless, most employees are rather happy with the quality of the devices provided by their companies. For tablets and smartphones the levels of satisfaction are slightly higher than those for notebooks and desktops.
“In the era of mobility, it comes as something of a surprise that corporate usage of smartphones and tablets is not as high as PCs, even when the use of personally owned devices is taken into account,” Ms. Kitagawa goes on to say. And even if the cost of providing mobile devices can quickly get out of hand, it is equally true that the appropriate usage of mobile devices can boost productivity, which in turn can easily justify the additional cost.
With Retarus Cloud Services for Desktops & Devices you can send fax or SMS messages via Retarus’ cloud-based infrastructure – straight from your desktop or mobile devices. And you don’t have to change your familiar applications or working procedures at all. For more details, please get in touch with your local Retarus contact person directly.
