I recently had a chance to connect with Erik Day, the Executive Director and General Manager for North America Small Business at Dell, and decided to ask him point-blank, “Why should small businesses care about Dell?”
Over the course of our conversation, Day explained why growth is the primary concern for small businesses and how Dell develops solutions that evolve as business technology needs change.
An End-to-End Solution for Small Businesses
As a small business owner or entrepreneur, you do not have time to waste. You need to spend time with clients, investors, and others to grow your business, but sometimes a lack of technology or the right support results in an unwanted shift in focus and lost productivity.
“What the small business customer wants are performance and reliability,” Day told me. “They cannot deal with downtime or being on tech support calls for hours. When you are trying to build your business, the last thing you want to worry about is your technology not working for you.”
Day explained that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution here, that technology solutions need to change as businesses grow. So whether you are a one-person shop, ten-person shop, or working with hundreds or thousands of employees, Dell offers different hardware, software, and security solutions to help businesses every step of the way.
Day explained that Dell’s goal is to give every customer the peace of mind they need to keep their small business running smoothly. They need high performing technology they can trust to work from the moment they open it up. They need as much built-in security as possible. Moreover, they need to know that someone will be there to help when they need it.
“It is not just about the hardware,” Day said. “It is really about trying to give them an end-to-end solution. We want to enable our customers to focus on their clients and their business, and not to have to worry about the technology.”
The Evolution from Consumer to Business Technology
As Dell continues to build small business solutions to fit each customer’s unique needs, they are paying close attention to the surge in adoption of consumer technology within the professional landscape. Specifically, Dell is focused on bringing the convenience, high performance, reliability, and security of their other business solutions to the tablet.
According to Day, Dell’s integrated two-in-one, 360-hinge technology into their Latitude tablet series. You can make it feel like a PC without having to detach anything, or you can flip it over and use it as a tablet. Moreover, to continue meeting their small business customers’ needs, they have added security and manageability into the product as well.
“As our business customers want this new technology, we can make sure the right stuff is in the computer. So if they have to connect it to something in the enterprise, IT managers can still manage and secure it.”
Touch also seems to be the next evolutional step in Dell’s small business technology. While cost, business budgets, and demand have led to the sluggish adoption of touch PCs, Day expects that touch will soon catch on just as other performance-enhancing technologies have in the past.
“The whole ecosystem around these PCs is becoming so much easier for the user, and touch is a key performance thing. It just makes everything more efficient. As we need to save more time so we can focus on our businesses, we need these things to make us more efficient.”
He also suggests that notebooks will soon overcome desktops in the workspace and that the “movable” workspace created by docking stations and wireless connectivity will be the next evolution of the small business workspace.
