Importance of crisis management | Bangkok Post: tech

DELL

Businesses are now alert to the need for crisis management and business continuity after last month's political protest, according to Dell (Thailand), which has managed to continue serving their customers despite its headquarters being on Sathon Road - the centre of the crisis - thanks to flexible computing.

According to Dell (Thailand) managing director Anothai Wettayakorn, employees worked from home, and while this might have led to a reduction in productivity, the mobility of the workforce was critical at such a time.

"We are moving to the cloud and virtualisation era," the managing director said, pointing out that a mobile workforce comprises three major parts - organisations with productivity and business continuity, user requirements with more variety and IT which can serve users with flexible computing.

Dell's Flexible Computing solutions and services extend the reach of virtual desktops and focus on granular applications and profile options.

The approach gives customers outstanding flexibility to centralise and control desktop management while enjoying the uncompromised experience of a full PC and thus organisations can now maximise workforce management and productivity.

"With flexible computing, all information is stored at the data centre and users can access it from anywhere," said Anothai.

Dell recently rolled out cloud services, of which three are value-added - namely, crisis management, email continuity and virtual remote desktop.

Dell has worked with VMware View and Citrix XenDektop software to enable users to work with virtualisation on a remote server.

Anothai noted that the political unrest last month has triggered customer concerns about running business and led to them planning data recovery and continuity backup strategies.

"Customers want Dell to help them migrate data and prepare technology to serve them for the future," he said, noting that there are some 200 Dell customers located in the high-risk zone and the solutions to serve these customers are crisis management, email continuity, remote server management and data migration.

The managing director believes that IT business will continue growing this year due to the internal factor of new technology roll-outs such as Windows 7, Intel iCore, cloud and virtualisation, together with the external factor that the Asia-Pacific region is expected to be the first zone to rebound from the global economic crisis. Countering this, however, is the negative image generated by the political instability, which may affect foreign investment.

Anothai noted that foreign investment in Indochina, a market which he also serves, has been expanding, especially in Laos, Burma and Cambodia.

Dell recently introduced its latest eight-model range of notebooks - the Vostro 3000 series and Dell Latitude E family - to serve customers with flexible computing and robust mobile computing solutions.

Tan Kiang, Dell South East Asia Client brand manager, noted that the understanding how "One size does not fit all", Dell products have been created in three groups: structural tasks for repeated day-to-day jobs, knowledge workers, and high-performance.

He said that the Dell notebook products are committed to be 100 percent LED technology because of benefits of reduced power consumption and longer battery life.

Anothai said this move will also affect the mainstream market for normal LCD, and today the Dell Latitude and Vostro series have evolved to encompass LED technology, except for the Latitude 2100, which is designed for students and features a touch screen LCD option, although by the end of the year these too will be entirely LED.