A workplace revolution – making digital room for millennials

For millennials, access to the Internet is not optional. They’re more dependent and demanding of the use and benefit that technology can bring to their everyday lives.

This extends to the workplace, where greater technology equates to more flexible working. All companies looking to embrace a diverse, future-proof model are committed to digital business models, processes and automation technologies as bait to lure the best among the millennial workforce. We speak to forward-thinking Bob Vickers, UK&I Senior Director at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company about how new AI-powered analytics and assurance innovations together with Smart Digital Workplace partnerships can revolutionise the workforce experience for the increasingly important millennial workforce.

Why would a company need a digital workplace strategy?

We’re seeing organisations being more mobile for obvious reasons. Workplaces are now moving from people coming in to work and just sitting at a desk in front of a PC to being far more mobile. Whilst we’re still working on a PC or laptop device, we’re not in a fixed place, moving between campuses and buildings, working from home, or even from a coffee shop. It’s obviously driven by things like people using tablet devices smartphones. We think companies need a digital workplace strategy because if they don’t, their employees will create one that may not be in line with a companies requirements for security and stability, etc.

What are the top digital trends in the market for 2018?

I think the top one is yet more mobility; more and more companies are moving towards a mobile workplace. Analysts predicted a couple of years ago that wireless would overtake wired connectivity. In other words, there are more wirelessly attached devices than wired. We are also seeing more applications being made available on tablet devices. If you look at large retailers they’re rolling out mobility infrastructure to allow their shoppers to have a better in-store shopping experience. In manufacturing, we are seeing IoT devices needing a mobility infrastructure.

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The top digital trend is increasing mobility, people wanting and expecting more on their tablet or smartphones. We’re also seeing a movement towards more voice services making their way on to our mobile devices. Obviously, a smartphone is intended as a phone, it’s a voice device, but we’re seeing applications like Skype for Business and others being rolled out over digital mobility infrastructures.

What will it take to exceed customers’ expectations in a digital world?

It’s actually very simple because people get very upset if things don’t work: it’s all about reliable technology. Since I joined Aruba 14 years ago, wireless has moved from being a luxury to an essential. If a wireless infrastructure is down, that’s bad news for many companies. They can’t function as effectively for the period of the downtime. I believe the thing is to exceed our customers’ expectation from an Aruba point of view is by delivering a very stable infrastructure, which is what we do.

More applications on smartphones and tablet devices is great, and people being able to do more things with those smartphones is fantastic, but one of the sort of things we preach is you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the fundamentals right as well. At Aruba, we put a lot of time, effort and energy into developing our technology to be stable, robust and very secure.

Millennials want technology that contributes to their personal growth, what is the one game-changing technology that we can expect from Aruba?

Well that’s a secret, I can’t tell you!  I’ve got two daughters and they are 23 and 25, they’ve never plugged a cable into anything to work a device, it’s a wireless infrastructure. It goes back to my original point about making sure that the network is robust, I suppose the game-changing technology is that we’ve created a secure and stable infrastructure. For us as an infrastructure company, what is more important than ever is how we make sure if a company deploys our equipment, that it’s going to be able to meet their demands over the next five years and more.

We made an acquisition a few months ago, a company that has a technology that allows us to emulate a client device on a network and to basically test the network, test different applications, test different traffic types so we can see in advance if there are potential problems that may occur on that infrastructure.

It really comes down to millennials who want to invest in their personal growth, so we have to be continually investing in areas where we think we can make that technology as reliable and as available as possible, but above all, it’s about user experience – making sure our technology delivers the very best user experience.

How will AI-powered analytics and assurance innovations together with Smart Digital workplace change the workforce experience?

I think AI is a bit like the word ‘cloud’, it’s very trendy and everyone’s got an Artificial Intelligence story. If you’re looking under the covers, many are a bit thin, to be perfectly honest. We are investing heavily in AI and we are putting a lot of development into it. Like I said earlier, we acquired a company a couple of months ago that very much sits in that space and they have a solution that we’re integrating into our technology which basically simulates a user, so it looks at the user and builds a pattern of an artificial user and it uses that intelligence to test the network infrastructure. This will drive a better user experience by being able to pinpoint potential problem areas in an infrastructure before it occurs.

The other thing that we are seeing with AI is there is lots of data that you can gather from a network infrastructure – about people’s movements, about what applications they’re connecting to, what types of devices they have, that sort of thing (obviously within the restrictions of GDPR).

There is a huge amount of data coming in from these mobile networks and being able to take those and analyse those and then come up with solutions is important. Let me give you an example. Within supermarkets, a number of them are looking at AI to monitor the flow around a store to see where people are going. If there are certain areas where people are dwelling or dwell points, then they can use that intelligence to sell that space to a manufacturer like Unilever or Procter & Gamble to place their products there. That requires quite a bit of intelligence, quite a bit of AI and a lot of analysis with big data that is coming in, and it is just one example of some of the developments that we are seeing.

The mobility market is growing at a phenomenal rate, and it’s very much in a high-growth phase right now.

We’ve seen people like the millennials we’re seeing these people coming into the workplace expecting a very different work experience. We at HPE had to adapt: we couldn’t have these people coming into to our offices sitting at a desk in front of a PC from 9 am to 5 pm.- That wouldn’t work: that doesn’t attract them, they want something different.

This has a number of ramifications in changing our working culture. In the next 30 – 40 years, I think the whole idea of a workplace, a head office, will diminish and what will remain will be a very small HQ with hot-desking with most people working from home or in some small collaborative centres. I think it will have a very big cultural impact and part of our responsibility as a vendor is to manage that and be mindful of the impact it could have. We think it will be a positive impact. Aruba’s job, put simply is to deliver this vision.

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