Competitive edge computing for SMBs part 1: Mobility

Sales of laptops have overtaken sales of desktops in Europe, and portable devices have started to look like a natural choice for business people - but smaller businesses should be careful. A cheaper laptop can bring with it a lot of other costs - as well as changes to the culture of the company.

Laptop sales shot past desktop sales at the beginning of 2007, according to market watcher IDC, and the gap is widening. Laptops grew by 31 percent between 2006 and 2007, while desktops only managed 12 percent growth.

The reason is clear - prices have tumbled. Users considering a £500 desktop two years ago would have had to double that price to get a decent laptop. Now they can get a useful notebook for the same price as their original desktop budget.

The benefits are equally obvious. With a laptop, users can work at any desk in the office, as well as on the train, on the plane, or at home. Users want them too, because laptops are now entertainment devices, and will play their DVDs and power their Facebook activities at home.

However, the story is a bit more complex than that, and small-to-medium businesses should add up the costs carefully - as well as considering the changes they will have to make to their organisation.

"When you buy a laptop or a desktop, the purchase price is less than 20 percent of the total cost," says Mike Walker, mobile business development manager for the UK at PC maker Lenovo. In other words, over the four year life of that device, you can expect to spend as much again, each year, looking after it - taking into account the cost of support, repairs, upgrades and other additional costs. "The costs each year go up, the older the product is," says Walker.

Road warriors

The detailed costs will depend on the type of users who have the laptop. So-called road warriors - staff who spend most of their working day off-site with customers or prospects - will clearly need a more robust laptop, and will probably give it more knocks, than a user who simply takes their notebook home for the occasional day working remotely.

Any small or medium-sized business (SMB) should buy laptops that suit the work pattern of each of their mobile workers, bearing in mind that specialised devices such as rugged or ultraportable machines will cost significantly more. SMBs should also factor in the cost of support - and consider paying for a higher-grade support option when a laptop will put in more miles.

"Health and safety laws should be considered," adds Walker. Small-format laptops are fundamentally flawed for long-term work, so users need to have that fixed anywhere the machine will be used for more than an hour or two at a time. " Ergonomically, the screen should be at eye level," says Walker. "That needs a separate riser or a separate screen, and possibly a separate keyboard and mouse. "

Lugging a heavy laptop around in a poorly designed bag can also promote problems with the back and shoulders.

So, factor in the cost of carrying bags, as well as screens, peripherals, and maybe a docking station in the office - and consider this for staff working at home, too. But it shouldn't cost too much. "Health and safety laws can easily be met, and not at a great cost," says Walker.

It's also important to specify enough memory, and check that the machines can be upgraded when necessary. In particular, memory and any wireless technology should ideally leave room for upgrades. For instance, in most laptops the internal memory and wireless cards are easily accessible, but only the newer laptops will have built-in antennas that allow an internal 3G or a Wi-Fi 802.11n card to be used.
Laptops also need insurance, and a different level of support contract from the supplier, as they are far more likely to encounter trouble than a desktop PC. Again, repairs have become easier, as laptop designs have become more modular.

Security is another additional cost - and one to be covered in detail later in this series of four articles. There is a whole industry centred around securing laptops, which includes the issues of securing data against loss when the laptop is used on a wireless LAN, or out of the office at a hotspot.

Buyers must also factor in the extra burden on a company's IT support service. "When laptops cost £1,500, only a few people had them," says Clive Longbottom of analyst firm Quocirca. "Now everyone has them, and that can swamp IT support with calls from off-site that are more difficult and expensive to deal with." At around £25 per call, it can add up.

We'll address support in detail later in this series, but the umbrella approach is to ensure that laptops can be managed remotely using appropriate software. Check the offerings from your laptop supplier and from third parties.

Blurred boundaries

Alongside technology changes, laptops affect - and reflect - the company's culture. How will staff use the ability to work on the move or at home? If the boundaries of work and life blur, will they over-work and ruin their family life - or goof off in office hours?

It's important to make sure that staff work appropriately - not opening confidential files in a public place, for instance, and taking care of the data they are using.

These issues have been more difficult to police in a small business setting, says Longbottom: "Staff in smaller businesses use laptops in a different way to those in large enterprises - they carry their work with them. In a large enterprise, the laptop is a window onto the work which is on central servers."

However, this is changing as cost-effective hardware means smaller businesses can run their own servers in-house, says Walker. "I know quite a few SMB and VSB [very small business] customers, who are using Exchange to control all their calendars - even without dedicated IT staff. These kinds of things are easy to achieve in today's environment."

Likewise, backup and recovery needs to fit with the company's IT style, but it also needs to work. Laptops will be off the network for long periods of time - and when they are connected over a remote link, it may not be practical to take a complete backup.

But before small businesses start to feel that laptops are a can of worms that could expose them to danger, it's worth remembering another benefit of having users carry data around with them. It does provide a real - if disorganised - kind of resilience to disaster, which may be make up for gaps in a small organisation’s central data management and backup procedures.

For instance, one orchestra recently had a hard disk crash on its admin office's Windows server. Only when they asked their IT services provider to restore from a backup, did they discover that the regular backups stipulated in their contract had not, in fact, been made.

Most of the staff use laptops, and found they could carry on working more or less as normal, using Web mail to handle correspondence they still had in their Outlook clients, and working on spreadsheets, contracts and plans that they had stored locally.

Ironically, only a few staff on older laptops and desktops with a shortage of local storage, who had been forced to store data centrally, got into difficulty.

It's clear, then, that laptops are coming. With planning and organisation, small businesses can get the best out of the machines, as well as reaping unexpected benefits on the way.

See also:

Competitive edge computing for SMBs part 2: Security

Competitive edge computing for SMBs part 3: Performance