Cutting edge technology and the business world go hand in hand. This can manifest in any number of different ways. There are the obvious examples of companies working to design and sell innovative new products. And of course, many industries find a competitive advantage from making use of the latest and greatest technology. And more often than not one will find new technologies influencing almost every aspect of a given company.
But it’s hard to imagine a more influential technology than portable computing devices. We can see the first inkling of modern smartphones in the PDAs commonly used in the business world a few decades back. That innovation pushed the underlying technologies needed for smartphones. But at the same time, it raises an interesting question. How is the business world handling smartphones now that this technology has become the norm rather than the exception?
The first thing to keep in mind is that a smartphone shouldn’t be considered as a single product. Smartphones consist of two main components. The devices combine hardware with an underlying operating system which provides the user interface. This isn’t all that different from the way a desktop or laptop operates. There we see a wide variety of operating systems which can run on one’s computer. The main difference with smartphones comes down to the fact that hardware is usually more heavily tied to the operating system. One can usually upgrade the operating system running on a tablet or smartphone. But actually, replacing the operating system is seldom feasible. However, at the same time there’s seldom any real need to replace the phone’s operating system.
A smartphone or tablet running iOS, for example, is also benefiting from all the optimizations built into the particular combination. But this is where we start to see where the business world is building upon prior innovation. In the early days of PDAs, one couldn’t really depend on high speed internet connections. This might not seem overly limiting to people outside the business world. But one can’t simply wait around for important information when every second matters. And furthermore, high speed internet connections are vitally important for applications which use a client server model.
This can be illustrated by using a hypothetical example in Los Angeles. With something like a business internet los angeles it will usually be extremely fast and reliable. This means that even a wireless connection should be fully dependable. The average person would just use that connection to load webpages. But in the business world it’s more common for workers to need access to a central database. A company’s database is usually a central repository for all information related to the company. This includes everything from payroll data to business transactions.
If a company’s internet connection is fast and reliable it means that they can use a cloud-based model to access that database from any given device. Going back to our earlier example of smartphones, we can see how this could tie into a company’s system. Smartphones are usually hampered by their hardware to some degree. But they can also offset processing or memory to cloud based threads. However, this is only possible if the cloud is accessible at a certain speed and latency.
Our example of Los Angeles would provide a connection that’s fast enough to use for cloud computing. And this means that we’re looking at a business in which every employee can always stay connected to the central database. Any given relationship within the company could then be tapped into through a smartphone.
