With supply chain shortages spiking the cost of memory, NAND flash, and other laptop components, businesses are understandably seeking ways to save money on their device programs.
“Devices are costing more, and a lot of companies are probably looking at extending their refresh cycles,” says Ben Molesworth, IT staff manager at Qualcomm. “But what’s the trade-off, and what’s the benefit of making a shift now, versus waiting?”
That’s an equation many organizations may never calculate. But the impact is real: what Molesworth calls a “hidden tax” from running old, slow tech that leaches employee productivity. Qualcomm has closely monitored the results of its ongoing device refresh, and the findings are illuminating.
Powering user productivity
At Qualcomm, users with four-year-old x86 devices have to wait two minutes or more for their laptops to simply boot up, compared to under 20 seconds for users with new Snapdragon™ X Elite devices. Also, the new Snapdragon-powered laptops have a real-world battery life of more than eight hours (or an entire workday), versus around 4.5 hours for the older laptops.
“No one at Qualcomm carries a power adapter with them anymore,” Molesworth says. “People just carry their laptops with them and go straight to their meetings.”
Another important metric: The rate of Snapdragon devices’ requiring hard resets is less than half that of the x86 devices. “Not only are users on Snapdragon experiencing fewer crashes but they’re also recovering from crashes more quickly when they do happen,” says Christopher Ord, senior staff IT engineer at Qualcomm.
Taken together, the minutes that employees no longer spend waiting for their laptops to boot up, searching for their charger, or recovering from crashes add up to hours of recouped productive time.
A more efficient IT shop
User productivity is only part of the story. New, more powerful laptops mean that IT teams also save enormous amounts of time they would otherwise spend provisioning, troubleshooting, and supporting a wide range of different models.
With the new Snapdragon laptops, users can image and provision their own devices rather than waiting for IT to do it for them. “End to end, that’s saving us an hour and 15 minutes for each laptop,” says Nicole Gross, senior director of IT at Qualcomm. “Multiply that savings by the 10,000 devices we refresh each year, plus devices issued for new hires.”
The new devices are helping save money in other ways as well; they use far less power than older machines, for example. They’ve also enabled Qualcomm to move to a wireless-first model, eliminating the expense of running cable and installing ports at new sites.
Until just a few years ago, Qualcomm refreshed devices only when employees asked, and some employees were using slow, decade-old devices. “It was a nightmare to manage,” Molesworth says. “I think that’s often overlooked. If you have a consolidated fleet, you only need to support modern hardware.
“You don’t want to be managing 20 different models,” Molesworth adds. “In this economy, it’s important to keep things simple.”
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Snapdragon-branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries.