CIOs anticipate extinction of landline and desktop PC

29 Aug 2012

New survey of IT leaders suggests that today’s office workstation is on its way out.

Could today’s office workstation, with its landline telephone and desktop PC, soon be a thing of the past? A large number of UK CIOs believe so, according to a new survey conducted by research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Virgin Media Business.

Sixty-five percent of the 500 CIOs surveyed said that the desk telephone is likely to become redundant as the dominance of the smartphone grows. And the next piece of office technology most likely to disappear is the PC, according to 62 percent of respondents.

 “The pace of change with technology is having a transformative effect on the way we work,” said Tony Grace, Chief Operating Officer of Virgin Media Business. “A decade ago it would have been unthinkable to suggest an office without telephones. Now it’s hard to imagine being separated from our smartphones.”

“Mobile connections to the internet are getting better by the day. Commuters in London can now access WiFi under the streets of the city at stations across the Underground network. Almost everywhere we go, we’re able to check-in at the office, social networking sites, or simply contact friends and family everywhere we go. Because of this, businesses have recognised the importance of the mini computers that smartphones have essentially become.

“This is leading us to rely increasingly on our smartphones and less on our landlines. The sophistication of mobile technology is also having an impact on the PC. It’s never been easier to work on the move, making stationary PCs significantly less useful than laptop counterparts.”

However, respondents were surprisingly cynical about the impact that tablet computers would have on the workplace. Almost one-quarter (24 per cent) of the CIOs surveyed expect to see the devices fall out of fashion. “Tablet technology still has a long way to go to justify itself and sit alongside smartphones as essential business equipment,” said Grace.

Virgin Media Business also revealed the impact that our appetite for 24-hour data is having on its own network: in the past year, the amount of data uses on its network consumed jumped to 765 billion individual bits of data each second, smashing the previous mark for the network by more than one-quarter.