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FUTURESCAPE
40
At your service
Products took centre stage at Samsung’s Futurescape event, but the service
wrap-around is what really matters. James Goulding reports
Transformative technology
A dock for a smartphone might not sound
the most revolutionary idea, but Graham
Long, Vice President of Enterprise at
Samsung UK & Ireland, believes that it
could be truly transformative by removing
the need for desktop PCs and notebook
computers.
In conversation with a number of
leading publications, including
Technology
Reseller
, he said: “One of the key
messages that we wanted to land here this
week is around DeX. I recently attended
a customer advisory board that we hold
in the US, where we invite our 20 largest
enterprise customers to talk to us about
how they see us doing as an organisation.
Some of the most interesting feedback
came from a customer who said ‘Don’t
underestimate how disruptive DeX is’. I
think DeX is one of those things that really
does have the potential to completely
disrupt the marketplace.”
Samsung as a Service
Another key ‘disruptor’ identified by Long
is the rise of Samsung as a Service.
Providing an echo of its erstwhile printer
business, this is the idea that in the future
businesses won’t invest large amounts of
capital in Samsung technology upfront, but
will instead acquire Samsung devices as a
service, paying a monthly service charge.
One of the benefits of this arrangement
is that it enables businesses to keep up
with fast changing technology and avoid
investing in devices that can quickly
become out of date. In his address, Long
said that Samsung was already providing
Samsung as a Service to a range of
companies, including property developers,
hoteliers, retailers and car dealerships.
He said: “As a specific example of
where we are yet again disrupting and
leading the change in a market, we will
be providing the largest residential rental
development in the UK with their digital
appliances to install in their properties. We
have agreed a subscription service model
that will provide all tenants with new
technology every five years. It’s the same
approach that we’ve used for Soho House.
Now they know that without any large
capital outlays, all of their guest rooms will
always have the latest TVs, as again we are
providing the product as a service.”
Long explained more to
Technology
Reseller
and a number of other journals.
“The things that I took away from the
customer advisory board event in Chicago
were around DeX – ‘Samsung, don’t
underestimate what you’ve got here; it
is truly disruptive’. The other thing that
came across very clearly was that all
of our customers want Samsung as a
Service. They wanted to understand how
they could utilise the subscription model
in a more efficient way, not just from a
mobility perspective but also in areas like
display and other technologies that we
manufacture,” he said.
Long added: “If you’re running a five-
star property, do you really want to have
nine year-old televisions hanging on the
At the beginning of June, Samsung held
its fifth Futurescape event – and its
first since the sale of Samsung’s Print
Business to HP. There were no printers
on display but lots and lots of screens,
all integrated with a variety of solutions
from key partners, many of them involving
interactivity, VR and AI.
Samsung established Futurescape
to spark the imagination of potential
customers – to get them to think about
how they could use Samsung technology
to transform the way they do business.
Highlights of Futurescape 2017
included the integration of smart signage
with smartphone apps to transform the
retail experience, a combination that has
enabled Rockar to bring car dealerships
from the town outskirts into the shopping
centre. Thomas Cook has taken this a
stage further with the use of VR headsets
that allow holiday-makers to ‘experience’
the attractions of a resort before buying.
Samsung is promising greater
convenience for office workers, too, with
the DeX docking station for the Samsung
S8. The processing power of Samsung’s
new smartphone is such that most of
us could do 90% of our workload on
the device – the only compromise being
the size of the screen. DeX fixes this by
connecting the smartphone to a larger
screen in the office, home or third space.
Graham Long,
Vice
President of Enterprise,
Samsung UK & Ireland
