Dell to help 500 million Windows XP users upgrade

windows xp

Dell will continue to target growth in the PC market, as an estimated 500 million devices running the unsupported Windows XP operating system remain in use.

Despite Lenovo dominating the overall PC market, Dell's commercial PC business has grown for seven straight quarters and this is something the OEM is keen to build on.

"There's a big install base of products that need to be refreshed," Kirk Schell, VP of the commercial PC group at Dell told IT Pro.

"Businesses need to think about future proofing their environments - everybody knows that in five years there will be a growing mix of touch OSs."

Approximately, 330 million of Dell's own customers are using devices which are at least four years old. The firm is now able to dedicate more time to helping them upgrade to Windows 7 and 8 because resources have been freed up thanks to privatisation.

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"We can allocate more time to talking with customers, partners and creating products. We are showing customers what they could do if they refreshed to the latest devices," he continued.

"For designers and engineers, the new workstations are bananas in terms of the throughput they offer versus devices [that are] four years old."

While laptops are still seen as the primary productivity tools within enterprises, Schell said tablets are becoming increasingly popular due to enhanced capabilities now on offer.

"We're finding companies are deploying tablets in 10,20 and 50k batches, which shows they are becoming an important part of the productivity message in the commercial environment."

He highlighted the 2-in-1 Venue 11 Pro device, which was announced at Dell World, as a tablet capable of replicating a laptop experience.

"You can spec that out with a Core i5, big memory load (8GB RAM and up to 256SSD) and run your whole corporate suite with no compromise," Schell said.

"It has an ergonomic keyboard you can connect to use legacy applications like Office. You can also dock it and connect it to multiple monitors for analytics, for example."

The VP also emphasised that another reason its commercial division is growing is because of the manageability and support packages provided to business customers.

"Dell clients are the easiest to manage of any tier one OEM. We have tools that will make it easier to do one-to-many system updates using vPro extensions, we have a large set of CAB files that will allow [us] to deploy drivers faster than anybody.

"We can provide time studies that show it takes less time manage Dell PCs, which means businesses spend less money."

Khidr Suleman is the Technical Editor at IT Pro, a role he has fulfilled since March 2012. He is responsible for the reviews section on the site  - so get in touch if you have a product you think might be of interest to the business world. He also covers the hardware and operating systems beats. Prior to joining IT Pro, Khidr worked as a reporter at Incisive Media. He studied law at the University of Reading and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism and Online Writing at PMA Training.