Michael Dell, founder, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, has said that work-from-home (WFH) can result in a distributed workforce globally and address social disparities.

Speaking at the Dell Technologies World event, Dell said that with WFH, there is a chance to build a highly distributed workforce. “People have asked for years, what happens if everyone works from home. Well, now we are finding out. The more we can virtualise travel, interaction, collaboration, communication, the more we become sustainable and productive,” he said.

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Looking at the challenges that exist in society and in the world today, we didn’t invent the goals for the specific challenges of 2020, and we are redoubling our efforts around sustainability, around inclusion, diversity and equity, transforming lives, he added.

Many companies across the world are in the process of getting a huge chunk of their workforce to work from remote locations in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. This has pushed up demand for technology — from PCs to cloud software to support WFH.

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Demand dynamics

Dell said that there is a rise in demand for this and organisations around the world, reflecting on the last eight months, have said technology is the only thing that’s worked, keeping their businesses going. “And so they’re investing faster and accelerating those digital investments,” he said.

Dell pointed to cases such as banking and financial services giant ING Group, for which Dell powered a digital banking initiative for 38 million customer and 55,000 employees; Honeywell, which it helped retool manufacturing to make N95 masks and hand sanitisers, as some instances where tech uptake has increased. He also cited the example of University of Texas in Austin, where the Texas Advanced Computing Center was put to work doing genetic analysis and sequencing in the race to develop vaccines and a cure, and the Texas government, which moved 10,000 employees to WFH for the very first time and needed to bolster its analytics to ensure public health officials had real time data.