In this dispatch from, “Sakonnected”, COO Amine Doukkali took to the stage and dared to imagine a future device paradigm.
Where the Fun Begins
As such,
the team thrives on crafting elegantly simple solutions to the most extravagant and complex problems enterprises are confronting. To do that, Sakon must imagine how our world will continue to change over the course of the next decade….
Amine began by explaining that, since its founding, Sakon has been a company that seeks out challenges. The leadership team loves to listen to the manifold problems enterprises encounter with device and network management. And while this kind of aggressive listening is where essential learning takes place, it’s also where the fun begins.
Arming the Imagination: Solving Real Problems in an Exponential World
With the Device Platform, Sakon has built an infinitely scalable tool that helps the enterprise run smoothly and accommodate constant change. It’s an apparatus that reconciles the very real and often vexing problems every enterprise encounters. Each solution to every challenge has a real customer behind it. Every prescription is “tried and true.”
But it’s also a fact that the world is changing rapidly. In the future, enterprises will not only face issues similar to what they’re confronting today, but more vexing issues as well, simply because of the exponential function.
More and more devices are coming into the enterprise in all directions at ever faster rates. It’s a massive market. Everywhere you turn, all we see are devices.
Covid only brought this reality home in stark fashion. In fact, what Covid essentially did was to force certain industries that are typically slow adopters of new tech to really “go for it” and quickly adopt new technologies and new methods for their use.
Amine suggested thinking about a hospital as just one example. How many doctors didn’t want to learn how to use an iPad over the course of the decade of the 2010s, until Covid forced their hand? In the process, how many physicians’ imaginations were set free? Because suddenly, a doctor somewhere realized she can use that iPad for a whole range of particular tasks, that the device can help her solve a range of problems, and help turn her into an efficiency machine…
Unexpected Impacts
Amine’s presentation then dared the audience to imagine the nature of an ever-changing workplace. As he noted, just look to companies like Google and Apple to understand the point. For instance, Google sees data on a scale unlike any other company. It sees data usage all across the globe. Google, therefore, really knows what’s going on out there. So when that company says something, we’d be wise to pay attention….
Amine then played a brief clip of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. At the time of the launch of the original Apple iPhone with Steve Jobs, Schmidt also was on the Apple board of directors. Yet, as Schmidt himself explained, even he had no idea devices would become so important to users and so impactful to organizations over the past fifteen years. Eric Schmidt simply did not realize how central to our lives smartphones would become.
Now imagine the decade ahead of us. Schmidt pointed out that it’s not at all obvious what follows our current paradigm. Still, many have speculated we’ll someday live in a world featuring all manner of intelligent and anticipatory services. At the same time, Schmidt himself has long said that going forward, a reasonable prediction is that the smartphone will get more powerful and become even more embedded in our lives, interacting with intelligent spaces in real-time. As such, our devices will become ever more personal over the next ten years.
Whatever form they take, it seems we’re racing into a world of ever more capable and immersive devices. And this phenomenon will impact the workplace in profound ways.
In fact, Schmidt urged us to also think about the nature of this thing called the metaverse that is evolving before us and link that evolution to what we’ve come to know as smartphones. Currently, there’s so much investment flowing into smartphones and their attendant apps that we should think hard
about how virtual reality and the metaverse may manifest as a complementary feature to tomorrow’s smartphone. It’s possible too that the metaverse may eventually leverage the smartphone to find its fullest expression.
Amine emphasized, there is no other company other than Sakon with a platform so focused on our ever-evolving devices, that has been purpose-built for such devices, with so many capabilities to adapt to whatever comes at us in our unknowable future.
As Amine pointed out to the rapt audience, if we presume that someday we won’t be able to access the metaverse without a device, then when it comes to everything we try to do within that metaverse… we’ll need a device to do it. The future metaverse-enabled smartphone will almost certainly be central to any future workplace paradigm. Or as Eric Schmidt put it, “you probably won’t talk on your phone very much in the future, but you’re going to use it a lot.”
It’s a long way of saying that what we might term a “metadevice” may be coming on the scene at some point. And the market for its capabilities will be enormous.
An Entire Ecosystem: Partners for the Future
Recognizing the exponential nature of change, Sakon hasn’t just built solutions. It’s built an entire ecosystem of partners to help take Sakon’s solutions to market (carriers, VARs, MSPs, etc.). Partners include the likes of Verizon, Honeywell, SHI, ATT, TMobile, Insight, and IBM. And all these partners have come to realize there’s no solution quite like Sakon in the offing. How many times has Sakon’s leadership team heard a client say, “This solution is exactly what we’ve been looking for…. If we could have, we should have built this ourselves!”
Sakon’s potential, in other words, is limitless.
The new dream is for Sakon to become the technology framework to manage device life for the Fortune 1000 enterprise.
That means every enterprise, every carrier, every VAR – in the same way that Salesforce became THE choice in CRM; in the same way ServiceNow became the ITSM platform of choice. Someday soon, every enterprise will understand how much it needs Sakon’s Device Platform.
Accomplishing Anything Together: Learning from Customers
By the end of his talk, Amine urged a celebration of sorts among his 800-plus listeners, as if what awaits the company is a party of collaboration with the best brands in the world. Everyone is invited. Sakon will come together as an organization to handle the size and scale of every opportunity. Everyone at Sakon will work together to flawlessly deliver accurate information and high-quality services and amazing experiences for current and future partners and customers.
So raise a glass, Amine seemed to say, and toast Sakon’s success. Because Sakon isn’t so much a company as a problem-solving machine – it captures chaos in a bottle and pours out world-class solutions.
See you in the future!
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