Hardware and software collaboration benefits business

The first European deployment of the TOUGHBOOK 55 is currently underway at Severn Trent, one of the largest water companies in the UK, which serves the Midlands area. The devices are being rolled out to the mobile workforce to support the key workers in their vital roles. 

TOUGHBOOK in Space

Lastly, I talked about even reaching into space. Panasonic and Microsoft worked with their customer Centrica and network connectivity partner NetMotion to send a TOUGHBOOK device into the stratosphere while it ran a successful Microsoft Teams call in the sky.

The test involved strapping a Panasonic TOUGHBOOK tablet to a weather balloon that took the tablet up, up and away into the stratosphere. The Teams call transitioned seamlessly from a Wi-Fi connection to a 4G LTE cellular network at 110 feet, and then maintained the call to a dizzying height of almost 10,000 feet, the TOUGHBOOK finally came crashing back to earth when the balloon exploded somewhere over Herefordshire at around 100,000 feet.

Apart from being just fun, this stunt tested the extreme limits of product durability, network connectivity and application performance. This type of collaboration and testing builds trust in relationships.

It’s no coincidence then that when Centrica wanted to take its tradition of service excellence to the next level – the cloud – it transformed the working lives of 29,000 employees around the world by deploying Panasonic TOUGHBOOK devices with Windows 10 Pro. Now employees use modern applications on connected devices to improve customer service and efficiency.

When Centrica migrated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 Pro and upgraded their British Gas field engineers to TOUGHBOOK devices they worked closely with both Panasonic and Microsoft to ensure the potentially complex and challenging process ran smoothly. With the cloud-based productivity apps of Microsoft 365 at their fingertips, field engineers can now easily access product information, process quotes, and use Microsoft Teams to collaborate with remote peers to troubleshoot problems. Microsoft Teams also speeds communication across the organisation.

Centrica also plans to use Windows 10 Autopilot to make device deployment more efficient. Panasonic will be able to ship a device to an engineer who needs one without having to preload the software. When the engineer turns on the device, it will connect automatically to the Microsoft cloud and download the necessary apps.

Another advantage of Microsoft 365 is enhanced security. The new Microsoft 365 tools are all cloud-based, so no customer data is stored on engineers' devices. This not only makes customer data more accessible to field engineers, but also enhances its security.

With these examples, I hope that the fruits of a really close and collaborative partnership between a mobile hardware and software provider are obvious. Engineers on both sides that understand each other’s hardware and software applications to a granular level can pay big dividends when it comes to planning, deploying and troubleshooting new solutions – even if you don’t have to put a device into space to prove it.