Workplace devices are the computers and machines that people use to do their jobs: the laptop handed over on the first day, the shared printer, the scanner a delivery rider carries, the cameras and speakers in a meeting room, and the wall of screens in a control room. Offices, warehouses, hospitals and colleges buy them by the hundred or the thousand, not one at a time.
Here is a typical first day. A new operations executive joins a logistics company in Gurugram. At 9:30 a.m., the IT team hands her a laptop. It was set up before she arrived: the company's apps are installed and its security rules are already in place. The IT team did this remotely, with unified endpoint management (UEM) software, which enrols, configures and updates every laptop the company owns. She plugs in a keyboard, a mouse and a headset. These are computer peripherals. Each of them has a small chip inside that runs firmware, the software built into a device that starts and controls it.
At 11 a.m., she prints her joining forms on the floor's shared printer, signs them and scans them back. The printer sends the scanned pages straight to the HR team's document system. The company does not own this printer. It pays the printer maker a fixed rate for each page printed, under a managed print contract.
At 2 p.m., she joins a team meeting. Some colleagues sit in the meeting room, and others join a video call from Chennai and Kolkata. The room's AV system (AV means audio-visual) picks up voices through microphones in the ceiling, removes the echo of the remote callers' voices from the room's speakers, and points the camera at whoever is talking. Much of this now runs as software on one standard computer, instead of on a rack of separate boxes. That change is an example of hardware-software disaggregation.
At 4 p.m., her manager takes her into the control room. A video wall, one large picture built from many screens mounted edge to edge, shows every warehouse, every truck on the road and every late parcel. Finally, she goes down to the warehouse floor. There, each worker carries a rugged mobile computer, a tough handheld computer with a barcode scanner built into it. Every scan is recorded in the warehouse management system (WMS), the software that knows where each item is. A few seconds later, the parcel's new status appears on the control-room wall upstairs.
What do these devices have in common? First, companies buy them in fleets, and each fleet is managed from one console. Second, a device maker does not make every part itself. It buys the processor, the memory and most other chips from chip companies, designs the device around them, and writes the firmware and the management software. Most of the large device makers write much of that software in Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai and other Indian cities. Third, many of these devices are sold and installed through partners. A reseller sells the equipment, and a system integrator, a specialist firm, designs the meeting room or the warehouse system and installs equipment from several makers. This is called channel sales.
Newer laptops also have an engine on the processor chip that runs AI models on the laptop itself, without a data centre. Such a laptop is called an AI PC. The chips inside all these devices are explained under semiconductors.