Zebra shows partners its stripes at roadshow

Zebra Technologies's channel partners have been turning out around Australia for the vendor's OS Migration Roadshow.

Around 160 partners, including Skywire, Ingram Micro, Sonar Technologies, BCDS, Dematic, SATO and Manhattan, have turned out for the first events in Sydney and Melbourne.

Last week's Sydney event also included a launch party for the ET50/55 Enterprise Tablet and ZQ500 Series mobile printers with attendees getting a sneak-peak at a soon to be unveiled product heralded as 'the greatest advancement in warehouse technology in the past 20 years'.

The roadshow heads to Auckland this week, then on to Brisbane on December 15.

Sydney attendees heard from VDC Reasearch executive vice president, enterprise mobility and connected devices, David Krebs, that his research shows customer satisfaction with existing line-of-business mobile solutions is waning.

Zebra says while its easy to ignore Microsoft, given the volume of Android mobile device shipments and the exuberance around all things Apple, Microsoft nonetheless reigns supreme among enterprise rugged mobile devices, with more than 90% share of the 15 million devices in use today.

However, the Windows embedded operating systems reach end-of-support in five years and with no backward compatibility offered by Microsoft, migrating to a next generation platform will require a rewrite of existing applications.

Wayne Harper, Zebra Technologies APAC senior technical director, say many companies remain unaware of Windows EOS in 2020 or are taking 'an ostrich-like approach' believing they don't need to do anything'.

Harper says resellers and channel partners are perfectly placed to help users, who are 'at a cross roads'.

"Take no action, migrate now to enterprise-grade Android or wait for Windows 10," Harper says. "Migrating now enables faster capitalisation.

David Fenner, Zebra Technologies general manager, enterprise solutiosn, says Zebra can help resellers offer their customers strategies to address customer migration barriers and challenges.

Resellers also heard from Fenner about Zebra's virtualisation offering which provides a bridge to restructure existing code without affecting its behaviour, allowing a customer's existing app portfolio to run on modern platforms,

"Over time you can replace older APIs with modern ones and eventually phase out virtualisation completely," Fenner says.

"Migration has immediate benefits," Fenner says. "Results can be proven and tested in weeks. It means faster adoption, less expense and lower risk.