The year 2020 brought one of the biggest accelerations of digital transformation in our lifetime.

Across industries, the shift to remote and hybrid productivity was a tipping point to redefine the future of how we work, collaborate and learn outside physical office spaces or classrooms. We have seen a significant increase in the reliance on technology to keep organizations connected. In the past year, Surface usage within enterprise organizations nearly doubled driven by strong growth in the use of collaboration and productivity apps to maintain business continuity.

Today, we are pleased to share the next step in our journey to support our business and education customers with the introduction of Surface Pro 7+ for Business. And to help organizations bridge the digital and physical divide in today’s hybrid spaces, we’re beginning to ship Surface Hub 2S 85” broadly in select markets later this month.

What we have learned in the last year

As a company, we are committed to designing technology that fosters productivity, creativity and connection to empower people to be successful wherever they work and learn. We have spoken at length with many of our customers in the last year, listening to their journeys into remote everything. These discussions, combined with extensive commissioned research and the work done by our research team, have helped us understand their rapidly evolving needs. This is a critical part of our development process – ensuring business and education customer voices are not only heard but brought directly into our product development. We found four key learnings during these conversations and research:

• The future of working and learning is hybrid and requires more flexibility: Views on remote work have changed: 82% of managers say they will have more flexible work from home policies post pandemic, and 71% of employees want to continue work from home at least part time. And while more people are working and learning from home, they are facing new physical space constraints as well as distractions that can interfere with productivity. People are sharing spaces throughout their home and are moving locations more throughout their days to stay productive and accommodate others.
• Connectivity is critical to uninterrupted business operations: Poor internet performance at home is a new challenge many are facing. With multiple people in a household now connecting from home, it is putting a strain on bandwidth – where people are using their cell phones more often as hot spots for online meetings due to poor internet connectivity.
• Camera to camera is the new face to face: Connection to one another is an area that arguably has felt the most challenging – people are missing the energy and connection that was attained when we could be together in a room physically. People are now relying on their device’s cameras, screens, speakers and microphones to be seen and heard. We have learned through our research that people are feeling more empathetic to one another now, that through the lens of a video call they have a better view of life at home and even feel more valued and included as a remote contributor in meetings with everyone being in the same virtual room.
• End to end security from chip to cloud is more critical than ever before: Rapid digitization means almost everything has gone online. Organizations need their data and workflows to be secure to enable remote and hybrid work. Devices need end to end security features to enable the productivity needed to maintain business continuity.

Customer obsession is core to who we are at Surface. We create products inspired by customers and with their feedback in mind. We continue to listen and evolve our product roadmap and priorities for Surface to support our business and education customers. This is why today, we’re introducing Surface Pro 7+ for Business.