Modern office, hybrid & remote working


THE DESK, THE MEETING


ROOM, AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN


Monitors have quietly become the hub of the modern desk. With workers expecting one cable convenience, procurement now weighs docking


behaviour, power delivery and KVM needs. Paul Butler, Sales Director UK & Ireland, AOC, explains how the channel wins business by guiding those choices, rather than chasing margin.


S


ix years ago, if you’d asked most IT directors what their office technology refresh cycle looked like, you’d have got a fairly predictable answer: desktops on a three-to-four-year rotation,


a meeting room projector that someone eventually replaces when it dims beyond use, and a cabling infrastructure that nobody wants to touch because the person who set it up leſt in 2016. Te pandemic changed all of that, though perhaps not in the way the headlines suggested. Te conversation I hear most oſten from channel partners and


end-users across the UK isn’t about whether people are coming back to the office. That question has largely been settled, and the answer varies by organisation. What I hear instead is a much more interesting question: what should the office actually do now? Because if half your workforce is there three days a week and working from home the other two, the old assumptions about what technology you need, and where you need it, fall apart quite quickly.


The desk has become a docking station Te single biggest shiſt I’ve seen in workplace technology over the past two years is the monitor’s quiet evolution from a passive display into the centre of the workstation. When a knowledge


16 | May/June 2026


worker sits down at a hot desk in 2026, they expect to plug in one cable, USB-C almost always – or Tunderbolt 4 for the Mac folks, and have their laptop charge, their peripherals connect, and their display light up at the right resolution. Tat expectation has fundamentally changed what procurement teams are asking for. Tis matters for the channel because it changes the shape of the


sale. A monitor purchase used to be a standalone decision, oſten made on price and panel size alone. Now it pulls in questions about docking compatibility, power delivery wattage, KVM switching for shared desks, and daisy-chain capability for multi- monitor setups. Te reseller who can walk a facilities manager through those considerations is adding genuine value and winning the deal on expertise rather than margin. Te ergonomic dimension has sharpened, too. With hybrid


workers splitting their time between a home setup they’ve chosen themselves and an office setup they haven’t, the physical experience of the desk matters more than it used to. Height- adjustable stands, flicker-free backlights, and hardware-level blue light reduction have moved from “nice to have” into formal procurement criteria, oſten driven by HR and occupational health teams rather than IT. For a channel partner, that’s a new stakeholder in the buying process, and a new conversation to have.


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