During the global pandemic, Emerging Technologies — the area of IT that I focus on — has seen an exciting influx of new technologies and offerings in a short amount of time that help keep people safe and connected.

Some of these technologies, especially robotics and drones, are causing disruption in the channel in a couple of ways: by providing new avenues for people to communicate in a socially distant world and sanitizing entire rooms autonomously. These emerging technologies are providing peace of mind to coworkers, students and teachers as businesses and schools create plans to reopen.

In my role as product manager at CDW for emerging technologies, I work with vendors that are producing some amazing new solutions. Many of these products are being taken up by emergency response and public safety organizations.

When it comes to emergency response, technologies such as drones and augmented reality (AV) and virtual reality (VR) are capable of assisting frontline workers in safely executing their tasks. Healthcare professionals and first responders can leverage those same technologies to maintain social distance and support early detection of contamination, and can also use mobile devices to stay in contact with non-urgent medical patients. Read about more use cases for emerging technologies.

Today’s unmanned aircraft systems — better known as drones — can be programmed to accomplish a slew of important jobs. In fact, drones are poised to radically improve many public safety applications, from fire departments using drones with sensors to locate people trapped by fire, to rescue teams sending drones to locate lost hikers in our vast national parks — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Drones themselves are already highly sophisticated and largely commodity technologies. What makes a drone application special are the sensors, software, flight services and data analytics that users bring to bear.

Drone technology has advanced rapidly in recent years, but organizations are still only scratching the surface of what these devices can do. For business and IT leaders who are unfamiliar with the technology, drones might seem like the domain of hobbyists or the military. But advanced features — such as high-resolution cameras, heat sensors, artificial…

In a busy mall, someone drops a bag and walks away. How long will it be before security staff notice? And when they do, how long will it take police to identify the person who dropped the bag if it turns out to contain something dangerous, such as a bomb? With a video surveillance system,…

Businesses, governments and other organizations worldwide were on track to spend more than $4.5 billion on drones in 2018, IDC estimates. That demand won’t plateau anytime soon, with spending continuing at a compound annual growth rate of 36.6 percent through at least 2021. The catch? When technologies are this new and this hot, enterprises typically…