Intel has rolled out the latest update to its vPro technology, which is designed to give IT enterprise managers the ability to remotely manage all the PCs in the enterprise.
Targeting small businesses with little or no in-house IT management capabilities, Intel’s 2008 vPro release now includes several automated features pertaining to PC maintenance, repair and security. Moreover, all the original vPro features that have delivered good performance within the firewall “will now work outside the firewall as well,” noted Peter Kastner, vice president and research director at the Aberdeen Group.
“No matter where in the world the device is, the corporate laptops that workers take home or on business trips are all now manageable, fixable, and diagnosable,” Kastner explained. “As long as you can get to a network, vPro and related technology can help to solve the problem.”
Huge Savings
One of the primary goals of Intel’s revamped vPro, which combines the chipmaker’s quad-core or dual-core processors with a new Intel chipset and gigabit network controller, is to enable small businesses to keep their PCs up and running while minimizing downtime and reducing the total cost of ownership, Kastner noted.
Five years ago, major service companies told Kastner that the TCO outcomes they saw were in the range of $700 to $3,000 per PC per year. On the low end, Intel’s vPro technology has cut that down “to under $500 per PC per year, and that’s not all that much more than just the device itself,” Kastner said.
On the high end, the vPro has pushed the cost to less than $2,000, Kastner noted. “So that the not-quite-so-efficient companies have whacked out $1,000 per employee per year,” which is a “huge savings that can go right to the bottom line,” he explained.
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