By George Clement and Richard Lansford
In a highly global environment, Intel’s IT department has a driving need to derive value from all of its soft and hard assets. Intel IT Services manage more than 77,000 mobile and 14,000 desktop PCs in 144 sites in 60 countries—all under ever tightening budgets. By treating the PC as an asset, rather than a piece of expendable hardware and by employing new strategies and technologies, Intel has been able to lower costs, achieve greater productivity and increase both worker satisfaction and IT efficiency.
With such an extensive workforce, Intel IT recognized early on the opportunity to control costs by reducing desktop and laptop diversity within the organization. By carefully reviewing end-user requirements, the IT department standardized the platform image and defined a viable refresh schedule that balanced refresh and maintenance costs with productivity gains. By standardizing using a single OS image, IT eliminated numerous existing images and regained the productivity dollars used to maintain them. Furthermore, by sharing its plans with the rest of the corporation, IT ensured end user buy-in, not to mention company-wide comfort with the hardware list and refresh schedule.
A study we conducted validated the company’s actions and cost savings1. We reviewed 30 companies, representing 10 different industries, all of which managed PC fleets ranging from 1,500 to 150,000 systems. We analyzed and determined what components an effective refresh policy contained and what the impacts are to companies that don’t have them. Our final results identified a cost and productivity breakeven point, based on an ideal three-year refresh rate for desktops and a two-year rate for laptops. Furthermore, it demonstrated that companies not maintaining an optimal PC and laptop refresh schedule paid 30 percent more to maintain their legacy hardware.
Evaluating the Role of IT
Frequently, IT spends most of its resources on deskside visits and simple PC management. By investing in new technology that enables remote management and fixes, IT can re-think its role in a corporation and can begin to consider how to add value to the organization, outside of routine maintenance.
Intel IT’s study also examined the potential impact of new management technologies. Remote management technologies enable IT organizations to remotely bring up and examine systems: even those with inoperative operating systems and hard drives. The evaluation team ran resolution scenarios on 44,000 internal trouble tickets to determine how many could by resolved more efficiently through the use of remote management. The result? Internal analysis and problem resolution could be accomplished up to four times faster and at a cost an estimated seven times lower, primarily through an increase in remote fixes and a significant reduction in the number of desk-side visits. The resulting ROI is now seen as a significant strategic advantage for Intel IT.
To further test the implications of remote management technology, Intel collaborated with John Hopkins Hospital and John Hopkins University to evaluate how adopting such technology could improve their IT services2. Intel and John Hopkins evaluated remote trouble shooting, inventory and patching capabilities and came away with a projected 32 percent return on investment over four years. The study also estimated a 20 percent cost avoidance in support software purchases with the ability to remotely audit software inventories maintained in non-volatile flash memory on each PC. Finally, the trial identified an additional 33 to 50 percent potential savings by turning PCs on and off remotely for patching.
Reducing the Cost of Security
According to the 2006 CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey3, “Virus attacks continue to be the source of the greatest financial losses” in computer crime. In 2006, 65 percent of the attacks on corporate computers were from viruses, causing financial damage and productivity losses estimated at $69,125 per incident. Also in the CSI/FBI report: unauthorized access of computers and denial of service attacks rank in the top five sources of financial loss from computer security incidents.
Similar to most IT organizations, Intel IT works proactively to prevent such incidents from occurring and maintains many reactive procedures in the event that an attack is successful. IT sees this dual strategy as paramount for protecting company assets, which plays a key role in Intel’s overall success. A critical element in this strategy is getting proactive and reactive patches out to clients as quickly as possible--regardless of whether a PC is turned on or off. In using new remote management technologies, PCs themselves are enabled to help manage security. IT trials demonstrated that patch saturation was significantly accelerated, not by hours, but by days, generating potentially huge cost savings for Intel by reducing the attack surface inside of the company.
Intel also potentially benefits from increased client availability. Traditionally, infected or subverted clients needed to be immediately shut down and would only be re-activated when an IT technician physically removed them from the network. The productivity lost while end-users waited for systems to be cleaned and re-imaged was considerable. With the new remote management technologies in place, however, the PC can detect an infection and can disconnect itself from the network. Meanwhile, the employee can continue to work offline while IT addresses the problem.
To further test how new PC capabilities can significantly improve remote PC manageability, Intel collaborated with several service providers to study how new active management platforms can improve end user support in a single or multiple enterprise scenario.
• One of those providers, EDS, evaluated automation and management capabilities. In the study4, EDS found that it could significantly improve inventory times, reducing customer desk-side visits and PC swap-outs by up to 75 percent, using remote management technologies. EDS recognized that higher levels of communication between the PCs and the management console were a strategic improvement and helped to enhance provider/customer communication and service.
• In another trial5, Unisys found that active management platforms could help them service multiple customers simultaneously, using a single management console. Based on the study, they estimated a single console could remotely power on and patch 30,000 PCs within 24 hours--a task that previously took several weeks. That advantage, combined with hardware integrated remote management and a faster ability to inventory the enterprise’s assets, yielded a compelling advantage that couldn’t be duplicated with software tools alone.
Managing Assets
Supporting a global workforce means that Intel IT needs to be able to find assets, regardless of their location within the enterprise. IT recognizes the ability to manage assets as critical to corporate decision making and realizes how inaccuracies impact IT and enterprise costs. With new remote management technologies, Intel IT will be able to mitigate software and hardware barriers to inventory and will be empowered to eliminate the restrictions inherent to managing PCs in local offices located in multiple time zones.
While evaluating how to deploy remote management technology, Intel IT demonstrated how the PC (deployed in the enterprise) registers with the central console automatically and how that machine is readily available for inventory and management even when powered down. This advantage will help Intel IT maintain a complete picture of its PC community even when 20 percent of Intel’s global desktops are typically powered off at any given time of day, due to local business hours.
Standardizing a PC fleet, changing the role of IT, providing enhanced security and tracking assets can benefit companies by increasing user up-time and freeing up IT staff from routine maintenance work. Intel IT takes advantage of new practices and technologies to help keep its PC environment protected, reliable and cost efficient. Such a strategic use of PCs can help any company keep employees happy, make systems more secure and maintain reputations, all while IT remains focused on creating value for the company.
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George Clement is a Systems Programmer for Intel IT in the Americas Region. He is responsible for enterprise application rollout and decommissioning. Clement also works with internal and external customers, advising them on enterprise desktop rollouts and deployments of Intel® vPro™ processor technology pilots. Clement joined Intel in May 2000 and has held technical leadership positions throughout his career.
Richard Lansford is a business value analyst with the Intel IT Business Value program. With over 20 years of IT experience, Lansford develops metrics methodologies and performs ROI analysis for projects within Intel’s IT department. Since joining the program, Lansford has been working with various IT business units to forecast the value of productivity gains expected with the roll-out of new or updated solutions. The Intel Business Value program was officially established early in 2002 and was developed to quantify the value of Intel IT solutions.
The views expressed in this article are the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily shared by FierceCIO or Fiercemarkets, Inc.
1 “Measuring the Benefits of Mobile PCs in the Enterprise,” Intel commissioned Wipro study, 2005.
2 “Intel® vPro™ Technology Offers Johns Hopkins New Ways to Increase the Efficiency of Remote PC Management,” Intel case study, 2006.
3 “2006 CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey,” by Lawrence A. Gordon, Martin P. Loeb, William Lucyshyn and Robert Richardson. Computer Security Institute, 2006.
4 “Improving Asset Inventories and Reducing IT Costs with Intel® vPro™ Technology,” Intel whitepaper, 2006.
5 “Unisys Solutions and PCs with Intel® vPro™ Technology,” Intel whitepaper, 2006.
This paper is for informational purposes only. This document is provided "as is" with no warranties whatsoever, including any warranty of merchantability, noninfringement, fitness for any particular purpose, or any warranty othewise arising out of any proposal, specification or sample. Intel disclaims all liability, including liability for infringement of any proprietary rights, relating to use of information in this specification. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise, to any intellectual property rights is granted herein. Intel, the Intel logo, Intel. Leap ahead. and Intel. Leap ahead. logo, and vPro are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Copyright © 2007, Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.