Intel® vPro™ technology and cost savings

Randy Nystrom: Hello! My name is Randy Nystrom. I'm a systems engineer in IT at Intel Corporation. I'm here today to talk to you about vPro and cost savings. So, I do PC training room and support across Intel. That includes 77 training rooms across 30 different sites, about a thousand machines.

And typically, from an escalation in a training room without the vPro, we'd get an escalation from the training room to the service desk. And then, the service desk then will contact the tech and get them dispatched to the training room to determine what our problems are. And then, once he determines what the failures are, then he'll go to the parts cage, pick up a part and then go back to the training room to do the repair.

Now, with vPro, what it allows us is we get an escalation from the training room. The help desk can go to the management console, connect up to the machine, determine what our failures are before even dispatching a technician. So, once we determine what our failure is on the computer... And the computer, it doesn't have to have an OS or anything, it could be a hardware failure or something. But we can still do remote diagnostics on this machine.

Well, now, we escalate to a technician who goes to the parts cage because we told the technician that we have a failure on this system and what the failure is. And then, the technician goes and does the repair. This could save up to 50 percent of the time that a technician spends doing a trouble call in the training room.

So, let's take a look at vPro and how it's helped reduce tech support time. Before vPro, power-ons would take one hour, because they'd have to escalate it to a technician, the technician would go to the room and then power it up. Now, after vPro, this can all be done from a central console.

With the OS and the software installs, you're looking at a four to eight hour timeframe for an OS install. And a software install, you're looking at a two to four hour install. Well, with vPro, we're able to do this with a central management console and we can reduce this down to two to four hours for the OS and one to two hours for the software.

With the bios updates in that, we've always had to escalate it to a technician and have the technician go out to the room. Depending on the size of the room, the updates would take between four to eight hours to update the training rooms. Well, now, we can actually do that from the remote console as well and we can get this done between two to four hours. And the capabilities of vPro allow us to monitor the machines in boot up phase, so we can actually see what's going on. We can redirect the machine's boot up so we can see it in real time right on the console itself.

So, let's take a look at cost savings, and what that cost savings means to me in the training room environment. After hours support, I'm able to increase the ability to do after hours support because I can use the help desk and the management console to do this. The help desk is a cheaper solution than having a technician go to the rooms.

Well, if I can remotely manage these machines and determine what my problems are, I can decrease... Before I have a technician go to a room to do a repair, because I can have the help desk do the diagnostics and then send the technician out there to do the repair with the part.

So, now, my mean time to repair is decreased because I've isolated what my problems are and the technician is then escalated, which means that it's going to be less time for the equipment to be up and running again.

For more information about vPro and cost savings, you can go out to Intel Premiere's IT Professionals website.