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Intel CEO Paul Otellini Unveils the vPro Platform - Part 2 of 4


Paul Otellini: I'm pleased to announce today, Intel's newest platform brand. We're going to call it vPro.

VPro has three substantial new capabilities that we're adding to the business desktop. The first is built-in manageability. This is to lower maintenance costs and increase the user uptime. The second is proactive security, being able to drive security out to the platform to defend the integrity of the enterprise in an increasingly hostile online world. And the third is energy efficiency. This is delivering the raw performance to the business client for all of us who want to drive performance and do new applications and new things with our computers, but still do that in an increasingly energy efficient environment driving power consumption costs down in the enterprise. And what I'd like to do shortly this morning is just take you through each of these and show you what's new inside this brand.

Paul Otellini: Let me begin with built-in manageability. This chart says that we've done a very good job at manageability so far.

Eighty-seven percent of all the business desktop problems that happen are even now to be addressed in a remote fashion. Only 13 percent of those problems require a desk-side visit. But if you look at the costs and go back to the cost data I showed earlier, those 13 percent desk-side visits cost almost half of our total maintenance and expenses in our enterprise. This I think is really important because it deals with all these things that require a hard asset, sending someone out to a desktop to fix a power-off problem, fix-and-repair kind of problems, bootable operating systems, disabled agents, etceteras, etceteras.

All of that today needs someone to go to the PC and fix it, or worse yet, to bring the PC to the IT shop.

VPro is designed to help solve that problem, to help reduce desk-side visits and therefore reduce the costs of running IT shops and enterprises. How do we do this? Well, one of the technologies that vPro incorporates is our next generation Intel Active Management Technology. IAMT is what we call it.

IAMT goes far beyond passive integration today and the limitations of today's software solutions. It addresses the management challenges that all of us have in running these IT environments and it looks in particular at those things which cannot be solved with today's solutions, like auditing a down PC, or remotely repairing downed operating systems.

So I'd like to show you an example of how this works and how this goes beyond remote repair and into active software agents and to do that, let me bring up Greg Bryant, who is with our digital office group. Greg.

Greg Bryant: Good morning, Paul.

OK, I want to do a demonstration of Intel Active Management Technology and how we can use that to help keep software agents healthy and active. It's one of the new features for Active Management Technology this year. And, Paul, as you know, I used to run a big portion of the IT shop inside Intel that did client management and what you find out is one of the key limitations of the software solutions today is they are only really as good as the agent.

So if that software agent that you used to do the remote troubleshooting or repair is not healthy, if it's not functioning, you've got problems. You can't really manage that box, it's going to drive a desk-side visit. And there's a lot of things that can happen to agents. Agents can be turned off accidentally by end users, they can be attacked by malicious software, you can install an application and have some kind of conflict. So a lot of things can happen to agents today that limit your effectiveness.

Greg Bryant: So, Paul, what I have here is I've got this system. Got a PC and I'm going to run through a scenario of how we can keep an agent active with hardware. We've got an email inbox, and kind of the scenario we're using is we got a note from our IT shop and in this case, we've got to do a patch. We need to go do something. I think most of you can relate to this. We get these notes frequently. Let me click on that note. And it's telling us we need to urgently do this patch, but to do it, we need to temporarily disable our virus protection. Now I know it sounds a little fishy to me, but we get these notes kind of often so I'm going to follow directions...

Paul Otellini: For once.

Greg Bryant: Yeah, for once, thank you. [laughter]

Greg Bryant: That's hitting close to home.

So I followed the directions. I'm temporarily disabling the virus protection.

Now the good news is our LANDesk software agent on the PC is doing its job. It's seeing me try to disable that software protection -- the anti-virus protection -- and it's giving me a warning. It's saying, "Gregory, do you really want to do that." I'm going to say yes. I really do want to do that. I want to install this patch.

Now what you saw Paul, right there, that fast, as soon as I disabled that agent, we got this splash screen pop-up. The hardware -- the actual PC hardware -- noticed that that agent was not running and told the LANDesk console to basically send an update and re-enable the agent on the PC. That was done in hardware, independent of the software, independent of the state of the system, and now you can see that the agent is back up and running. So obviously that's really key in terms of keeping these things really simple, but very key in keeping in terms of keeping PCs up and healthy and manageable.

Paul Otellini: And you solved a serious problem.

Greg Bryant: Solved a very serious problem.

Paul Otellini: I think that's a great example of how our active management technology and LANDesk can help keep those PCs from having a serious problem requiring that service visit that we talked about earlier.

Greg Bryant: Now the other thing I should show really quickly, you know this is a case keeping the agent running if the PC is still up and functional.

But, let's say you and I were out here and we click on a file folder and we hit a blue screen. That happens today, I think most people, "Hey we've got a blue screen. System won't boot." Today, Paul, you would have to call the help desk and ask them for help. There is no way they can remotely fix the system. It won't boot. They have to send a technician out in order to remotely repair this. What we can do with Active Management Technology is we can remotely manage this system.

Paul Otellini: So here the IT shop is rebooting they system.

Greg Bryant: So back from the console again, we can talk to that manageability engine, the AMT capability in the vPro platform. We can fix this machine from remote without sending a technician.

Paul Otellini: Perfect.

Greg Bryant: Thank you very much.

Paul Otellini: Now that was just a base hardware capability that we built into the systems. As I said a minute ago, we're not doing this alone. As we think about IAMT and vPro, it's very critical to also think about the kind of software partners we also deal with, and IT out-sourcing departments. This kind of technology will change the economics of those departments and to help us understand that better, I'd like to invite up Kim Stevenson. Kim is VP of IT Out-sourcing Services at EDS. Good morning Kim.

Kim Stevenson: Thanks.

Paul Otellini: So tell us a little bit about EDS.

Kim Stevenson: Sure. EDS is a twenty billion dollar company. We do IT out-sourcing application and business process out-sourcing. We have roughly just over 400 customers and we're the largest desktop service provider in the world. We provide complete end-to-end management of PCs, laptops, mobile devices, printers, the local area network, campus area networks, and of course all the software that runs on these devices. We have over three, three and a half million laptops and desktops in the estate, so you could say there's a couple hundred thousand servers that support that environment.

Paul Otellini: So you're a very good customer too.

Kim Stevenson: Yes. [laughter] And I think the way I think about it is when you aggregate that estate it's probably the most complex workplace environment out there.

Paul Otellini: Perhaps you can tell us a little bit about how the vPro platform technologies will impact your environment. How you've been working with us on the technology for some time now.

Kim Stevenson: Yes, we've been working with Intel for roughly the last 18 months. We've set up some labs at EDS to test these new capabilities. And, of course, we're really focused on how they operationalize and what processes we change in our support model because we are now able to leverage the technology.

Paul Otellini: And what's so interesting about the platform to you?

Kim Stevenson: Well, let me start with this. We sign multi-year contracts, you know five to ten year contracts with our customers. In those contracts, there typically is an annual price reduction in there.

At the same time we're committing to these price reductions, more and more software goes on to the devices during that period of time and the labour costs rises during that period of time.

We're very interested in technologies like vPro to take our service to a new level and active management strikes at the heart of what we're trying to deliver, being able to deliver stuff remotely and consolidate those skill sets so we can eliminate desktop-side visits and, of course, the manual processes.

Just in the demo you performed I was thinking that's great, my service desk agents, I can change the work that they do; my on-site support people, I can change the work that they do and really integrate all of those operations about PC upgrades, patch installations and even virus remediation.

Paul Otellini: What does this mean in the aggregate in terms of benefits for EDS?

Kim Stevenson: Well, we're a multi-vendor estate, which I think most CIOs including EDS, we've been trying to over the years consolidate to a single vendor. And it's nearly impossible. We really have almost every PC manufacturer and then of course almost every part model in the estate. So it makes it really complex to try and support that environment.

What we can do with the vPro platform, especially with the direction the operating system is going, we can support all PC types with the same processes, greatly simplifying the desktop environment. We also have the ability to remotely manage those environments and, again, whether you're doing software updates or patch installation we can take advantage of hardware consolidation and really taking the highest cost component of delivering desktop support to a different level in a way that we'll see value to the customers.

Paul Otellini: Kim, can you share some of you initial results with the audience?

Kim Stevenson: Sure. They are early results and we expect over time we'll have even more. But if you look at where we've done thus far, we've been able to identify the specific hardware-software problem types and in every case been able to reduce the desk side visits by 50 to 75 percent depending on problem types. So that's really huge.

The other piece is that we've been able to increase the speed of deployment of critical software. Our deployment time has gone down around 90 percent and that's really important if you're thinking about things like PCs get turned off at night, and that's the perfect time you want to deploy patches but then you have to wait till the workforce comes in the morning. You think about trading room floors, you think about call centers, where you really can't afford for that time delay.

Not only will this improve the cost structure, but it also improves the desktop support, improving the end-user's productivity and reducing their downtime. We really think about it in terms of shifting the desktop support model from what I call a one-to-many model to a many-to-many model, so overall improving the response time and our mean time to restore. So these are just some of the benefits. I get excited.

Paul Otellini: I can tell.

Kim Stevenson: I'm like Gregory. Because we really think that if you sum it all up, it's about having a more productive workforce and a more secure environment. And we provide that to our clients.

Paul Otellini: That's wonderful. Well thanks for sharing your insights this morning and I love working with EDS and let's keep it going.

Kim Stevenson: Certainly. Great.

[applause]



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