How Manageability Tools Support Effective IT Strategies

Downtime isn't just an inconvenience, it's a drain on resources and revenue. In today's world resilient IT is no longer a luxury—it's a necessity. Hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman were joined by Novin Kaihani, General Manager, Commercial Client Platforms & Software Products at Intel, for an in-depth discussion on the critical role manageability tools play in formulating effective IT strategies.

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Listen for more on future-proofing your IT, including:

• Real-world Impact: They discuss the results of compelling case studies (including insights from a Futurum research paper) showcasing Intel vPro deployments.
• A comparison of hypothetical airline case studies; one implemented vPro preemptively, whereas the other faced challenges during an outage.Think cost savings, increased efficiency, and a smoother IT experience.
• Outage Resilience: How Intel vPro's powerful manageability features can help organizations not just react to major outages, but recover quickly and minimize damage.
• ROI That Matters: The bottom line is crucial. They discuss cost savings and ROI that Intel vPro brings to businesses, backed by data from Forrester Consulting.*
• Broad Applications: Intel vPro offers resilient, remotely manageable, and scalable solutions that could benefit a variety of organizations looking to thrive in today's digital landscape.

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Learn more at Intel vPro® Platform Is Built for Business. Watch the video above, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

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‍References:

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• https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/08/delta-says-chaos-after-crowdstrike-outage-cost-it-380-million-in-revenue.html
• https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-american-airlines-profits-outage.html
• https://www.ciodive.com/news/american-airlines-crowdstrike-outage-operatioins-recovery/722428/

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*DISCLOSURES This study is commissioned by Intel and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis. While Forrester did find benefit in security outcomes for organizations deploying Intel vPro endpoint devices, no product or component can be absolutely secure, and Forrester makes no guarantee of the security outcome of organizations deploying Intel vPro endpoint devices. Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in Intel Hardware[1]Enabled Security. Intel reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study. Intel provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews. Forrester fielded the double-blind survey using a third[1]party survey partner.

Patrick Moorhead:
The Six Five is back, and we are back from Davos, Switzerland. This is our first podcast that we’re doing here. It’s great to be back, Dan. Boy, we talked a lot of AI when we were out there. A lot of the discussions were the one-two punch, and that was, “Okay, we want to bring this AI in, but we want to make sure it’s resilient. We want to make sure it’s safe.” That even carries through with client computing.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, it absolutely does. Companies right now, they’re trying to find the efficiencies, they’re trying to find the productivity, they’re trying to find the reliability, they’re trying to find the security. They’re really tying threads together, Pat. I talk a lot about AI ROI and that being a big part of the year, but look. The blocking and tackling, the core ability for your workforce to be productive, is massive, and taking it out to the edge, bringing it on device, Pat. Do not be mistaken, everyone. Client is a big thing. It’s important, and it’s really where a lot of the work gets done.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah, it’s amazing. Things like resiliency and security get a lot of lip service sometimes, but when it comes to the forefront is when there are outages. There are technologies to limit your risks and increase your resiliency. I can’t imagine a better person to have this conversation with than Novin from Intel. Novin, great to see you.

Novin Kaihani:
Great to be back.

Daniel Newman:
It’s great to have you on the show. I mean, as Pat and I were kind of saying in the preamble, there’s not a topic right now that’s more front and center than AI. Of course, it’s like that requires so many different partitions, of what AI is and where it takes place and how it works. Something we got to spend some time about, when we were actually with you in Santa Clara doing a series of Six Five videos about AI PCs, we spent a lot of time talking about the management. I remember that was around the time that there was that massive outage with CrowdStrike, and there was some significant determinations of how to blame, how to fault, how to fix, what to do and go forward. We had some great conversations. I want to pivot, Pat, if you both are okay, and talk a little bit about vPro with you, talk a little bit about this topic, because frankly, it’s refreshing to talk a little bit more about something other than just AI. Refresh, for instance, is a hot topic. The AI PC is driving part of it. How do you see the ability for organizations to balance the forging ahead with the most advanced AI-enabled tools, but also ensuring that some of those core manageability and functionality tools are still being put into place to optimize performance?

Novin Kaihani:
Yeah, absolutely. Similar to when we talked last time, when you think about AI coming into the enterprise, there’s things like content creation and productivity, but really we’re focused on what it means for IT as well. For IT, you can split it in a few different ways. One is around intelligence on the PC, delivering this predictive, proactive-style PC, where it’s not IT reacting to issues but rather being more proactive, and highlighting what is going on on the PC and taking action to remediate it. We’ve seen progress even since the last time we talked. We’ve been working with Lakeside, who is in the digital employee experience space, and they just announced at CES with us around optimizing for that AI PC hardware that we’re delivering into the market. What customers are going to be able to see is AI and intelligence on the PC, driven in an efficient way that gives employees a better experience and then delivers cost savings for IT.

That’s in the, I would say, more insight space, but as we’ll probably talk a little bit more about today when we think about remediation, that’s like the meat and potatoes of what you need to be able to deliver in your enterprise. That’s the heart of vPro, if you will, in that vPro manageability space, where you can get your devices back up and running in a matter of minutes. When we think about the outage from a few months ago, many customers of vPro were able to get back up and running in a matter of minutes, because they could reach those devices regardless of where they are in the world. The OS was down, get it patched, back up and running. It’s pretty amazing.

Patrick Moorhead:
Let’s do a drilldown on that. We pointed out you had Delta, big disruptions. American seemed to recover a lot faster, as in not weeks but hours. You know I do my best research on social media platforms … that’s a joke … but my snarky comment that I had immediately within minutes of seeing this is, okay, it’s either old PCs or new PCs that they didn’t turn on certain features, or they bought brands of PCs that didn’t have features where you could do a fast rollback, or if something got corrupted in the BIOS, you could update that. I’m curious. Let’s get a little bit more specific. How exactly does vPro assist? I know that you’ve made it easier as well, because there’s a lot of organizations who buy it and some don’t turn it on.

Novin Kaihani:
That’s right, yeah. With vPro, baked into the hardware, we give customers the ability to reach that device regardless of the OS state. That means, say you can’t boot into Windows. What are you going to do? You’re going to go hunt that device down and manually go in and take action. That’s not efficient, and largely, a lot of folks dealing with the outage from a few months ago had to do that, and it’s incredibly painful. With vPro, what you end up doing is using the software, either directly from Intel or from your UEM provider, getting direct access to vPro on your own terms, right? You go in and activate it, and you control that flow. What it gives you the ability to do is do remote KVM at a hardware level, so you can frankly go into BIOS if you wanted, or recovery mode, remotely. In that outage scenario where you couldn’t boot into the OS, folks were going into recovery mode remotely, because that device is in constant connection with the software. It was fantastic to see those customers who have vPro and have turned on the management capability get right in there, get those devices back up and running, and like we said, in a matter of minutes, versus sending somebody out there, touching every single device in your fleet, trying to get it back up and running.

Daniel Newman:
We’re going to drill on that in a minute. I mean, Pat, all I could think about when you were asking the question talking about the airlines was you and I standing in line in Zurich when we were leaving Davos and we were trying to head home, and watching them trying to turn these terminals on and check people in. It was like eight people in two hours to check in. I mean, it was just incredible. You think about sometimes how much this equipment ages out and how poorly it’s managed at times, and then the risk. It’s just to me, I mean, I think we were trying to do the math, Novin, but I mean, it had to be an eight- to nine-figure difference between American and Delta, both near- and long-term. Because the thing is, you can kind of equate the loss of the time you were down and the refunds you had to give. What you can’t immediately equate is the actual cost of the customer that just absolutely was fed up with the situation, employees that took abuse that decided to leave and not come back. All of this could have been fixed with a simple manageability tool, which just absolutely blows my mind. That’s one use case, but there’s obviously a lot of less-severe use cases where just having vPro can deal with basic things like intrusion detections and risk managements, and of course, optimization of the user. It can drive ROI, can drive cost savings. You’ve been looking at this more holistically. What do you see typically when it comes to the value that this tool implementation can create?

Novin Kaihani:
Yeah. Typically what we see is around a 2X ROI on their investment, which is fantastic, right? I mean, because you’re going to buy a PC for your employees anyways. The incremental add of buying a vPro system, you’re going to recoup. That incremental investment, like I said, you see a 2X return on it, not just because it essentially protects you out of a global outage like we’ve been talking about, but on your day-to-day environment. You have employees that run into issues, corruption, that may not be triggered by a global outage. You still need to be able to step in and remediate those PCs. The alternative is productivity loss or setting a device back in, or you’re going into an IT shop to try to fix it, give them a loaner device. None of that is, frankly, a good employee experience, let alone the cost of trying to ship a device back in and get a new device back out. We give our customers the ability to really just get in there, remediate as fast as possible and get employees back up and running. It’s interesting. We talked about that global outage. We’ve seen estimates of $5 billion-plus in terms of business loss. Those are direct business losses, let alone productivity loss and things like that. When you think about making the choice around what PCs you’re issuing, it’s that holistic picture, the day-to-day, how do you get people back up and running, and then the assurance that you can deal with a significant outage and get your business back up and running. That’s what we end up discussing a lot with our customers, and that’s where they see the value.

Patrick Moorhead:
We talked a lot about airlines, and maybe I forced that in with the Davos conversation here and all the trains, planes and automobiles we were having. I would suppose that the applicability of vPro is not just for aviation, it’s for other industries. Maybe anyplace that you see an industrial PC used by back-office workers, seems like there would be some applicability. Do you have a lot of customers in other industries?

Novin Kaihani:
Yeah. I mean, we see it all across the board, but I’ll give you a specific example back to that outage. I had a couple hospital networks give me a call during that outage. They had to send an IT person into an operating room to get a PC back up. I mean, they’ve got the small form factor PCs plugged into a screen. They were having to send IT folks into operating rooms to get those back up and running. I mean, you never want that to happen.

Patrick Moorhead:
Not when I’m getting surgery done, for sure, or my family members.

Novin Kaihani:
Exactly. My point there is you see a lot of this. It’s not just employees that are dealing with some of these pains, it’s across the board. I mean, there’s PCs in every nook and cranny of a company. You gotta ensure that you can reach those devices and remediate whatever issue might happen. Again, it doesn’t have to be a global outage. If that operating room PC goes down, do you still want to send an IT person out there to go fix it, or remediate it remotely? The applicability is across the board, but just to highlight a real-world example in the hospital network.

Daniel Newman:
Novin, our team is collectively working on some research that’s trying to do a little bit more hypothetical evaluation of what’s going on here, customer use cases as well as the real consequences, everything we’ve already talked about throughout this conversation. You’ve been involved and been interacting throughout this process. Curious, what are some of the insights that you found most interesting, and what are some of the implications that you’re really focused on in terms of how this can help communicate better going forward to get more people to work with Intel and with vPro?

Novin Kaihani:
Yeah. The one thing that we’ve heard loud and clear is the simplicity of what customers are asking for. You rewind, let’s say five years ago. To get this remediation capability, it was frankly a difficult process, right, setting up servers and installing software in order to gain access to the out-of-band capability. Today, we’ve invested so much in modernizing vPro and making it cloud-connected that we’ve looked to make it as simple as possible. One of the things that we just announced a couple weeks ago is called vPro Fleet Services. What that really is is any vPro customer can go to vprofleet.intel.com, log in and activate vPro manageability, and then gain access to their power control and remote KVM directly from that console, so we try to make it as simple as possible. My challenge to the team was, “I want to see my 8-year-old be able to pull up the site and be able to activate vPro, and then click the button to get remote KVM,” and we’ve done that. We’ve really been investing in making sure that vPro is simple to deploy, simple to use, so that everybody is taking advantage of the manageability capability. You’re going to see a lot more from us in this space to ensure that it’s that simple to use, because our customers say they need the out-of-band capability. They just need a simple way to get access to it.

Daniel Newman:
Well, Novin, I want to thank you so much for taking the time and going through all this with us. We see this as a very important trend. We know that the inflection around the next generation of AI PCs and Copilot PCs is going to bring a wave of enthusiasm as software continues to proliferate. We want thinner, we want lighter, we want faster, and of course we want more manageable. I think sometimes that that last part maybe gets missed, and hopefully, everybody that’s out there listening to us right now and joining in this conversation, reading Patrick and my commentary, reading the collective commentaries from our firms, really understands this. The fact is that there’s seven-, eight-, nine-figure risks that go with large fleets and deployments, because really keeping systems up and running is a much bigger deal than just access to your PC. Novin, let’s do this again sometime soon. Thanks so much for joining The Six Five. It was great to see you.

Novin Kaihani:
Yeah. Great to see you guys again.

Daniel Newman:
Thank you, everybody, for tuning into this episode of this Six Five special webcast, brought to you in partnership with Intel. We appreciate everybody tuning in, being part of our community. Subscribe. Join us for all of the great content here on The Six Five. We gotta say goodbye for now, but we’ll see you all really soon. Bye-bye.