vPro makes SA inroads

By Leon Engelbrecht for Intel

Johannesburg, 01 Apr 2008

The City of Cape Town and the SA Police Service are singing vPro's praises, says Intel South and sub-Saharan Africa GM Jacques van Schalkwyk.

vPro is motherboard technology that allows enterprise IT departments hardware-based management of desktops and notebooks linked to the company's LAN or WLAN.

Van Schalkwyk says both have spoken publicly and favourably about the manageability, power saving and better total cost of ownership over time that vPro has brought.

He says at least six other major South African accounts are assessing vPro and adds that an as-yet unidentified large insurance company has also chosen the product.

"One of the biggest benefits we see out of the City of Cape Town is the ability to monitor the behaviour of the system, which is not a capability they had before," says Van Schalkwyk.

"Remote management has been around for some time, but the 'beyond blue screen', the BIOS updates, those types of capabilities were never there, and you'd be surprised how much of the cost, on the maintenance side, relates to those type of issues."

Sean Maloney, Intel's global executive VP, adds that he thought vPro would appeal because of the better manageability it offered enterprise, "but one of the big attractions [as it turns out] is power, the simple thing that you can switch them off remotely".

Van Schalkwyk says another advantage encountered is the eradication of downtime. "Virtuality is reality now."

Consumer vPro

Van Schalkwyk and Maloney add that indications are service providers may in time expand vPro-like services to consumers. "There are a lot of companies who see it as an opportunity for income," says Van Schalkwyk. "Instead of just selling Internet access and services, they can remotely manage your system, keep it optimised, keep it virus protected, etc."

Maloney says consumers will also soon have the ability to remotely access files on home or small office PCs remotely "from a cellphone or any computer", while bypassing the machine's operating system.

"It will come out of deep sleep at the snap of the fingers and you can access the files. When you stop looking it goes back into deep sleep - and that is independent of the OS," he says.

"These vPro features over time are going to allow for a much more secure lower power consumption environment where computers will by default switch off, but will immediately be awake when you want them - either locally or remotely.

"That's how the Web will evolve: there will be two billion computers all in that type of state, instead of them all sitting there with their hard drives whirring - it will be a more rational power consumption model," notes Maloney.