Intel® vPro™ Technology

  Section 4 of 13  

Mobile Manageability in Low-Power and Operating-System-Absent States

Manageability’s Value Proposition

A manageable computer allows for IT service providers to perform asset management operations remotely. Basic asset management operations include retrieval of information and control of a computer’s state or data. Armed with this information, the IT service provider can fix a computer, ensure a computer’s optimum health, or track a computer’s hardware and software assets—all remotely.

Managing a computer remotely reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for corporate computers. TCO includes the cost of hardware and software components. TCO also includes these less tangible costs:

• Expenses and wages paid to IT engineers for the time they spend walking, driving, or even flying to a malfunctioning computer.
• Wages paid to the support personnel at IT call centers.
• Costs involved in lost productivity of employees while a computer is disabled or malfunctioning and awaiting the intervention of an IT engineer.

Up until five to ten years ago, corporations owned desktop computers for the most part. Therefore, researchers and developers of client manageability standards and tools concentrated on desktop computers, especially manageability in low-power states. An Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) who wished to add a manageability capability to mobile platforms could attempt to do so, but only in a “copy-paste” manner. In other words, an OEM could take manageability-supporting hardware and firmware originally developed for desktop platforms, plug them into a mobile platform, and hope that they would work well. As we will demonstrate in this article, in most cases, such hopes could not be realized.

  Section 4 of 13  

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