CRN Network
Patrick Gelsinger, Intel’s global CTO met up with leading Indian CIOs to highlight the cost benefits of technology refresh in an economic slowdown.
Citing a recent study by Wipro, Gelsinger said, “Companies can save roughly Rs 98,377 in terms of productivity gains and power savings by switching from old desktops to laptops.”
The Wipro research surveyed 50 Indian companies having an average of 6,861 employees, 3,609 desktop PC users and 1,184 mobile PC users.
The study claims that Rs 92,935 can be gained through increased productivity by shifting from old to new and faster PCs. In addition, shifting from desktop to notebook can save Rs 1,892 per PC per year in power bills. Switching to laptops also eliminates the need for UPS, thereby providing an additional savings of Rs 3,550 in UPS capital and running costs.
“At Intel, we have moved nearly 95 percent of our employees on to notebooks which has resulted in significant benefits,” Gelsinger said.
The research suggests that nearly 50 percent of respondents feel that new applications, service packs, updates and patches are the major reasons for increase in maintenance effort every year. Over 25 percent of the companies said they experience increasing number of hardware and software failures as the
PC ages.
Over half of the respondents said that security incidents increased with older PCs as they were under-powered to run new security protocols. More than three-quarters attributed it to patches left unresolved, while 40 percent said that the older configurations missed regression testing thus making the PC vulnerable.
To drive his point home, Intel also presented customer case studies of the Bombay Stock Exchange and BPCL.
Anjan Choudhury, CTO, Bombay Stock Exchange said, “We have taken a decision to refresh every four years with a warranty for the whole period so that cost of ownership is minimized. The refresh will help us increase employee productivity. Also, it’s a great time to buy as you can bargain really hard.”
Anil Kumar Kaushik, GM, IT, BPCL shared that replacing desktops with notebooks and having vPro enabled PC fleet has helped the company become more cost efficient. “Since the past two years, we have decided to replace all old desktops with notebooks. Presently we have 7,000 nodes, of which one-third are notebooks. Of these clients, nearly 20 percent are vPro enabled which has helped reduced our maintenance and service costs substantially.”
Kaushik said it costs BPCL roughly Rs 1,500 to service one maintenance call. “Being an organization with a vast geographical spread our estimated cost per service call is nearly $30 as it requires the engineer to travel to the upcountry location. Add to that the cost of downtime. Intel’s vPro platform has allowed us to reduce that cost substantially as it allows remote management,” he added.
According to the research, the PC refresh cycle among large Indian enterprises is an average 4.1-year and all the respondents said that they don’t plan to delay technology upgrades despite a challenging economic scenario. |