WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT VPRO (AND WE DID)
Microsoft flew many of its top executives to Taipei, and I took the opportunity to interview Stephanie Hallford, vice president and general manager of Intel’s business client platforms. Top of the agenda was vPro, which, I admitted, had come to mean a badge in my mind rather than anything more significant. Was there a danger that this initiative, launched back in the Windows XP heyday of 2006, had lost its way?
“When vPro launched, OSes were not stable. So the simple message of ‘when the OS is down, I can still get to the system’ worked. Fast forward ten years, that’s not the case anymore,” said Hallford.
Then there’s the sea change in how people use computers. “We recognise that the business end user has more influence, period. Whether in enterprises or a 250-person company, you need satisfied users. And particularly with younger millennials coming in, who are used to a level of technology and are not going to accept something less – and are very mobile.”
That’s why vPro is no longer about security alone. Instead, says Hallford, it ties in with Project Athena 9 ( see p35) and Intel’s target of slimmer, longer-lasting laptops. Take the problem of companies loading their own images onto machines, which can cause battery life to plummet. “The minute they put their IT load on in their image, [battery life for one laptop] dropped from 20 hours to 14 hours,” she said. Until Intel sent in one of its engineering teams. “We basically tuned and enabled and got the battery life back to 18 hours. And now we have a recipe, but that recipe is specific to that environment. So now we’re going out with that OEM [original equipment manufacturer] and doing the same thing with some of their key customers. And we’re trying to learn and build a broader story that could be scaled, and could be replicated.”
Security remains a huge focus, however. “Coming out now is Intel Hardware Shield, which is basically a BIOS hardening. So picture an attack that comes under the OS, which is happening more and more now. With an Intel hardware-hardened BIOS, if there’s an attack underneath, it locks it down. And in the next version [released in the second half of 2019], it will actually be communicating with Microsoft Windows so the OS can react.”
Anyone who’s looked at HP’s recent business PCs will realise this sounds familiar; it’s just that HP is calling the technology SureGuard. A point I put to Hallford. “So HP actually built their first round of SureGuard based on our Hardware Shield technology, level one,” she said. “That was called something that no one can ever remember – Intel Runtime BIOS Resilience – which is why I changed [its name] to Hardware Shield! And we’re evolving it over time. So the first version they have in all their systems. And this new version will be enabled as part of their Whiskey Lake [8th Gen] and Coffee Lake [9th Gen] machines.”
The other side of the new-look vPro is to make it easy to manage laptops through the cloud. “We’re putting a lot of effort into making our remote manageability cloud friendly,” said Hallford. “So this is important to small and medium businesses and to these service providers who manage these small/ medium businesses: what they can do is set up through their own cloud, or through the customer’s cloud, an ability to remotely manage a fleet. And that would mean lower costs as you don’t have to send a physical person to go touch a PC in the wild, you have higher uptime, you’re able to power on and off energy costs – a lower TCO.”
And this, Intel hopes, will persuade IT buyers to pick machines with a vPro badge.