Where and how people work has changed dramatically in 2020. With more end users working from home, and more IT staff having to support those workers remotely – often from their own homes – managing a fleet of PCs has never been more challenging.
That means it has never been more important to make the right choice in purchasing PCs to meet your organization’s needs today, and into the future.
In July 2020, AMD, along with Spiceworks Ziff Davis, surveyed 409 ITDMs and administrators from the U.S. and EMEA regions (specifically from the U.K., Germany, and France) about the current landscape of PC purchase priorities and maintenance patterns. Respondents belonged to organizations of all sizes, from SMBs to enterprise organizations (as long as the company had 100+ PCs).
The survey revealed a number of insights that can help IT decision makers (ITDMs) make more informed purchasing decisions.
What ITDMs Want From Their PC Fleet
According to survey respondents, what IT teams value most in a PC are:
- Performance – 54%
- Cost – 43%
- Security – 38%
- Manageability – 21%
The Role of Manageability
In-band management, or managing locally through the network itself, is the most common form of PC management. In the AMD survey, 59% of respondents said they used in-band and direct methods to manage PCs, while only 39% used out-of- band methods. The survey revealed that in-band management continues to be the primary focus of procurement and management efforts.
Survey respondents expressed that three quarters have Intel vPro® processors actively deployed, while half of total respondents said they have Intel AMT enabled. However, a more revealing insight emerged when analyzing the data in more detail: High and consistent use of Intel AMT is minimal. It turns out that only 14% of those surveyed use Intel AMT on a monthly basis.
Even more surprising, 49% of respondents don’t use Intel AMT at all. Instead, IT teams use a variety of tools to manage their PC fleet. The most commonly used tool was Microsoft Intune (used by 32% of total organizations and 40% of enterprise organizations surveyed), which provides in-band capability.
In fact, 63% of respondents indicated that they spend most of their time using OS-level tools (in-band tools), to troubleshoot a PC while the OS is still running, instead of diagnosing a PC that will not boot. Respondents expressed that 38% use more than one tool, with many businesses also employing additional, complementary tools to enhance and resolve out-of-band manageability issues.
They survey also revealed several other key insights.
Click here to read the entire report.
