Take Advantage of Intel vPro Manageability Capabilities

Countless organizations are using Intel vPro, Intel’s business PC platform, for its hardened, multilayer security; optimized device performance; and improved enterprise stability. But so far, many aren’t using one of Intel vPro’s most powerful capabilities: advanced device manageability.

There are a couple of forces at play here. For one, all of the other features come activated out of the box. Although Intel vPro Manageability is included at no additional licensing costs, organizations must perform several steps to configure and activate the manageability feature within their organization. Another problem: Many IT leaders mistakenly think that Intel vPro Manageability will simply duplicate the functionality of their existing device management platforms.

Let’s start with that second misconception. Third-party management platforms such as Microsoft Intune and Omnissa WorkspaceOne are amazing in pretty much every situation except for one: a blue screen outage. This is that error screen that users dread, informing them that their device has crashed so badly that its OS can no longer operate safely on the machine. In this instance, most endpoint device management platforms are useless, as they require a functional OS to work.

Because Intel vPro Manageability sits directly on devices, though, the solution allows IT professionals to remotely monitor, update and repair machines, even if their operating system is down.

Intel vPro Manageability offers IT teams comprehensive tools for efficient remote management, diagnostics, and maintenance of PC fleets — enabling businesses to recover from the unexpected in a matter of hours, not days or weeks. This can be done across hundreds of thousands of distributed devices, even when they are powered down or if the OS is unavailable. But Intel vPro Manageability must already be enabled before disaster strikes.

This difference has never been illustrated better than in July 2024, when a global outage left millions of PCs around the world unresponsive. Enterprises that had already activated Intel vPro Manageability were able to remotely power up, patch and recover their systems within hours.

By contrast, those without it had to physically touch every device — a process that stretched on for weeks — while users were left staring at blue screens. This sort of prolonged downtime can easily cost an organization millions of dollars in lost productivity and revenue.

Two major airlines were in the news during that outage. One of them was running Intel vPro with its manageability technology activated, and that airline was able to recover its systems with minimal downtime, only canceling 1% of its flights. The other was forced to cancel hundreds of flights as its IT shop worked overtime for weeks, trying to get the company’s devices back up and running.

Even one-off device errors can show how powerful it is to have a remote management tool that doesn’t depend on an OS. Imagine, for example, that one of your top salespeople gets a blue screen while traveling abroad for a presentation that could land a huge account. With traditional device management tools, there isn’t much that IT professionals can do, short of hopping on a plane. But with Intel vPro Manageability, they can remote into the user’s PC at any time and help fix the issue.

Intel vPro Manageability includes hardware-level device management features provided by Intel Active Management Technology. 

When combined with Intel vPro-enabled management software, Intel AMT provides a robust set of tools to manage devices remotely, even when the OS is not working correctly.

It works over wired and Wi-Fi connections, behind firewalls and through the cloud, and it is on available all Intel vPro devices.

Intel AMT is built into the hardware. When securely activated, it provides a way for IT to connect to the device, even when the OS is down. Help desk and IT admins can power on devices, boot to a BIOS or recovery image, access a KVM Session, and remediate a system.

There are currently three ways for organizations to activate Intel AMT:

• Intel vPro Fleet Services: An Intel-hosted Software as a Service solution that integrates with Intune’s administration console
• Intel Endpoint Cloud Services: Customers can use existing Unified Endpoint Management solution vendors as a single tool to natively access Intel vPro Manageability
• Intel Endpoint Management Assistant: A self-hosted solution for organizations with existing infrastructure or special governance requirements

To be frank, each of these is a multistep process, and some IT shops have struggled to set up Intel AMT on their own. That’s why Intel has partnered with CDW for an Intel AMT Activation Service offering. During the engagement, CDW’s consulting engineers review an organizations’ IT environment and then install, configure and activate Intel AMT using either Intel vPro Fleet Services, Intel EMA or the customer’s preferred endpoint management tool. To date, CDW has performed more than 100,000 device activations for businesses ranging from Fortune 500 companies to startups.

As of now, CDW is the only Intel partner authorized to provide this service.

In many organizations, Intel AMT goes unused not because of lack of value but because some teams are unaware it requires activation and provisioning. This often demands coordination across endpoint, security and management tooling — work that gets postponed until a major outage exposes the gap. By partnering with CDW, an IT organization gets an experienced team to help deploy, configure and activate Intel AMT at scale by handling the discovery, activation, testing and IT team training required to enable remote device management across the environment — ensuring they are ready for a blue screen outage , whenever it might strike.