We often have eyes only for cutting-edge technologies, dedicating attention and placing all hopes on the edge of the frontiers of scientific innovation, certain that the only definitive solution to the routine problems that hinder us will come from what is still unknown we are investigating. the business. Yet, there are few cases in which this actually happens: very often it is instead those platforms designed and evolved with coherence and sense of the concrete to have a greater impact on everyday life, offering opportunities to make small and large revolutions aimed at confirming one’s own competitiveness on the market. In many cases the real advantages of such solutions emerge over time and in the case of vPro, launched way back in 2006, we can speak of true “foresight” which is bearing fruit today.
The long hybrid era demands flexible IT
The turning point, in this case, can be identified with the Covid-19 pandemic and the changes that followed. This event with its broad disruptive power has also changed the fate of numerous solutions conceived in unsuspecting times, giving them a gift an unthinkable effectiveness at the time of their conception. An effectiveness that those who had to evolve and update them were able to refine even further, working on updates that were increasingly suited to that “new normal” in which individuals, businesses and institutions still find themselves living.
What characterizes the post-covid global panorama, in the working context, above all is the still growing predominance of a new paradigm: the hybrid work. The “everywhere working” imposed by Covid-19 has never disappeared as a model and lifestyle, and is still impacting the job market in a powerful way. More silently than during its debut, but this trend shows its predominance unequivocally, even in Italy. The data from the Smart Working Observatory of the School of Management of the Polytechnic of Milan clearly states this. After the peak of the pandemic and the physiological reduction that followed, in 2023 i remote workers there were 3.6 million and in 2024 it is estimated to be 3.65 million. A permanent trend also confirmed by less quantifiable but highly significant phenomena such as the rise of new professions linked to hybrid working – such as the chief hybrid office – and the strong propensity of younger people to choose companies ready to trust their employees, even if they operate in spaces different from the classic office ones.
For those who offer IT solutions to companies, all this entails the need to review or shape their platforms in a targeted way, so that they increasingly become a support tool for all companies that want to be able to bet on productivity of its workforce, even if hybrid. “When a platform promptly responds to the needs of the hybrid paradigm and caresses the expansion ambitions of those who adopt it to manage their IT stack, it can be said to be a modern platform,even if conceived almost 20 years ago” he begins Andrea Toigo, Public Sector Digital Strategy Development Manager at Intel. The reference is to the characteristics of Intel vPro, which was immediately equipped with a series of features (possibility of centralized management of hardware management; attention to security; advanced monitoring functions) which have taken on fundamental importance in the new technological framework.
Scalability to be guaranteed: that IT does not hinder business dreams
In addition to adapting to the hybrid model, IT solutions can – and should – become allies for those who aim not only to keep up with the times, but also to expand. Beyond geographical or sector boundaries. In concrete terms, this means proposing IT fleet management platforms capable of “withstanding” mergers or acquisitionsand indeed, to favor them.
The calls, incentives and institutional stimuli for internationalization and, more generally, for growth of Italian businesses they are not in short supply, but they have no effectiveness other than propaganda in the absence of real IT tools that make them so process possible, smooth and simple.
“In this sense, those who offer IT solutions for managing the company’s IT stack have a great responsibility” underlines Toigo. “It has the “task” of showing itself flexible and effective regardless of the number and type of devices to be managed. It must guarantee more than ever the resolution of any problem remotelyeven by connecting directly to the hardware, with the possibility of keeping the lines separate synchronization of the various devices”.
In fact, depending on the strategy and business context, Toigo underlines how it must always be possible to decide how to manage the devices involved in the new corporate structure. A necessity linked to objectives safety, but not only. Also of productivity, interoperability and, sometimes, internal and institutional regulations to be respected.
Intel vPro updates to keep up
Over the course of 19 years of evolution, the platform has been enriched with features with the aim of responding to the needs of both big and small companies, often the most awkward in transition to hybrid working. Size doesn’t matter, but neither does the sector for Intel and its platform, presented in new version at the 2024 edition of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Among those who, especially in Italy, could benefit most from it, there are the manufacturing el‘healthcare, according to Toigo. “In the first case, it becomes decisive when I have several factories scattered across the territory to be managed autonomously with PCs in the field – he explains – in the second case it greatly simplifies situations of strong stratification of PCs within large hospital structures that use them a lot powerful but also extremely simple”.
Intel does not exclude any sector with its “refreshed” and multi-faceted vPro platform, promising a 47% productivity improvement compared to PCs from three years ago. It intends to bring AI within the reach of all businesses, but also looks to the world of system integrator and to those who offer IT services to multiple companies or work with the paradigm device as a service. In this case, its platform would constitute “an indispensable business opportunity if we want to remain competitive on the market, today and in the coming years, years in which it promises to be even more challenging and crowded”.
