By Charles King. Pund-IT, Inc. February 11, 2015
Dell announced it has extended its flagship ProSupport Plus support service to PCs and tablets. Via its SupportAssist technology, Dell said that it is the first and only company in the industry to offer proactive and predictive automated support for issue prevention and resolution for end-user systems. The complete solution is designed to provide maximum support with minimal customer effort.
According to Dell, ProSupport Plus for PCs and tablets combines everything needed in a single offer, including:
- In-region 24×7 priority access to ProSupport engineers with deep hardware and software expertise
- Proactive and predictive automated support enabled by Dell’s SupportAssist monitoring technology
- Self-service case management and parts dispatch via Dell’s TechDirect portal, mobile application or API
- Workflow management for support cases that enables customer and partner technicians to deliver proactive and predictive support with Dell
- Coverage for drops, spills and electrical surges to protect hardware investments
- Hard drive retention after replacement to ensure data control, and
- Dedicated Technical Account Managers who serve as a single point of accountability and provide monthly reporting for customers with 1,000 or more ProSupport Plus systems.
ProSupport Plus is now available in 66 countries around the globe for Dell Latitude, OptiPlex, Precision, Vostro, XPS, Venue and Chromebook products.
The pitch
Dell’s ProSupport Plus is the industry’s first proactive and predictive automated support service to extend from the data center to the desktop.
Final analysis
Support services for PCs and tablets are a headache in the best of times, but the potential migraines resulting from supporting thousands or tens of thousands of employee endpoints would be enough to drive a score of Apple Genius Bars into intensive care. So how Dell can effectively and cost effectively deliver such a service, as it is now doing with ProSupport Plus, is well-worth considering.
Dell’s ProSupport Plus for PCs and tablets rests on three pillars, two of them fairly common and one less so. The first is Intelligence in the form of health checks, system maintenance processes and proactive recommendations that Dell performs and shares with enterprise customers’ IT organizations. The second relies on the Expertise of deeply knowledgeable engineers who ProSupport Plus customers can contact 24/7/365, as well as dedicated technical account managers assigned to work with customers that have 1,000 or more Dell PCs, laptops and/or tablets.
The third pillar is the “secret sauce” Technology behind Dell ProSupport Plus – the SupportAssist system that monitors customers’ PCs and tablets, assesses their condition and makes proactive and predictive recommendations to ensure that endpoints continue working properly and effectively. Dell isn’t the only IT vendor that leverages proactive/predictive technologies. In fact, such offerings are relatively common in data center solutions.
But Dell’s ProSupport Plus is the only service that utilizes such technologies for PCs and tablets. Given the increasingly critical role that employee endpoints play in business, as well as the increasing stress and strain such devices (particularly mobile laptops and tablets) are subjected to, it’s hard to imagine ProSupport Plus being anything but happily welcomed among Dell’s business clients. With that in mind, it seems odd that other business endpoint vendors haven’t pursued or enabled similar services.
While we expect Dell and its customers to do very well with ProSupport Plus today, it’s also worth considering the service’s longer term applications. For example, it is arguable that an enterprise with thousands, tens of thousands or tens of thousands of desktop, laptop and tablet clients qualifies as a scale model of future Internet of Things (IoT) environments with orders of magnitude more sensors and other intelligent endpoints.
From that perspective, what Dell is achieving with ProSupport Plus now, especially its automated, proactive, predictive SupportAssist technologies, could well lay the groundwork for solutions supporting future IoT environments. For the time being, as PCs, laptops, tablets and other computing endpoints continue to evolve and propagate in companies of every kind, we expect Dell and ProSupport Plus to be in close attendance, helping to ensure that those organizations’ employee endpoints perform at their very best.
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