The Total Economic Impact™ Of The Intel vPro® Platform As An Endpoint Standard: Spotlight On Resellers

Intel commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview seven representatives from five organizations and survey 500 respondents and conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with using the Intel vPro platform as an endpoint standard.¹ Alongside this analysis, Forrester Consulting also conducted two additional interviews with representatives from Intel vPro reseller partners to better understand the value proposition of reselling, activating, and delivering services around Intel vPro.

This abstract will focus on these partners’ experiences building and going to market with an Intel vPro practice. The interviewees from these partners include:

• A program manager of a large North American systems integrator that resells and delivers consulting and activation services around Intel vPro.
• A senior consultant at a small European reseller focused on volume reselling devices with intel vPro hardware.

Resellers and system integrators play a pivotal role in distributing and activating Intel vPro devices, enabling greater efficiency, security, and manageability for customers across industries. Intel vPro technology encompasses a suite of features designed to streamline IT management, enhance security, and improve overall system performance. Partners unlock these benefits by leveraging tools such as Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT), Intel® Endpoint Management Assistant (Intel® EMA), and other Intel vPro platform tools and features, which enable remote access, monitoring, and troubleshooting of vPro-enabled devices.

Because most customers are either unaware of the option of activating their vPro devices or lack the skills to do so, partners can capitalize on a significant and growing opportunity starting with their existing vPro customers. These partners can generate revenue through several activities, including reselling vPro devices and delivering consulting, activation, and managed services around the additional remote management and security capabilities native to Intel EMA and AMT.

Partnership Drivers

The interviewees’ from partner organizations shared several motivations that led to adopting the Intel vPro platform as their endpoint standard for their customers. Key priorities for these organizations included:

• Becoming a trusted security partner. With cyberthreats growing in sophistication and frequency, businesses seek robust security measures to protect their sensitive data and infrastructure. Intel vPro’s hardware-based security features, such as Intel Hardware Shield, offer advanced threat detection and mitigation capabilities, making it an attractive option for partners looking to fulfill their clients’ security needs. By aligning themselves with Intel vPro, partners differentiated themselves as trusted advisors capable of implementing security guardrails not only at the software level, but also at the hardware level.
• Facilitating digital transformation. Intel vPro’s remote management capabilities, facilitated by tools like Intel AMT, empowered the interviewees’ partners to offer value-added services such as remote troubleshooting, software updates, and system diagnostics. By enabling clients to centralize management tasks and minimize downtime, the interviewees noted their partners helped businesses achieve greater efficiency and agility, driving down operational costs while enhancing overall performance. As a result, resellers and service providers could position themselves as indispensable allies in the journey towards digital transformation, leveraging Intel vPro technology as a cornerstone of their service offerings.
• Building net-new revenue streams. Interviewees’ partners offered comprehensive consulting and deployment services to help clients integrate vPro-enabled systems seamlessly into their existing IT infrastructure. This included assessing organizational needs, standing up an Intel EMA server, and providing hardware customization and performance tuning services to ensure that vPro-enabled devices met clients’ specific workload requirements and delivered maximum performance. The interviewees noted their partners also investigated the future potential for providing managed security or remote management services to further offload the burden from customer IT and security teams. A senior consultant at a European reseller said, “Our next step is offering managed services after activating vPro and we anticipate around 10% of our customers will be interested in this.”
• Creating brand differentiation. Offering expertise in deploying and configuring Intel vPro technology allowed the interviewees’ partners to differentiate themselves in the market by showcasing their proficiency in implementing advanced IT solutions that enhance efficiency, security, and performance at the hardware level. This differentiation helped partners attract new customers and opened potential downstream services opportunities with existing customers.

vPro Features

The Intel vPro platform includes both high-performance Intel® Core vPro® processors and several added tools and features for users and IT managers. With Intel Active Management Technology and Intel Endpoint Management Assistant, IT managers and help-desk representatives can use advanced management tools, such as enhanced remote access for managing devices and resolving issues, regardless of whether a person is at the device or if it is powered off.

In addition, Intel® Stable IT Platform Program (Intel SIPP) ensures application and hardware driver compatibility; this provides assurance that a new update will not lead to driver issues, which improves the rate of success for patch deployment. Intel® Hardware Shield mitigates the risk of firmware-level attacks to endpoint machines as well provides advanced threat detection and application with data security.

Key Results FOR PARTNERS

Benefits enabled by the Intel vPro platform for the interviewees’ partner organizations include the following:

• Higher average selling price. Devices with vPro installed had an average selling price that was over $200 higher than devices without vPro. For the interviewees’ partner organizations, this resulted in richer profit margins on just their hardware resale activities alone, without any services added. Furthermore, the security and manageability benefits of vPro bolstered the value proposition of devices, increasing market demand while creating a natural upsell opportunity for potential downstream services.

• Rich profit margins. In addition to enriching resale margins, vPro also generated attractive services margins, particularly for activation services related to standing up Intel EMA. Interviewees shared that these activation services were highly scalable and delivered fully remotely with limited resources, therefore generating gross profit margins of 50% or more for their organizations. Additionally, since most customers lacked the skill set to stand up EMA servers in-house, the interviewees’ partners were able to attach these services to their hardware sales without significantly driving up their customer acquisition costs.
• Wide addressable market. Interviewees noted their partners made minimal investments to stand up their Intel vPro practices, yet still managed to grow their businesses without significant sales and marketing investments. This is because these partners already acquired a large book of business from customers who purchased vPro devices but did not yet activate them. Because of this existing relationship, the interviewees’ partners could win business faster while reducing the need for guesswork and outbound outreach.

• Strengthened partnership with Intel. By actively promoting and delivering vPro activation services, the interviewees’ partner organizations strengthened their relationship with Intel. This collaboration allowed these partners to leverage Intel’s marketing support, comarketing funds, and training resources, which can lead to increased visibility, joint marketing opportunities, and access to potential customers.
• Expertise and differentiation. By developing expertise in vPro activation, the interviewees noted their partners established themselves as trusted advisors for customers seeking vPro-enabled devices and associated services. The ability to provide specialized knowledge and support in vPro activation set these partners apart from general technology providers and positioned them as a reliable and knowledgeable resource for broader IT and security needs. Consequently, the interviewees’ partner organizations uncovered many cross-sell opportunities after selling or servicing vPro devices, with as many as 70% of vPro opportunities resulting in potential cross-selling opportunities for adjacent or related security or IT products.