Electronic Data Systems (EDS) this week will detail what it calls "hands-off automation" of desktop PC management.
The new offering, dubbed Agile Workplace Services, is designed to handle everything in the PC lifecycle from procurement to management and to reduce the costs of managing PCs, according to Kim Stevenson, vice president of the desktop and mobility group at EDS.
"We are trying to take the desktop management process and put governance across the spectrum, so at the IT manager level all the pieces are connected," Stevenson said.
Stevenson explained that through a virtual model, tasks such as purchasing, pricing, provisioning, and management of desktop services including software installations, data migrations, desktop builds, upgrades, and patch distributions, can be accomplished with minimal action by tech support reps.
For instance, EDS can "drizzle" a user's PC image and data across a network to end-users, so that migrating to a new PC or updating applications is easier on both the IT side and the user side.
Robert McNeill, a senior analyst at Forrester Research said that automating the entire PC lifecycle is the direction that other services providers, namely IBM and Hewlett-Packard, are moving as well.
McNeill added that three factors currently make outsourcing desktop services low-risk and practicable now: client management tools have become mature, network bandwidth is fatter so customers can touch more corporate desktops on the network than ever before, and compression technologies allow for faster sending of packets, such as software patches, around the network.
"Totally hands-off automation -- there will always be a certain amount of field services engineers needed," McNeill said.
EDS said that Microsoft will incorporate the desktop management code into a future release of SMS Server.
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