Why are organizations like the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and BPCL replacing their PCs every four years? And why do most companies opt for laptops when doing a PC refresh? If the results of a recent study are to be believed, Indian enterprises can save up to Rs 1,00,000 per year by refreshing old desktop PCs. The cost savings accrued are mainly from reduced maintenance costs and productivity gains.

Citing a recent study by Wipro, Pat Gelsinger, Senior VP and GM, Digital Enterprise Group, Intel, said, “Companies can save roughly Rs 98,377 in terms of productivity gains and power savings by switching from old desktops to laptops.”

Pat Gelsinger

The Wipro study polled 50 Indian companies having an average of 6,861 employees, 3,609 desktop PC users and 1,184 laptop PC users. It claims that Rs 92,935 can be gained through increased productivity by shifting from old to new and faster PCs. In addition, shifting from desktop to notebook can save Rs 1,892 per PC per year in power bills. Switching to laptops also results in eliminating the need for UPS, thereby providing an additional savings of Rs 3,550 in UPS capital and running costs—a total saving of Rs 5,442.

 “At Intel, we have moved nearly 95 percent of our employees on to notebooks which has resulted in significant benefits,” Gelsinger said.

The Wipro research suggests that nearly 50 percent of respondents feel that new applications, service packs, updates and patches are the major reasons for increase in maintenance effort every year. Over 25 percent of the companies polled said they experience increasing number of hardware and software failures as the PC ages.

Just over half of the survey respondents felt that security incidents increased with the age of a PC. Of these, all attributed the cause of frequent security incidents to older systems being under-powered to run new security protocols and running older operating systems. About 73 percent attributed this to patches left unresolved, while 40 percent said that the older configurations missed regression testing thus making the PC vulnerable. And 27 percent said it was because of downloads.

To drive his point home, Intel also presented customer case studies of the BSE and BPCL. Anjan Choudhury, CTO, BSE said, “At BSE, we have taken a decision to refresh desktops and laptops every four years with a warranty for the whole period from the manufacturer so that cost of ownership is minimized. We are going ahead with refresh as usual as it will help us increase employee productivity and meet the demands of new resource hungry applications. We are also getting some price advantage in buying hardware now compared to the past.”

Anil Kumar Kaushik, GM, IT, BPCL, shared that replacing desktops with notebooks and having a vPro enabled PC fleet has helped the company become more cost efficient. “Since the past two years, we have decided to replace all old desktops with notebooks. Presently we have 7,000 nodes, of which one-third are notebooks. Of these clients, nearly 20 percent are vPro enabled which has helped reduced our maintenance and service costs substantially.”

Kaushik said it costs BPCL $30 (approx. Rs 1,500) to service one on-premise maintenance call. “Being an organization with a vast geographical spread, our estimated cost per service call is close to Rs 1,500 as it requires the engineer to travel to the upcountry location. Add to that the cost of downtime. Intel’s vPro platform has allowed us to reduce that cost substantially as it allows remote management,” he added.