PlumChoice Taps Intel vPro To Deliver Remote Services

Company:

Headquarters: Billerica, Mass.

Technology Sector: Services

Key Product: PlumChoice SafeLink

Year Founded: 2001

Number of Channel Partners: Initiating channel program

Ideal Channel Partner: Small-business-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: PlumChoice offers high-margin incremental revenue opportunities for VARs at a time when service-oriented offerings provide a safety margin against slowing hardware sales.

The Lowdown: PlumChoice's latest offering is a basic managed-IT-services-by-proxy setup for VARs that either don't have their own managed services practice or are finding the one they do have tough to sustain. The company began as a tech support call center but has built up its ability to do remote system repair and maintenance thanks to advances in its own and vendor partners' technology platforms, said CEO and founder Ted Werth.

"The company was founded eight years ago because I had to help my father with his computer problems over the phone, and it never worked. I realized there was a better way and an opportunity to deliver better support in the market," Werth said. "And as a result, we've developed a great practice of solving problems remotely. The numbers speak for themselves -- 91 percent of the time we solve a problem on the first call, 95 percent of problems are solved remotely and, best of all, we've got 96 percent customer satisfaction."

PlumChoice's strategic partnerships include alliances with AT&T, McAfee and OfficeMax. But a new leveraging of Intel's latest vPro technology has the company actively seeking VARs to partner with in delivering remote IT services to small businesses. Intel's Remote PC Assist technology, built into the latest vPro platform for commercial PCs, is the basis of PlumChoice's extended SafeLink platform for out-of-band system management.

"We do 95 percent remote fixes for homes and small businesses, but we can also do on-site service delivery all across the country," Werth said. "All of our service people are certified, background-checked, drug-checked, etc., and we record 100 percent of all our remote processes."

PlumChoice puts together point products in a service package with an ongoing subscription that channel partners can sell to their own customers. And Werth has some advice for VARs mainly working with commercial customers -- don't miss out on growing opportunities to sell to home users.

"In a down economy, people are looking for entertainment. In the old days, they'd go to the movies, but now they're staying home to get cheap entertainment on the Internet. They're not necessarily buying new computers right now, but they're willing to spend a little bit more on services to keep what they've got running," he said.