Intel: Two-Thirds Of Firms Still Refreshing PCs
"If you bought a PC four years ago, YouTube wasn't even around. Facebook was a college campus product," said Rob Crooke, general manager of Intel's Business Client Group, presenting the results of the study earlier this week. "The world in which PCs are being used today, with hi-def video and other new technologies, is dramatically different than what it was when these PCs were being bought."
The study, conducted by Wipro Product Strategy and Services in March and released this week, surveyed CIOs and equivalent IT decision makers at 106 companies in North America and Europe. Companies surveyed had at least 25 percent of their PC fleet represented by notebooks, while North American organizations in the study maintained at least 5,000 PCs overall and European firms possessed at least 2,500 PCs.
Crooke said about 60 percent of the companies surveyed are refreshing their client PC fleets at the same rate they maintained before the economic crisis became undeniable toward the end of 2008. A small percentage of companies -- less than 10 percent -- were actually accelerating their refresh patterns, he said.
In addition to new media applications that required more up-to-date hardware, security, energy efficiency and cost-of-ownership concerns were key drivers in companies' decisions to keep refreshing PCs, Crooke said.
Rapid ROI turnarounds on server technology " such as Intel's new Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 series multicore processors, which the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker promises will deliver a payback on the upfront investment in less than eight months when the new chips are used to replace older, single-core servers -- may not be possible for client systems, Crooke said, but certain ROI scenarios come pretty close.
Companies that deploy new PCs to replace four-year-old systems can reduce their operational costs by 50 percent, he said, breaking that down to a 52 percent potential savings on maintaining desktops and a 48 percent savings for notebooks. The annual cost of supporting individual desktop and mobile PCs increases by 59 percent in year four of their deployment against year one, according to the study, as the expense of repairing, securing and replacing parts in older PCs starts to creep over the $600-per-system mark for desktops and the $1,100 mark for notebooks.
The upshot is that adopting a three-year refresh rate instead of a four-year rate would save a "typical company" -- one with 20,000 desktops and 11,000 notebooks under management -- some $3 million in that span. According to Intel, moving to PCs built on its Core 2 processors would deliver ROI in 17 months to the typical company.
And Intel says the numbers get even better if you refresh with Intel's baked-in system management hardware, vPro. Crooke said companies refreshing with vPro-flavored Core 2 systems can look forward to ROI in just 10 months -- a number approaching the heady promises on the server side.
"There's a great opportunity here. Any good crisis should not be wasted, as they say," Crooke said.
Given the higher-than-anticipated 6.1 percent plunge in the U.S. GDP for the first quarter, it would seem that there's still plenty of crisis left to not get wasted.