Last week I attended a full-day briefing hosted by Intel, with presentations by Altiris, Symantec and Adobe. Intel showcased vPro, its new desktop architecture and branding (announced this week, available later in 2006), and these partners showed how it makes their products better. I found it particularly interesting that the new desktop will incorporate two key features that significantly shift the desktop management paradigm - second-generation Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and Intel Virtualization Technology (VT).

Intel AMT integrates a microcode-level "manageability engine" deeply into the chipset. Locally, it can monitor activity, such as the heartbeat of a local management agent, and automatically take remediation action. Remotely, external systems can communicate with the hardware to perform diagnosis and recovery actions such as installing, loading or restarting agents, diagnostic programs, drivers and even operating systems.

One vendor that is taking advantage of Intel AMT is Altiris. At the briefing, Altiris demonstrated live how an administrator, using a Web-based console, and regardless of the desktop's operational state (e.g. powered off, corrupted BIOS, no agent installed, etc.) could use the Altiris Resource Manager with a remote Intel AMT desktop to:

* Detect inventory information like the CPU, disk, network card, and tracking ID.

* Power on, power cycle, and reboot from either a local or remote image.

* Access the BIOS screen to change settings.

* Control the user operating system in a HyperTerminal window.

* Filter traffic to and from the network, blocking the ports at the local system.

According to an EDS pilot (conducted with Intel), this type of remote capability can reduce deskside visits by 50% for hardware problems, and 75% for software problems - enabling faster response and better uptime for end users, and major cost reduction and resource efficiencies for IT, in enterprises of almost any size.

Intel VT provides a lightweight virtual machine that sits on top of the hardware platform and underneath multiple virtualized operating systems. This allows a lightweight management application to run natively in a separate partition, insulated from the user operating system such as Windows or Linux.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.