* IBM offers desktop management and maintenance
IBM Global Services last week brought a new dimension to the pay-as-you-go outsourcing model by launching a new offering targeted at an often-overlooked professional services market: desktop management.
Big Blue unveiled a bundled offering called IBM Workplace on demand services that will let enterprises hire IBM Global Services to manage the acquisition and management of PCs, printers, copiers, fax machines and mobile devices for a single monthly service fee. The outsourced service could cut customers’ desktop management costs by as much as 30%, the company said.
In many companies, the acquisition and maintenance of devices such as copiers and fax machines is handled on a departmental level, which means that the enterprise often acquires a mix of technology and cannot take advantage of volume discounts or maintenance agreements that might cut costs. PC and mobile device acquisition and management usually are more structured, but the cost of local administration may still be high.
Under Workplace on demand services, IBM Global Services proposes to consolidate all of these acquisition and management efforts, enabling enterprises to outsource desktop devices and office machine maintenance efforts. Under the service, IBM will acquire, install and maintain PCs, printers, copiers, fax machines and mobile devices for all of the enterprise’s sites as needed, then send the enterprise a single monthly bill.
However, the new services initially focus primarily on IBM devices. Workplace on demand services essentially bundle Big Blue’s current service offerings for IBM notebooks, desktops and printers with existing consulting services that help enterprises consolidate printing and other output devices, manage wireless devices, and streamline PC acquisition processes. In essence, Workplace on demand services simply bundle a variety of offerings that IBM previously offered separately.
IBM officials said that the Workplace on demand services are analogous to the company’s on-demand services for the data center, in which IBM Global Services offers a single, pay-as-you-go resource for acquisition and maintenance of computing power, then sends the customer a monthly bill.
However, the analogy is flawed. The chief advantage of outsourced, on-demand data center services is that they enable enterprises to pool expensive server resources with other users and draw them on an as-needed basis, much as they would with a power utility. But in the desktop environment, IBM is offering no such pooling of resources – only a consulting service that helps streamline and rationalize the acquisition and maintenance of end user devices.
This is not to say that IBM Workplace on demand services might not be valuable. Indeed, there has been significant research that indicates the cost of supporting a device – whether it is a copier or a high-end PC – generally surpasses the cost of purchasing that device within the first year or two. Estimates on the cost of maintaining the average PC range from $2,000 to $5,000 per year. By consolidating those costs, and implementing a structured method for maintenance, enterprises could gain significant savings.
IBM’s use of the term “on demand services,” however, could confuse many enterprise IT executives, who are still struggling to put some meaning behind phrases such as “utility computing” and IBM’s own autonomic computing initiative. These terms, which are targeted at lowering data center costs by taking an advantage of a more efficient infrastructure, do not map well to the end user environment, where devices are generally not shared.
The IBM Workplace services could be valuable to enterprises, but the company’s liberal use of the “on demand” term could cause it to lose meaning. Outsourcing services for the desktop and outsourcing services for the data center clearly are in separate categories, and outsourcing providers should continue to position them that way.
