Lenovo debuts enhanced SaaS tool for smarter PC fleet management

Lenovo has unveiled Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus, a new enhanced version of its cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) device health management tool.

With this move, the company extends its commitment to and footprint in the Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) space.

"DEM solutions such as Lenovo's give enterprises the means to make data-driven business decisions to help optimise helpdesk costs while increasing employee productivity and satisfaction," the company says.

"Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus is specifically designed to take advantage of Lenovo's unique position as a leading technology provider for commercial IT teams. After surveying customers to understand their largest unsolved IT pains, Lenovo developed an advanced predictive analytics solution with a flexible, extensible architecture and enhanced security," it explains.

Lenovo Device Intelligence, unveiled last September, assists enterprise-level IT administrators in the monitoring, diagnosing and remediation of PC issues while leveraging Lenovos AI predictive analytics to help predict potential system failures or performance issues before they occur.

The new Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus solution carries over Lenovo's signature AI-driven predictive analytics and adds even more proactive device insights and increased functionality to drive better business outcomes.

The tool collects 10,000 data points every 15 seconds from each device, allowing it to monitor millions of aggregated data points across the fleet in real time. Then it reports on device health trends and provides deep root-cause analytics, quantifies end-user productivity impacts driven by IT resource constraints and gives valuable insights to inform decisions such as hardware and software investment right-sizing for better business outcomes. All this can greatly help a company optimise its support costs, increase end-user productivity and improve overall end-user experience.

When developing Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus, Lenovo worked with Lakeside Software, an industry leader in the DEM space. By integrating Lakesides solution with Lenovos own predictive analytics software, Lenovo has built a solution that provides a wider set of analytics and more tools to drive actionable insights and proactively impact service operations.

Remote management challenges in IT

Managing a large fleet of PCs can be challenging even in the best of times. Of course, that challenge has been accelerated by the pandemic, which caused an explosion in the number of people working remotely. Many trends of this era--including employees working more from home--are likely to stick around for the long-term as offices become more of a hybrid business centre.

The impact has been felt by IT professionals seeking to diagnose and mitigate common and sometimes systemic PC health and performance issues. As more is demanded of IT professionals, they find themselves looking for ways to automate tasks to keep up.

"Our predictive analytics engine applies machine and deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) models to an organizations environment to help predict common end-user pain points such as blue screens of death, hardware failures such as HDD/SSD and batteries, and applications that can cause performance degradation issues," Lenovo says.

"As the models become richer and more sophisticated with more data, the technology learns and gets smarter over time, being able to predict issues with greater accuracy."

Enhanced tools for resolving issues

Lenovo says it designed the Lenovo Device Intelligence platform to help IT professionals better monitor the health and performance of both Lenovo Think-branded and third-party PCs.1 Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus builds on Lenovo Device Intelligences advanced predictive analytics, proactive insights and alerts, robust reports and fleet health scoring. It also adds enhanced insights, alerts, reports, analytics, and more options to execute issue remediations. For deeper insight into PC health, it features productivity impact assessments driven by IT resource constraints, root cause issue analyses, and peer benchmark comparisons.  It also features user experience scoring, asset optimisation insights and more.

Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus gives IT organisations capabilities to:

• Monitor and assess with real-time sensor monitoring of millions of datapoints for broader visibility into fleet health and productivity impacts
• Predict and prevent, optimising support and increasing employee uptime and productivity
• Analyse and resolve, swiftly mitigating issues and improving key Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) metrics
• Optimise and improve to keep fleets running at peak performance and improve the employee experience with technology that fits a business needs

Impact of predictive analytics

When a large organisation begins leveraging predictive analytics, the impact can be enormous. A 2017 McKinsey study concluded that predictive analytics can drive a 10-40 percent reduction in IT maintenance costs and a 30-50 percent reduction in device downtime.

Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus uses S.M.A.R.T. insights to prevent battery and SSD failures2 while also mitigating performance degradation issues such as system slowdowns and crashes. Based on Lenovo internal testing, LDI Plus has, on average, an 85 percent accuracy rate in predicting the most common blue screen of death failures before they happen.3 The Lenovo Device Intelligence deep learning model has also proven itself to be more than 90% accurate at pinpointing current and new applications that cause performance degradation.4

 Strict data privacy protection

Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus is built on a multi-layered security stack with strict data privacy policies. It follows industry best practices and takes a stringent approach to protecting sensitive customer data. Protection measures include:

• Individual tenants so each customers data is partitioned and kept completely separate
• Hosted multi-region tenants ensure compliance with regional data privacy requirements
• More secure, encrypted APIs
• Web-app firewall providing IP/domain whitelisting, attack monitoring and intrusion detection
• Strict user access policies