Device analytics – a source of intelligent management

Are you struggling to efficiently manage your device fleet? Alleviate the struggle with Ricoh’s device management capabilities. Understand how analytics can help proactively anticipate problems to maintain business continuity.

The view of IT as “just” a support organisation there to “keep the lights on” is ancient history. Today, IT is a change agent, a partner to the business, providing the new applications that will help the business grow profitably, while staving off competitive threats. But as long as IT retains responsibility for labour-intensive, traditional support roles for elements of the organisation’s resources, their ability to help stimulate business growth is compromised. This is why a range of “as-a-service” offerings have emerged to free IT from the burden of unproductive maintenance and support tasks.

The mobility of workers has increased the challenges of managing a fleet of potentially hundreds of devices geographically dispersed among an organisation’s offices as well as employees working from home, or a café, or from anywhere, at any time. These added complications have caused organisations to look at outsourcing as a strategic initiative. Rather than tie up highly-skilled and highly-paid IT resources being responsible for requisitions, approvals, procurement, day-to-day help desk support, and asset management, outsourcing enables an organisation to redirect IT attention to its core business and hire outside resources to handle non-strategic tasks.

One added business value that is not immediately obvious to customers deciding to engage with a service provider for end-user device management, is the substantial benefits resulting from device analytics and reporting. These are built into Ricoh’s device management capabilities, and are provided by HP software in their partnership with Ricoh for the end-user compute business.

Ricoh end-user device analytics and reporting

Ricoh’s device analytics and reporting use HP’s TechPulse product. The purpose of Ricoh’s device management and TechPulse is to help proactively anticipate problems and fix them before they occur. You can view device and OS health incidents and reports from the dashboard on the Ricoh device portal, or alternatively, you can select a plan with security and application reports and let Ricoh service experts monitor and manage it for you so that you could run your business smoothly while being stress free.

HP TechPulse analytics and reports include:

• On the software side, TechPulse provides reports on inventory, installation, utilisation, patching status and any usage errors.
• On the hardware side it provides insights down to the component level, including CPU and memory utilisation, thermal issues, remaining disk space, smart battery health and hard drive health.
• Additionally, device details such as OS version, manufacture date, location and warranty status can be provided.

The advantages that these reports provide are:

• TechPulse can help you optimise your IT environment to “predict the future”. It can predict when a battery or hard drive is likely to fail, or when a disk is nearing capacity. This allows you to proactively replace components before an issue develops.
  • Business benefit – eliminate/reduce unproductive user time
• By seeing reports that show the top 10 software applications used, you can determine whether applications with license charges are actually being used
  • Business benefit – eliminate the cost of unused license charges
• The reporting can identify over-utilised or under-utilised devices – perhaps some end-users could benefit from a higher-performing device while others could perform their tasks with lower-cost, less powerful devices
  • Business benefit – reduce the overall device fleet costs and maximise user productivity
• The reports can identify which applications are causing over-utilisation – this may be unsanctioned software which you can remove
  • Business benefit – each exception to the standard corporate image has the possibility to introduce security risks which are exceptionally bad for business
• You can monitor which devices aren’t running anti-virus software or firewalls
  • Business benefit – undetected viruses can easily lead to ransomware risks and data loss, both of which can lead to financial losses and damage to the business brand and reputation
• Reports highlight if a device is not responding
  • Business benefit – unused devices can be returned to the managed service provider to reduce the monthly OpEx charge. Lost devices can be remotely wiped to eliminate security risks. Conversely, analytics that show appropriate utilisation are a positive acknowledgement of the user’s productivity and contribution to the business

In Summary

You can see that with device management and the powerful analytics, Ricoh’s offering goes well beyond simply outsourcing repetitive, administrative tasks. It adds significant value by maximising device uptime, reducing downtime, maximising user productivity, and reducing costs.

So, if you’re struggling to manage your device fleet, let us show you how we can alleviate the struggle. Get in Touch with a Ricoh expert by clicking here.