The Wyse products have had their own specific support packages since they were acquired by Dell, but the increasing visibility of the Dell ProSupport brand, and the availability of some new services not previously available to Dell Wyse has led to the change.
Jim Roth, Dell’s Executive Director of the Support and Deployment Product Group
Today, Dell is announcing the availability of Dell Services and Support for Wyse Thin Clients. Since the acquisition of Wyse, its customers had been offered updated versions of the legacy support packages Wyse had made available previously. Now, the same services and support portfolio available on Dell’s data centre and device offerings – ProSupport, Accidental Damage Service and Deployment Services – are also available on Dell Wyse.
“The services and support we offer on Dell servers, storage and devices have not to date existed on Dell Wyse,” said Jim Roth, Dell’s Executive Director of the Support and Deployment Product Group. “There were support contracts available, but they were the legacy offerings from before we acquired them. From a services perspective, this brings them into the mainstream of Dell, and wraps our services around them.”
While Dell acquired Wyse back in 2012, Roth said the timing was right to do this now.
“They had good services in place, and so there was never a ton of urgency, but it was always the plan to do this,” he said. “Now was the time to bring it into the mainstream. The Wyse business has done very well and customers liked the products, but there also is increasing awareness of Dell’s own branded support products, and customers now expect ProSupport on them.”
ProSupport’s proactive support gets customers up and running sooner by phoning home, setting up a ticket and send diagnostic support itself when a problem takes place.
“ProSupport is the flagship,” Roth said. “Accidental Damage Service is a useful extension, which covers spilled liquids, drops, falls and other accidents.”
Roth said that while the compute in VDI products won’t be directly affected by damage, they don’t expect that to affect demand.
“People buy Accidental Damage for things like cracked screens, so the source of the compute isn’t as relevant,” he stated.
Deployment capability, which encompasses configuring BIOS settings, applying asset tags, and installing new systems into the environment, is a net new capability for Wyse support.
“This is something we are bringing to Wyse, for the first time, so that out of the box, there is no configuration work,” Roth said.
Dell Services and Support also provides 24×7 access to in-region technical support experts. They also handle third party collaborative software support like Microsoft Windows – and even products like Quicken – to provide ‘one-stop shop’ service.
Roth said that the issues in diagnosing problems with VDI products make them an especially good candidate for a support package.
“Because the compute isn’t in the endpoint device, the lines between the data centre and device can be blurry,” he said. “The customer can also think it’s an endpoint issue, when it could be configuration with the back end that is the problem. Having to bring in an engineer to sort it out would be more common on Wyse than on Latitude notebooks because of this need to figure out where the problem is.”
Roth said that ProSupport these days is seldom specific to a particular use case, and he expects this to be consistent with Dell Wyse.
“More and more we see customers want to blanket their whole environment with ProSupport, especially in a mission-critical environment,” he said.
Roth also indicated that he expects the attach rate for support on VDI thin clients to be similar to those on other endpoint devices.
