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Remotely Managing Expensive Field Equipment

Equipment manufacturers are realizing a significant opportunity to reduce support costs relating to field equipment by leveraging remotely monitoring and managing capabilities.

MRIs and other medical devices, industrial control systems, robotic machines, digital signage equipment, and other expensive field equipment require on-site health checks, software updates, and on-site expertise to verify the updates are correct. Newly available technologies provide OEMs solutions to lower their support costs by leveraging remote health monitoring, automated updates and remote connectivity — OEMs do not have to invent these solutions, but leverage the latest technological tools available on the market.

Monitoring and management solutions can function as a gateway managing a group of equipment from a centralized location, from a device connected to the equipment, or even from software on the equipment itself. Various solutions that provide value to these OEMs are geared at fully-integrated and locked-down appliances with management agents or software agents installed directly.

According to Claire Ortega, senior services product manager at NEI, “Many OEMs are experts in their respective disciplines, but may not be experts in appliances or remote agent solutions. Consider new developments versus legacy equipment. With new, you can create the right computing capabilities to install the agent on the equipment. With legacy and already deployed equipment, you can reduce support costs using an attached appliance to manage a unit or multiple units.”




So how do end users benefit from these remotely managed and self-contained solutions?

“By controlling and automating approved updates and alerting on failing field replaceable units, the system remains highly available,” Claire continued. “…for legacy equipment, they plug an appliance in, connect it to the device to manage, run a quick set up wizard, and are up and running. In this new era of lowering IT resources, companies have little time to spend installing and configuring complex solutions as well as managing them.”

With more emphasis in IT infrastructure efficiencies, these remote management capabilities allow OEMs to provide significant value ultimately to the end user. IT

Jeff Hudgins is vice president of product management at NEI Inc. (www.nei.com).

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