What are the main technology trends that Intel is looking at?
A key trend is Big Data. Globally, as well as in India, data is growing exponentially in volumes. It has become a route of competitive edge for all enterprises. Data is almost doubling up in every two years. Two years ago, it was more or less the structured data that was growing. Today, it’s the turn of unstructured data; which accounts for about 80-90% of the total. Along with the explosion in data, devices that are used to capture data are also transforming. For instance, today, corporate executives, capture data using smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks and so on. The composition of data also has several dimensions such as volume, velocity and variety. This poses tremendous challenges for infrastructure development in terms of capturing this data and making it into meaningful information, which is the primary need to achieve competitiveness.
The other mega trend is the Internet, which has become all-pervasive and powering all industries. The third is Cloud, which has been adopted in many formats by the industry. These trends are posing a series of challenges, exerting pressure on the back-end infrastructure. It has to be more agile, more secure and the kind of sizes you talked about in the earlier days do not work any longer.
So what are Intel’s plans to tap these trends? How are you helping enterprises manage these?
Intel is an innovative company in terms of the ability to anticipate such trends and respond to emerging needs. Globally, and in India, we are working with corporates, so that we learn from each other and deploy technologies that are cost-effective and meet performance needs, flexibility and ability. We are coming out with technologies that are not just measured in terms of performance and energy efficiency. We have complete solutions to address emerging challenges such as security, energy management, reducing latency and the storage. Security has become the key pillar of computing and has become all the more pervasive – be it in a chip software. Another area we focus on is product innovation. The servers that are coming upon Intel platforms are giving almost 50% more performance than the previous generations. At the same time, you can increase energy efficiency by 50%.
What are your innovations on security?
When the data was having only volume, we used to talk security as an anti-virus solution or so to address security needs. Today, security has become all-pervasive so the way we treat security has changed much. To deal with these emerging needs, Intel has incorporated more security into the hardware. To strengthen authentication, we have the Identification protection technology (IPT), which provides several critical built-in defences including embedded one-time password, embedded public key infrastructure, protected transaction display and so on. Similarly, we have an asset-protection technology to safeguard data on stolen devices. Security is so important in a virtualised environment since a malware attack on one application can really infect other applications as well. We are coming out with what we call a trusted execution technology to manage security in a virtualized environment.
What is Intel’s vision on Cloud for the future?
Cloud adoption is rapidly growing everywhere. Apart from public sector enterprises such as IRCTC, we are also seeing Cloud adoption in the corporate sectors such as banking, manufacturing, equities and energy. As far as the infrastructure of Cloud is concerned, we see more private Cloud adoption among Indian enterprises. However, service sector companies are adopting public Cloud. When you are building infrastructure on a Cloud environment, you need to be aware of the device it is being accessed on. Though series of conversations with vendors, analysts and customers, Intel has identified key themes that emerge as critical to what customers want from Cloud computing infrastructures and solutions.
Therefore, Intel has three main components for our Cloud initiatives. Our Cloud computing is federated, automated and client-aware. To enable it, there should be efficiency, simplification and security built on open, interoperable solutions that embrace standards. Intel is working directly with leaders in global IT providers and is an advisor to the Open Data Center Alliance, which focuses on delivering next-generation data centre and Cloud requirements. The alliance will define a roadmap for the highest priority usage models for Cloud and next-generation data centres and lay out requirements to address with multi-vendor, interoperable solutions. Intel responds to these usage models and others that we identify through our end-user engagements to deliver products and technologies that meet requirements of usage models.