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Intel Plans Enterprise Platform Brand
By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 4/24/2006
SAN FRANCISCO -- Marshalling its forces against an increasingly bothersome threat by rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel today pulled together three of its most recent enterprise technology initiatives under a single brand umbrella it is calling VPro, aimed at IT and automating enterprise management.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s CEO Paul Otellini announced the new platform at an event here today.
“VPro helps us reinvent the business client,” said Otellini. The announcement comes at a time when Intel is facing a growing threat by AMD in the enterprise space. The smaller processor company has made penetration into the commercial/enterprise space its top priority this year.
Intel hopes the new brand can repeat the success of its Centrino platform launch which was aimed at the consumer market. And while marketing plans for the brand are similar, including VPro stickers on desktop computer products that incorporate the platform, Intel said the budget for the VPro campaign will not be as large as the Centrino budget because the enterprise audience is smaller than the consumer audience.
“It is not a broad campaign in the sense of Centrino, but we will have an active campaign, said Tom Kilroy, VP of the digital enterprise platform at Intel, during a question and answer session with members of the press. “We are building excitement and awareness in targeted way.”
The company plans a series of events between now and the platform launch in Q3 to familiarize enterprise customers with the platform’s capabilities. In addition, Intel will offer “seed” computers to enterprise customers now so that they can test the platform in their own enterprise environments.
VPro pulls in “three pillars,” Intel’s Active Management Technology, its security technologies which rely heavily on partitioning, and its new Core Microarchitecture to improve performance per watt.
Intel will bring the technology to the desktop first, with systems available in Q3. Then, in early 2007 the company will extend the platform to address mobile clients. Further out on the horizon Intel plans to introduce quad-core to the platform’s hardware environment and extend virtualization beyond the microprocessor to other parts of the system such as the hard drive and the input/output (I/O) of the PC, Otellini said.
Three pillars
The three “pillars” included in the VPro platform are designed to improve operational efficiency for IT organizations. The first pillar is the second generation of Intel’s Active Management Technology. Otellini noted that 87 percent of all business desktop problems can be addressed remotely, and that the remaining 13 percent – the desktop visits – account for half of the costs in the enterprise.
“We’ve put Active Management into the chipset,” said Greg Bryant, general manager of the digital enterprise platform at Intel, during the press question and answer session. That means that agents remain alive and functioning even if something has tried to shut them off. “It’s almost a low level firewall capability in the chipset.”
The second “pillar” is security, Otellini said. This piece of the VPro platform pulls from AMT and virtualization technology. Intel demonstrated an “embedded appliance” for security on the PC, so that even when the end user disables, for example, the firewall, the PC itself is still protected.
The third “pillar” of the new brand is energy efficient performance in the form of Intel’s new Core Microarchitecture, announced at the company’s recent Intel Developers Forum in March. Otellini said that Intel’s new Core Microarchitecture will be embodied in the desktop processor, code-named Conroe and set for release in Q3.
Conroe will offer twice the performance of a Pentium 4 and offer more than four times the energy efficiency in performance per watt than Pentium 4 devices available today, Otellini said.
All together, Intel is hoping the new brand will encourage IT buyers to recognize the value of its enterprise client platform.
“This gives them something to care about and go when they are thinking about replacing a desktop,” said Bryant. “’Do I buy the cheapest thing I can get’ or do we give them something to care about. We are giving them a reason to buy a professional PC and giving them a reason to upgrade.”
