Intel wants to be a global software leader

James Delahunty
10 Sep 2011 20:24

Intel VP sees company as leader in software as well as hardware.
Doug Fisher, Corporate Vice President, General Manager of the Software and Services Group's Systems Software Division, Intel Corporation, was speaking at Intel's Software Media Day on Thursday in San Francisco. He said the company had a challenge to get people to recognise it as a software company as well as a hardware company.

He singled out the consistency of Intel's architecture in the chipmaker's close relationship with industry partners who develop for everything from high-end servers to mobile platforms. Servers and high-performance systems can rely on Intel's Xeon microprocessors, while Intel's Core products power most of the world's PCs and laptops. For mobile users, there's Intel's Atom line.

He said that Intel has been involved in the development of software for the past 30 years, a lot of it directly from acquisitions. One of Intel's recent and most important acquisitions is McAfee, as Intel increases its focus in the area of system security.

"Software companies are reshaping the industry today," said Fisher, who said the company must support worldwide developers by continuing to provide developer tools, maining software developer training and education programs worldwide and through developer conferences and other direct engagement.

In his opening presentation he asked who is the world's fastest growing telecoms company? And the fastest growing recruiter? And the fastest growing book seller? "They are all software companies!".



Intel's global investment organization, Intel Capital, also announced on Thursday seven investments in software firms worth $24 million. They include five new investments and two follow-on investments. "The best computing experiences unite leading-edge hardware with amazing software," said Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and Intel executive vice president.

"These investments in best-of-breed software vendors play an integral part in Intel's software strategy by fueling the creation of compelling and unique user experiences across devices. They also demonstrate our stage-agnostic approach to investing in support of this ecosystem."

Intel's seven investments involve:

• DynamicOps - Based in Burlington, Mass., which provides an Operations Virtualization platform that enables enterprise IT to evolve existing infrastructure into on-demand private and public cloud services, achieving leading time-to-cloud and providing the ability to respond to market dynamics faster and more economically.
• enLighted - Based in Sunnyvale, California. It is helping transform commercial energy management by providing a solution that offers simple installation and maintenance-free operation. enLighted's application brings distributed people-aware intelligence to traditional lighting fixtures. Intel's vision is to support embedded companies like enLighted in the intelligent building market segment by providing comprehensive open-source embedded software and hardware to accelerate deployment of embedded solutions.
• IP Commerce - Based in Denver - IP Commerce enables application developers to create customized, intelligent multi-channel commerce applications and payment workflows that give retailers enhanced opportunities to interact with customers. IP Commerce is aligned with Intel's compute continuum strategy by allowing developers to embed rich payment functionality in applications that can run on billions of connected devices.
• Guavus - Based in Santa Clara, California. It is a real-time analytics provider, providing solutions for timely decision-making on big data for Fortune 1000 enterprises.
• Swrve New Media - Based in San Francisco. It is a social gaming company, that provides game personalization and testing for social games that redefine the relationship between game makers and game players. Swrve's real-time personalization allows design, product and marketing teams to continually test and adjust their games in the cloud, maximizing engagement across an unlimited range of players.
• Gaikai - Based in Los Angeles. It is a cloud gaming service that streams 3D video games directly to an end-user's web browser.
• Revolution Analytics - Based in Palo Alto, California. It is a leading commercial provider of software and services based on the open source "R" project for statistical computing.