Transcript: Intel Introduces New Brand vPro with Podcast from Tom Kilroy Intel's VP Digital Enterprise Platform Group

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.PodTech.net/?p=538

Intel Introduces New Brand vPro with Podcast from Tom Kilroy Intel's VP Digital Enterprise Platform Group

Host: Welcome to the PodTech.net Intel briefing with Tom Kilroy, who's the Vice President of the Intel Digital Enterprise group. Welcome to the podcast.

Tom Kilroy: Thank you, good to be here.

Host: We're here in San Francisco at the Ritz Carlton, you guys are having a big event here. Intel's got a big announcement going out the door today around the enterprise, and you've got other big companies here, EDS and Symantec, talk about the enterprise environment. Everything is going digital?? Sean Maloney did a podcast with us at Sundance, he says, "no-brainer, everything is going digital. It's a digital world!"

Talk about the announcement that Intel is doing with the enterprise today.

Tom Kilroy: Well, it's an exciting announcement. Our very first enterprise platform brand, and it's all about delivering greater value to the enterprise. Not just the end user, who's going to have a great experience relative to the performance of the platform, but IT. We're enhancing the security of the platform, building in management into the chipset, up to 40% greater performance and 40% greater power efficiency.

Host: You manage the platform group of people within Intel, who look at the enterprise, that's all they do is talk about the enterprise. How is the enterprise changed. Honestly, you guys have been on the chair as a company, you've got the dual core architecture out there, and a slew of announcement from CES on. It's a new world for Intel. Talk about that from an enterprise perspective.

Tom Kilroy: Well, before I talk about that, let's change. I'll say one thing that hasn't been changed is the fact that 80% of IT dollars is still spent on maintaining the enterprise as opposed to new applications that are going to help differentiate and make more competitive. That's a problem, and that's exactly what we're talking about here today and how we're going to address that, in terms of reducing the total cost of ownership, allowing IT to focus more strategically, not having to employ their own personnel to do deskside visits.

So this is a big breakthrough to kind of address something that's been a problem for some time. As far as new opportunities go, there's clearly voice over IP, television over IP is more of a consumer ploy, but small business Voice-over-IP is becoming a much bigger play, and technology like dual core can help enable, obviously, much greater performance for applications like that.

It also offers us a unique opportunity with this platform here today to really take advantage of virtualization, to have a service partition that will be totally transparent to the user, where IT can go in and do some analysis, brake fix, while the user can go on doing what they want to do uninterrupted.

Host: Let's talk about the innovation around here. You mentioned virtualization. virtualization technology has been out for a while now, and it's been heralded as a kind of great tool, but now a lot of new examples are being seen. Talk about specifically these kinds of innovations in this announcement and the impact of that.

Tom Kilroy: virtualization has been out for a little while. We've announced virtualization with our server platform and our desktop platforms for some time, but again we now have an application with vPro technology, and we're here with many software vendors today. It really enhances their capability now to securely deploy their software in this partition, which is a virtualized partition. So now that as a usage model, if you will, for virtualization, very relevant to the desktop client. So, it's allowing greater flexibility for IT to be again deploying a service while not interrupting the user, and our ISVs can do this securely, whereas in the past there was too much risk with that.

Host: So, also you talk about security too. You're here with EDS and Symantec, two really known players in the industry. Intel's doing a lot of...getting a lot of support, if you will, from other companies, and it's into the platform. Is this the future of how platforms are being built these days, by reining in these third parties, and how has that changed.

Tom Kilroy: We think so. What we're doing is hardware enablement. We're working to help our ISV partners to have more robust applications, and by having hardware enabled features, there is the example I just mentioned relative to the virtualization, it's really unleashing the full capabilities of their applications, so we see this as certainly a trend of the future. A lot of collaboration with the applications providers as well as the service providers that are now going to be able to take the vPro technology, use that as a way to remotely deploy the services to businesses that they have.

Host: We're here with Tom Kilroy who is the Vice President of Intel's Digital Enterprise group, who runs the whole team, runs the platform around digital enterprise. Talk about the environment out there from a customer's perspective. Talk about your customers and users. You had big enterprises, traditionally had a certain way of doing things with certain technologies that you had. Small businesses, small, medium sized businesses which have grown from having internet connection to a couple servers to basically now being in essence their own big, little companies. How has the lines between small and medium sized businesses in enterprise changed or blurred in the needs of those customers. Is it true that they are kind of the same now?

Tom Kilroy: I think that's a great question. To some degree, the small businesses don't have the resources, they don't have the same IT capability that an enterprise would have. Yet, the risks they might have relative to viruses or security issues, are the same. Very much is important in small businesses as a large enterprise. So, I think there the lines are blurred. It's how are these addressed.

Now, our platforms I mentioned earlier for enterprise, is a great means for IT to do a better, more efficient job of servicing, managing the client without having to deploy expensive resources. In small business, this is a great opportunity which is why there are so many service providers here today, for them to offer enhanced level of service using this platform, so that small business can benefit from the same features that an enterprise would.

Host: Some of the things you talk about in your announcement today, although really geared towards the high enterprise, big enterprises. Actually benefits to small/medium sized enterprises just the same because they don't have IT departments.

Tom Kilroy: Great examples that with vPro technology there's a constant streaming of data. So if you have a hard drive, an optional hard drive, you can stream this data constantly through vPro technology, and what this will do is essentially act as fault tolerant for disaster recoveries, which are very much of an enterprise requirement.

Host: What kind of feedback did you get from the large enterprises? Obviously they have huge development teams. Some have in house development teams, you guys had developed the platform. When you talk to the large enterprises, what have you heard and how has this announcement come out, have we delivered to them?

Tom Kilroy: Well, I think what I most frequently hear from the large enterprise, including yesterday when I heard from a couple CIOs is "You're helping break through this last 20% of the problem." Because again, with the software technologies that have been in place with the ISV, we're building upon and trying to get to that last mile of solving the problem. For example, asset management and being able to see what's on the network, and have a sense of knowing the security that they're trying to implement either through our platform or around our platform, is an effect.

Host: So these new brands really hit the mark for the production environments of the enterprise in terms of managing assets, also taking care of the uptime in terms of viruses, et cetera.

Tom Kilroy: It's a real time environment, and they're dealing with it every day. Viruses are something that's a way of life, 24 hours a day. And again, tracking the assets, there's mobile users coming in and out, new clients being deployed on a regular basis, and one of the beauties of Intel is stable image platform program, we've had it for four years now, this is just building on that. So, the reliability of a single image that can be guaranteed in an enterprise globally for a one year period is just a big breakthrough for IT.

Host: You guys have been doing amazing work, and this is just an accumulation of new technology over the years. You manage the group with the platform, you have that 20 mile stare, you got to look out into the future, what's the next challenge, the hurdles, et cetera. What do you see evolving over the next few years? Not to get into talking about product road maps, but just from your seat, how do you see the industry evolving and the enterprise? General trends.

Tom Kilroy: Well, I think that software is becoming increasingly a bigger play in the enterprise, but there's a lot going on. Again, I think the mantra is total cost of ownership. IT has been very clear. They got to reduce their costs and become more strategic, help their company become more competitive. So our job, being a platform provider, is to make sure we're helping enable that, but I think if you look at, but looking back to virtualization again, there's a lot of movement around server consolidation, we need to be out in front working with our partners, which we are, the VMM providers, the ISVs, so that their code is running and optimized best on our architecture.

As I said, we're building in technology, we're hardware enabling the platform so that their applications can become more robust. So we're working not just on efforts today around very specifically security and manageability, but we're aligning our road maps, our platform road maps, with the ISV road maps so that, as you say, the trends of the future are optimized to run the hardware platform.

Host: Intel, going direct with software developers, developing relationships. Tom Kilroy, Vice President of Intel's Digital Enterprise group. Lowering cost of ownership, increasing competitive enterprise, and that's great language of love for CIOs out there and small businesses. Congratulations on your announcement. Thank you for the broadcast.

Tom Kilroy: Appreciate it. Thank you very much, I enjoyed it.