Transcript: Intel CEO Paul Otellini Says It's Time to Give PCs Help

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.PodTech.net/?p=541

Intel CEO Paul Otellini Says It's Time to Give PCs Help - Part 1 of 4

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Intel's president and CEO, Paul Otellini.

Paul Otellini: Good morning. Good morning, welcome, and thanks for coming this morning. We're here today to introduce a new innovation in business computing. And we think it's very exciting. We think it will help solve a lot of the issues that all of us who run IT departments know about and, at the same time, set a new standard in industry goodness in terms of security, manageability, and the improvement of our computing environments.

But before I tell you about what we're going to do, let me take you back a little bit and talk shortly about what's happened in terms of the evolution of business computing over the last twenty or so years. And this is one picture that summarizes it all. It started out with the PC coming into business twenty odd years ago. It got better with the graphical user interface. Processors got better. 286, 386 and so forth. But the first time we saw some standards around manageability were about a decade plus ago with the DMTF task force organization and we started seeing the evolution of standards.

Computing went on, the Pentium came out, Intel helped drive the evolution of the standard high volume servers, greatly reducing the cost of servers, the back end of our businesses. And then three years ago with the introduction of Centrino mobile technology, we helped popularize and standardize WiFi and make that today an indispensable tool for business.

But business continues to go on. We have a number of problems that we all face as the ongoing cost of running our IT shops. In general, IT spending has become problematic because today a typical IT shop spends almost 90 percent -- 89 percent exactly is what Gartner shows -- of their budget on just the ongoing, day-to-day maintenance activities, and only 11 percent on the things we need to do to get better going forward, to give us that competitive edge that I think business IT is all about. Maintenance includes a lot of things.

It includes things like dealing with increased complexity, security, repairing things, site visits, etceteras to fix things that are down. A few short years ago, the hardware cost of the PC was about equal to four years of support costs. Things have changed in the last couple of years. What's happening now is that the supports cost is 2x the cost of the hardware, completely flipped around. So, as we look at this, we think it's time to reinvent the desktop, and that's what today is all about.

Unlike the notebook, which has had a substantial amount of evolution over the last five years, the good old business PC really hasn't changed very much. Well so what, you can say. Isn't everybody going mobile?

Not quite. The business desktop market today still accounts for over 70 percent of all PCs sold, and that's over 85 million units a year. We think it's time to reinvent those 85 million units and help bring productivity, help bring manageability, help bring better security into the business environment. It's all about driving costs down and driving productivity up for our collective employees.

To do this we will deliver a new set of technologies in hardware and in software that, much like our Centrino mobile technology did a few years ago, really solve a live business issue that all of us have. It includes a number of things: A new dual-core microprocessor, and a feature-rich chipset.

It also includes a number of Intel-developed technologies like Intel Active Management Technology, Intel virtualization technology for hardware-based virtualization, and Intel software, which comes together and brings a lot of the value to the base platform that our software partners will then add even more value on top of that.