Intel Offers Answer for Consumer/Enterprise IT

While end users used to go to their office for the fastest Internet connections and best e-mail systems, they are now telling us they get cheaper services online and better connectivity from home, Intel's enterprise architect told a Canadian audience on Thursday.

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Speaking at the chipmaker's Premier IT Professionals event, John Dunlop tackled the topic of emerging client technologies.

"Consumer market innovation beats the enterprise," said Dunlop.

Part of the problem, according to Dunlop, is that providers are targeting the consumer market. "We are starting to see new capabilities emerge ... you want to take advantage of it, but it has no hooks to be able to scale it to the enterprise level," he said.

"It's definitely a big challenge for IT as we are being perceived as being behind the curve. Certainly, we can all whine about security, regulatory compliance, privacy concerns -- obviously very important topics -- but the challenge seems to get worse every year," said Dunlop.

The definition of mobility is also changing, according to Dunlop. "It used to be you give someone a notebook and they can go anywhere and they can use VPN to get back to their apps and data. Nowadays, it seems the definition of mobility is the ability to roam between devices," he said.

A cold war continues to exist between IT and end users, Dunlop pointed out. "We are all in it together, we are all trying to make the business successful, but at the end of the day ... IT pros and end users have completely different perspectives," he said.

IT's traditional one-size-fits-all solution drives down costs, protects the environment and increases data security. But standardization doesn't accommodate new devices such as personal laptops and iPhones, he pointed out.

"We are struggling to figure out how to reconcile new challenges with our existing model. The answer is, we need a new model," he said.

Virtualization is the driver for that new computing model in the desktop environment, according to Dunlop, and client virtualization, which brings benefits of centralized manageability and agility, is the key.

"I'm talking about the abstraction of our services, getting those layers abstracted from one another so you can abstract the OS from the hardware, you can abstract the applications from the OS, you can abstract the data from the platform," said Dunlop.

But while virtualization ROI is "a slam dunk" in the server space, client virtualization has always been a tough sell, he pointed out.

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