Data Center: The Future is Software Defined

It is a very exciting time for the industry of information and communication technology (ICT) as it continues the massive transformation to the digital service, or “on demand”, economy.  Earlier I had the pleasure of sharing Intel’s perspective and vision of the Data Center market at IDF15 in Shenzhen and I can think of no place better than China to exemplify how the digital services economy is impacting people’s everyday lives.  In 2015 ICT spending in China will exceed $465 Billion, comprising 43% of global ICT spending growth.  ICT is increasingly the means to fulfil business, public sector and consumer needs and the rate at which new services are being launched and existing services are growing is tremendous.  The result is 3 significant areas of growth for data center infrastructure:  continued build out of Cloud computing, HPC and Big Data.

Cloud computing provides on-demand, self-serve attributes that enable application developers to deliver new services to the markets in record time.  Software Defined Infrastructure, or SDI, optimizes this rapid creation and delivery of business services, reliably, with a programmable infrastructure.  Intel has been making great strides with our partners towards the adoption of SDI.  Today I was pleased to be joined by Huawei, who shared their efforts to enable the network transformation, and Alibaba, who announced their recent success in powering on Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture (RSA) in their Hangzhou lab.

Just as we know the future of the data center is software defined, the future of High Performance Computing is software optimized. IDC predicts that the penalties for neglecting the HPC software stack will grow more severe, making modern, parallel, optimized code essential for continued growth. To this end, today we announced that the first Intel® Parallel Computing Center in China has been established in Beijing to drive the next generation of high performance computing in the country.  Our success is also dependent on strong partnerships, so I was happy to have Lenovo onstage to share details on their new Enterprise Innovation Center focused on enabling our joint success in China.

As the next technology disruptor, Big Data has the ability to transform all industries.  For healthcare, through the use of Big Data analytics, precision medicine becomes a possibility providing tremendous opportunities to advance the treatment of life threatening diseases like cancer.  By applying all the latest Cloud, HPC and Big Data analytics technology and products, and working collectively as an industry, we can enable the sequence of a whole genome, identify the fundamental genes that cause the cancer, and the means to block them through the creation of personalized treatment, all in one day by 2020.

Through our partnership with China technology leaders we will collectively enable the Digital Service Economy and deliver the next decade of discovery, solving the biggest challenges in society, industry and the sciences.

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