Does anyone care that Intel is inside the cloud? No. No one cares but that doesn’t stop Intel from pushing the crap out of Intel Inside and pretending that it means something. It’s great for the 16 companies they signed up because, now they get Intel marketing dollars for… doing nothing.
Intel announced that is teaming up with 16 cloud service providers (CSPs), as it calls them, and basically saying, Intel Inside because, Intel thinks that IT departments will care.
CSPs participating in the new Intel program will be recognized by using the “Powered by Intel Cloud Technology” badge to distinguish their Intel-based instances. In the past, Intel had only aligned itself with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“Much like when choosing a car, the type of engine that runs a cloud service dramatically affects performance and efficiency,” said Jason Waxman, vice president, Data Center Group and general manager, Cloud Platform Group, at Intel. “Cloud customers want to know what technology their applications are running on because it has direct impact to their business.”
Well, unless you are an anally fixated car enthusiast with some really in-depth knowledge, you haven’t got a clue who made the parts for your latest auto purchase, and you probably don’t care.
Intel is thinking that a heterogenous cloud platform should help improve performance. The company cites the example of Shopzilla, the price comparison engine, and how it increased its revenue by up to 12 percent by accelerating its page load times from seven to two seconds.
Now, we may really dumb on the matter of cloud infrastructure, but what is the frigging point of having a whole bunch of Intel machines linked together in your cloud when the whole point of having a cloud, or a hybrid cloud service, is the fact that you adapt without having to know what is going on at the platform level?
The key thing here is that Intel will drive direct marketing campaigns and participate in co-marketing activities with CSP partners meaning, Intel will give CSPs in the program money to pretend that Intel Inside is great.
This sounds like a waste of money for Intel, but what is it going to do? CSPs should be kicking Intel’s butt. CSPs should be making Intel rue its margins and prices. One mobo should be the same as any other to CSP. Screw Intel Inside.
As soon as Intel jumped in with its car analogy, you could tell that the whole thing was a bit of a sham.
Dear Intel: you are going to have to figure out how to live in a world where your existing business model of upgrading PCs with evermore complex and evermore expensive CPUs is kind of dead. Trying to kick a dead horse is not a motivation factor.
