All Intel eyes were trained firmly on the future at this year’s partner conference, held in Northamptonshire. The slogan being bandied around was ‘Sponsors of Tomorrow’, reflecting Intel’s latest global marketing campaign, which posits that advances in the digital age are basically all due to silicon ­ for example, in micro-processors.

So it was no surprise that Intel launched its partner day with a talk by Global Futures and Foresight (GFF) chief executive David A Smith.

Smith listed and described various phenomena informing change in the 21st century, including global warming and the environmental challenges, Moore’s Law-based advances in IT, mass migration, and slowing birth rates.

The conference was officially opened by Chrissie Harrison, channel manager for UK and Ireland at Intel, who noted that the channel had taken a big hit from Q3 of 2008 onwards, but that things have started to look up.

“Also, there has been an increase in innovation and creativity in new products coming to market. So are you a shrinking market, the reseller channel? The answer is no, definitely not,” she said. “Forty per cent of Intel’s total UK revenue is still via the channel, and in fact it has always been around that level.”

Intel hoped that resellers would look at the new technologies appearing and use them to build solution and services opportunities for themselves. Hardware and software would never sell themselves without local support.

Help with marketing
Tim Black, director of SMB and channel business at Intel, said the chipmaker is challenging the view that it does more with its vendor partners than with channel partner when it came to marketing.

“We want to make sure we make it much easier to lift that content and syndicate that to allow you, the channel, to use that in your own marketing campaigns and the like,” he said.

The channel is not homogeneous, and Intel’s initiatives would reflect that. Also, the chipmaker is developing and releasing various tools that could help the channel sell, such as online return on investment (RoI) calculators.

“And we are challenging ourselves to deliver training in a way that meets your needs,” said Black.

Intel’s continuing investments in R&D meant opportunities would continue to arise. The company had spent $7 billion (£4.3bn) in two years to fund deployment of 32nm manufacturing facilities for products that do more with less. Five years ago, Intel would have been using that money to make transistors smaller, faster and cooler, but today transistors were also being developed that incorporated manageability and security features.

“The big benefit is that we are taking the x86, if you like, into adjacent markets, which will open some opportunities for you,” said Black.

New tech opens new verticals
Healthcare is an example of a vertical now sprouting high-tech opportunities for solution providers. Others included the energy, utilities, transport and digital signage markets.

Black said that Intel saw all of the above as likely to prove particularly lucrative.
“[With digital signage,] really nobody is out there today in a volume space delivering [certain] solutions to market,” he said.

Advances in Intel processors would continue to develop over the next few years in ways that encouraged the parallel development of technological trends, such as virtualisation and consolidation.

“The Intel Atom processor today is about 80 per cent consumer and 20 per cent business use. There is a business opportunity around taking netbook architecture and so on as a kind of companion device in the business market,” said Black.

Meanwhile, other developments would offer improved business productivity to users ­ such as ultra-low voltage (ULV) processing, which should foster advances in form factor and battery life.

Escape to the country for Channel Conference
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