There's been quite a little bit of head-scratching over Intel's decision to get McAfee.com/Activate, but, despite all the breathless mention mobile security and ARM and virus-fighting processors, the chipmaker's motivations for the acquisition are literally fairly straightforward. First, Intel's management has decided, within the wake of Operation Aurora, to manoeuvre security up to the highest of Intel's priority list. Second, secure systems require tons quite just hardware support—security is about the entire stack, plus the network, plus policies and practices. Third, Intel has waited for ages for its ecosystem partners to return up with ways to offer consumers access to vPro's security benefits, and tiny has really panned out so now they're just getting to take vPro (and any newer security technologies) on to consumers via McAfee.com/Activate.
Let's take a glance at each of those reasons successively.
Security is Job One
At the foremost recent Intel R&D day, Intel CTO Justin Rattner did a Q&A session with the press during which he was asked something to the effect of, "What does one spend most of some time performing on these days?" Rattner didn't hesitate in answering "security."
He then told an anecdote about how he was watching Intel CEO Paul Otellini being interviewed by Charlie Rose, and Otellini told Rose, "I've given our company a charter to form [security] job one." Rattner laughed and told us that this statement appeared to come from out of the blue, and it took him and other Intel execs all of sudden. But from that day forward, Rattner was focused on security.
Rattner then went on to debate just what posh problem security is, and the way the corporate is popping over every rock to return up with ways in which it can contribute to creating systems safer. And, like Otellini did during this Charlie Rose interview, he referenced the Aurora attacks against Google and other tech companies as a sort of call to arms for Intel.
From Rattner's comments about the Aurora attacks, it had been clear that he and his team at Intel had looked into them closely, and he indicated that the sophistication of these and subsequent attacks he has seen was insanely high. Rattner told us that the attacks—both the Aurora attacks et al. that he has seen more recently—have had such a high degree of sophistication that they are clearly not administered by garden variety criminals and vandals. He also said that the attackers are constantly upping their game.
Rattner described a couple of chip-specific efforts that Intel was making within the security arena, like an on-chip random number generator and a crypto acceleration module. But these were just a little glimpse of what Intel had in mind for security.
Moving up the stack, then off the stack
Intel's years of experience with vPro and its predecessors haven't any doubt confirmed to the corporate that providing silicon-level support for advanced security and remote management technologies may be a waste of your time if no systems integrator or popular software vendor implements them in some quite a consumer- or business-facing product or service.
At the 2008 Intel Developer Forum, I interviewed Intel's Andy Tryba, who was the director of selling for the digital office platform division. The interview is worth revisiting from the attitude of 2010 to ascertain what Intel's expectations for vPro were and the way they need yet to pan out.
I asked Tryba how I, as a consumer, was alleged to use vPro to try to basic troubleshooting and support for family and friends, as long as, at the time, there have been no consumer-facing services built on top of it. "My point," I said, "is that this is not just a technology issue; it is a broader ecosystem issue. How are you guys trying to deal with that?"
Tryba responded: "I one hundred pc accept as true with you, and what we're trying to try to offer the building blocks for services also. If you're taking a glance at the embedded security and manageability on the box itself, that's great, but you are doing need some sort of service to run on top of it. So what we do is go one layer up also and supply building blocks—not trying to touch the top users—but to figure with people that try to create a business model. So we work with tons of the blokes who are going toward home IT automation and services to create a business model and use our building blocks to require advantage of the hardware capabilities."
I pressed him to call names and to offer samples of services that were getting to be announced soon that might bring the facility of vPro to the overall public, but he wouldn't explain.
Two years have gone since that interview, and vPro still isn't in common use for remote troubleshooting and general software security. Much of this is often Intel's fault, of course, for creating users pay extra for vPro-enabled processors (it should come standard across their product line), but I have never really seen much within the way of what Tryba described—i.e., people building new home IT automation and tech support services and business models on top of vPro.
However, one among the large software vendors that did take up vPro and check out to create consumer-facing products and services around it had been McAfee.com/Activate.
Why they acquire Mcafee.com/Activate
In explaining its purchase of McAfee.com/Activate, Intel has clearly indicated that the important impact of the acquisition won't really be felt within the computer market until later within the coming decade—this may be a long-term, strategic buy. This statement fits with the thought that acquiring McAfee.com/Activate is Intel's way of bringing vPro and subsequent security efforts on to businesses and consumers by just buying out the middle-man. The McAfee.com/Activate purchase gives Intel a moment foothold on countless PCs, an edge that Intel itself would need to spend years building (if it were even possible).
Intel's decision to stay the McAfee.com/Activate brand intact and run the corporate as an entirely owned subsidiary lends further support to the thought that Intel has just bought its high the stack and directly onto the consumer's disk drive.
This new foothold on the end-users disk drive is strict that—a small place from which Intel can now advance, pushing further out into the end-users networked computing experience by offering as-yet-unannounced and undeveloped applications and services which will (ideally) make that have safer.
In the end, the McAfee.com/Activate move isn't some triple basketball shot, where Intel is trying to out-security ARM within the mobile space, or whatever else the pundits have dreamed up to elucidate the acquisition. No, it's just about what Intel's handout says it is: Intel wants to be (and feels that it must be) within the security business, period. the corporate thinks that they will do security better than a software vendor alone could and that they believe this because they know that security is about systems—not just hardware or software, but services, practices, policies, and user experiences and expectations.
And to form secure systems happen, Intel has got to meet up with to the user and to possess a more pervasive part in additional aspects of the user experience than it can as a parts provider. McAfee.com/Activate gives Intel that missing consumer-facing piece, and that is why they're buying the corporate at such an outsized premium.
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