LAS VEGAS — Intel president Renee James, told a crowd of more than 3,000 customers and channel partners at the annual McAfee Focus conference that the Intel/McAfee partnership was made to invent the future of security.
One of the key areas Intel/McAfee is targeting is the highly lucrative Internet of Everything, which Cisco Systems has measured to be a $14.5 trillion profit opportunity.
James said that Intel now has the product line for mobile and introduced Quark, Intel’s super-tiny, low-power processor for smart devices. Quark is aimed as a competitor to the ARM processors. One of the main areas where Intel want to differentiate itself is in wearable computing, which is a big part of the burgeoning Internet of Everything marketplace.
“The future of security will not be like the past. We need to invent this future and it will be more about securing people and data,” she said during her keynote address at the conference, held here.
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The security strategy behind new products such as Quark is to design protection that is integrated and ubiquitous. James said that McAfee will be making new product announcements in this area soon, but the goal is to raise the base level of security where everyone is protected.
“I don’t want this to be an opt-in option. There should be no option. We can’t live like that anymore. We require a base line level of security where no one should opt-out of. And, maybe they should not have to pay for it. That’s the mission,” James said.
McAfee CEO Mike DeCesare told CDN that he could not make up a number on how much the security opportunity for the Internet of Everything is worth.
“Chip technology like Quark for example, will have McAfee security inside at the start. What we are seeing is the Internet of Things footprint is getting smaller and Intel is playing a major role in that space. Security is going to be embedded and an important part of the Internet of Things,” DeCesare said.
But while the Internet of Everything is on the horizon Quark will be positioned for Software Defined Networks and biometrics. Quark with McAfee security solutions can deal with protecting privacy and not just about smartphone devices.
James admitted that Intel has zero per cent share in mobile, even though the chip making giant has a large marketshare in the overall mobile communications space.
“Zero per cent share is not very successful with phones,” she said.
James offered this perspective on Intel’s performance in mobile: “The mobile phone business is tough and very hard to make money from. It had great scale but it was on a model where people did not get paid. The rest of the world gets paid, but in mobile you do not get paid. People who have phones don’t care about security and the service providers do security for themselves…We resisted it and you can build a billion units and make no money. It costs $6 to $7 billion for a fab and then another $3 billion for the technology. We did not think about the connected devices and that’s why we introduced Quark. Our focus is to take security all the way down across the product line and grow up the security to phones as fast as possible.”
But three years after the $7.7 billion acquisition was consummated, James can finally see daylight. “A lot of people remind me that I may have lost my mind to acquire McAfee, but we are in our fourth year and these things take time.”