Intel: Internet of Things is the next game changer for IT industry

“This will be the biggest inflection point for IT for a number of years.”

Intel expects the Internet of Things to be the next game changer for the IT industry, allowing firms to sift through huge quantities of data via technology such as the chip giant’s forthcoming Quark low-power processor.

Doug Fisher, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s Software and Services Group, pictured above holding the tiny Quark chip, said that the firm expects to see huge enterprise demand for its Quark processor, although he declined to name specific companies being targeted as customers when questioned by V3.

“We’re not doing this out of our own joy,” he said during a media session at the Oracle OpenWorld show in San Francisco on Monday. “This will be the biggest inflection point for IT for a number of years.”

Fisher said that while technology advancements such as virtualisation and connected computing via networks were important, they were not mission changing, whereas the Internet of Things is a massive change to IT.

“You have to sift through and analyse all this data out there. GE has 23 sensors in a jet engine delivering a terabyte of data every day. Sensors are great for maintenance, predicted failures, all the unseen, back-enterprise stuff that’s not consumer visible,” he explained.

Intel unveiled its Quark ultra-small system-on-a-chip (SoC) family for wearable technology – which is said to be one fifth of the size of the firm’s current Atom processor and uses a tenth of the power – at its IDF show earlier in September. Chief executive Brian Krzanich said Intel has been working on wearable technology and has reference designs with different form factors. He expects Quark to start appearing in devices from next year.

The wearable tech aspect – while it has garnered most of the headlines helped by launches such as the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch – forms part of Intel’s plans, but is not the crux of the Quark strategy, said Fisher.

“We’ll innovate around wearable tech. But I’m not worried about hitting every aspect of that, Quark is designed for wearable tech and sensors, for minute types of devices,” Fisher said. Instead, Intel is much more excited by how the broader internet will be altered by the dominance of sensors, which Fisher said would reach five billion by 2020.

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