Lessons in IT management from Intel’s vice-president and CIO

LAS VEGAS – At Hewlett Packard Co.‘s (NYSE: HPQ) Tech Forum event this year, Intel Corp.‘s (NASDAQ: INTC) vice-president and CIO, Diane Bryant, took to the stage to deliver a keynote presentation on innovation acceleration and what IT departments must do to help keep up.

Because the pace of IT innovation is accelerating at such a rapid pace, Bryant said today’s organizations require enterprise innovative solutions that scale. From an IT department standpoint, she said the role of IT should be centered around helping to drive down costs through automation.

“IT is critical to helping you drive your business,” Bryant said. “At Intel, there are four ways that we deliver value through IT: increasing employee productivity, facilitating business growth, delivering IT efficiencies and continuity and driving business efficiency.”

With advancements of mobile technologies and more and more users now having access to more than one device, Bryant said security and threats become an increasing threat inside of organizations.

“The consumerization of IT is here and employees want to know why they can’t bring their devices into work and why IT doesn’t support them,” she explained. “The speed of business continues to accelerate and we’re at a time where we think everything should always be up and available.”

In the future, Bryant suggests we’re moving towards a world where device independent computing will be made possible through technologies such as client virtualization.

In terms of information delivery or business intelligence capabilities, Bryant said in the “old days” there was a process of gathering data, reporting and historical analytics. Since then, the industry has made continued progress towards automated reporting which allows users to make more informed decisions based on historical trends.

With respect to enterprise security, Bryant said an organization’s security model must continue to evolve where the security perimeter extends to people and processes, in addition to the data.

“We’ll go to a tiered-based trust model that’s based on who you are and where you are, coupled with the trust level of the device that you’re carrying and the classification of the data that you’re trying to access will also matter,” Bryant said.

Recently, there has also been a shift from data centre computing to cloud computing environments, Bryant said. As organizations begin to move towards a shared infrastructure, they will eventually see a reduction in the costs that are associated with running their environments.

Particularly at Intel, Bryant said her commitment to the company is to return $650M worth of value back to the company between 2007 and 2014.

“We’re well on track to hit this goal to further help drive costs out of our data centre compute environments,” she said.

When it comes to technology refresh cycles, Bryant said HP’s ProLiant G7 servers, which are built on Intel’s Xeon 5600 series of processors, helps with throughput and performance. Intel is also using these servers inside of its infrastructures.

“We’re seeing better performance and are replacing our four-year old servers at a ratio of 20:1 to have better computing capacity and a lower total cost of ownership,” she said.

Her advice to IT professionals amidst the rapidly changing IT landscape is that they need to make investments to understand any given business, create and maintain “strong partnerships” to help make transformation happen and to also have a “continuous plan” that addresses the question of “what next” within their organizations in order to deliver real business value.

Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Maxine Cheung
Maxine Cheung
Staff Writer, Computer Dealer News

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