Does anyone else think this IntelPR has Infiniband written all over it? :~)
Intel to launch $200 mln Internet services drive
By Duncan Martell
SAN FRANCISCO, May 11 (Reuters) - Intel Corp (NASDAQ: INTC). will announce a plan on Thursday to spend $200
million over two years to build an Internet media business that will allow customers to transmit everything from movies to
conferences to online training via the Internet.
The plan is the latest effort by the world's biggest chip-maker to broaden sales beyond the microprocessors that account for 80
percent of its revenue, and it builds on Intel's initiative announced last year to provide Web-hosting services to companies.
The Intel Internet Media Services business will allow customers to transmit audio and video, including conferences, movies,
online training and concerts, via the Internet from a network of broadcast operations centers Intel plans to build.
The foray into new territory will bring the Santa Clara, California-based company into competition with firms such as Akamai
Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), which provides technology to speed the delivery of rich, media content over the Web,
and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), which provides Webcasts of live events with its acquisition of Broadcast.com.
While the personal computer market, which uses Intel's microprocessors as the brains of PCs, is growing strong, Intel has in the
past year been seeking to reposition itself as the predominant supplier of buildings blocks of the Internet economy.
Intel cited figures from the Internet Research Group predicting that the market for streaming media services -- audio and video
on the Web -- would soar more than 20-fold to $2.5 billion by 2004.
The company also announced initial customers, including Nasdaq.com, Comedy.com, MeTV.com and Golf Magazine, adding
that at least one of these customers had replaced its streaming media services from competitors to Intel.
"If anything, it's very early within the market but we do see significant momentum building over the next two to three years both
in terms of the size of the audience and the need to distribute content globally," said McGregor Agan, director of market
development for Intel's Internet Media Services. "We think we're well positioned to be successful."
Agan declined to comment on internal sales projections and also on how many Intel employees would be dedicated to the
effort.
He added that Intel launched its streaming-media efforts in February with a few customers and will this summer have completed
its first "broadcast operations center" in Portland, Oregon, a state in which Intel is already the largest private employer.
Intel is diving into this market, Agan said, because of current problems such as poor reliability due to congestion on the Internet,
overloaded server computers, the lack in ability to broadcast events small and extremely large via the Web and viewing
streaming media from server computers that are far away from the user, which can create delays and jerky images.
"Overall, there is clearly long-term demand for large-scale Web-hosting applications and service support," Agan said.
Intel, which is now facing renewed competition from once-struggling Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD), its chief
rival in the microprocessor business, is adding to a growing list of competitors.
In the last two years, Intel has focused on its data-networking business to small- and medium-sized businesses, where it
competes with 3Com Corp. (NASDAQ: COMS) and Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO)
On top of that, with its data center business, which hosts Web sites and the like, it competes with Exodus Communications Inc.
(NASDAQ: EXDS), International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and others.
The 32-year-old company already has a data center up and running near its headquarters in Santa Clara, California, another in
Virginia and one soon to be operational in London. It has said that by year's end it expects to have 12 data centers in
operation. |
