Since long, I have publicly stated that Intel must enter the public cloud market. The reasons are simple. There was a time in history when most hardware was purchased by individuals or small and medium-sized companies. These entities had little bargaining power and Intel was able get high margins for their hardware products.
Cloud players such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure Google, Rackspace, Rackspace, and Google are now available. Small and medium-sized companies no longer need to buy large quantities of hardware. Instead, they rely on virtual machines provided by Public Cloud players. These Public Cloud companies buy large quantities of hardware in bulk, and have a lot of bargaining power. Imagine the threat to Intel if Amazon AWS announces tomorrow that it will use AMD hardware and will gradually move to all AMD datacenters. It will certainly put a huge dent in Intel stock price, and other Cloud providers might follow suit. Not a good scenario for Intel. Even without this, an Intel world in which a large chunk of Intel hardware is sold only to a few Public Cloud Providers with huge leverage is not a good situation.
Therefore, Intel must be a Public Cloud provider that sells its hardware directly to end users. They will need to be prepared for the journey. Today, Intel announced a first step in this direction. Mashery, an API portal management company, was purchased by Intel for $180 million. You need to have physical datacenters and software that can expose them via APIs for any Cloud offering. We believe Intel partnered Mashery to test the waters and has now purchased the company to help them bootstrap their Cloud Offering.
Is Intel likely to offer a Public Cloud service in the near future? We think so.
Click Here to read more about the acquisition.
