Intel has released its annual performance report, the IT Business Review, which is a retrospective look and analysis of the year 2014 looking at social, mobile, analytics, cloud, the internet of things and security.
Looking at the companies big data analytics, Intel has been working to integrate multiple data sources which has enabled them to use a decision support system in order to impact revenue and margins. The work with advanced analytics on supply, demand and pricing has resulted in revenue optimisation of $264 million for 2014.
By using web analytics on analysis of web usage the company has found a way to predict and adjust product positioning and pricing on the company’s websites, which is based upon customer response to marketing campaigns.
Further cost reduction initiatives have been implemented by using a reusable big data analytics correlation engine, the estimated savings for pilot projects involving future processors is reported to be greater than $13 million.
Additional use cases for data collection and analytics across Intel’s manufacturing supply chain has seen marketing and other operation tests being undertaken to try and improve the companies operational efficiency, market research and business results.
Intel state that in 2014 alone, the use of BI and analytics tools increased revenue by $351 million.
Moving onto cloud services and Intel write that they now deliver more than 85% of new services in the cloud for its Office, Enterprise and Services data centre environments. The cause of the success of Intel’s private cloud is attributed to implementing a provider-like cloud hosting strategy, advancing self-service infrastructure as a service and platform as a service as well as enable cloud-aware applications.
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The private cloud, according to Intel, is saving the company around $7.5 million annually while supporting an increase of 17% in operating system instances in the environment.
Intel appear keen to make applications smarter in order to maximise the advantages of the cloud such as self-service provisioning, elasticity, run-anywhere design, multi-tenancy, and design for failure.
Intel claim that, "By increasing interoperability between private and public clouds, this approach of designing cloud-aware applications has moved us closer to a federated, interoperable, and open cloud that is agile and cost effective."
Further to Intel’s cloud interests, the company has begun looking at how hybrid clouds can benefit the company by conducting a hybrid cloud PoC using open source OpenStack API’s.
Intel wrote in the report, saying: "Hybrid cloud hosting can provide additional external capacity to augment our own private cloud while enabling us to optimize our internal capacity. Hybrid cloud hosting also increases flexibility, allowing us to dynamically adjust capacity when needed to support business initiatives efficiently."
"We have accelerated hosting decisions for our business customers by developing a methodical approach to determine the best hosting option. We consider security, control, cost, location, application requirements, capacity, and availability before arriving at a hosting decision for each use case. Offering optimized hosting solutions improves business agility and velocity while reducing costs."
