Intel is confident that the increasing prevalence of data-collecting sensors in the internet of things will prove "the biggest inflection point in IT we've seen for years," and is pitching its new Quark chip for just this purpose, according to the company's VP of software and service, Doug Fisher.
After this morning's Oracle OpenWorld 2013 keynote, which featured on Intel's attempts to push Oracle's Hadoop platform to the enterprise internet of things via its new Quark chip - a tiny chip with the processing power of a 486 processor - Fisher expanded upon Intel's position in a question and answer session.
Further reading Oracle OpenWorld 2013: Oracle unveils in-memory processing to rival SAP HANA Intel unveils Quark Atom microprocessors intended for wearable computing Intel plans to ratchet up mobile platform performance with 14-nanometre silicon
While Intel revealed its chip earlier this month with the wearables market as a target, Fisher said it also aiming for the business market.
While Fisher refused to elaborate on a potential customer base for the chip, he confirmed that Intel was "investing in this kind of technology because we expect it to be deployed in the industrial internet; the internet of things. That's absolutely what we expect. So we're investing to be a part of that. We're expecting 5bn connected endpoints by 2020: Intel's going to be a part of that."
Saying the Quark chip would provide a 10 times reduction in power use and a 5 times reduction in size from existing solutions, Fisher confirmed that Intel was "not doing this out of our own joy, but because we believe in the venture".
Speaking of the impact he believes technology such as Quark will have, Fisher said that, in recent years, while rising levels of automation and "connecting islands of computing with networking and deployed virtualisation" at reduced cost have proved "impactful", they are not what could be called "mission hanging".
In comparison, Fisher said he believed that the increasing use of sensors - powered by technology such as Quark - in the internet of things is going to drive big data into the stratosphere.
"Having zetabytes of data that you can mine for value; you have to sift through it, and decide what can provide value for customers," said Fisher.
"Mobile phones are absolutely a part of that," said Fisher, but it's sensors that are going to prove the real difference.
According to Fisher, General Electric now installs 23 sensors on jet engines, that deliver a terabyte of data each on a daily basis. Boeing, meanwhile, gather 640 terabytes everyday across their fleet in tracking elements such as maintenance and predictive failures. or 640 terabytes a day for Boeing. Such adoption, said Fisher, are "really going to change things".
"It's about the seen versus the unseen," he said.
"This is the unseen, which is not consumer visible, but a lot of the time I think that's a lot bigger than what you'll see as a consumer. I think the internet of things and these sensors are going to be the biggest inflection point for IT we've seen in years, because they can bring business now."
"You have to change the mindset if you run an IT company as to how you'll extract information, and while doing that, learn how to extract value."
The race, it seems, is on. How is your business investing in the internet of things to capitalise on the value of big data mining through the internet of things? Or like cloud and big data before it, is the internet of things just a lot of vendor hype? Leave your comments below.
