Intel IT’s US$9 Million Savings Journey

Intel’s internal IT division consist of 6,400 individuals serving over 91,500 Intel employees across 54 global sites. This includes support for over 110,000 PCs; of which 80% are mobile; and over 29,000 handhelds with 60% being personal-owned.

Keating

Liam Keating, Intel’s China IT country manager said, “The benefits are real. Since a server refresh program some years ago, Intel has consolidated its data centres and saved as much as US$9 million up till 2011.”

Intel’s IT has also achieved 72% virtualisation and expects to save a further US$3 million every year for the next few years. Keating explained, “We are aiming for 75% virtualisation.”

Intel has also responded to current trends and aligns its IT focus with delivering business intelligence, greater security, consumerisation and more agility. The fact is that there is growing adoption of public clouds, but also industry ready products for private cloud provisioning like metering, virtualisation, orchestration software and more.

Keating said, “The new normal is that organisations expect to have rapid delivery of real productivity tools without having to wait.” He also gave the example of business units in organisations, that provision services for themselves, utilising SaaS and public cloud services out there in the market.

“A business unit could set up their own services in 6 to 8 weeks without (their) IT (department).” But because of IT’s role as an integrator within an organisation, these BUs still need IT’s expertise to hook up to existing infrastructures and technologies at the back end.

Intel provides 80-percent of their internal services via the private cloud and utilise the public cloud for provisioning of non-core, non-mission critical applications and services.

Besides having a successful journey towards the cloud, the chip maker also helps companies on their cloud journey with the Intel Cloud Builders program and by contributing to the Open Data Centre Alliance (ODCA) as a technical advisor.