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The Intel IDC Tour and Effectively Correcting an Expensive Misconception

By Rob Enderle September 16, 2022

Often people tend to put Intel’s competitors into the same class as Intel and, increasingly, that is a mistake. I was reminded of that this week when I toured IDC Israel Development Center (IDC) Intel's and FABs. It reminds me of touring Panasonic’s hardened factory and then touring what was represented as a comparable effort by Panasonic’s most powerful competitor. Panasonic’s capability was more comprehensive and not only larger and far better equipped, but it also made the competitor’s effort look like the difference between Mercedes-Benz building a car and some guy building a kit car in his garage. But Panasonic didn’t market that difference so the competitor, which was cheaper, more powerful and far better penetrated into the segment effectively outperformed Panasonic in a market where Panasonic should have been preeminent.

IBM has just announced its IBM i System Subscription solution which has the economic benefits of a cloud service but still provides the security and peace-of-mind benefits of an on-premises solution. 

Can you have your cake and eat it, too? With this service, IBM appears to be saying yes. Let me explain.

– Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

The US Chips and Science Act took over a year of negotiations to pass and contain provisions that supply around $11B in semiconductor research and development. To begin to make use of this money, over 100 companies in the technology sector have come together to form the ASIC (American Semiconductor Innovation Coalition). This is a broad effort to help address the dire situation the U.S. Semiconductor industry is in because of the pandemic, Ukraine War, and China’s increasing hostility toward Taiwan. Let’s talk about ASIC this week.

– Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

Years ago, while working at Giga Information Group, several analysts got together and created a service we loosely referred to as “events,” and then wrote about what we had captured as best practices over the years. With companies now going back to having in-person analyst events, I thought it would be handy to cover some of those best practices again to help companies improve the quality of their events.

– Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

Let’s talk about how HPC and supercomputing are changing and how NVIDIA’s efforts are functioning to create a better world. This is all from Ian Buck’s (VP and GM of NVIDIA’s Accelerated Computing) keynote at ISC22.

– Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

There have been a lot of discussions about bad store practices of late in which Apple ends up consistently in the hot seat for overcharging for services that are provided by the application developer, not Apple … In contrast, Microsoft has announced it will charge if you use Microsoft’s more reasonable financial services but, if you choose to implement a store from inside your app, you can do that for free. Thus, with Microsoft, you pay for the service you get and, as is generally the case in the real world, if you do it yourself, you don’t have to pay a “tax” to anyone for that privilege.

Let’s talk about the difference between Microsoft and Apple’s market approach in the context of this, admittedly, rather obvious better approach to building revenue.

– Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

Cisco had an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) event this week and one of their practices, focused on creating a 360 Ecosystem, is in sharp contrast to Dell’s Concept Luna in terms of approach. But the two approaches aren’t contradictory and could be layered to create an even more sustainable effort from both firms. Cisco is arguably the leader in ESG across the segment largely because they are, as a company, the most focused on making progress on a variety of fronts including homelessness and working with governments at scale to improve communications and governance strength.

Let’s explore that this week.

– Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

AMD and Mercedes may be one of the most powerful and interesting technology racing partnerships currently in existence. AMD had a prior partnership with Ferrari, but it seemed to be more of a marketing relationship than an operational one. This time, the AMD relationship highlights one of the market advantages in terms of server performance, making it more powerful than the earlier effort. It showcases how these things both should and should not, be done.  

Let’s talk about AMD, F1 racing, and Ferrari this week.

– Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

HP was once one of the leading innovators in high-end video conferencing and collaboration with its Halo video conferencing effort. It was the first to wed high resolution video conferencing to a service that could link two sites at opposite ends of the world in a seamless experience. However, it failed and was sold to Polycom. Polycom was acquired by Plantronics, which had also been developing market-leading sound solutions for video conferencing rooms. Now, HP has acquired the combined entity which had been renamed Poly.

– Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

Last week I attended the IBM event with Fast Company on its hybrid cloud solutions. IBM is unique in that it often populates events like this with customers who talk about how IBM’s solutions are used rather than the far less interesting performance metrics of new hardware, software, or networking solutions. This use of customers to create content is far more compelling than the usual vendor talking head, and, in terms of credibility, people who use a technology are far more credible than those who sell it. In short, IBM’s use of customers to tell the story has for some time been a best practice.

– Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

Next week is NVIDIA’s big GTC event, and there will be a ton of content on AI, the metaverse, digital twins, simulations, graphics, and super-computing. It is also the definitive event on autonomous vehicles and robotics, and this is all happening during the Russian attack on the Ukraine which provides an interesting and troubling context to the future of safe driving. I’m specifically talking about the ability to avoid accidents and hostile areas even if you are out of range of a wireless network or that network is no longer functioning.  

– Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

TechTalk Summits is proud to announce our partnership with The Enderle Group. The Enderle Group provides an unparalleled look inside breaking technology events to identify the core reasons that buyers and builders of technology should care. Rob Enderle will be providing dedicated content to TechTalk Summit clients.