Boston, MA 03/28/2014 (wallstreetpr) – The announcement that Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) made a “significant equity investment” in Cloudera should come as no surprise to Intel watchers. Intel has been trying to grow beyond its traditional role as a dominant player in the PC business. Both the parties that made lots of profits during the heyday of “WinTel” are looking for new growth strategies.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has been trying hard to grow beyond its core strength of selling PC operating systems and consumer software such as Microsoft Office. Similarly, Intel is trying to brand out beyond selling microprocessors to PC manufacturers.
Both are trying to come to terms with the reality of a shrinking global PC business and an ever-growing smartphone business.
Big Data
One of the growing areas of business is Big Data analytics and Intel’s Cloudera investment will enable Intel to offer an analytics platform that combines Intel’s high-end Xeon server technology with Cloudera’s Hadoop-based enterprise analytic data management software. This will help Intel make a strong push into being a provider of hardware for the growing data center market with its insatiable demand for servers and storage capacity.
Wearable Devices and Internet of Things
Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) has announced that it completed the acquisition of BASIS Science Inc. which specializes in wearable device technologies. This will give Intel a strong start in getting into the wearable device market which is mostly focused on health and wellness right now, which is the key strength of Basis Science.
Having missed the bus when smartphones and tablets from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and others suddenly redefined consumer technology, Intel does not want to miss the next bus when consumers show a preference for wearable computers. With technology majors Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Samsung launching their versions of wearable computing devices, Intel wants to be the company that makes the microprocessors that run these devices.
Diverse Ventures
Intel continues to push ahead to try and maintain its leadership role in microprocessor technology with energy-efficient 14 nm Broadwell chips.
Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) is collaborating with networking giant Cisco Systems, Inc (NASDAQ:CSCO) to enter new arenas such as software defined networking.
Intel is trying to be a supplier of non-CDMA LTE chipsets to smartphone manufacturers like Apple. It’s reducing its headcount by 5,000 as per a January 2014 announcement which should make it a leaner organization. It has announced that it won’t be making any new hires in its offshore development locations such as India.
All this should keep Intel in the game for decades to come.
