Intel marching on in China

Was in Bangkok with Intel this week to get an update on the firm’s cloud and datacentre plans – well, the two are inextricably linked I suppose.

No news as such but key themes from that part of the business included Big Data; stellar growth in China thanks to the datacentre needs of the large internet firms over there like Tencent and Alibaba; and continued security risks as pointed out by a McAfee representative.

Jason Fedder, Intel’s Asia Pacific datacentre group GM, agreed with the view of EMC and others that China is where some of the most exciting cloud projects are taking place today thanks in part to the lack of legacy infrastructure in organisations there.

But he went further to say that the PRC is really turning itself from being a technology follower to innovator – pointing to Tencent and Alibaba’s efforts to craft their own compute standards under the Project Scorpio banner, and of the state-run telcos ripping out their IBM boxes to replace them with spanking new Xeon kit.

Intel’s been in China for some time and is about as well-supported over there as any foreign company can be given the sometimes harsh business climate afforded non-local companies.

As an example of its growing influence in the country, Fedder explained how Intel is trying to broker a deal to ensure the closed Chinese crypto-standard Trusted Cryptography Module (TCM) is made interoperable with the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) hardware authentication standard its TXT technology is built on.

However, there are some aspects of doing business in China which even Intel can’t get around fully, as IT manager Liam Keating told me. The network infrastructure is still pretty bad outside the Tier 1 and 2 cities in the PRC, a fact made worse by the Great Firewall and meaning challenges in the firm’s smaller field offices and complaints from staff, he said.

To get around this Keating and his team have been forced to look at other ways to improve traffic flow, such as “in-country cacheing” using outsourced cacheing providers, and by modifying app design to reduce the amount of dynamic content.

It’s reassuring to know that even Intel has the same problems experienced by many when it comes to China’s infernal internet infrastructure.