Intel pledging $24 million investment to software ecosystem
Intel has pledged to push forward with the software arm of its empire, and it is proving it with a significant financial commitment to its partners.
The Silicon Valley giant will be pushing more than $24 million in investment funding to its software partner ecosystem for the purpose of driving innovation to support Intel's own software strategy.
That strategy revolves around several pillars of focus -- namely mobile software, cloud services, embedded software, visual and parallel computing as well as high performance computing. One that stands out, particularly thanks to Intel's acquisition of McAfee this year, is security.
Speaking at Intel's Software Media Day in San Francisco on Thursday, Lisa Lambert, vice president of Intel Capital and managing director for Intel’s software and services, noted that most of these areas of focus -- especially cloud adoption and cyber-threats -- are driving up demand for new surveillance and intelligence solutions.
Lambert posited that Intel Capital brings equity and business resources to help achieve these objectives.
"There are a lot of venture capital firms in the world," said Lambert, "and there are a meaningful number of corporate investors."
Recipients of these investments consist of the following seven companies -- five of which are new partners and another two are follow-on investments:
- DynamicOps (Burlington, Mass.): Operations virtualization platform that enables enterprise IT departments to use existing infrastructure when transferring to on-demand private and public cloud services
- enLighted (Sunnyvale, Calif.): Develops simple and maintenance-free application for smarter buildings and lighting fixtures
- IP Commerce (Denver): Provides Platform-as-a-service that functions as a commerce operating system
- Guavus (Santa Clara, Calif.): Provides integrated and scalable platforms for the purpose of rapidly codifying industry-specific analytics
- Swrve New Media (San Francisco): Provides game personalization and testing for social games that are meant to redefine the relationship between gamers and game developers
- Gaikai (Los Angeles): Cloud-based gaming service that streams 3D video games directly to web browsers
- Revolution Analytics (Palo Alto, Calif.): Commercial provider of services and software based on the open source "R" project for statistical computing
For 2011 so far, Intel has already pledged $273 million in investments in 76 deals, and 47 percent of those dollars went to companies outside of North America. For reference, Intel made 119 deals worth $327 million in investments throughout all of 2010, with 44 percent of dollars directed outside of North America.
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