Well it did strike me as a rather unusual piece of news when i’d read that Intel had bought Mcafee, although in the year of 2010 which seems to be the year of vendor consolidation I guess it should be no surprise. Mcafee that is predominantly based within the Anti Virus market space and most recently the security and compliance space is going to be rather a new territory for Intel.

Something leads me to believe that its not a spur of the moment purchase and there is a lot more devil in the detail, these are some of my reasons in short;

Patents

It strikes me that Mcafee has a lot of these, and in particular to my blog title I have discovered they have this patent.

This patent as it states could have implications for the big SaaS players such as Google, Microsoft and VMware, its basically a sure thing to be central to the future of Cloud computing revenue models. Does this mean Intel own intellectual rights to anyone selling SaaS or any related based service? I’m not a patent specialist so can’t completely concur however it does sound like it has potential.

Future tech

Linked in some respects to owned patents, I have a suspicion that Mcafee has been working with Intel for some time on technology that moves the security engine into a hardware layer of either on the CPU, Mainboards or Network cards. Couple this with Intel’s vision of vPro and centralised onboard management of compute nodes and this has potential to reach the consumer space in the home and then devices in the commercial space.

Confusing messages

The above are my main reasons that I think mcafee were purchased, their are a lot of confusing messages that I expect are being read, one of mine is VMware VMsafe. This technology has been in the works for well over Three years now, the future is clearly based on this for a virtualised environment and the basis around the efficiencies and performance gains are achieved mean VMsafe will mean less revenue to be made on AV (and in future other) server agents. Does this however mean that less revenue will be made on this area of business? do Intel care due to knowing something we don’t? I think its going to be an interesting future with this acquisition so I will be watching it unfold rather closely.

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