With all the talk about the motivation behind Intel’s purchase of McAfee, it seems readily apparent that differentiation in the market for mobile devices, from smartphones to laptops, is a primary element of the acquisition. Four things are converging in this market that help explain Intel’s interest in the mobile device market and McAfee — with the last one likely being the most important:
- It is a huge and rapidly growing market, and adoption of the devices continues to skyrocket.
- The devices are basically small computers, with many of the same types of online access, personal information, etc. that other computers have.
- Malware attacks are starting to hit the mobile community, and people need to protect their devices and themselves.
- Intel currently has very little presence in this market, and it needs a foothold — and thus, a why to differentiate themselves from the already entrenched players such as ARM and Qualcomm.
According to the article, “Intel’s walled garden plan to put A/V vendors out of business,” the world’s largest chip maker wants to change the way it approaches security “from a known-bad model to a known-good model” (read, to “application whitelisting”) and push x86 into niches that it doesn’t currently occupy such as mobile phones.
I won’t comment on all the other financial and strategic parts of the acquisition, but I do believe that this part of Intel’s strategy makes complete sense. Despite the objections of some developers, users of mobile devices like iPhones and iPods have already come to accept, and even enjoy, an excellent example of this “known-good model”: application whitelisting through Apple’s App Store!
In theory, with the “known good” approach, Intel can now offer mobile device manufacturers and providers some foundational application whitelisting enforcement tools, in silicon, to help them roll their own versions of the App Store. I say “in theory” because application whitelisting is not as simple to do in practice as it is in theory… something we know quite well at CoreTrace since we have been pioneering the technology for years now. I plan on outlining the critical components that any mobile application whitelisting approach must have in a subsequent post.
Of course, all this raises another question: How are the other chip manufacturers like ARM, Motorola and Qualcomm going to respond? Are they going to adopt a similar strategy?
I certainly know what I would do…
Huge organizations are so predictable. They often pay the most money for companies that, like them, are also on the verge of undergoing a disruptive change that makes their buy unwise. We are swinging back to the “network is the computer” computing model, 10+ years after McNealey predicted it, and they pick now to drop a massive wad of “casheesh” for something that in 5 many years will turn out to be totally irrelevant. It is like these huge business dinosaurs attain a point in their lives when they start actively trying to find tar pits to sink into.
[...] speculations about the Intel/McAfee deal continued to reverberate throughout the industry, new findings about the intentions of the infamous [...]
[...] With McAfee deal, Intel is (sort of) in the App Store business… How will other chip makers res…Without question, the Intel-McAfee deal was one of the biggest endpoint security stories of the year. However, the motivation behind the acquisition left many security analysts trying to make sense of it all. Our take on the whole thing was simple: with very little presence in the rapidly growing market for mobile devices, Intel needed a foothold to differentiate itself from other established players in the market. As malware attacks continue to hit the mobile community, there’s a growing need for people to protect their devices and themselves. We believe that was the thinking behind the Intel purchase. [...]