The Ultimate Branding Coup? – Intel Inside Goes Cloud

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

One of the awesome things about cloud computing, especially when it comes to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), is that customers don’t have to even think what sort of hardware is used to run their virtual machines. The rise of the cloud has mirrored the rise of low cost, commodity hardware and the move away from IT caring about what brands sit in their data centers. You’d have thought then that cloud would pose a real threat to vendors whose widgets tend to be differentiated by brand – in a nameless, faceless world, what do they have left to go with?

Which is why it is so perplexing from the outside, an an undeniable coup from the inside, that Intel INTC has managed to take its "Intel inside" brand and make it relevant in the cloud world. Even more perplexing when we first saw it, late last year, was that it wasn’t a second rate underdog using the branding – that would have made sense as a kind of a point of differentiation against the incumbent…

But no, it was Amazon Web Services (AWS) who went public at Intel’s developer event last year saying that AWS instances that exclusively use Intel’s Xeon processors would be displaying the "Intel Inside" brand. So much for commodity huh?…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/01/15/the-ultimate-branding-coup-intel-inside-goes-cloud/