Intel Corp. is stepping up its cloud game with the introduction of the Intel Cloud for All. Announced last Friday, the initiative is aimed at bringing the undeniable benefits of cloud computing to more and more businesses, and will take the form of new “industry investments and collaborations to unleash tens of thousands of new clouds,” Intel’s executives explained.

Intel is hoping the new initiative will accelerate cloud adoption in the enterprise by making it easier to deploy public, private and hybrid cloud services.

Intel argues that the cloud isn’t realy up to scratch for many enterprises, and so it’s promising to solidify a Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) to change that. Currently, Intel says that 75 percent of cloud users are consumers, and that enterprise cloud adoption has been held up by numerous problems, including a lack of scalability, gaps in open-source enterprise grade features and the general level of complexity.

Intel Cloud for All is intended to solve those problems, both for the enterprise and for small-and-medium-sized businesses.

“The key to delivering the efficiency of the cloud to the enterprise is rooted in software-defined infrastructure,” wrote Jonathan Donaldson, VP and GM of Intel’s software-defined infrastructure group. This push for more intelligent and programmable infrastructure is something that we’ve been working on at Intel for several years. The ultimate goal of Software-Defined Infrastructure is one where compute, storage and network resource pools are dynamically provisioned based on application requirements.”

Donaldson added that Intel will therefore take part in numerous collaborations within the industry to make sure that its SDI stack integrates frictionlessly with existing data center infrastructure.

More specifically, Intel is focused on three areas that it hopes will lead to an increase in cloud deployments and help businesses maximize those efforts:

1. “Investing in the ecosystem to accelerate enterprise-ready, easy-to-deploy software defined infrastructure solutions.”
2. “Optimizing SDI solutions to deliver highly efficient clouds across a range of workloads by taking full advantage of Intel platform capabilities.”
3. “Aligning the industry and engaging the community through open industry standards, solutions and routes to market to accelerate cloud deployment.”

As one of the first steps, Intel says it’s to collaborate with Rackspace Inc. on the development of a new Openstack Innovation Center focused on building more enterprise features and scale optimizations into the software’s source code.

“The OpenStack Innovation Center will include the world’s largest OpenStack developer cloud consisting of two 1,000-node clusters that will be available to the OpenStack community-at-large to support advanced, large-scale testing of OpenStack performance, code and new features. These testing clusters are expected to be available within the next six months,” Intel officials said.

Intel hopes the new innovation center will help drive a “second wave” of cloud adoption.

“Consumer services from major cloud service providers have driven the first wave of cloud adoption, accounting for 75 percent of current cloud usage,” officials explained. They added that this “second wave” is already underway, with the Internet of Things and Big Data technologies leading to new opportunities.

“The cloud has been critical to the digital services economy and has enabled tremendous innovation and business growth, but broad enterprise adoption is not happening fast enough,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group. “We believe that through this initiative we will enable our customers to realize the benefits and innovations gained from the latest cloud computing technologies.”

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