In 2020, Intel Corp. announced the Pandemic Response Technology Initiative, which was a pledge to invest $50 million in accelerating technologies, solutions and partnerships to solve some of the biggest challenges that the pandemic was presenting to the world at large. Their partnership with Splunk Inc., a company that produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing big data, led them to create some significant advances within industries such as healthcare, particularly in regards to telehealth.

“There’s quite a bit of breadth in the types of solutions we’ve deployed as part of the pandemic response,” said Rick Echevarria (pictured), vice president of the sales and marketing group and general manager of the Intel Olympics and Paralympics Program at Intel Corp.

Echevarria spoke with John Walls, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf21 Virtual event. They discussed the ways Splunk and Intel have partnered to create solutions during the pandemic. (* Disclosure below.)

Using data to improve healthcare during the pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic when travel was restricted, businesses closed and millions sent home to work remotely, the healthcare industry was figuring out how to use telehealth in better ways to manage remote care, as well as creating data security and privacy for patients. Multiple institutions needed to access and track data, all the while keeping it secure, as they were also learning out how to confront a deadly new disease in ways never seen before.

Intel and Splunk collaborated by starting to look at Splunk’s data analytics capabilities, machine learning and algorithms, and they then integrated those capabilities into Intel’s OpenVINO platform to create application solutions based on visual data. There were a lot of other focuses to make all this happen, too, including an emphasis on high-performance computing.

“An example of that is … work we’ve done around using X-rays to detect COVID on certain populations,” Echevarria said.  “We’ve invested in high-performance computing … to help the researchers find cures for the current pandemic and then looking at future pandemics. So it’s been quite a breadth of solutions, and it’s really a testament also to the breadth of Intel’s portfolio and partnerships to be able to enable so much in such a short amount of time.”

Ultimately, customers in all industries are talking about digital transformation — both during the pandemic and post-pandemic. And it truly is all about capturing data, according to Echevarria.

“[Transformation] requires … the ability to capture, to ingest, to analyze the data and to do that on an infrastructure that is going to scale with your business, that is going to be reliable, and that is going to give you the flexibility for the types of solutions that you’re wanting to apply,” Echevarria concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of during the Splunk .conf21 Virtual event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Splunk’s .conf21 Virtual conference. Neither Splunk Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE