Intel showcases the power of touch

Tech giant Intel last week hosted an event designed to showcase the benefits, challenges and opportunities touch-based devices, applications and services can deliver to the business world.

Dubbed In Touch With the Future' the event held at the Park Plaza on London's Westminster Bridge brought together more than 130 IT professionals, spanning a range of business sizes and industries, from education to finance, retail, manufacturing and everything in between.

Graham Palmer, Intel's UK country manager, kicked off proceedings by describing touch as "a marathon not a sprint." He also talked about the key role the company plays not just in hardware efforts in working with partners and customers to support the surrounding software and services ecosystem. This role will become even more prominent and important in the new dawn of touch as businesses want to maximise the value of existing investment in applications and software, he suggested.

Walid Ali, director of engineering for Intel's mobile communications group was first on the stage, to provide real-world enterprise anecdotes about touch as well as demonstrating the technology.

"We have adapted to the device rather than the device adapting to us," he said to universal agreement from the assembled delegates. "End users want flexibility [whereas the IT department thinks differently] It has become a tug of war."

Next up, Microsoft's John Jester, general manager of Microsoft's enterprise and partner group, built on Ali's scene setting by going into greater detail about how Microsoft Windows 8, coupled with the power of Intel architecture, is helping to support new user experiences and driving increased business value.

Some 85 billion apps were downloaded in 2012, according to Jester, further illustrating users' appetites for tools and technologies to help create new app experiences and satisfy this demand.

Jeff Kilford, Intel's UK global support engineering manager, continued the Windows 8 story by detailing how Intel itself has embraced the power of the new operating system and all it has to offer. Intel itself is a global business, with employees carrying out a role of back office or front line customer-facing roles, meaning the benefits it has realised are equally applicable to others.