By Nick Flaherty
www.flaherty.co.uk
Intel buying McAfee in 2011 for $7.7bn was all about the
enterprise. Now, Intel spinning out McAfee into a separate company in a $4.2bn
deal that is all about the Internet of Things.
Back in 2011, Intel was aiming to secure the enterprise
alongside its PC and server processors in a market where it dominated. Now it
needs to secure the IoT, it needs cooperation from companies that license the
ARM architecture. Hence the need for an independent venture.
The key change is the McAfee Data Exchange Layer (DXL), the
industry-endorsed communication fabric providing real-time interaction between
applications. This needs to be taken down the stack to the gateway, where Intel
processors are being used, but further down to the node. This is the challenge. Another Intel company, Wind River, is already taking up that challenge, pushing the VxWorks real time operating system further into the IoT.
The McAfee Security Innovation Alliance has over 135
partners around the world, and 30 of these are using the DXL connection as an
API.
The giveaway is in the new strapline for McAfee - innovation,
trust, and collaboration. The new company is 49% owned by Intel, with the remainder
from equity house TPG and private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo, bu tit has to demonstrate that it can work well with the rest of the industry that does not rely on Intel. Intel
Senior Vice President and General Manager Chris Young will lead the new McAfee
as Chief Executive Officer. TPG partner Bryan Taylor has been named Chairman of
the Board.
“Cybersecurity is the greatest challenge of the connected
age, weighing heavily on the minds of parents, executives and world leaders
alike,” said Christopher Young, CEO of McAfee. “As a standalone company with a
clear purpose, McAfee gains the agility to unite people, technology and organizations
against our common adversaries and ensure our technology-driven future is
safe.”
“We offer Chris Young and the McAfee team our full support
as they establish themselves as one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity
companies in the industry,” said Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel. “Security
remains important to Intel, and in addition to our equity position and ongoing
collaboration with McAfee, Intel will continue to integrate industry-leading
security and privacy capabilities in our products from the cloud to billions of
smart, connected computing devices.”
The advantage of DXL is that it is an open standard. Unlike
typical integrations, each application connects to the universal DXL
communication fabric and there is just one integration process instead of
multiple efforts, which makes it suitable for enterprise scale IoT deployments.
OpenDXL will support a broad range of languages, enabling
developers to create integrations using their favourite development
environment. One app publishes a message or calls a service; one or more apps
consume the message or respond to the service request.
As is the goal for any standard, the interaction is
independent of the underlying proprietary architecture of each integrating
technology and integrations are much simpler because of this abstraction from
vendor-specific APIs and requirements.
In addition to creating native DXL integrations, developers
can also wrap their services to interact or wrap the API of a commercial
product to publish data onto DXL. Other services can listen to DXL messages and
calls to enrich their functionality with the latest data, or take appropriate
action. For a more sophisticated app reflecting orchestration, these sorts of
actions can be scripted together to drive a waterfall—or simultaneous set—of
actions.
The challenge now is to persuade the wider embedded industry
that the new McAfee is truly independent of Intel in order to use the
technology.
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