Intel to detail vPro extensions beyond management features at IDF

Intel is set to add new capabilities to its vPro technology for businesses in its 4th generation Core processors, extending it to enhance file transfer and collaboration tools, offer secure wireless display capabilities and better integrate it with the small business advantage (SBA) platform for SMEs.
In an interview with V3, Intel's Business Client division general manager Rick Echevarria said that the company is looking to build on its vPro technology in ways designed to help boost end user productivity.
While the 4th generation of its Core vPro was announced as part of the Haswell launch last month, Intel is planning a broader launch at its upcoming Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, where more details will be disclosed.
"In September, we will talk about our decision to turn vPro into not only a security and manageability platform, but how we are also building into the platform technologies that are intended to help you be more productive and to have a better experience as a user of technology," said Echevarria.
As well as extra management capabilities and enhancements to its KVM technology, Intel is adding to vPro encryption key management that will work with encryption support in its own flash solid state drives (SSDs), as well as opening up encryption capabilities through application programming interfaces (APIs) to secure file transfer and secure file sharing services.
"We have a lot of capability in our active management technology to manage keys, and for those workers who want to go drop their data in different locations, we want to give IT the ability to manage those keys."
"We'll provide the underlying technology, the APIs, and we'll choose a few of our partners. SkyDrive Pro represents a very good opportunity for us and there will be a few others we will partner with," Echevarria said.
While the 4th generation Core platform launched with Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) technology built in, Intel is looking to offer a secure version of this for corporate environments by integrating it with vPro.
"Wi-Di is one of those technologies we have to go and enhance for the business environment because it is a hassle to be dealing with cables and connections and adapters, and it's one of those technologies that gets a lot of usage from a productivity perspective," said Echevarria.
The overall strategy seems to be to expand vPro so that other management tools and business technologies can plug into it and extend its capabilities.
"We're basically turning this management and security capability that's in vPro into a programmable engine for IT," he said.
Intel is also looking to integrate vPro better with its small business advantage (SBA) tools, which are aimed at smaller companies that may lack an IT department to take care of PC management processes for them.
"If you look at vPro, it's really designed as an enterprise class technology, so with SBA, we looked at whether there were some things we could leverage from that platform that small businesses might want to use," Echevarria explained.
"What you will likely see in future is us taking more of the vPro functionality and exposing it through the SBA interface. We will also enable OEMs to do the same thing with an SDK, so they can take those capabilities and expose them in a simpler way for small businesses."