Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Vice President and General Manager of Business Client Platforms at Intel, Tom Garrison.
Hello. Welcome, everyone, to the 6th Generation Core and Core vPro Business event. I'm so happy to be standing in front of you and welcome you on this rainy, soggy day here in San Francisco, welcome all the people on the webcast as well. For those of you not here, we've done our best to try to end the drought in California all in one day. Thanks again for braving the elements. I'm excited to share the incredible innovation that the 6th Generation brings to business. These 6th Gen platforms represent the culmination of the hard work of thousands of employees around Intel, whether it's the planners and architects or the chip designers or the manufacturing professionals, as well as our sales and marketing team. Also the OEMs with their system designers as well.
This is a tremendous amount of work, today is an exciting day because we get to unveil the innovation to all of you. Thank you for attending and thank you for all of the hard work to all of you out there that have made this event today possible. A year ago, when we launched the 5th Generation platforms, we talked about our vision around workplace transformation. Workplace transformation, as you recall, began initially with the driving force being real estate cost savings. It started in Europe, firms were looking to try to dramatically consolidate their real estate holdings, bring employees closer together, and save that money. In doing so, they not only saved the money from real estate, but they also saw the other benefits around productivity and efficiency and collaboration. Employees really liked these new, more modern, collaborative work environments.
Our vision, Intel's vision that we shared last year was around no wires, that vision remains the same today. We are passionate about delivering the new modern workforce with no wires, not being encumbered with the burden of wires. Just over the last year since we announced this vision, we've been successful in deploying over 300 trials and actual deployments of Pro WiDi. This is wireless display. We also have had success with our wireless docking initiatives. All of these are available now from all of our vendors. We have demonstrations here on site, but are available worldwide. Employees around the world love this technology and love this innovation. As we look at surveys around the world, the surveys say that about 70% of enterprises are in some part of a workplace transformation project.
Either they've already completed it, they're in the planning phases, or they're in the middle of a workplace transformation. I can say from an Intel standpoint, the customers that we talk to directly, 100% of them are in some form of a workplace transformation project. This is a pervasive trend around the world, and Intel is no exception. By our own Intel project of workplace transformation, we measured a 37% reduction in the hard cost of the cost per employee per square foot. Workplace transformation not only delivers productivity enhancements and delivers a workplace that people want to work for, it delivers hard cost savings as well, as demonstrated by our results. Workplace transformation is not by itself enough. Workplace transformation needs to be enabled by technology, and that's where 6th Generation Core vPro and Core platforms come into play.
These designs that we're announcing today for business deliver incredible new form factors. They deliver these transformative capabilities because it's not just about performance anymore. Now it's about what kind of connectivity solutions they are, what kind of management solutions there are, security enhancements there are. All of these are now embodied in the 6th Generation platforms that we're talking about today. The benefit, of course, is the productivity and efficiency, which are the ultimate measures of the value of the platform. Today, we'll talk about some of the security enhancements we're making around hardened multi-factor authentication, and we'll speak more about that. Quite simply, the 6th Generation Core platforms are undoubtedly the best processor ever for business. If I talk about how to measure success, we can talk about the innovation we've had in more traditional vectors, like performance.
The 6th Generation platforms will typically, in an enterprise environment, replace platforms that are five or six years old in some cases. If we measure it relative to a five-year-old platform, these machines will deliver two and a half times the performance of the machine they'll be replacing. At the same time, those platforms will be four times faster at wake. An employee that wants to use their new 6th Generation platform, these machines will seem lightning fast. They're incredibly responsive. That's what employees want. They don't want to wait. When they want to get the job done, they want the machine to be there and ready for them to use. On the notebook side, on the mobile side of our business, these platforms now have three times the battery life.
When you're on that long flight from San Francisco to the East Coast or over to Europe, you now can rest assured that your device has three times the battery life. Think of all that productivity that you can have now when you're not around a power outlet. On the desktop side, we've seen incredible innovation on the desktop side as well. 6th Generation is a complete portfolio of products. On the desktop, we've seen innovation driving to newer, smaller, more innovative form factors that are up to 25 times smaller in terms of the overall size. The value you see for 6th Generation spans the gamut of platforms. That is part of our drive, that is part of our vision, is to deliver choice. We have a vision, a strategy that says we want the right device for the job.
Just a few years ago, the typical process was that IT would pick one or two platforms, maybe one or two notebook machines, or maybe one desktop machine. As an employee within those businesses, you were just issued your device. With the 6th Generation platform now, you have a common architecture that can span all of these different form factors, but at the same time, we see incredible innovation in the designs themselves. You can see the gamut ranging from the most razor-thin clamshell devices that are just stunningly beautiful, they're absolutely stunning in every way, through to the sleek detachables or convertibles. We're driving quad-core processing now into mainstream notebooks. You get incredible performance enhancements as well. We are also, on the desktop side, you see the most beautiful eye-catching desktop all-in-ones.
Beyond that, we see small form factor desktops, and even all the way down to Compute Sticks, all of which are powered by the 6th Generation Core platforms. In fact, if you think back just a few weeks ago at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it's worth noting that five of the top 18 platform awards were actually won by business platforms. Business platforms at a Consumer Electronics Show. That speaks to the incredible innovation that you see on business platforms. These are the world's best platforms out there, and that's what the awards actually speak to. Beyond that, I talk about the form factor breadth, in terms of the number of designs, we actually have a record number of designs, an all-time record. We have over 200 6th Generation Core platforms that are business designs across all of our OEM partners. That's a record.
We also have another record, which is more than 100 vPro designs for business. This is driven by, again, the value the 6th Generation brings to the market, the fact that our OEMs are so excited by all the new capabilities, and the drive to deliver the right device with the right set of capabilities to match the needs of the ever-changing workforce. Some of the examples of the innovation that we see, I thought I'd take just a moment here and showcase some of the incredible designs. The first here is the HP EliteBook Folio. This design is just stunning. This design has really everything that you think of when you talk about the aesthetics. The beautiful thin and light form factor, the razor-thin design here. You can put this in your bag, you would barely even notice that it's so light.
The design itself, when you look at the materials, they're beautiful. From a responsiveness perspective, this is a great design that has all of the capability that you would come to expect from the very best business PC. This was an award winner at CES as well. Recognized by the industry as one of the leading platforms out there and something that I certainly can't wait to get my hands on as well. Moving on, here's an example of the type of thin and light tablet design that you can see. This is a sub-eight-millimeter tablet design. From a weight perspective, it's very light. Full Core vPro capability, you get all of the performance capability, the management capability, security capability that you would come to expect, in the most sleek design possible. From a convertible standpoint, this is the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga.
This design here gives you the full Core i5 vPro performance. This is only 17 millimeters thick. It gives you the utility of a wraparound convertible, so it can be in tablet mode. It can give you the convertible capability as well. The full flexibility, but at the same time, the aesthetics, but also the great look and feel of something that you can put in your bag, doesn't weigh much. It gives you the full performance with less than 2.8 pounds for the total design. This also comes with an integrated fingerprint sensor, which I'll talk about in a little bit with some of the exciting new capabilities that are in this design as well. From our partners at Dell, we have the Dell XPS 13. This design, again, is just eye-catching. Look how thin and sleek this design is. It's just a stunning design.
This design actually features the world's first virtually borderless infinity edge display. Again, who would have thought that a small business around the world could have a choice like this with something so nice, so slim, so sleek with all these capabilities built for business? It is something to behold. On the desktop side, this is a fully functional, fully featured desktop design from HP, the HP EliteDesk. This has a Core i5 vPro machine in it. These designs now are so small they become nearly invisible. These desktop designs can, yes, reside on your desk or maybe even under your desk, or they could be mounted behind screens, behind or next to projectors. These class of desktops now are finding their way with this new innovation around the smaller form factor.
They're finding their way into new and ever-expanding areas to deliver their value, and it's an exciting space. A tremendous amount of energy is now happening in the desktops as we move to these smaller form factors. One more example of the evolution to smaller form factors is this. This small little device right here is a full Core m vPro PC. If you remove the bottom, there is an HDMI connector right here. You can plug it into any HDMI-enabled screen, and you now have a full vPro-capable PC, highly managed, very secure. This is changing the world when it comes to remotely managed television devices as well as Internet of Things. These devices are so small they can just plug right in, and again, you get the full benefits of vPro with its resiliency, security, its manageability.
These are devices increasingly that don't have associated users with them. Think, for example, a vending machine. Think, for example, a monitor at an airport that's 20 feet up above the ground. You want to be able to manage these devices without the need of having a user. You can have an IT person remotely connect, manage the device however it needs to be managed, and the device is up and running. Incredible innovation, and these are just a few. I would encourage those of you who are here in the room to look at the full spectrum of devices that we have over next door immediately following this keynote. I will say it's not just about the beauty and the aesthetics.
Think of the innovation that goes into these designs, from the design itself to the material science, to the thermal engineering work that goes in to make sure that these devices are operating appropriately. All of the electrical work that goes in, the visual stunning designs, all of those skills that are brought to bear by the professionals around the world. This is an exciting space. Business PCs are where innovation is happening right now, it's an incredible, exciting time for us. We're happy to be working so closely with Microsoft. With the combination of Windows 10, which is the leading operating system out in the market today, coupled with the leading sixth-generation Core vPro and Core platforms, you get the best possible experience.
We've been working with Microsoft for many years, as you can imagine, talking about the innovation that we want to deliver with our sixth-generation platforms. That has resulted in over 140 unique optimizations between the sixth-generation platforms and Windows 10. Some of these are capabilities that most people don't even understand or maybe even need to understand. Low-level feature correlation between a technology that we have in hardware, like SGX capability, which stands for Software Guard Extensions, coupled with Microsoft VSM capability. Together, those two come together to bring a whole new level of container security to Microsoft's products. These are capabilities, for example, with SGX, is only available in sixth-generation Core. There's many of these. There's so many of these that we can't mention them all. Together and combined, they result in an incredible experience for business users. We're excited as well around vPro.
vPro is a brand that represents really the best of business platforms. These are platforms that are designed with the security and manageability and performance and stability built into the platform. Since its inception about 10 years ago, we've shipped over 175 million vPro chips to the marketplace. Today, as we sit here today, over 110 million of those vPro systems are still in the installed base today, still working as part in businesses around the world. As I mentioned before, vPro is an important element around the Internet of Things as well because it's so critical that the devices that are represented by the Internet of Things, whether it's a vending machine or whether it's an ATM machine, these are devices where businesses rely on them to be up and running. vPro plays a key role there. We see vPro continuing to grow.
We see the adoptions just from 2014 to 2015, we've seen more than doubling of the activations of vPro, turning on all those capabilities that are unique to vPro. We've seen a doubling of that. We've seen designs just in the 2015 timeframe, that one single design of nearly a half a million clients. We've seen other customers come in and buy 160,000, 130,000, 110,000. These are massive purchases of the vPro systems, it's because they see the value, because they know so much is riding on it, making their employees productive and available for whatever work needs to be done. The vPro today is the building block for business computing, we're excited about that. We're excited about the progress that we've made over these last 10 years, we're excited about what the future has for vPro.
We've been extending even beyond the platform itself, and we're, again, relentlessly driving towards this vision of a no-wires workplace and workplace transformation. If you recall back in June, we launched a product called Intel Unite. Intel Unite is a conferencing solution. It's software that runs on top of a vPro desktop in a conference room that allows people to very easily and seamlessly connect, share, and collaborate. It's very much analogous to what I talked about with workplace transformation. This product embodies workplace transformation. Since our launch, we now have seven OEMs, and we have over 200 deployments underway around the world. We've seen tremendous pickup of the product, a lot of excitement.
Many people-- One of the best things about my job when we talk about Unite is when we expose Unite to the user for the very first time, and we say, "Why don't you go ahead and present from your laptop?" You see for just a moment this look of terror, like, "Oh my God, I can't believe I'm going to have to try to do this." You just simply watch them put in their simple pin code to connect to the Unite PC in the room. They click one button, and all of a sudden, their material is up and displaying in the room. They light up, and they say, "Wow, that was so easy." We're trying to drive that level of easiness into all aspects of the Unite product.
Today, we're happy to announce, in addition to the seven OEM designs you see there from Acer, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, and Lenovo, we see now a partnership, and we're announcing a partnership with Logitech. We're very excited about that. They're going to be integrating the Unite software capability into their conferencing room peripherals as well, coupled with a vPro desktop. We're very excited about that. You'll see and hear more from that partnership in the coming months ahead. Intel is also a user of Unite in our work environment. In fact, we have Unite in today about 600 conference rooms worldwide. By the end of 2016, we'll have Unite in over 3,000 conference rooms at Intel. We're a very analytical company as well, so we wanted to measure what were the benefits that we saw from Unite.
What we saw was that specifically in rooms with Unite, before Unite had been installed, that the average meeting was starting somewhere around 7-8 minutes after the hour. That was driven by the fact that people would come in, they were having trouble connecting to the projector, maybe they forgot their dongle, and the experience just wasn't good. There's all that wasted time, wasted productivity. Now, with the Unite PC in the room, we have measured the start times of those meetings, and now it's just over two minutes. We see just over two minutes versus seven or eight. That's a significant productivity increase, and at the same time, employees love it. It's the number 1 IT-requested service at Intel. We see this not just specific to Intel, we see this at other companies as well.
I'd like to invite Sean O'Farrell back on stage, he participated in the event earlier, and have Sean share with us Eli Lilly's experiences around Unite. Sean. Thank you, sir.
Thanks, Tom. Well, as Tom mentioned before, we're under a workplace transformation right now, at the beginning it was solely focused on the desktop. In a lot of cases, it was the same thing that Intel had talked about before in that we were going after reallocating space so that we could squeeze more people into the same amount of space using hoteling and things like that. As we got through this, since it's been going on now for three or four years, one of the things that we noticed that was forgotten about was the conference room. We have a wide variety of conference rooms at Lilly because Lilly is a very meeting-oriented culture, and we love to have our meetings.
We hand out the little ribbon that says, "I survived a meeting that should've been an email." That's given out really on almost a daily basis around our company. Just in the corporate center alone within the Indianapolis area, there's approximately 1,000 conference rooms. These go from the big telepresence rooms and down to the very small enclaves where people have one-to-one or one-to-three people meetings. I can tell you just from my perspective, none of them are the same. We've got different hardware on the wall, and it really kind of follows when the conference room was last remodeled. In some cases, again, as Tom was alluding to, you walk in and they've got to figure out, okay, do I hit the button that says PC? Is the projector on? Is it a flat panel?
One of the things that'll bring a tear to probably some of the really home theater people here in the room is a brand-new 70-inch 4K display, and our facilities people put a VGA cable on it. That thing is running and stunning 800x600 resolution. That in and of itself provides a problem because the laptops we have, we've got a combination of DisplayPort, we've got VGA cables, we've got HDMI, and dongles are now more pervasive as the Surface and some of the MacBooks and things are coming online. There's no common denominator across any of them. There was a lot of scrambling back and forth. Myself, I had to run up to our executive floor just last week.
A consultant came in with one of the really small new USB-C Macs, and he brought an adapter with him, a USB-C adapter, but it was only HDMI. It's the only one he had. Bad for him in that he should've probably been better prepared, but he wanted to display. We had our head of HR, our CIO was there, and I think our CTO was there. They called me and I had to run up and just like magic produce a VGA USB-C dongle, which I, thank God, was able to do and save the day. I shouldn't be put in that position. This is where we went after the wireless capability, and all of a sudden it became a sinking feeling to me now because we wanted to do wireless. We wanted to clean up the desktop.
Now we're looking at a Miracast dongle perhaps or something plugged into the back of the TV. We've got a lot of Macs and iPads floating around the company. We're looking at having to deploy and manage 1,000 Apple TVs to get the AirPlay capability. That doesn't even begin to address the backup plan because in some cases, the technology could fail. We're still dealing with wires and cables and dongles. We saw the Unite product and it was sort of the clouds parted and the ray of sunshine came down, and it was like, okay, this is going to save me. We've got one device that we can put in there that can be managed in vPro, it can be managed by the system tools that we already have in place.
On top of that, we can also then start to leverage that PC that's in the room. We can do things like keep track of how many times that the room is being used, which is a big deal because in a lot of cases, some of our executives like to hoard the conference rooms, sort of like Gollum in "The Lord of the Ring" and they, "Our conference room is so busy, it can't be shared. It can't be shared." We want to be able to come back to them and say, "Yeah, you've used it twice this month," and the rest of the time it sat dark when people are scrambling looking for something else. Almost becomes then our workplace becomes more intelligent. We want to have a more intelligent conference room.
We can begin to leverage sensors and turn the lights on and off when people leave, turn the projector off to save the bulb if there is a projector there. Be able to, hopefully, in some of the newer conference rooms, control the temperature and things like that. Those are the things we're going to be going after, and we look at Unite right now as the linchpin, not only to save the sanity of my team from having to manage multiple devices and again, 1,000 Apple TVs in a corporate setting. Not that there's anything wrong with the Apple TV, but it's just, again, it's just more stuff that we have to keep track of. I think we're going to be able to save at least two or three headcount out of this and provide a more positive user experience.
That's great because it's not just about the capability that we have today with Intel Unite, but because now you have a PC in the conference room, it's such a flexible architecture, you can add functionality, whether it's, like you said.
Skype for Business or any of the other things. We are looking at that as well, and I know that's an enhancement you guys are rolling out right now, I think, as we speak.
Right.
That is something that we're going to look at. We're excited about the possibilities. We've got it running in the lab. We're going to have two conference room, pilot conference rooms up and running by the end of the month, one of which is going to be the one with the 70-inch 4K display because it just irritates me that there's a VGA cable plugged into nothing. I didn't even think it'd be possible to do that, but they figured out a way to do it. We're going to be looking by the end of the year to have approximately 300 rooms up and running globally between Indianapolis and our London office, and then it'll spread around the world as conference rooms get remodeled.
That's great. Yeah, we're adding all kinds of capabilities. We include the Skype for Business now integration into Intel Unite. It will be a plugin. We have full support around OSX, so if you're running a Windows PC, of course you can connect, but also with an OSX PC, you can connect. We've been adding new capabilities as well, like extended display and auto disconnect. When the meeting's over and you walk away, you can disconnect from the meeting. These are all capabilities that are being driven and funneled in from the users around the world, whether it's Intel users or other companies like Lilly, who are asking us for new capabilities. Because it is a software product that's running on a PC, it's a very flexible thing for us to be able to add features over time, and you'll see more and more of these capabilities coming in.
It doesn't take too much imagination to think about, look at all the things that would be great to have in a conference room to make meetings more effective. Now we have the PC in the room, we have the tool to be able to deliver those functionalities. It's a very exciting innovation, the whole area around the conference room, and with Unite and the Collaboration PC at the center of it. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Tom.
As you heard, for those of you here in the room, from the panel discussion that we started off with, security is becoming more and more critical, and specifically the endpoint security is becoming more and more critical. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a world today where it's an estimated 117,000 corporate cyber attacks every day. This is a prevalent and persistent issue. More than 50% involve identity with stolen or misused credentials. With phishing, in particular, trying to phish a user's username and password is the fastest-growing class of attack. These attacks are expensive. Breaches are expensive. The estimates actually vary, but an average of the cost of these attacks ranges about $20 million per attack. That's in cost of the data. It also impacts the brand image of the companies.
If we look at this class of attack, there are over 750 million PCs around the world in the installed base and businesses all around the world that are vulnerable to this class of attack. The time was now for Intel to do what we can from a platform architecture standpoint to try to advance the capability of the machine and our platform with 6th Generation to begin to address this class of attack by adding new capability to the machine. Again, our vision is still around workplace transformation, but with the world that I just described, with all the classes of attacks, we needed to expand the definition of workplace transformation and now extend it to include security. Now, what do we mean by security? We are announcing for the first time ever a new capability in the PC we call Intel Authenticate.
This is now available for preview for customers to begin their testing to see what we're talking about, to be able to try it in their environments. We're very excited about this. It is designed to dramatically improve identity security. It is true multi-factor authentication. By that, we mean it is multiple factors. You get to use two or three or four factors, whatever IT decides, and you need those factors to be able to gain access to the PC. We're aware of some people who say multi-factor authentication, but they really mean offering a choice of factors. Maybe there is one or two or three factors, and you pick one, and once you use it, then you're in. We are offering a solution that provides IT the choice of choosing one, two, or three factors, maybe even four, to be able to gain access to the machine.
This is true multi-factor authentication. Importantly, this stores user information like their biometrics, the IT policy about what's required to get into the system to gain access, as well as the credentials themselves, are all stored in hardware below the software level. These are now not vulnerable to the classes of software attacks, the malware attacks that are out there and so prevalent today that are oriented around stealing information. Importantly as well, these are policy-based capability, meaning IT can set a policy and then drive that policy across all of the 6th Generation platforms. They don't need to do this on a device-to-device basis. We have the different factors or classes of factors, one of which is biometrics, and that's pretty simple. Initially, that's going to focus around fingerprint. Over time, we'll add other factors.
Could be facial, could be other types of biometric information as well. We also have a secure PIN. Think of the PIN that you use for your ATM card, that kind of a concept. Now you would enter your PIN either through a touch screen, if you have a touch screen PC, or you can use your mouse, and you can enter that in. That's all done in a very secure way so that software malware that's designed to take the images from your PC, called screen scrapers, they don't see the PIN pad. The PIN numbers themself are randomized. That whole class of attack doesn't work. In fact, you can't enter the PIN with the keyboard as well. The reason is because there's a whole other class of attack around key logging that just watches for the keystrokes and logs the keystrokes.
That's why I use the mouse or the touch screen to be able to do the PIN. We also have proximity. Initially, that'll be around Bluetooth-enabled phones with either Android or iOS. Those phones, when they're near the PC, let's say it's Tom's phone next to Tom's PC, well, that becomes one factor. It's very likely that it is actually me sitting at my PC if my phone is there. That's just one factor. Also, with vPro machines, we have the ability to do what's called logical location. The AMT location is basically a small engine. The management engine in a PC goes out, and it looks to see what network is it around, and it does this regularly.
It says, "Am I in a network that I know, or am I in a network that I don't know?" IT can decide based on what network the PC is talking to. It can decide if this is a trusted network that I may only ask for one factor of authentication. If I'm in another environment where maybe I don't recognize this network, then I'm going to ask for a different set of factors to authenticate. There is all this flexibility built in. IT can decide how many factors, in what scenario those factors, in what order they want to ask for the factors, all of that, and then embed those decisions into the hardware directly and have full control. Authenticate runs on Windows 10 PCs, but it also will run on Windows 8 and Windows 7 PCs as well.
Companies that are maybe still in the process of transitioning to Windows 10, maybe later this year or beginning of next year, they can still begin their testing in the Windows 7 or Windows 8 environments, maybe even deploy as well. As they transition, they have the confidence that Authenticate will also work with the more modern Windows 10 as well. I thought what I would do is pause for a moment. We have a very brief video to help explain in a little bit more detail, a little bit more about Authenticate. Please roll the video.
More than half of all data breaches start with misused or stolen credentials. Traditional software-only security solutions risk exposure of key IT and user credential data to malicious software, greatly reducing the ability to protect user identity. This exposure potentially puts the network in danger from unauthorized access. Intel Authenticate can help close these vulnerabilities by protecting authentication credentials and IT policies in hardware below the operating system and out of reach of typical suspicious software and applications. With support for multiple factors of authentication, credentials are captured, encrypted, matched, and stored entirely in hardware, making it much more difficult for even the most advanced threats to reach them. Managed IT departments can tailor their own combinations of available factors through flexible policy configuration and enforcement, transforming identity protection across the enterprise.
Okay, I'd like to invite Brad Medairy up on stage and have him share his experiences with Authenticate and his view of how this could transition in enterprise. Thanks for joining, Brad.
Hey, thanks, Tom. I work for Booz Allen Hamilton, and we're a large global consulting firm focused around providing cyber solutions to our clients. We support some of the world's largest clients or organizations, both from the federal perspective and also commercially. We all know these guys are under attack, constant attack, by very sophisticated and evolving threat actors. We're seeing a lot of change in the landscape. 15 years ago, we were worried about a 13-year-old in their parent's basement trying to hack some organization and wreak havoc. In the last few years, we've seen a lot of nation-state activity, sophisticated countries attacking our critical infrastructure and trying to steal and siphon data. Over the last probably 24 to 36 months, we've seen a big focus around organized crime and sophisticated crime syndicates compromising information, credit cards, and trying to monetize that information.
We've also seen a big focus around the extended enterprise, the Internet of Things. The attack surface is evolving quite rapidly. It's open to much more new and sophisticated attacks. I think we're going to see a lot of focus around crimeware. We're going to see a lot of focus around ransomware against critical infrastructure, against automobiles, and other things as we continue to move forward. The other thing that we're seeing is an increasingly mobile workforce. I know in our organization, a lot of our clients' organizations, we're seeing a lot of folks now telecommuting, working from home. Something that we haven't had to deal with a lot in the past.
We've seen some of our clients' employees, they get compromised, their credentials get stolen from their home by an attack on a light bulb that's connected to a router that then compromises a workstation and gets the credentials. The attack surface is expanding. The adversaries are getting more sophisticated, and there's a lot of threats against both us personally and the organizations that we work for. I was talking to an executive from a company that was recently breached, and we were talking through how they had typically solved their problem, and it was sort of like buzzword bingo. They had the best technology suite that was available in the commercial marketplace. Buzzword bingo, IPS, IDS, endpoint software, and host-based security. They had the best of everything, but they were still breached. We were talking through what exactly happened.
At the end of the day, it was an authorized user who had their credentials stolen that caused the entry point into the organization, and they stole a lot of sensitive information from that particular organization. We're really excited about partnering with Intel and our clients around the Authenticate technology. We think it provides a couple key things that will really help strengthen the security posture and allow us really to focus on finding the advanced threats. We think that this Authenticate technology really provides a solid foundation by storing the credentials in hardware. We also think that it's going to allow our clients who have bought all these sophisticated software solutions to still integrate and provide it as part of an integrated ecosystem and be able to better take advantage of these tools and technologies. We also see, moving forward, really a spend ceiling coming.
There's been a lot of investment in tools and technologies, we've seen O&M costs continue to rise. It's not sustainable over a long period of time. If we focus on the fundamentals, optimize some of the existing technologies in the infrastructure, we think it's going to be a much better long-term state for organizations. Lastly, we're excited about true multi-factor authentication and the business processes and the business objectives driving the technology as opposed to the other way around. When I talk to a lot of IT system administrators, they would love to have 40-character passwords that folks change every day. It's great, right? Very secure. At the end of the day, it doesn't actually enable your business.
Things like biometrics and having this capability support biometric authentication, we also think that's the wave of the future and something that we're working with our clients to implement and integrate. We're looking forward to the partnership. We think this is really sort of the next wave, it's really going to help clients go a long way towards being more secure.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Take care. I thought I would just take a moment here and give you a simple example of Intel Authenticate in action. Here we have a PC. This is a Windows 10 PC, and I will go ahead, and I will lock this PC. Now the PC, what we've done is we've set it up so that the IT administrator is first wanting to see if the phone is in range. We have a phone right here. This would be Tom's phone next to Tom's PC. That could be in my pocket. It could be anywhere near the device. In the future, it could move beyond phone. It could be maybe a wearable device or something. You'll see the evolution of these proximity-type devices move from phone, but also include other devices moving forward.
First, it will ask to see if the phone is in range, and then it will ask me for a biometric. This is, again, Windows 10, so instead of entering a password, I just simply clicked Connect, and very quickly, it went and looked for the phone. It found the phone, and now it's asking for a fingerprint. I will just very quickly touch the fingerprint like so, and I'm in. From a user standpoint, think about how that changes the game. The user will think they don't have passwords anymore. This is great. I don't have to remember these passwords anymore. I can just sit down at my PC, hit the button, put my finger on the sensor like that, and just that quickly, I am productive. From their perspective, this is a huge win. From IT's perspective, look what they just did.
They just significantly raised the security posture of the platform. Now you have devices with true multi-factor authentication. Again, this was just one example of a Bluetooth connection with proximity with a fingerprint. IT could change that, change the order. They could have used the pin. They could have used the location. There's full flexibility now built in, and this is built into the hardware. This is part of a platform architecture, and it's available on every core processor and the Intel Core vPro processors. This is something that you get as part of the 6th Generation platforms. We're very excited about this. We expect companies now around the world to begin their testing, and through that testing process, they will provide that feedback to us. We can make changes and modifications accordingly to add features, to add new capabilities as they see fit.
As that feedback comes in, we would expect eventually we'll get to the production and deployments of this. That's a standard process to test these capabilities first. We're very excited now to be able to be in a position where the Intel Authenticate solution is available to everyone to begin that testing. The environments that we have been talking about principally so far, at least the examples we've been talking about, have been more oriented towards medium and large businesses. These are businesses because we've been talking about IT and the IT decision-makers about what platform capabilities they want to have and so forth. That's just part of the story. That's only part of the market. There is really the businesses that have managed IT, and then there are the businesses that don't have IT at all.
These are companies that are typically small businesses. They typically have 20 or fewer employees. They nonetheless still value and strive for all of the same sort of collaboration capabilities that we are talking about for the larger business as well. They want to be secure. They want to have PCs that just work, that are able to be managed in a way that their data is secured. They don't have that expertise to be able to deliver that capability. We're excited because we have a product called Small Business Advantage that is tailored at this small business set of customers. We are going to deliver these capabilities with the Small Business Advantage focused around productivity as well as security, and this is something that you can imagine if you are a pet store owner or maybe a bicycle repair shop or a dry cleaner.
These are companies that they want technology to help them grow their business, but they don't want to have to spend a lot of time managing their environment or, in a bad case, potentially making a change to their environment and then having their overall compute solution not be available, and then their business is kind of dead. We're providing a capability with Intel Small Business Advantage that is preloaded on the small business-oriented designs from our OEMs. We have over 90 OEM designs and over 120 channel designs that are available worldwide. The Small Business Advantage software is actually loaded on the PC at purchase, preloaded, or can be available via download.
It delivers these productivity capabilities like chatting or screen sharing or being able, if you forgot, maybe you're out talking to a customer and you forgot a particular file, and you need to try to reach back to your company and grab that file and get it back to your device. These are capabilities that large IT shops can do, but it's a daunting path for small businesses to do it when they don't have IT professionals. Now they have solutions that'll give them that extended capability, the ability to do some of these functions and at the same time, do also basic health kinds of things around backing up the data, restoring it. Maybe in some cases, they want to block USB for certain kinds of devices, like maybe thumb drives.
Some businesses are concerned that either rogue employees or other bad actors will come into their environment and use a USB to steal information or load malicious code onto their PCs. They want to be able to manage their USB. We have a capability called USB Blocker that allows them to make those decisions, whether they want to block entire categories of devices like thumb drives or maybe a whitelist certain thumb drives that are okay, but everything else needs to be granted access individually. Or entire categories like keyboards, they would be universally allowed, as an example, or mice or other USB devices. We give them that capability with USB to make the decisions that they see fit. These are, again, features that we hear from our customers that they would deeply value.
We're excited about Intel Small Business Advantage and the capabilities that we continue to add here. With the broad portfolio or breadth of designs that we have around the world, with over 120 channel designs worldwide, these companies can rest assured that they have the capability at their disposal. Again, in summary, we're excited about 6th Generation vPro. It is undoubtedly the best business processor ever from Intel. With Intel Authenticate, it's this exciting new capability that addresses real needs for businesses that helps them protect their client endpoints, raise their overall security posture, and it's all embedded in the platform hardware, in the platform architecture of 6th Generation. You get it for buying 6th Generation. We're excited that companies will be motivated to go out and start their testing and then eventually deploying 6th Generation with Intel Authenticate in their environment to help secure their environments.
Again, workplace transformation, it is our goal. It is our mission to continue to drive and enable workplace transformation. We remain relentlessly focused on the no-wires workplace and driving what that means to the evolving work standard and how employees collaborate. The 6th Generation is a great example of a platform that does just that. We advance things around wireless display, around wireless docking, around that wire-free workplace. We embed capability into Intel Unite to really change the PC environment and how people collaborate in the conference room spaces. If you look forward, the amount of innovation that's going to be coming in a lot of these areas is just exciting. We're happy that you all joined today. Thank you all for being here in San Francisco and for the many hundreds of you that are on the webcast worldwide. Thank you very much.