Intel Launches Sydney Solution Center

Sydney, Australia
September 4, 2001

Intel Australia today announced the opening of its Intel® Solution Center in Sydney to help accelerate the deployment of cutting-edge e-Business applications on Intel® technology. The center aims to help customers reduce the total cost of ownership spanning all components of the e-Business enterprise by migrating, optimizing and consolidating solutions on Intel® Architecture.

Managed by Intel® Solution Services, the Sydney center will help e-Business solutions providers (eBSPs), systems integrators, system manufacturers, software vendors, and companies deploying e-Business systems. Customers can evaluate, enhance and scale their e-Business infrastructure, identifying and creating solution stacks to reduce the risk of deploying new applications and technologies on most environments.

"More and more organizations are faced with the challenge of keeping pace with advances in information technology. But often the challenges of maintaining day-to-day operations makes it hard for them to keep up-to-date or trial new solutions while running their core systems,"said David Bolt, general manager, Intel Australia.

"Intel Solution Centers are unique as they provide complete flexibility, allowing organizations to prove new concepts and analyze any hardware, operating system and application combination, testing it in real-life scenarios," he said.

According to Bolt, more and more organizations are seeking to lower costs by moving to open standards based on Intel architecture. "We use strong, reliable, proven methodologies perfected through Intel's best known methods to validate solutions before implementation in mission critical environments."

Intel Solution Centers are a strategic tool for Intel, designed to promote and enable solution stacks for e-Business enterprise, optimized for Intel architecture. Bolt explained that the centers are based on a cost recovery only model. "Intel has invested US$100 million in 17 wholly-owned Intel Solution Centers globally. Fees are charged only to recover the cost of resources. This translates into significant savings for customers doing proof of concept testing for services they can then sell to their own customers."

The Sydney center is linked to a worldwide network of Intel and affiliate solution centers, providing access to an extensive range of resources.

In Australia, customers can access the Intel Solution Center from sites in Melbourne and Brisbane, as well as through numerous alliance centers. Current customers include Bullant, Redrock Communications and Traveland*.

Traveland worked with Intel Solution Services to design, implement, test and retest a massively scalable, centralized data infrastructure that would move Traveland's business and technology into the Internet age. Weeks of intensive design service, supported by Intel experts brought in from around the globe, identified the optimal server configurations to support Traveland's expanding needs, now and well into the future.

"The Intel team worked like they were working for us and completely took on the project like it was their own," said Ciaran Kelly, IT Architect at Traveland's headquarters in Sydney.

"It's a very specialized service to provide this proof of concept work," said Kelly. "It was a very complicated project and while other companies may have been able to do it, not all would have been able to do it in the timeframe we required. I was more than impressed by the outstanding dedication that the Intel team showed, even to the point of working 24 hour shifts to get the work done in time. They functioned as a team and were totally committed to achieving the goals of our project."

Intel Solution Center Services

The Intel Solution Center in Sydney will offer a whole range of services to address key e-Business needs including:

A menu of e-Business and network technology services (e.g. porting and network management services)

• Education services
• Optimized solution stacks
• State-of-the-art testing center
• On-site technical consulting

World-class engineers Access to a broad industry collaboration

Intel Solution Services will develop a series of tools for the center to optimize the efficiency of applications running on Intel®-based systems and speed their implementation. These tools include:

• Deployment guides detailing how to deploy, fine-tune and optimize a configuration for best performance on the Intel technology
• Guidance on selecting application parameters
• Guidance on selecting applications for specific solution stacks
• Capacity planning guides to help e-Business and service providers to monitor the performance of their solution stacks.

Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at http://www.intel.com/au/eng/local.