Sunny Clouds: Intel Data Center Rev Up 15%, Beating Other Categories In Otherwise Lackluster Earnings

A shining light appeared in Intel’s otherwise mediocre second quarter earnings results today. Data center revenues were up 15.1%, beating all other categories.

The news reflects the changing IT landscape. Companies are looking to get more out of their data centers in an effort to optimize what they already have. Servers are getting abstracted so technology vendors are looking to differentiate. That comes in the form of better efficiencies that Intel can offer.

Intel has been quietly developing its data center management business. It has primarily done this through its partners that sell server technology.

Revenues for the data center group were about $2.8 billion compared to $2.43 billion last year.

Here’s how that compares to other categories:

You would think that companies would be cutting their data center budgets. Barb Darrow broke down the results last week from the Uptime Institute. About 49% of respondents said private cloud spending is up from 35% last year. More than half of the respondents said their data center budgets are up as well.

Node Manager and Data Center Manager (DCM) are Intel’s two core offerings. According to Data Center Dynamics, the node manager firmware helps extract power and temperature data. DCM sits on top of the firmware as middleware. It aggregates data from each of the firmware feeds.

HP, Dell and IBM are some of Intel’s most important partners for the DCM technology. The list of partners also includes such storage companies as EMC and NetApp.

Intel gets better margins for its data center technology than it does for its PC client platforms such as its notebook and desktop computers.