Infocomm 2019 | Intel announces the Unite Cloud Service — an open, low-cost, and IT-friendly collaboration solution

The Intel Unite solution is a low-cost, high-quality, and secure collaboration solution for businesses. The Unite Solution is scalable and platform agnostic making it easy for IT Pros to deploy it irrespective of their organization's IT setup. Intel's Unite Solution platform started in 2015 as a way to enable easy wireless sharing and has evolved into a full-fledged collaboration solution. Now, at the Infocomm 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida, Intel is taking Unite to the cloud with the launch of the Unite Cloud service.

In a traditional on-premise deployment, Intel Unite Solution needs a PC hub powered by an Intel Core vPro processor enabled for Intel Unite along with the Intel Unite app on client devices and a PIN server for authentication that has to be provided within the organization. While the Unite client works on all devices, the heart of the collaboration system, the PC hub, is Intel CPU-specific and is needed to securely log-in remote users.

With the new Intel Unite Cloud service, Intel provides the PIN server in the cloud thereby reducing operation and maintenance costs for IT while simplifying manageability. Intel said that the cloud unlocks new markets for Unite and allows for further scale-up. There's a growing ecosystem of partners for Unite that includes players across various segments such as AV, software, unified communications tools such as Skype, Cisco Webex, and Zoom, and room control devices. 

Unite may not really be a cash cow for Intel whose primary revenue source still remains CPUs, but the company sees a lot of potential in this segment. Cloud collaboration is poised to be a big thing in IoT, data centers, and VR. Although Intel didn't specifically talk about this in the presentation, the company could be looking to develop telemetry solutions to enable organizations track the attendance and productivity at meetings. Biometric security is also something Intel is interested in enabling for business meetings to authenticate the participants. Real-time translation via the cloud and even VR is being mulled for the future. These services could come from Intel or partners and can directly plug-in to the Unite Solution architecture.

Intel also expects to diversify Unite Cloud into additional markets such as education, healthcare, and digital signage. The Intel Unite Cloud service will be available for businesses from June 12.