Intel wants to sell 'corporate Napster'

Intel is planning to release a corporate peer-to-peer application inspired by Napster.

Doug Busch, IT director of Intel, said the company has developed a P2P technology called Share and Learn inspired by the controversial music-swapping service.

He told silicon.com: "We got the idea from Napster as we had a big demand to distribute large multimedia files for various departments but the WAN required to do that was very expensive.

"We simply couldn't afford to do it so we set up this file-sharing scheme so users can access the information they want from the LAN."

The sale of the technology is part of the chip giant's plan to sell off many of the applications it developed internally in its ongoing quest to turn itself into an internet-based organisation - something it's been trying to do for the last four years.

Today, Busch said very few business processes are paper-based and he claimed the company is only a few years away from being totally internet-based.

Busch claimed the company has saved hundreds of millions of dollars through Share and Learn, and through its knowledge management and collaboration tools.

Since Share and Learn was introduced, Intel has seen a tenfold improvement in file transfer performance and a 15 per cent saving on network costs.

Busch declined to comment on when the product will be released commercially.

The man who oversees Intel's worldwide IT requirements also had some words of wisdom to help CIOs weather the economic storm.

He warned against hoarding money as a way out of the economic downturn and claimed Intel rolled out Windows XP - part of the company's new standard platform specification - during one of the black spots in its history.

Intel has also installed Windows 2000 on all of its laptops in an attempt to improve reliability and reduce total cost of ownership.

Taking the company online is also a good way to save money, he advised.

"Ebusiness won't change the deal-making - that's done on the golf course - but it will make the business processes that come out of that deal run more efficiently."