Big System Builder Bucks In PC Refreshes

Intel said that some 40 million PCs worldwide currently installed in businesses with fewer than 100 employees are greater than three years old with some 12 million to 15 million of those in the United States, meaning the market is ripe for upgrades.

Audio, video and wireless capabilities in Intel's new chipsets open new opportunities.

Intel outlined its strategy to leverage advances in the small-business market last month at CMP Media's XChange 2004 conference in Chicago. Part of that strategy is to help system builders move into the home convergence market, Intel said.

"With the new board [the 9156 Express chipset] there is a great opportunity to take the value proposition to small business," said Todd Garrigues, Intel's channel marketing manager for digital home and desktop CPUs.

Garrigues said the audio, video and wireless capabilities built into Intel's new chipsets open new opportunities for system builders.

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"Because there are so many features integrated on the board, small businesses don't have to worry about adding cards like graphics and audio," he said. The new integrated Intel Graphics Media 900 will support dual displays so, for example, users can work on a PowerPoint presentation on one display while having Internet or e-mail access on the other. In addition, built-in PCI Express Bus Architecture represents up to a four-time increase in bandwidth for graphics, he said. Intel will apply much of this small-business technology to the digital-home market, Garrigues added.

This October, Intel will also introduce its first integrated wireless capabilities on motherboards available for the U.S. market with global introduction in 2005.

"What we are trying to do in the consumer space is what we did with the Intel Centrino launch in the laptop space--to make wireless ubiquitous," he said.

"The new 915 and 925 chipsets seem targeted at that home convergence," said Brian Deeley, president of Graymar Business Solutions, a system builder in Timonium, Md. "This is something that we are very interested in if the manufacturers stick with this push."

Deeley's company currently focuses on government and education markets. But he thinks Intel's new chipsets could do for the home convergence market what Centrino did for the mobile market. "Eighteen months ago, we didn't build any whitebooks," he said. "Today, we build about 30 per month."