Intel Has a Good Story with McAfee

Intel Corp.'s announcement that it would by security firm McAfee Inc. for $7.68 billion could have an interesting play in the federal information technology market, according to Washington tech analysts. By having a McAfee at your fingertips, Intel can bolster the security in its chips, giving it a leg up in agencies looking for safer PCs, laptops, and wireless devices, some federal IT market watchers say.

That holds for the entire market, actually. "Analysts expect that many of the tools that McAfee provides today may be built-in to chips and devices over time," the New York Times reported.

But it is a good story for the federal market. In an interview earlier this year, Intel executives pushed the idea to Nextgov that PCs aren't simple commodities, meaning the components of a PC or laptop have become so indistinguishable and clock speeds so fast that one make is relatively similar to another. The argument was made that the chips' in the devices are different enough to make a distinction between computers. What makes them different is the security that is coded into the chips.

Now with McAfee in its corner, that argument will be easier to make, evidently, to a federal market that is now teed up to consider everything cyber.