IT and Society: Lenovo unveils cloud service that detects hardware capabilities of user’s laptops

Lenovo has announced a hosted applications service that enables corporate clients to use capabilities of their laptops and computers more efficiently. The new service thus can detect the hardware capabilities of an end user's laptop and tailor the service accordingly.

Secure Cloud Access (SCA) service provides access to Windows applications that are hosted on a central server and optimizes the services based on the available processing power, memory, graphics, battery life and bandwidth, said Bryan Thomas, manager of alternative client computing and server software at Lenovo. The goal is to deliver services that are commensurate with computing capabilities available on the client.

Hardware data on a client is exposed to the cloud through specific chip features on Intel's latest Core processor. Intel has published APIs (application programming interfaces) to remotely access data on the hardware attributes.

Apart from laptops and PCs, SCA also works with other devices such as smartphones or tablets that include a Java-capable browser. Most of the smartphones and tablets today come with ARM processors, which are not compatible with Intel's APIs.

The company is targeting the service at companies in the finance, health care and education sectors that deploy remote computing services.