At the Intel Cloud Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, Liam Keating - the Intel IT country manager for China – revealed that when Intel first implemented the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program, which allowed the company’s staff to use their personal smartphones and tablets for official work, the move did not go down well with the IT staff-members who wanted to see the back of it at the earliest possible.

According to Keating, Intel’s IT staff – which comprises 6400 employees, out of a total of the bigwig chip-maker’s 91,500-strong workforce worldwide – initially considered the BYOD program as an “irritant”, and wanted the company to do away with it.

However, the chip-maker persisted with the BYOD program and, under thanks to its standardised basic global BYOD policy, as many as 60 percent of the 30,000 handheld devices that it currently supports are under the BYOD program.

The company’s BYOD policy allows the employees to use their personal wireless devices for work-related activities, provided that the devices meet specific OS requirements. Though the BYOD devices allowed by Intel do not have access to the Intel network, they are stipulated with access to work email accounts, contacts, and calendars.

Revealing that Intel’s attempts to support the BYOD program notwithstanding, the company was not much receptive about the program early on, Keating said at the conference that “having to deal with these so-called consumer devices was, I would say, initially an irritant, actually"; and added: "I think many IT people personally hoped it would go away and it wouldn't last."