At this week's Intel Developer Forum (IDF), Renée James, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Services Group at Intel (www.intel.com) outlined her vision for transparent computing.

This concept is made possible only through an "open" development ecosystem where software developers write code that will run across multiple environments and devices. This approach will lessen the financial and technical compromises developers make today.

"With transparent computing, software developers no longer must choose one environment over another in order to maintain profitability and continue to innovate," says James. "Consumers and businesses are challenged with the multitude of wonderful, yet incompatible devices and environments available today. It’s not about just mobility, the cloud or the PC. What really matters is when all of these elements come together in a compelling and transparent cross-platform user experience that spans environments and hardware architectures. Developers who embrace this reality are the ones who will remain relevant."

Software developers are currently forced to choose between market reach, delivering innovation or staying profitable. By delivering the best performance with Intel's cross-platform tools, security solutions and economically favorable distribution channels, the company continues to take a leadership position in defining and driving the open software ecosystem, says James.

Develop to run many places

While developers regularly express their desire to write once and run on multiple platforms, currently there is little incentive for any of the curators of these environments to provide cross-platform support. Central to Intel’s operating system of choice strategy, the company believes a solution to the cross-platform challenge is HTML5. With it, developers no longer have to make trade-offs between profitability, market participation or delivering innovation in their products., says James.

Consumers benefit by enabling their data, applications and identity to seamlessly transition from one operating system or device environment to another. During her keynote, James emphasized the importance of HTML5 and related standards and that the implementation of this technology by developers should remain open to provide a robust application development environment.

James reinforced Intel's commitment to HTML5 and JavaScript by announcing that Mozilla, in collaboration with Intel, is working on a native implementation of River Trail technology. It is available now for download as a plug-in and will become native in Firefox browsers to bring the power of parallel computing to Web applications in 2013.