"The OT players are getting a lot [more] traction than those large global SIs because they bring subject matter knowledge of the OT environment," he said. "These are the people who work in oil and gas, on the rigs and the well … that's a totally different skill set than the IT players [who] are working primarily in the enterprise. What you're going to see is a confluence of OT and IT coming together."

Ballon said he is seeing a tremendous amount of conversion from customers moving from competing architectures onto Intel, due to the company's full end-to-end solution. "They realize the total cost of ownership is optimized when you have an end-to-end architecture, and it's more secure," he said.

"From a silicon point of view, there is no one else other than Intel that can actually provide you with secure offerings on the machine, in a full computing architecture, and back to the data center with integrated security."