Intel is kicking off the Year of the Horse with a series of strategic investments in Chinese tech firms that are helping to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing and analytics among local companies, which are coming under increased pressure to differentiate as the number of consumers and mobile devices continue to grow at breakneck speed.

China is a favored investment destination for the chip maker, which has poured over $670 million into more than 110 technology vendors since entering the market in 1998. Among the latest additions to the list is BlueWhale, a Tianjin-based maker of network storage solutions and IT management software that specializes in business continuity.

BlueWhale is joined by China Cloud, one of the country’s largest outsourcing providers and an emerging player in the international infrastructure-as-as-service arena. The third and perhaps most notable firm that Intel has taken under its wing this week is Yeapoo, a provider of mobile marketing solutions that claims to serve “thousands of enterprises.” The company develops tools for creating platform-independent web pages, analyzing consumer sentiment and targeting content to specific audiences.

Intel enterprise software strategy chief Pauline Nist explained her company’s growing focus on bleeding edge technologies, and Big Data in particular, during one of her many interviews on theCUBE.

“What these new tools are doing, and what Intel is very happy to aid in, is buy industry-standard hardware, put a pile of it together in parallel and run these new tools to help you go through that data,” she told SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante. “Intel is happy to see this turn into something that gobbles up silicon, after all that’s what we do for a business.”

See Nist’s entire segment from her latest visit to theCUBE, broadcast live last week from #BigDataSV in Santa Clara, California:

photo credit: chooyutshing via photopin cc