Mobile devices Toolkit

Intel's Midas man

Tags:
Viiv,
Argentina,
Emerging Markets,
India

Michael Kanellos CNET News

Published: 13 Jan 2006 16:15 GMT

...side, what we did is take a look at what IT guys do, and we started it with talking to our own guys. About 11 percent of the IT budget is focused on what we call innovation: driving competitiveness of the company or driving productivity. But 89 percent is on the plumbing, making sure that there are no hiccups. So that's what gave birth to AMT [Active Management Technology, for remotely controlling desktops], LaGrande [security], virtualisation and so on.

You'll see the first examples of this come out in the desktop arena. You'll also see it come out in the mobile arena and then in the server arena, with IOAT [input/output acceleration technology].

Will you have specific platform brands like Viiv and Centrino for these markets? Is it the kind of thing you need for enterprise sales?
I think that'll vary case by case. It certainly will in the home environment, where we've got the opportunity to articulate what we've done differently. It's the same notion on Centrino. Why did we brand on Centrino? We didn't brand it because we wanted to sell a collection of these things together. We branded it because we designed the products to work together and wanted to deliver against the four vectors (wireless, weight, battery life and performance). Without the brand, we couldn't have done it.

Viiv is very similar. There's a range of things we're doing in Viiv, which, if you don't buy the components that make up Viiv, we can't assure the experience.

Bundling chips in Centrino, though, also enabled you to sell more chips. Before that, Intel really didn't have a presence in Wi-Fi. Will Viiv enable you to enter any new markets or increase your sales through bundling?
Not per se. We didn't do it in order to get into a new market segment or to increase our portion of sales of a particular product. We did it in order to be able to assure the consumer of the experience that we're committing to. It's not about imperial overreach.

But incremental sales aren't a bad thing.
No, as a byproduct that happens to grow our business, it's not a bad thing at all. Home is the untapped opportunity, in terms of the intersection that's taking place between consumer electronics and computing today. If you assume that with Viiv, we're providing some basic benefits and basic capability, albeit on the PC side, will there be a drag effect into other areas? We hope there is.

Intel tried something like Viiv two years ago, with the E-PC and it didn't sell. What will be different now to make acceptance greater?
I think several things. The E-PC introduces a new category, and it takes a little bit of time. As technology industry executives, we always over-anticipate the ramp-up, and we underestimate the ramp-down of an older technology. Also, I think many of the E-PCs didn't have some of the CE-like features that we've been working with since then and have incorporated into Viiv.

One of the features that people think about when they think about a CE device is, you push a button, and it comes on, right? Like a TV. With a PC, you push a button, and it thinks for 30 seconds before it comes on. That's something people don't like in a CE environment. So we've actually applied technology to address exactly that, and you'll see it in Viiv.

Have you been on the road lately?
The last trip I took was to China for a day, then to Taiwan for two days. I hadn't been to Taiwan for some time, so I needed to go tell them about our road map for the next year. And then I came back. Then I was in London for a day, then Warsaw, Poland, for a day. I'll probably hit something like 20 or 30 countries this year.

How are sales in the emerging markets?
It's been going very well. In the emerging markets, you have this amazing cocktail where a) IT penetration is low and b) growth rates are phenomenal, fuelled by indigenous activities or foreign investment. The other thing we see in these markets is the natural tendency of the citizenry to accept technology as a means of improving themselves, and the governments are supportive of that.

Other than India and China, where else might tech centres spring up?
Russia has sort of the same dynamics going for it as China and India do: a highly educated population, and if you look at that region as a whole, the population is not small.

If you look at Latin America as a whole, it's quite large, and the gross domestic product is not bad. Argentina has a phenomenal software capability, right. In fact, we're opening up a lab in Argentina precisely for the software arena. And in the Middle East, Egypt has a good base of engineering. It is sort of the development hub for the Arabic-speaking world, so there's a tremendous amount of talent there.