Pat Gelsinger's First Day at Intel - Who is Intel's Customer?
Transcript
>> Hey, how's it going? It's Keith Townsend, Principal of the CTO Advisor. Who's Intel's customer? Today is Pat Gelsinger's first full business day as CEO of Intel. He's coming from VMware who had a very different customer than Intel's customer. Well, what do I mean by that? Well, Intel's customer, the entities that writes a check to Intel and Intel ships, processors, network cars, et cetera, to directly are typically OEMs, distributors and cloud providers. And Intel meets with those customers regularly talking about their needs from a cloud providers perspective.
What do they need and excuse to provide the right balance of CPU processing power versus power usage versus network bandwidth, IO bandwidth, et cetera. Intel customizes to these individual markets versus VMware's customer. VMware takes software and abstracts cloud infrastructure or creates cloud infrastructure. So some of VMware's customers will be Intel's customers but mostly in VMware talked to folks like me and many of you watching the CTO dolts. They talk to data center operators, developers more recently and cloud providers talking about building services and providing services from the separate parts of IT infrastructure.
How does that resonate with you when you think about the Intel brand. When you think about Intel, do you think about engaging Intel directly at some of these complex conversations? Intel has a big push around AI and being able to use Xeon processors, Optane storage, Intel ethernet, Intel networking, Intel security to ingest more and more data, so you can use your Intel processors to analyze that data. Are you having direct conversations with the Intel's of the world? Are you having these conversations with IBM, VMware, Dell technologies, HPE, AWS, et cetera.
Pat, I think changes the focus of Intel slightly. Pat has spent the last seven years talking to the people trying to use AI to make business decisions. People implementing SAP HANA on top of Intel Optane storage, Intel persistent memory and Intel's Xeon processors, Intel networking and IO services. People who are actually running into the problems needing to make decisions on should they go all AMD because AMD has better speeds and feeds from processor perspective. Should they go ARM? Cause ARM has a better power to performance ratio than any of the x86 solutions.
This has been, I think Intel's core problem beyond the fabrication issues and production issues they've had getting to the seven nanometer process. I think for most customers Intel Xeon processors performance is good enough. What customers need is a way to solve their business problems. And Intel has, I think, for the most part failed to get into the conversation talking about how their five pillars, that we talked about, the network IO and storage and PMEM and all these other components that Intel has built around Xeon, which are compelling stories, are not reaching the ears of the people needing to make purchasing and design decisions.
I'm hoping that Pat changes that, that conversation. So the Intel can be successful. Hey, you know what? I think the industry needs a successful Intel but I think more importantly, so that customers have a second kind of voice in their ear outside of just the cloud providers. Just outside of just the OEMs building solutions. I think Intel has a very unique idea and approach to distributed systems. And it's worth hearing and considering. Maybe you decide to go with AMD or ARM at the end of the day but I think a more engaged Intel is a better educated buyer and a better educated buyer ends with better IT solutions and technology solutions, which solve business challenges which is the whole point of this.
What do you think? Do you think Pat is the catalyst needed to change Intel's outlook and relationship with technology consumers or is Intel too far behind and they just need to fix their fat processes? Or is it a balance? Let me know in the comment section below. Until the next CTO dose, you can follow me on the web. com is the website which you can contact us directly. Or you can reach out to me on Twitter @CTOAdvisor on Twitter.
Talk to you next CTO dose.
