Hot on the heels of Intel's latest 2GHz Pentium 4 release, Technology & Business put these burning questions to David Bolt, general manager of Intel Australia.
Q: To start off, what is the number one challenge facing Intel in Australia?
A: Managing and maintaining our business growth, particularly as Intel's business and product lines continue expanding into many new segments. While most people know Intel as the maker of the Pentium Processor, many people don't realise that our product lines now extend from next-generation mobile phone and PDA architectures, through communications and networking products, right up into mainframe-class enterprise servers.
In addition, we have grown our local services businesses such as our Web and Managed Hosting business, Technology Consulting, and now our Software Porting Labs. We have an active venture capital business where we take equity positions in local technology companies. We even sell educational toys and consumer electronics devices like PC Microscopes, MP3 players, and digital cameras and video cameras.
The marketing folks also need to keep finding and inspiring new users and uses for our growing PC products such as the new Pentium 4. Keeping abreast of all these developments and maintaining the team with the right skills to support them all keeps us very busy.
Over the next five years, what do you see to be the biggest change the PC will undergo?
It's hard to pick out just one area, but some of the more visible changes will come from the increased digitisation of information and the desire for faster and more mobile access to data and entertainment services. The lines between PCs and traditional electronics products will become increasingly blurred and at the same time the functions will be more and more interdependent--not only from a technology angle, but also from an industry and business perspective.
A simple example is the dilemma that many retailers now face as they try to decide which departments should sell what products and how to optimise shelf space. Should the home electronics departments sell PCs or should the computer department now sell the cameras and TVs? Should a music department sell MP3 players as well as CDs? What about movie DVDs, where do they belong? Book stores now sell software, but what about electronic books? Maybe a chemist should sell digital cameras, PCs, and colour printers, as well as processing analogue films? What the heck...why not just put them all together?
Recently, a number of branch offices of Intel Research have opened around the world. Are there plans for this kind of operation in Australia? What kind of research is currently done here?
We have no immediate plans to open an R&D centre, although we are keeping an eye out for interesting technologies and companies as part of our venture capital initiatives. It's more likely that if we find something particularly interesting, we might look to acquire the company and make Australia the base for R&D. This is more likely than just looking to start up a green fields program in Australia. For example, Australia has some very innovative work going on in areas such as optical communications and we are actually expanding our venture capital focus in looking at earlier stage research investments.
Our main business model is to promote new architectures and then help local companies to build hardware using our core technologies. That's what many of the Australian team do today. Another growing focus is supporting the local software vendors to develop and optimise applications for future Intel platforms. Currently the focus is on our new Personal Client Architectures and the XScale processors for PDAs and 3G Phones, Northwood processors for desktop and mobile PCs, and the 64-bit Itanium that will be used for high end workstations and backend servers.
