Intel thinking outside the box

Intel CEO Craig Barrett said the company will aggressively target opportunities outside of its traditional revenue stream in PCs during 2004.

That includes moving outside the United States, which now accounts for about 30 percent of Intel's sales and into developing countries; driving hard into the burgeoning digital home market; tapping the telecommunications sector's interest in open-systems infrastructure; riding momentum in the business server space; and making a concerted effort to build cellular-handset market share. 'I think we're poised to grow in every dimension,' Barrett told financial analysts last week in the US.

Intel executives stopped short of signaling a major upgrade cycle for the commercial market, saying most companies are investing in systems only as needed to boost productivity.

Central to the company's growth in 2004 will be its ongoing efforts to integrate technology that addresses both communications and computing functions. That thinking was behind the release last March of the Centrino mobile platform, which has generated an estimated US$2 billion in revenue for the company since it was launched, said Intel President and COO Paul Otellini.

Gil Broude, vice president and general manager of TTX, an Intel Premier Provider in Canada, noted that Intel employs thousands of software engineers, which it is leveraging for its expansion. 'The sum of the parts is going to be more than one in the future,' Broude said.

Among the architectural enhancement efforts Otellini discussed during the meeting was Tiano, a project focused on building features for better recovery and management into the BIOS. Otellini said BIOS manufacturers can license Intel's software to include it with their firmware, although he provided no time frames for its availability.

A factor in Intel's push into the digital home will be the Grantsdale chipset, which will provide 'soft' wireless access point capabilities.