Intel poached Qualcomm’s former co-president, Venkata ‘Murthy’ Renduchintala, last year, for which it paid $25 million. Renduchintala has decades of experience, making it a big move and a surprising one as well since Intel rarely hires top execs from outside, says Business Insider.
IoT – the next big thing
Renduchintala took no more than 6 months to establish himself as the No. 2 person at Intel. His influence gained strength when CEO Brian Krzanich handed him the responsibility of making the final decisions about the company’s $1.2 billion reorganization plans, which include laying off 12,000 employees, the report said.
Since moving to Intel, Renduchintala has made very few public statements, but in a blog post on Thursday, he laid out his vision for Intel for the first time. In a nutshell, he conveyed that the Internet of Things space is growing at a fast pace, and the chip maker is in a good position to seize the opportunity.
“Today, connectivity is defined by people connecting to other people and to the cloud primarily through mobile devices – smartphones, PCs, tablets and the like. In the future we will add more than 50 billion smart and connected devices, machines, autonomous vehicles, buildings and cities,” Renduchintala said.
He noted that these devices remain on and connected always and thus demand the greatest data bandwidth possible. Definitions are also changing with this revolution, just like they have been for mobile devices. Mobiles are not just phones any longer, and now they are about connecting billions of things, including tablets, phones and PCs, the executive said.
Intel not exiting mobile
On speculations about whether or not the company is exiting the mobile segment, Renduchintala made it clear that the chip maker has no plans of exiting mobile, but rather, it is broadening its definition to make it synonymous with the interconnectedness of the more than 50 billion “things.”
He added that Intel has decades of experience in powering the world’s PCs and servers, embedding intelligence into unexpected devices and creating open ecosystems, and this positions it to deliver the comprehensive portfolio of end-to-end hardware and software technologies for this revolution. Intel is aligning its products and architectures to an entire panorama of smart and connected devices, thus enabling itself to create new experiences, the executive said.
A lot of Internet services for other companies receive power from Intel’s data center chip business, which has a near-dominant position. Still, the chip maker needs to keep tabs on where the next big thing will come from, and Renduchintala’s comments do hint that the answer to this is the IoT business.
