Intel's Midas man

Anand Chandrasekher has a knack for being in the right spot at the right time.

In the 1990s, he headed up the effort to get Pentium chips inside workstations. Intel went from being a blip in the market to dominating it a few years later. When laptop sales exploded, he ran Intel's notebook division. Centrino became a success story under his watch.

Now, as senior vice-president of sales and marketing, he occupies a position once held by current chief executive Paul Otellini. Unlike in recent years, where Intel was trying to grow by getting into new markets, the chip giant is now spending most of its energy trying to come up with new ways for people to use their PCs, which, in turn, could prompt a wave of upgrades. Just before Intel made a big splash at Macworld, Chandrasekher sat down with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com to talk about the Viiv platform, world markets and Intel's plans to get inside TVs.

Why don't you give us the quick history of Intel's platform strategy of selling a complete suite of products rather than single chips.
Everybody kind of assumes that it was after Centrino [which bundled a chipset, a processor and a Wi-Fi chip] that we jumped on this platformisation approach, but it really wasn't. We started four to five years ago. It was actually pre-Centrino. The Pentium 4 was pretty tough for us to get ramped into the marketplace. The marketing campaign and messaging around it was all around speed and the old way of doing things.

It broke the speed barrier from a clock speed standpoint, but the market clearly had moved beyond that. So Pentium 4 was a wake-up call to us internally, and the wake-up call was that we really needed to anticipate usages and what people are really doing with their PCs.

The success of Centrino effectively gave enough confidence to the management team and, in particular, Paul [Otellini], who said it was time to change the entire company, orienting it around platforms.

What other types of devices does Intel want to get into? With the Oplus Technologies acquisition, it looks like TVs are on the list.
That, I think, is probably the next space. The TV, as you and I have grown up with it, is not going to be the TV that the next generation of kids grows up with. It's going to be dramatically different. If I look at the home today, there are multiple pipes coming into it. There's one pipe through which you get data into the home, there's another pipe through which you get voice, and there's a third pipe through which you get content. At some point in the near future, and we can debate at what point that is, but in the near future, I think that those three pipes will effectively be one pipe.

As those three pipes converge, the screens inside the home will change. There's no reason your PC screen cannot be a content screen as well as a communications screen. By the same token, you're going to use your TV screen for voice, video communications, data. The amount of intelligence inside of it is going to have to change.

At a friend's house recently, we were watching a cricket match. India was playing Sri Lanka. The cricket match was piped into the PC because it was on the Internet. None of the major service providers — Comcast or Dish or whoever — was actually offering that particular match, but there was an Internet service provider that did. So the cricket match was being piped to the PC, and from the PC, it was being piped to the TV.

How does the platform approach differ for your different markets? For instance, what can you do for corporate customers?
There's a lot we're doing on the manageability side. Viiv is about what we can do in the home; Centrino is about what we can do in mobility. On the enterprise...