TAIPEI -- As vice president and general manager of Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, Anand Chandrasekher was the executive who
led the company's Centrino charge. Now he has a new challenge: leading Intel's global sales organization. Chandrasekher, now
Intel's vice president and director of sales and marketing, sat down for an interview with IDG News Service during the Computex
exhibition in Taipei. In a quiet meeting room away from the crowded show floor, he spoke about recent changes at Intel and
how the company has long wooed Apple Computer with sweet talk and microprocessors. Following is an edited transcript of the
interview.
IDGNS: How is Intel after the change in leadership from Craig Barrett to Paul Otellini?
Chandrasekher: I think the change from Craig to Paul is probably viewed as a bigger change outside Intel than it is inside
Intel.
IDGNS: Does it mean anything that Paul Otellini doesn't have an engineering background?
Chandrasekher: Paul's been in the company 24 years. He ran the Intel Architecture Group for 10 years, so he's a technologist.
The fact that he's got a bachelor's degree in economics doesn't mean he doesn't know technology. People make a lot out of
the fact that he doesn't have an engineering degree. I do have an engineering degree but I do not consider myself technical
anymore. I've been out of the mainstream of designing these kinds of parts. At his level, what he needs to be able to do is
not design circuits. What he needs to be able to do is ask the questions. He needs to be able to know what questions to go
ask. He knows how to do that and has demonstrated that for the last 20 years.
I'm very comfortable with the guy and obviously our board is very comfortable with the guy. I think it will be pretty seamless.
Inside the company, we've had two CEO transitions that I've been a part of, Andy [Grove] to Craig, Craig to Paul. It's been
pretty smooth. Paul's been president since 2001 and effectively even running the company since 2001.
IDGNS: How are plans coming along to support location-based services with the Pentium M?
Chandrasekher: We've done a lot of development on location-based services and capabilities. When you have Wi-Fi embedded into
your platform, you can triangulate the location of an individual using the fact that you have Wi-Fi in your PC and you know
where your access point is. That gives you two data points in terms of location. If I have a third access point which that
PC can also talk to, now with those three I can triangulate your location to within 100 meters or so. Within that range of
granularity, we know you can use Wi-Fi for global positioning and things like that.
We've done a lot of work in this area. We've transferred a chunk of that technology over to Microsoft and it will get incorporated
into the Longhorn release. You'll see it coming to market, but it will be in the form of the Longhorn release and that's the
path we chose to take because we've got to get it exposed in the marketplace and it's got to be part of an application software
package, which is not us. We do great silicon but somebody else has to do the software, so we chose Microsoft.
IDGNS: The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Intel has been trying to get Apple to use its processors. Has Intel
been talking with Apple?
Chandrasekher: We always talk to Apple. Apple is a design win that we've coveted for 20 years and we continue to covet them
as a design win. We will never give up on Apple.
IDGNS: What would you be willing to do in order to win Apple's business?
Chandrasekher: Well, nothing unnatural that we wouldn't do for other design wins. It's got to make sense from a business standpoint.
We would do what makes economic sense. If we can do that and still get the design win, we'd do it.
E-mail
Printer Friendly
Reprints
(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
