Come January 2013 and India will become the first country to have twowomen at the top for $54-billion Intel. Currently based in Santa Clara, but hailing from Kolkata, Kumud Srinivasan, will become the first woman president of Intel in India, and join Debjani Ghosh, the head of sales and marketing for India. The outgoing president for Intel IndiaPraveen Vishakantaiah, who is moving to Intel in Santa Clara, introduces Srinivasan to ET. Excerpts: How does it feel that two women will now be leading the charge for Intel in India?
Kumud S: It's a proud feeling. I am yet to meet Debjani but I am happy that Intel stands out for progressive views. There is a significant focus inside Intel on creating a work environment which makes women successful. I am looking forward to working in India.
Praveen V: I would say it's a very performance based culture in Intel which promotes women. It's important especially in a country like India, where women have to keep up with a work life balance.
What are your key priorities for Intel in India when you take over in January?
Kumud S: India is one of the most important non-manufacturing sites for Intel in the world. My first priority is to ensure a smooth transition. A change can be disruptive. I just want to sure that the momentum that we have achieved continues.
I would want to take India to the next level as a centre for innovation besides R&D, and also realise its true worth in terms of its market potential. We do have a large market presence but it has somewhat lagged in terms of its potential.
How important is India, as an R&D site for developing products for Intel which get launched all over the world?
Praveen V: We are playing R&D role in almost every segment for Intel - from servers to PCs to smartphones and now tablets. Bangalore is a very key site for developing Intel's Ivybridge processor. A large part of the innovation happens out of here.
Our engineers here are also developing integrated graphics systems for chips for phones and tablets. On the server side, greater part of the Xeon server CPUs is developed out of Bangalore. The Clovertrail tablets on Windows 8 which will come out soon, have a significant contribution out of India.
What have been your learnings from managing IT for Intel globally?
Kumud S: I was managing IT for a portion of Intel which designs chips, as well as for the part that develops software. I have been in IT for last 25 years. My role (as VP and general manager, Intel IT) was to ensure that Intel's engineers get enough computing power 24x7 to develop the next generation of products, no matter which part of the world they are sitting in.
We have a very large Internal cloud. On top of that we have virtualisation and various layers to manage the cloud.
It's a mission critical role, as even one hour of delay in testing or computing can delay our shipments schedules.
What revolution can in-memory computing (IMC) bring to the PCs in future? Does Intel fear it can cause a disruption?
Praveen V: We are investigating that currently. But it's very interesting. Not everything that you want to compute needs to be done from the CPU. A lot of times, a system's performance is hampered as a CPU is just waiting for the data from the memory, and sitting idle. With IMC you can actually compute inside the memory itself.
But at the system level, a lot of efficiency is required to make it stable and usable. The challenge will also be to see that vendors don't start making their own standards of memories, which can disrupt the ecosystem that we all have built on standardisation.
Fundamentally, PC performance will go up with IMC. We can insert more apps like gesture recognition and voice sensing inside PC chips. It will allow us to be very creative and make devices even more powerful.
What are future technologies that Intel is working on, which can solve India's problems?
Praveen V: There a lot of people in India who still get intimidated by a PC or don't know what a weblink is. The future technologies that Intel is developing can help people appreciate computing much better with touch and gesture capabilities. India also faces power issues. Next year, Intel's Haswell family of processors will get launched which can make computers run on connected standby. What it effectively means is that the PC will continue to download data from internet, even if the battery has gone on a standby mode. In future you will see many more devices that carry perceptual inputs and have inbuilt cameras to recognise you. Of course, Intel's vision is to ensure a compute continuum across devices and offer a seamless experience on be it a tablet, PC, Smartphone or any other device.
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