Barrett: Powering the Internet

BANGALORE: It was Craig Barrett’s fourth visit to India in the last five years, second as Intel chief. Last week, while starting his Asia tour, the Intel President and chief executive officer made it clear why he was in this part of the world more frequently. He had said that Asia would soon be Intel’s largest market after the US.

The focus of Barrett’s trip is mainly to promote and enhance e-business. During his visit he would address leaders of the industry at e-biz focussed seminars and would discuss the vast opportunities, challenges and choices confronting today’s business leaders in India, and means to devise savvy e-business strategies that set the foundation for long-term success. The session will highlight the need to build e-business infrastructures, which will deliver customer value by transforming business processes with partners, vendors and customers into electronic transactions. Dr Barrett, who joined Intel Corporation in 1974 as a technology development manager, believes that business-to-business (B2B) worldwide would grow to $7 trillion in the next four years and that the Asian market would account for 14 per cent, growing at an estimated 150 per cent rate through 2004. He also pointed out that, forecasts showed that B2B sales in Asia, excluding Japan, would reach $1 trillion within the next five years. As a building block supplier to the Internet economy, Intel is providing e-business solutions with a choice of network infrastructure and microprocessor products from the Pentium III to the upcoming Itanium high-end server platform.

Barrett has always believed that online business would become the business model of the era and has always pushed and stressed the importance of Internet penetration. On his earlier visit to India, he highlighted that India needed to capitalize on the convergence of voice and data and invest heavily in telecom infrastructure, as this would provide the much-required bandwidth, which would in turn boost the demand for IT-enabled services. Barrett pointed out that the growth in the Indian Internet segment has been spurred by its deregulation and that Internet penetration was more directly linked to access cost of Internet services than PC penetration and urged India to lower its Internet access charges. Even at Delhi on Thursday, when he was explaining how the Internet could change the way business was done, he pointed out that there are four categories of e-business models. The first is just the marketing kind, where companies display their goods and services on the Web. The second, is where Web sites transact on the Internet. The third category is interactive decision making, which include online auctions. The last model is where the entire supply chain management, from procuring raw materials to delivering the final product, is done online.

Stressing the importance of e-business, he also brought out the fact that, Intel took its first online order only 18 months ago. "Today our entire business worth $35 billion a year is Internet-enabled." He also believes that online business is essential because business can be analyzed better if it is electronic, which means better management. It is due to Intel’s focus on Internet that it has picked up stakes in various Indian Net companies. As Barrett said, "Intel Capital (the venture capital funding arm of Intel) will pick up equity stakes in companies that bring in exciting new technologies to the world of the Internet. Investments such as venture capitalist funding are to generate interest in the Internet in this country."

Barrett is busy in combating with what is probably Intel’s biggest challenge in decades – taking Intel from the Inside to the Outside. Out of the PC, and on to the Internet. Intel, if Barrett has his way, will soon power the Internet. In its efforts to promote Internet, Intel will offer free PCs and Net access to all its 70,000 employees around the world, so that its employees and their families can participate fully in the Internet revolution. As part of Intel’s initiatives for India, Intel has taken up education as a focus area. The objectives of the Intel education programme is to create awareness of the value of computer technology-based education, catalyzing effective use of multimedia computers and the Internet and promoting overall interest in science and technology among children. The world of Barrett has mainly been full of Internet and online business.

When instant access to information, speed of execution, 24-hour access, global competitiveness are some of the key benchmarks of tomorrow's business strategies, it is not surprising that Internet is the order of the day. The emergence of the Internet and the opportunities it presented for B2B and business- to-customer (B2C) is also immense. The Internet is offering a variety of networked, multimedia applications, including conferencing and corporate communications, rich publishing information and interactive training and learning. The growth of the Net market is totally demand-driven that is growing exponentially because it is delivering a function that was earlier unavailable.