Intel is committed to India: Barrett

NEW DELHI: Reiterating Intel’s commitment to India, Intel CEO Craig Barrett

said the company has launched a couple of strategic initiatives specifically

targeted at India. This comprises Intel’s investment funding in India, its

education initiative and its development activities in Bangalore.

During the last 18 months, Intel has invested around $100 million in around

15 Indian start-ups. Intel plans to increase the number of companies receiving

investment to 30 during this year and double the investments in the next year.

On the education front, Intel has been working in close collaboration with the

Department of Education and the NCERT. Intel plans to train around 100,000

teachers in India during the next three years. The development center in

Bangalore, which houses 50 engineers now, will have 500 engineers in three

years.

Barrett said he expected to see an exponential growth in India’s Internet

business. The B2B e-commerce worldwide is expected to reach $7 trillion in the

next four years. The Asian market is expected to account for 14 per cent of the

B2B segment growing at an estimated rate of 150 per cent through 2004. The race

for the Internet leadership in Asia is on and the country that embraces the

Internet the fastest will emerge the winner, said Barrett. Therefore, India

needed to capitalize on the convergence of voice and data and invest heavily in

telecom infrastructure. This will provide the much-required bandwidth, which

will in turn boost the demand for IT-enabled services.

India’s inherent strengths, a strong base of knowledge workers and telecom

infrastructure, is just the prop the country needs to propel it into the

Internet economy, he said. India needs to continuously ensure that PC

penetration is on the increase, develop hosting centers and build system

integrator services. Barrett pointed out that the growth in the Indian Internet

segment has been spurred by its deregulation.

Its e-biz all the way



In an hour long presentation on how the Internet could change the way business
was done, Barrett noted that there are four categories of e-business models. The

first is just the marketing kind, where companies will display their goods and

services on the Web. The second category is where Web sites transact on the

Internet. Explaining how fast this model is growing, he said, "Intel took

its first online order only 18 months ago. Today our entire business worth $ 35

billion a year is Internet-enabled."

The third category is interactive decision making, which includes online

auctions. The last model is where the entire supply chain management, from

procuring the raw materials to delivering the final product, is done online.

"This is the category where we'll have the maximum number of solutions and

the most excitement," he said.

Explaining why taking a business online is becoming essential these days,

Barrett said that a business can be analyzed better when it is electronic. And

better analysis means more facts and better management, which give it a

competitive advantage over competitors. The bottomline of Barrett's presentation

was, "Revolution is not the technology, but the change it enables."