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November 1-15, 1999 CHIEF GUEST |
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It's more of a psychological concern that there is something better in the market
CT: This a unique handover. Is such overlapping a general practice in Intel? Avtar Saini: This is the preferred way. Atul came and grew the market. He knows the complexities which have to be understood to do the business. An overlap of this nature goes a long way. It's nothing which can be done very quickly-write it on a piece of paper and hand it over. Do you have any particular plan for India, as you are more of a design person? AS: India has come a long way and this is the part where we are ramping into a sizeable market. On the other side, a new angle we are adding-the development centre. India has a big engineering community, many programmers, and inherent talent to do software. It will not to be a development centre, which is pushing just the agenda. It should become an entity, which is extremely productive, efficient and world class. Our agenda: grow the capability and then let it go where it goes. Mr Vijaykar, which are the great things you would cherish from your tenure in India? Atul Vijaykar: I haven't done a post mortem yet. But as I look back, from an Intel standpoint, we've got a fairly significant presence now in the country. We've grown our business significantly, established our brand, not just in the metros but also in some of the secondary and tertiary cities. Five years ago it was primarily IT people who knew about Intel. Now even schoolchildren, housewives look for an Intel processor inside their PCs. I feel good that we've got a good infrastructure in place that Avtar can build on. AS: There is definitely a lot of optimism that India has attracted all over the world, which we on the inside were feeling but it was not obvious to the world. The next ten years are going to be exceptional. And what I feel after coming here after a long time, is the energy, the passion, and the new outlook-especially in the new generation. That's very encouraging. What's the competitive scene like in India? AV: We have now expanded our portfolios, so we see our charter as being the leading supplier of building blocks in the Internet economy. Microprocessors continue to be our primary offering but we are now also a significant player in servers, networking and we intend to be a major player in online services. In each segment, there's a different competitor. On the CPU front, clearly AMD is a potential competitor. In information appliances, we have StrongArm, but there are competition products. In servers, Sun is a competitor. An Intel study has said that if you look at all the E-commerce revenues that are being projected and translate on the number of servers that will be required for it, you'll find that only 4 percent of the servers that will be required are currently installed. That's 20 times growth ahead of us. 3Com is a competitor, where in the mid range we supply networking systems, adapters, hub switches. In the high-end, our intention is to be a leading supplier of networking silicon. In the online services area, EDS is a competitor. The environment is changing dynamically and we are increasing our product portfolio to take advantage of the much larger opportunity, which is ahead of us. How big is Intel in terms of turnover in India? AV: We don't disclose figures. But we think, we have 90 plus percent share of the microprocessor market, which is still the largest part of our business. India is slowly but surely beginning to be a significant player in the worldwide scenario. According to our internal analysis, in three years, India will potentially be one of the top ten countries in the world. In a five-year horizon, it will potentially be one of the top six countries in terms of the size of the computer market. What are the inhibitors that you are much concerned about? AV: I'll give you my view, but Avtar, I'm sure, will later form his own assessment. The area in which the government should do something immediately is the telecom infrastructure. We should get this new telecom policy clarified, passed; and TRAI needs legislative action to clarify its authority. We need at least one more round of tariff rationalisation and reduction-that's another key issue. Action is also needed on the cyberlaw front. If these can be done in the next 90 days, we'll be off and running even faster. AS: At the philosophical level, that means taking the island of India and bringing it very close to the global Internet economy. The hardware side, Internet and the telecom, are all getting closer. What happened to the projects you had started for schools? AV: We call it Project Vidya. It's an active programme that we launched about three years ago. At that time the challenge was to expose teachers, school children and parents to the benefits of multimedia. In three years, at least the urban areas have by and large understood that. We continue to have cyber-schools in Delhi and Mumbai, but now we've introduced a cyber bus that goes around the rural areas exposing children, their teachers and parents to the benefits of multimedia. The teacher training programme has really gathered momentum in the last year. If you go back to the CLASS programme 10 years ago, you'll find that it was limited to hardware. They didn't take care of the infrastructure side, or teachers training. We have a worldwide initiative on teachers training. We've modified and applied it here. We expose teachers not just to computer skills-that's the easy part-but, more importantly, to how they can incorporate the knowledge of computers into their core curriculum. Eventually, you don't want just teach students how to learn or write a program in BASIC. What you want is to use computers to learn science or geography better. Teachers are now finding that what took them six weeks to teach-for example, the digestive system-using the computer they can convey the information to the student in two weeks. AS: Over time we're going to encourage the use of Internet. It has a lot more content. Also, we are planning to develop an educational Web site. The teachers can go there and look up any latest information and maybe even give a feedback. Manufacturing in India doesn't feature in Intel agenda yet. Right? AS: At this time we don't have any manufacturing here. The first step was the marketing. Now, we've added the development side. The design and development is an easier decision. AV: What is the infrastructure you need for a development centre? Connectivity-fast lease lines. You don't need to move lots of equipment in and out like gases and chemicals. For a factory you need world-class infrastructure-not just power, but a whole system which has to be in place. Are you also planning to produce PC-on-a-chip like National Semiconductor? AS: Integration for the sake of integration is not smart. If integration is done in a meaningful way, then only it makes sense. For instance, we did integration of graphics on our chipset. It brought value to the platform, removed one of the dependencies and brought the cost down considerably. PC-on-a-chip: this phrase has been around for 15-20 years. It doesn't mean anything. As time goes by whatever component makes sense to integrate to the overall platform, brings in functionality as well as the cost down... we'll do that. Chip upgradeability has never been encouraged in India. Why? AS: The issue there is more of technology than business. As time goes by we move to new processes, the power supply is changed, the I/O is up, and they change very rapidly. Definitely, in business, we want to do it but it is not feasible from a technology perspective. If you look at Pentium III-the power supply, the I/O subystem it takes, versus your chip of three years ago, are very different. When you say upgradeable that means that the platform of today will have to absorb the technology of two years hence. The visibility into that and you have to pre-design for something which is going to come two years later on, that's difficult to develop. In fact, at some point upgradeability slows down the innovation itself, it slows down the performance. It becomes an inhibitor. AV: Also, if someone has bought a Pentium II last year, firstly the system works as well as it was supposed to work, and it would continue to work for a lifetime. Secondly, if that user wants more performance he has the option of putting Pentium III into it. There is always the perception that there is something better in the market. That creates some concern. But the reality is that what he has is still working exactly the way it was supposed to work. It's delivering everything it was committed to deliver. It's more a psychological concern that there is something better in the market. As time goes by, the needs of a PC user changes. His capability changes and he wants to evolve to the next platform. Systems are not thrown away, people mature off to the next system. What technologies or products do you see exciting in the near future? AS: There is a lot of advanced research type stuff happening in the lab on the usage of the computer. There is speech related, recognition related development. It's been a while but now there is more focus on it. And the other thing is the connectivity, the Internet. The exciting part is as the streams come in, as bandwidth increases, the capability increases. Today we have a certain level of connectivity. As the connectivity changes the applications are going to change. People are talking of cable networks, et al. Megahertz has been with us for about 30 years and we're moving into the Gigahertz era. Techies like us earlier used to measure things in microseconds, then we started measuring in nanoseconds, and now it's pecoseconds. I don't even know what comes after Peco. RELATED DATA |
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The marketing wizard, Atul
Vijaykar, moves back to the US. In comes tech-savvy, Avtar
Saini, as the new chief of Intel India. Will that mean a change in the course
for the processor leader? In a candid chat with Computers
Today, the unique duo, both brought up in Mumbai and having
more than 17-year stint with Intel, recounted their achievements and agenda, cherished
memories or first impressions, views on inhibitors and the competition. 
