If you have been following Intel (News - Alert) over the past couple of years you will remember that there were a lot of missed opportunities. In 2013, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, suggested that computing will always get cheaper and smaller. The problem was that it was Intel’s rivals that benefited from the shifts to tablets and mobile devices.
A few months later, Intel President Renee James mentioned that while Intel was successful, it has a tendency of breeding complacency and fear. He also noted that Intel did not appreciate the impact that the iPhone (News - Alert) would have on mobile and ultra-mobile computing. For a while, Intel and others in the PC business were hoping that the tablet was a limited market for content consumption and were hoping people would just gravitate back to the computer.
It was about this time that Brian Krzanich took hold of the reins and became CEO at Intel. The feeling was that in Krzanich the company found someone who would look at the world as it is, not as how Intel wishes it could be. It seems that the new CEO has been putting the Intel name back on people’s lips. The company is entering new markets, such as wearables and mobile devices and has started to make an impact.
In 2014, Intel managed to deliver its highest revenue year ever. According to Intel, this was made possible due to the fact that it is rapidly changing the business by expanding its product portfolio, evolving user experiences and diversifying the customer base. Of course, this does come at a cost; the expansion of Intel’s product portfolio means that IT must now deliver an increasingly complex lineup of new products and services.
It is because of these changes that on February 17, Intel said that it was able to increase its annual revenue by $350 million by using more efficient and advanced business intelligence and analytics tools administered by the company's internal IT department. It seems that the IT department took up the challenge and followed through with profitable results.
It is easy to ask a lot of questions and hope that you hear some answers that you like. But the tricky part is asking the right questions and receiving the answers that actually have relevance. In a statement released by Intel’s CIO Kim Stevenson, she said "What it really comes down to for any company is framing that business problem so that you answer the right questions and then marry previously unused or new data to solve that problem."
By answering the relevant questions, Intel was able to leverage the cloud, social media platforms, data integrations, and analytics to produce cost-cuts in the way the chip giant does business. The result is the $350 million that was added to its bottom line.
You would imagine that with 106,000 employees at over 170 sites in 66 countries, making sure that everyone has the correct and useful information is impossible. It seems that the use of social media was the right answer to the question.
Social computing and advanced collaboration allows for the sharing of ideas in addition to providing the potential for Intel’s talent and expertise to be accessible to all of its employees. These capabilities address specific, shared goals of Intel’s business leaders reducing organizational boundaries, increasing speed to information, helping to build stronger teams and improving employee productivity.
The following, according to Intel, is a breakdown of some of the biggest IT-driven boosters of revenue in 2014:
- $75 million in new revenue gained with the implementation of a new sales and marketing analytics engine;
- $13 million netted with a pilot program to reduce product test times;
- $250 million added to the balance sheet courtesy of "integrating multiple data sources into a decision support system to maximize revenue by optimizing supply and demand."
An area that is always of great interest, not only to Intel but to all companies, is the matter of security. Stevenson noted that network security has become markedly more efficient at Intel. In 2013 it took Intel’s IT Data Analysis Throughput system somewhere in the neighborhood of about two weeks to detect a threat, in 2014 that time was reduced to just 20 minutes. That relates to two weeks of cost savings.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson