Intel re-brands to spread net wider

The company formerly known as chip giant Intel is undertaking a massive re-branding scheme during this quarter to promote its networking and infrastructure wares, as evidence mounts that its revenues are beginning to be more widely spread across its four main divisions.

Henrik Hansen, director of marketing at Intel's comms product group in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, said this morning that its Netstructure initiative is part of a company-wide convergence strategy, embracing clients, servers, online services and connectivity.

These are the main four divisions of Intel, which, Hansen claims, has now overcome its perception in the marketplace as solely a CPU provider.

Indeed, said Hansen, Intel is now restructuring its sales team to go into large corporations offering enterprise wide solutions, and striking deals with a number of very large system integrators (VLSIs), which may then fulfil the orders and be the prime contractors for practically everything in an installation.

"This is the infrastructure market, and not just plumbling but more of an e-business infrastructure," said Hansen. Intel staff are calling on end users, he said.

A new breed of service providers is emerging, he claimed, including unlikely names such as Barclays.

Hansen admitted that Intel's push into the building block state did, on occasion, cause channel conflict. "A lot of small integrator companies suddently have to buy 20 servers in just a few days," he said. Intel was working on a solution to provide a rack mountable solution with CPU.

He said that Intel's thinking now is that large corporations will want to in-source their Web and e-business resources over the next few years.

Interesting. And, according to him, Intel's great Server Farm project, which was the buzz this time last year, is a separate profit and loss group, and a customer of the Greater Intel.

While Intel has obviously propagated a Powerpoint presentation across the 80,000-strong corporation which pushes the four divisions line, its Capital division is the arm to watch. Missing parts of the jigsaw puzzles in the corporation's network line up depend on the decisions this cash liquid division makes.

* The briefing is part of Intel's Views at Ten -- a monthly breakfast gig for UK journalists. We were rather startled to notice an iMac mooning at us from a graphics shop across the way in King Street, Covent Garden. We trust this was not done deliberately... ®