Debjani Ghosh, managing director, Sales and Marketing Group, Intel South Asia, is quite excited on the business opportunity in India. She firmly believes that innovation helps in driving competitive advantage. Over the years, Intel has been listening more and more actively to its consumers in terms of their needs, their desires and their expectations from technology. ?This has helped us develop technologies that consumers will accept instantly?ultrabooks is a classic example of bringing to market what consumers want from their portable devices,? she tells Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interaction. Excerpts:
What are the opportunities that you see in the Indian PC market and what is the strategy behind improving your market share in this space?
One of the biggest challenges in the Indian market is the lack of PC relevance. While most consumers say that they want a PC, the urgency to buy one is low as they do not see an immediate or urgent need. This arises from lack of awareness about what you can do with a PC. Also, low cost of labour in India further drives down urgency. Having said that, the potential in this market is huge with around 80 million households yet to buy a PC.
One of the trends we are starting to see is of widespread desire amongst people to seek new opportunities and build a better life. We feel that PCs are central to this desire of transformation of life. Our focus will be on creating the right ecosystem of
partners that will enable development of usage models with real benefits and driving a mass campaign to build end user awareness.
In line with this, we are introducing various initiatives to reach out to the first time buyers across the country, educate them and help them explore the power of a personal computer. The idea is to make the computer the centre piece of all aspirations that the consumers have about their lives. We realise that this will not be an Intel only effort and therefore we are working with our OEM partners to make this a pan industry initiative on increasing the PC penetration in the country. We have one of the strongest channel membership programmes in the country and we will continue to harness the power of that to bring our new and innovative offerings to the consumers.
What is the technology differentiator that Intel brings to the table?
We at Intel strongly believe that innovation helps in driving competitive advantage. Intel?s ?tick-tock? strategy is a blue print that the company has used successfully to maintain its technology leadership and competitive advantage. By tick-tock strategy what we mean is in ?tick? years, Intel will introduce a new manufacturing process while ?tock? years will see the introduction of new designs of central processing units (CPU). That is a strategy that we have adopted and will continue doing so, going forward.
Besides the technology, Intel?s biggest differentiator will remain its unmatched manufacturing prowess that helps us bridge the gap from concept to product faster than anyone else in the industry.
What are the future trends and challenges that you see in the processor market?
From Intel?s perspective, 2012 will be the year of 22nm Tri-Gate transistors being introduced in various product segments, providing an unprecedented combination of improved performance and energy efficiency. Going forward, both business users and consumers will expect new capabilities in their devices with embedded security at every layer, including the silicon, without compromising performance or battery life. That will lead to exciting form factors with security built in, easy automation with security embedded, and new compute models that are both flexible and secure.
Transistors continue to get smaller, cheaper and more energy efficient in accordance with Moore? Law. Because of this, Intel has been able to innovate and integrate, adding more features and computing cores to each chip, increasing performance and decreasing manufacturing cost per transistor. The biggest challenge going forward will be to ensure how to do this every two years as device dimensions become so small that physical laws become barriers to advancement.
