Jack Schofield
‘Think of us as a networking company,” says Intel’s executive vice- president, Frank Gill. Intel is already the world’s largest chip manufacturer: its Pentium processors have about 80% of the desktop computer market, and a growing share of the market for the servers used to run corporate applications. Now it wants to provide the hardware to connect these computers together.
Last week, Intel held “networking days” in London and San Francisco to announce its strategy, along with a range of networking products: the Intel Express 500 series of switches and three Ethernet hubs, the computer equivalents of small telephone exchanges.
Most of the new products were developed by Intel Denmark, in a division formed from Intel’s takeover of an innovative Danish networking company, Case Technologies.
“At Intel, we start with the premise that all computing is networked, or ought to be,” Gill says. Andy Grove, his boss, has a vision of a billion PCs all connected together within a decade.
“It’s going to have wonderful social consequences,” Gill says, “but we ain’t going to get to a billion if we just deal with large corporations: we have to target homes, small and mid-sized companies, branch offices …”
Part of Intel’s problem is that it has just about saturated the PC market. However, only about 30% of PCs are “connected”, so that market has lots of room for growth.
Bringing the network facilities already enjoyed by large corporations to small businesses and home users involves making the equipment easier to instal and run. “It’s part of our assignment to use technology to hide complexity,” Gill says. After that, Intel can use its huge chip-manufacturing capabilities to drive down the price.
It’s an approach that has worked with plug-in network cards, used to attached PCs to local area networks. Intel entered this market in 1991, and its sales are now worth more than $500-million a year. However, this market will start to decline as more and more PCs are supplied with networking already built in, and Gill thinks this “client connectivity will become part of the standard PC chip set” supplied, of course, by Intel.