Q&A: Intel Channel Chief Talks Stimulus Strategy

Page 1 of 2

Intel has long pushed for steady public investment in long-term education and IT infrastructure projects. Now, with federal stimulus money beginning to arrive in state and local coffers, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant is fine-tuning its strategy for participating in IT-focused projects to digitalize health-care records, spread wireless broadband coverage across the country, develop a "smart" power grid and more.

Intel also hopes to bring its partner channel along for the ride, says Steve Dallman, vice president of Intel's Sales and Marketing Group and general manager of its Worldwide Reseller Channel Organization. Channelweb.com caught up with Dallman following his organization's Intel Solutions Summit held last month in Las Vegas, where the company hosted a stimulus panel for the purpose of educating partners on opportunities and strategies for participating in a big new round of public sector IT spending.

We wanted to talk to you about Intel's strategy for the stimulus spending that's starting to shake loose, because at last month's Intel Solution Summit in Las Vegas, your organization put on a panel of experts, including Paul Thomas, Intel's chief economist, to specifically talk about the stimulus and what your channel partners can to do to take advantage of it.

Well, it was early in the game, getting some ideas and directions to look at.

So how did that panel go? The partners I've talked to say they really got a lot out of it. I also talked to one of the guys you had on it, Paul Taylor from the Center for Digital Government. He's an expert in the field of procurement processes and about exactly where this stimulus money is going to be going, and he had some very interesting things to say, but let me just ask you, how do you think Intel partners can take advantage of this stuff?

I think the panel went really, really well. The Intel economist was pretty interesting in that he was able to talk more toward the kinds of products that the premier providers build. He was also global in his talk and he was a little more encompassing to Latin America. We had a lot of Latin American guys there.

Paul [Taylor] was very much more focused on [Washington] D.C. and what was being done there, and on all the pushing and pulling among the groups there to get this thing going right. And he said, whether it's the right way to spend the money or the wrong way to spend the money, they're going to spend it and the result's going to be that at some point in time it's going to pick up the economy. So we need to take this opportunity to spend it wisely and do things that can build on our future.

And that's kind of where I am and where our company, Intel, is on this kind of thing. For the last decade, Intel's been talking about productivity. I think our look at this is that there are some things in this stimulus package that can really build a long-lasting infrastructure. So if this is something the country needs to do and something the country has decided to do, let's go do it the right way and take care of education and take care of broadband. Let's try to figure out a way that we can use things like smart servers to reduce the power consumption of the country and have something long-lasting.

But we're definitely trying to stay away from the 'head-in-the-trough' attitude that you might see some people having. Because there could be some real long-lasting good that goes beyond just fixing a current billing issue. We'd love to see education flourish. We think education flourishing will help our business and our partners' businesses. Gosh, we're just praying that we see more engineers coming out of our universities.

Next: Big Education Opportunities

1 | 2 | Next >>

Tweet

   

More