Intel Forms Channel Products Group

Intel's grand objective is to significantly retune all its partner programs, both foreign and domestic, in 2005. The idea is to foster face-to-face dealings with more of its partners than ever before, with the goal of influencing sales. Intel's channel group also plans to give resellers advanced training in the company's burgeoning product line, so that they're up to speed on the new wireless and multicore technologies due to hit the market in the coming months.

"They will put forth a significant effort to define, develop and adapt products for the emerging markets," a source close to the group told VARBusiness.

The new channel group will be led by Bill Siu, who moves over from vice president of the Intel Architecture Group, where he was responsible for desktop processors. Siu "will seek to expand on Intel's success in global markets by combining into one organization existing groups focused on developing and selling Intel products to meet the unique needs of local markets worldwide," Intel said in a statement.

Jason Chen, who heretofore had been the point-person for worldwide channel efforts as director of the sales and marketing group, will leave the company at the end of the month to attend to what Intel says is a family health matter.

Anand Chandrasekher, currently the notebook processor honcho as general manager of Intel's Mobile Products group, will divide up Chen's duties with Eric Kim, the former Samsung executive who joined Intel last November.

The channel, however, is only one leg of Intel's broad reorganization. The company yesterday set up four other divisions: the Mobility Group, which will develop notebook PCs and handheld computing devices; the Digital Enterprise Group, which will develop computing and communications infrastructure platforms; the Digital Home Group, focused on entertainment and media computing; and the Digital Health Group, which will explore product opportunities in health-care research and diagnostics.

Intel is painting the realignment as an effort that's in tune with the company's new "platformization" strategy. Under that approach, Intel hopes to break away from a marketing story that's only about faster processors. Instead, it is emphasizing nonprocessor technologies, such as faster memories and I/O interconnects. The idea is that such features will drive overall increases in system performance beyond what can be accomplished simply by boosting the speed of the processor.

"Intel is putting the people and resources in place to sharpen our focus on the development of platforms that meet the demands of our customers and provide innovative and exciting new technologies for the marketplace," said Intel president Paul Otellini in a statement.

Intel's reorganization comes two days before its biggest product launch in months. Tomorrow, the company will announce its next-generation Intel Centrino mobile technology platform. Code-named Sonoma, the platform adds enhanced audio and video to Intel's basic mobile features, turning notebook computers into mobile entertainment systems.