Intel’s IT Efforts Yield $350M in New Revenue 

The world's largest chipmaker says it leveraged components of the IT infrastructure it supplies for others to generate $350 million in revenues during 2014, according to the company's annual IT business review.

The company, which employs 106,000 full-time workers in 66 countries, stressed in a recently released report that it is making greater use of IT services like data analytics and collaboration tools to "optimized business workflows and unlock new insights" to help generate millions of dollars of new revenue.

Kim Stevenson, Intel's chief information officer, also cited the emerging Internet of Things as another tool the chipmaker is leveraging to boost productivity.

Intel said the biggest revenue gain, more than $250 million, came from integrating multiple data sources into a decision support system used to boost revenues by tweaking supply and demand. “What it really comes down to for any company is framing that business problem so that you answer the right questions and then marry previously unused or new data to solve that problem,” Stevenson argued.

Intel claimed another $76.2 million revenue increase through the use of advanced analytics applied to sales leads. That effort included using an analytics engine to track web site and call center traffic as a way to identify potential customers, Stevenson explained.

The chipmaker said it has steadily consolidated the number of non-manufacturing datacenters from 87 in 2011 to just 61 in 2014. Virtualization is driving these efficiencies: Intel said 80 percent of its datacenters have been virtualized while the storage capacity has more than doubled in the last four year to 106 petabytes.

Intel said its recently completed private cloud has allowed it to provision new web applications for its workers in less than a day. Before instituting server virtualization, it took the company up to 90 days to provision IT services. Server virtualization reduced that total to 14 days, and the completion of a private cloud cut the time needed to provision web apps to 45 minutes, the annual review noted.

Heavy investment in server and datacenter virtualization along with deployment of a private cloud has allowed the company to build and leverage what it calls the Intel Social Collaboration Platform. Among other applications, the Intel platform enables group discussions, community engagement and project management.

CIO Stephenson's point is that the investment in IT and analytics translated into new company revenue over the past year. The chipmaker also claimed $2 billion in revenues from its emerging Internet of Thing business.

The IT push comes as Intel completes its transition from a PC-driven device maker that registered only modest success with mobile devices like tablets to a chip manufacturer focusing on connecting devices, sensors and other gadgets that will serve as the building blocks of the Internet of Things. The company has been leading efforts to develop standard interconnects that would allow a range of devices to connect with wireless networks.

Hence, the company is moving on parallel tracks as both a supplier and consumer of IT infrastructure and analytics services to boost revenues.