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Within the pages of CIONET Cookbook No. 3, discover a compilation of success recipes shared by 21 of today’s most influential and dynamic information technology leaders across all business sectors. This unique volume presents new recipes for digital success based on CIONET TV interviews with top digital leaders across Europe.
Right now, it’s clear that we all face extraordinary technical and business challenges. This third edition of the Cookbook presents further insights into the best practices required to flourish in a new digital era.
Unlock the recipe for unparalleled business success as Lisa Spelman, corporate Vice President and General Manager of Xeon Products & Solutions at Intel Corporation, shares her closely-guarded secrets to thriving in the ever-evolving world of technology and innovation.
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Lisa Spelman is corporate vice president and general manager of Xeon Products & Solutions at Intel Corporation. Graduating from the University of Washington in 2000 in business administration, marketing and finance, she joined Intel as a financial analyst. She subsequently balanced her time between product marketing and IT management, gaining a holistic view of the server market, data centres and the end-to-end IT estate.
Intel is an American multinational headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Founded in 1968 by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, the company invented the first integrated circuit in 1971, heralding the start of the digital age. Its x86 chipset has become the standard instruction set for personal computers. Intel supports open system architectures and hosts the Open Source Technology Centre.
Lisa says the semiconductor market has evolved at a break-neck pace, with new entrants and innovative manufacturing techniques fueling a fierce race to compete in an industry where the number of transistors in a silicon chip doubles every two years (as predicted by Intel founder, Gordon Moore).
The cost of participating in this sector has risen exponentially, with the cost of building a typical manufacturing plant or ‘fab’ now exceeding $10bn. The high level of competitiveness in the semiconductor market has led to market consolidation in both the design and manufacturing segments. Intel remains a leader in both segments.
Lisa also refers to the rapid evolution of chip architectures and the advent of graphics and compute processing units. She says artificial intelligence (AI) should be seen as an inflexion point. Data-hungry AI applications will boost the demand for chips further. However, Lisa believes Intel is ready to overcome these challenges and suggests there is no limit to the company’s growth potential, even in a disruptive environment.
Lisa is, first and foremost, a customer advocate. She believes leadership is acquired and then retained by listening to customers. By building close partnerships and engaging with service integrators, server manufacturers and corporate customers, Lisa helps Intel to maintain market dominance. Her two-way dialogues have ensured the company creates a close alignment between supply and demand.
She says Intel provides the “brains” of an enterprise, which is a foundation that extends from laptops and other edge devices to central mainframes and out into the public cloud. She believes Intel must be agile and responsive to changing customer requirements across all platforms. This positioning requires a careful balance between hardware and software skills, and an open-source architecture that draws on an ecosystem of specialists. She says “IT is the business” for most modern organisations and executives must live in a cloud-first world.
Lisa says infrastructure components, such as data centres, are critical to business agility. That’s where Xeon plays a crucial role, addressing the end-to-end requirement for computing power and storage. Xeon is a $20bn business and employs about 10% of Intel’s total workforce of 100,000 employees.
During the past decade, Lisa has seen a dramatic shift in the role of the data centre, which has moved from being a static asset to a cloud-based architecture that provides agility and scalability. She says artificial intelligence (AI) has led to an acceleration in the demand for high-performance computing during the past five years. Having run Intel’s IT infrastructure, Lisa believes a mix of on-premise and public cloud provision is the best way to deliver high-performance computing, even with tenfold increases in demand.
With her sharp focus on customer requirements, Lisa says the Xeon business must accommodate fast-evolving client requirements. These customer requirements include:
Lisa believes Intel’s partnership with Red Hat has profoundly influenced the Xeon business. Intel is recognised as being the number one Linux code contributor. Lisa sees further opportunities from the rapid increase in AI workloads and the need to overcome fresh security challenges, which will require innovations at both the chip and system levels.
As Intel evolves into a full-service platform integrator, Lisa believes talent will be critical to the company’s success. She looks for deep expertise in candidates and a strong fit with Intel’s culture, where having fun plays a central role. Running infrastructure at scale is a stressful task. She says it’s crucial to create a safe space to share ideas.
Discover how Lisa navigates Intel's $20bn Xeon business through choppy waters by constantly tuning in to customer needs. of running complex infrastructures.
She advises aspiring leaders to bring their hearts to the workplace, to be true to themselves, and to encourage those around them to be authentic and trusting. Her mantra is to “always stay close to the customer”.
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