On September 27, Intel held a press conference at Intel Korea office in Yeouido, Seoul, and introduced the main contents of '2016-2017 Intel IT Annual Performance Report'. Through this report, it is introduced that Intel has achieved the goals of business growth, operational efficiency, and asset protection by digitization, and five major areas through advanced analytics, new data center technologies and cloud-based solutions and services.

In this report, Intel highlighted the 2016 theme of digitizing to grow, speed up operations and protect assets through innovation, and the five major areas, including advancing Intel's products and services in the marketplace, transforming how Intel's businesses run and grow, increasing workforce productivity and experiences, delivering operational excellence, and promoting an engaged and innovative workforce, are achieved through advanced analytics, new data center technologies and cloud-based solutions and services. And, it is added that this set of goals has been achieved while securing security.

In addition, Intel's IT department uses digital and artificial intelligence technologies to transform and optimize the way of providing service to customers and the overall business processes, accelerate innovation and play a key role in driving business. Intel IT has contributed significantly to Intel's sales performance in 2016, and by 2017, the IT department will meet expectations for provision of effective leadership that would drive innovation, operational improvements and workforce productivity that would open more business growth opportunities for Intel.



Ten-I CHIU, IT Manager of Intel APAC and Japan, introduced that Intel highlighted the 2016 theme of digitizing to grow, speed up operations and protect assets through innovation, and the five major areas, including advancing Intel's products and services in the marketplace, transforming how Intel's businesses run and grow, increasing workforce productivity and experiences, delivering operational excellence, and promoting an engaged and innovative workforce, are achieved through advanced analytics, new data center technologies and cloud-based solutions and services. And, it is added that this set of goals has been achieved while securing security.

At present, Intel has about 106,000 employees, including 5,775 IT staff and 23 IT support sites supporting 150 branches in 49 countries. And Intel's per-employee IT spending is around $12,700 in 2016, which is 2.3 percent of its 2016 sales. And in IT storage and servers, they are more than doubled from 84,000 units in 2014 to 185,000 units in 2016, and demand for compute is on the rise for a variety of products to meet current market conditions.

In the current status of IT devices, within a total of 220,000 devices, it is reported that mobile PCs are about 151,000, smartphones are 53,780 and desktops are 14,500. The tablet accounts for a small portion of 500 units, and it is explained that people use 2-in-1 or other devices such as notebooks in the mobile office environment, and in terms of the smaller devices, the movement of using smartphone is distinct, so demand for tablet is not much. Meanwhile, as for security, more than 2,500 applications have been certified for security, including 696 mobile applications and 99 external SaaS solutions.



In terms of innovating the way of business execution and growth, "B2B Customer Environment Innovation" aspect was introduced. First, the structure that had previously been focused on products is provided in the form of a 'resource center' reconfigured as a customer-centered structure, so that it could be utilized as one login information. It is also introduced that by linking data from marketing activities to sales data, it became possible to make more strategic decisions. In terms of accelerating product development, there was a case that the period of up to 39 weeks was shortened by introducing techniques such as machine learning so that quickly find and fix problems during product development.

Establishment and expansion of Intel's data centers are progressed by 30 to 40 percent each year. Also, high-efficiency, high-density data center construction is in progress, and the data centers are analyzed and optimized with various indicators. In addition, with the utilization of hybrid cloud, the benefits of rapid provisioning and minimized management are enjoyed. For responding demand for a new data center, 'software defined infrastructures' is being utilized. And it is mentioned that, in the case of Santa Clara's new data center in the United States, racks were built narrower and higher to increase density, and PUE also reached 1.06.

The integration of advanced analytical techniques has had a major impact on changes in business practices. In the past, sales to selected large customers were major, but as new business areas grew, it became harder to use past models. Hereupon, it is introduced that Intel's Sales and Marketing Account Recommendation Tool (SMART) uses predictive analytics to extend coverage, relationships, and sales in the market channel, supporting business more effectively, and also supporting judgment of how to approach which customer with which product. It is added that the company gains insight by having data-lake configuration through Hadoop after integrating data related to CRM and many other unstructured data and analyzing into various forms.



Intel's factory performance is also a key competitiveness, and the ‘smart factory automation’ used advanced analytics to process more than five billion data points per day per factory, enabling engineers to extract needed information in 30 seconds instead of four hours. Therefore, engineers could get information for more quick and accurate decision. At the same time, as ‘game changer’ projects that will take place for many years, the integration of augmented reality, which uses remote eyesight(RES), and extended application of ‘remote tool control’ assembly test, which was already introduced in Wafer Fab, were introduced.

Meanwhile, Intel is also considering external adoption with ‘Mobile First, Cloud First’ as for the parts far from the core business, and recently, replacement of SaaS-based human resources (HR) system has been introduced. The existing 18-year-old HR system was replaced by SaaS-based, and in this process, Intel redesigned 224 integrations for external vendors and internal downstream applications and simplified the overall HR environment by eliminating more than 250 legacy applications and interfaces. Moreover, according to the cloud era, the role of IT is becoming a ‘cloud broker’ that mediates the way to understand demands of users and achieve goals in optimal forms.

In terms of digitizing the supply chain, Intel is managing inventory of the supply chain in real time by combining in-memory solution. Through it, Intel's automated inventory management system in 2016 reduced pipeline inventory by 12.5% to deliver a business value of $ 121.3 million. In addition, as new tasks, improvement of the supply chain efficiency using IoT, the use of drones in warehouses, and the automated measurement of box size and inventory through the tablet's real-sense camera were mentioned. On the other hand, along with these new systems, it is emphasized that the employees and processes that use them also need to be changed to the appropriate form.



In terms of upgrading products and services, the machine learning platform 'Coverage LIFt Framework (CLIFF)’ was introduced. Intel introduced the platform that it enables to more quickly find out problems by using machine learning technology in design-stage validation, validates the target function more than 60 times compared to the standard regression test, and identifies new problems more than 30% for each execution. It is introduced that it already had identified more than 20 new bugs in one product. Furthermore, it is added that CLIFF will expand its capabilities to automated debugging and smart implementation through future enhancements.

At the same time, Intel introduced that engineers are better able to manage product design process by using visualization and dashboard analysis. On dashboard, which provides online analysis about all the intellectual property design data of SoC product, top-down analysis function for information such as verification quality and schedule is available. With this unified platform, Intel's product group can accelerate the rate at which IP blocks are approved for production. The solution is now used by more than 2,000 users, achieving outcomes including generating business value of $110 million in 2016 and saving $40 million for each SoC project.

Intel also introduced that it has a dedicated team from 2009 on big data analysis. The team was initially small, about 10 people, but has proven to be a real help in business, and is now said to have more than 150 people. The vision they pursue is to secure competitive advantage through big data and analysis, and Intel progresses activities related to big data and AI, at product design, development, and sales internally and at distribution of deep-learning SDK and health care related analysis externally.

In addition, it is explained that the new server design, "Disaggregated Server Architecture", allows for independent upgrades of compute and I/O modules without replacing networking, storage, fans, and power supplies with long replacement cycles in server replacement. Intel has installed more than 30,000 of these servers so far, with an average replacement cost savings of 44% and up to 65%. It also allows Intel's design teams for more frequent replacements so that they benefit from performance improvements using the latest Xeon processor-based technology, and annual savings of $ 1 million in operating cost are expected.


Agile and DevOps aspects were introduced in terms of manpower productivity enhancement, and the new team of Agile and DevOps Program Transformation (ADOPT) was introduced that they have been putting their back into optimizing efforts such as expense and resource by strengthening the idea of ‘one IT’ to eliminate silos and increasing visibility to the investment of IT. On the workspace aspect, 'Seamless User Workplace', a user-following working environment, was introduced. Users can utilize the working environment with the same settings, even when they switched from one device to another, and it is possible to relocate environment within 30 minutes in PC replacement.

Intel's Unite solution lets meeting participants share and annotate their content and presentations seamlessly and instantly in conference rooms or remotely, without wires. It also utilizes vPro technology-based remote management from company dimension. Having the Intel Unite solution in 2,800 conference rooms saved Intel an estimated 50,000 hours of employee meeting time in 2016, and it plans to upgrade at least 1,200 additional conference rooms worldwide in 2017.

In terms of 'innovative manpower training,' Intel's IT department has filed more than 600 patents over the past five years, and run programs such as forums to promote creative culture, committees for reviewing patents, and Hackathon. Besides, the approach to security uses more cloud solutions, connects with the inside as well as the outside environment, educates the users, raises security awareness, and confirms SaaS applications. In addition, IT department is emphasizing security awareness to developers and checking for security awareness of users by sending phishing e-mails directly.

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