Intel lays down case for software focus

Hardware needs software more than ever, CEO Brian Krzanich said
For decades, Intel chips would be unboxed and put straight into computers. But the chip maker is now trying to tie software closer to hardware before it starts producing chips, said CEO Brian Krzanich on Wednesday.

"For companies like Intel that are for the most part hardware companies, we tend to use software as a driver for hardware, and we tend to think of software as helping drive [the] need for hardware," Krzanich said in a chat session on Reddit.

In driving his point home, Krzanich invoked former Intel CEO Andy Grove. Grove said that software and hardware were complementary, and "drove each other," Krzanich wrote.

Intel's software focus has grown in recent years, which became evident when the company appointed Renee James as the company's president in May, a promotion from her previous post as executive vice president and general manager of the software and services group. James and Krzanich work as a team to make decisions for the company.

In recent years Intel has also made many software acquisitions, including McAfee. Intel intends to push the acquired software into mobile devices and PCs.

Intel is tuning McAfee -- now renamed Intel Security -- software to take advantage of security features on its chips. Intel also acquired software companies like Wind River, whose real-time operating system is considered key for its supercomputing and low-power "Internet of things" chips to securely collect and quickly process data.

Intel has also released its own Hadoop distribution designed to work best with its server chips.

"We now spend a huge amount of time upfront thinking about the experiences we want a user to have before we put one transistor on the chip," Krzanich said.

That is how Intel has changed its approach in chip development -- first defining what a product is going to be used for, developing the software and tools around it and then tuning the chip to meet that user experience, Krzanich said.

"It's about experience, and without a great user experience from the un-boxing onwards...you don't have a product," Krzanich said.

Krzanich also touched upon the company's relationship with Apple.

"We've always had a very close relationship with Apple and it continues to grow closer," Krzanich wrote. "We're always trying to build the relationship with all of our customers to be closer."

Apple uses Intel's chips in PCs, but uses its own ARM-based processors in the iPhone, iPad and other devices. After sticking to making mainly x86 chips in its factories for decades, Intel opened up to making ARM-based processors earlier this year, and will be making 64-bit ARM chips for Altera, which makes FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays).

Analyst firm IC Insight last week sent a note saying that Intel should cut a deal with Apple to make 64-bit chips on the 14-nanometer process, which is considered the industry's most advanced manufacturing technology.

Krzanich also said he hopes 40 million tablets with Intel chips will ship this year.

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So Long IT Specialist, Hello Full-Stack Engineer

At GE Capital, the business is focused not simply on providing financial services to mid-market companies but also selling the company's industrial expertise. They might help franchisees figure how to reduce power consumption or aid aircraft companies with their operational problems. "It's our big differentiator," says GE Capital CTO Eric Reed. "It makes us sticky."

And within IT, Reed is looking not for the best Java programmer in the world or an ace C# developer. He wants IT professionals who know about the network and DevOps, business logic and user experience, coding and APIs.

IT Specialist Out, Full-Stack Engineer In
It's a shift for the IT group prompted by an exponential increase in the pace of business and technology change. "The market is changing so much faster than it was just two or five or, certainly, 10 years ago," says Reed. "That changes the way we think about delivering solutions to the business and how we invest in the near- and long-term. We have to think about how we move quickly. How we try things and iterate fast."

But agility is a tall order when supporting a $44.1 billion company with more than 60,000 employees in 65 countries around the world. "There are several markets we play in, and we can't be big and slow," says Reed. "But the question is how to we make ourselves agile as a company our size."

Like many traditional IT organizations, GE Captial had one group that developed and managed applications and another that designed and managed infrastructure. Over time, both groups had done a great deal of outsourcing. It wasn't an organizational structure designed for speed.

An engineer by training, Reed saw an opportunity to apply the new product introduction (NPI) process developed at GE a couple of decades ago to the world of IT development. Years ago, a GE engineer might split his or her time between supporting a plant, providing customer service, and developing a new product. With NPI, we turned that on its ear and said you're going to focus only on this new product," explains Reed. "You take people with different areas of expertise and you give them one focus."

That's what Reed did with IT. "We take folks that might do five different things in the course of the day and focus them on one task -- with the added twist being that you can't be someone who just writes code," says Reed.

A New Type of IT Team Forms
Last year, Reed pulled together the first such team to develop a mobile fleet management system for GE Capital's Nordic region. He assembled a diverse group of 20, who had previously specialized in networking, computing, storage, application, or middleware, to work together virtually. He convinced all of the company's CIOs to share their employees. They remained in their initial locations with their existing reporting relationships, but for six months all of their other duties were stripped away. "The CIOs had to get their heads around that," Reed says

The team was given some quick training in automation and given three tasks: develop the application quickly, figure out how to automate the infrastructure, and figure out how to automate more of the application deployment and testing in order to marry DevOps with continuous application delivery.

There were no rules -- or roles. "We threw them together and said, 'You figure it out,'" Reed recalls. "We found some people knew a lot more than their roles indicated, and the lines began blurring between responsibilities." Some folks were strong in certain areas and shared their expertise with others. Traditional infrastructure professionals had some middleware and coding understanding. "They didn't have to be experts in everything, but they had a working knowledge," Reed says.

The biggest challenge was learning to be comfortable with making mistakes. "GE has built a reputation around execution," says Reed. "My boss [global CIO of GE Capital] and I had to figure out how to foster an environment were people take risks even though it might not work out."

Project Success
The project not only proceeded quickly -- the application was delivered within several months -- it established some new IT processes. They increased the amount of automation possible not only at the infrastructure level, but within the application layer at well. They also aimed for 60 to 70 percent reusability in developing the application, creating "lego-like" building blocks that can be recycled for future projects.

Business customers welcomed the new approach. In the past, "they would shoehorn as many requirements into the initial spec as possible because they didn't know when they'd ever have the chance again," says Reed. "Now it's a more agile process." The team launches a minimum viable solution and delivers new features over time.

For IT, "it was a radical change in thinking," says Reed. "We've operated the same way literally for decades. There were moments of sheer terror." And it wasn't for everyone. Some opted out of the project and went back to their day jobs.

But Reed is eager to apply the process to future projects and rethink the way some legacy systems are built and managed. "We had talked about services-oriented architecture, and now we have something tangible that shows it can be done," Reed says. "On the legacy side, we have to decide if we want to automate more of that infrastructure and keep application development the old way or invest in this."

Some employees remained with the fleet management app team. Others started a new project. And a few went back to their original roles. "We're trying to make disciples so more people can learn about this process," Reed says.

Reed can envision the IT organization changing eventually. "What we look for in people when we hire them will change. There were years when we went out in search of very technical people. Then there were years of outsourcing where we sought people who could manage vendors and projects," Reed says. "Now we need both, and we need to figure out how to keep them incentivized."

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