John Johnson, vice-president and co-chief information officer
at Intel, has an annual budget of $1.2bn and is responsible for
5,500 IT staff across more than 50 countries.
Efficiency is one of Johnson's key drivers. Each year, the IT
group publishes an
annual
report showing how well it is doing, and areas that need
improvement. He says, "We use the annual performance report to
allow the staff to see their performance for the year." The report
shows that Intel's IT operation charges just over $12,000 per
employee per year for IT services. This works out at approximately
3.12% of the company's revenue.
The Intel IT group has been publishing its annual report since
2000. The latest 2008 report shows an 5% improvement on energy
efficiency since 2007, and an 18% reduction in the number of data
centres Intel operates. The company has made overall savings of
$95m, much of this is down to reducing the number of datacentres
Intel operates. "We began consolidating servers and datacentres in
2007, when we had 130. We now have 75," says Johnson.
Intel runs its enterprise applications out of two datacentres
and is increasingly using virtualisation and centralisation to
improve the efficiency of IT services, but some parts of the
business still require dedicated IT. Johnson says, "Manufacturing
plants are self-contained and run their own datacentres. The chip
design applications are run either in virtual cloud environments or
using server farms located close to where the engineers work, to
allow them to manipulate complex images." Line-of-business
applications like ERP are run as centralised computing services,
supporting multiple countries."
Along with reducing the number of datacentres, Johnson is
focused on energy efficiency. Intel's state of the art Oregon
datacentre uses ambient air for cooling. Rather than use air
conditioning to cool servers, Intel uses what it calls air
economisers, that expel hot air outside and draw in air into the
building for cooling the servers. This site is built on a modular
design to support expansion. "We have done a lot of work to enable
us to add capacity. We want to be able to add infrastructure, power
and rows of servers when we need more capacity," he says.
Efficiency will play a greater role in 2009 for Johnson, as the
company looks towards IT to enable staff to work more efficiency
during the recession. Johnson is a strong believer in tools like
desktop video conferencing. He says, "Staff have been told not to
travel so I am seeing more video conferencing, particularly
PC-based conferencing." According to Johnson, it is not always
necessary to use high-end telepresence suites.
Staff are increasingly using tools like Yammer, the corporate
Twitter-like service, Facebook and are blogging. As such,
collaboration and social media are high on Johnson's agenda for
2009.
Intel's IT group
The IT group at Intel is responsible for supporting and
developing enterprise business applications, productivity software,
engineering applications, manufacturing applications, voice and
data networking, datacentre operations, and custom
applications.