Ketan Sampat, who has been appointed president, Intel India, based in Bangalore, told reporters that he would manage the company's relationships with government entities in business development, site management, education programmes, research initiatives and investments in India.
He will also oversee research activities at Intel India Development Centre in Bangalore. Avtar Saini, director, Intel South Asia, will focus on driving Intel's sales and marketing activities in the region.
Describing India, as an "IT Powerhouse", Sampat said the country, which, at present was the seventh largest consumption market for Intel, would become the "fifth largest by 2007".
He said one of the company's thrust areas would be to make computing and communication pervasive by setting foundation building blocks for a 'total IT nation' and also enabling policies for balanced growth.
The second was the operation of a world-class knowledge centre, IIDC, set up in Bangalore in 1998, which has grown from 10 employees to 1,000 today. The centre was working on hardware to drive the E-Biz infrastructure, software to drive Intel business efficiency and modular computing to aid telecom, he said.
Sampat said that the other area of focus would be on Intel's investments in India through strategic relationships to drive enterprise growth, investments in wireless, communication and computing and also investments in knowledge transfer in education as a special initiative.
The product line offer for this year would be Centrino Mobile Technology in the laptop category, Prescott in the desktop and Manatoba, which would be wireless on the internet in a chip, he said.
Intel's four new partnerships have been with PWC, Satyam, Infosys and TCS.
Saini said the challenges ahead of the company were increasing relevance of PC to the consumer through local usage models and increasing community access, bringing the benefits of efficiency to small businesses and partnering with government, since the government IT spending is going to be $8 billion by 2007, according to a survey, he said.
