Brian Krzanich has led a major reshaping on Intel Corp.'s (INTC) business since being appointed CEO of the legacy chip giant in 2013.
When he stepped into the role, Intel was in the throes of a declining PC market, which meant that it needed to begin looking elsewhere beyond its PC and data center CPU business in order to stay afloat. Krzanich said Intel was a "single-product company" where PCs were 80% of the business. Intel's PC unit now makes up a much smaller share of the company's overall business, but it's still managed to buck industrywide declines and continues to grow.
He quickly saw that emerging technologies like cloud computing, autonomous vehicles and 5G wireless networks could become big growth markets for the semiconductor company. Cloud computing and autonomous systems both generate a lot of data, which is where he believed Intel could step in. The company began positioning itself as a data center first company, making the chips that can analyze and process all the information flowing from new, complex systems like cloud computing platforms.
It means that Intel is no longer restricted to the approximately $45 billion PC CPU market and can now claim a growing share of the massive data center chip market, which Krzanich estimates to be about $260 billion.