Charles Lyons-Burt
Kathleen Robinson is a general manager and sales director for Intel’s business with federal system integrators and the defense industrial base. She spoke with ExecutiveBiz about the strategic importance of Intel’s partner programs, the recently passed CHIPS Act, and the five “superpowers” of opportunity in our latest Executive Spotlight interview.
You can read the full interview with Kathleen Robinson below.
You lead a team that serves the defense industrial base and system integrators. How important are Intel’s partners in your work?
Our Defense Industrial Base, or DIB, team has a partner-first sales motion. We foster and lead that partner-first approach for Intel Public Sector. Intel’s integration partners are our “route to market” for our DIB team in the federal and public sector.
It’s a privilege and an honor to collaborate with the DIB partners and system integrators serving federal agency missions. I was reminded of this fact over the recent Veterans Day holiday, when we recognize the nation’s veterans as well as the men and women on our own Intel Public Sector team who have served. Our goal to champion the warfighter is always at the forefront of our initiatives.
DIB partners are important because they bring an extraordinary amount of innovation. We stay competitive collectively by providing very early access to emerging technology, supporting new workloads, and focusing on what matters most to our customers. It’s inspiring to me to be part of this team of accomplished global account executives managing our DIB partners.
How are you working with Intel’s partners to help the DIB and system integrators execute their mission?
We’re building consistent go-to-market activities with our DIB partners through technology designed and built with Intel chips. We’re also providing early access to custom foundry services. This is our Integrated Device Manufacturer 2.0 framework.
IDM 2.0 involves building most of our products in Intel factories, expanding our use of external foundries, and offering Intel Foundry Services, or IFS. IFS will serve the exploding global demand for chips for fabless companies offering world-class process technology, advanced packages, and a broad intellectual-property portfolio – with our DIB partners early in line.
We provide hardware and software tech enablement though early access to product development kits, fabrication, packaging, and testing, plus access to Intel subject-matter experts supporting the platform designs. We relish this bi-directional communication with our DIB partners.
For example, we’re building momentum with Intel product frameworks to address the software shift to the left of silicon technology. This will help our partners shorten development cycles. We’re supporting proofs of concept motions to drive a data-value model — what we call “dFlow” along with tools such as oneAPI for open source programming — to better enable the data, systems, and tools that support our nation’s military, national security, healthcare, and citizen services.
Intel has talked about five “superpowers” of opportunity, including ubiquitous compute, pervasive connectivity, edge to cloud, AI, and sensing. How do these guide your team’s work with partners and customers?
These superpowers are the foundation of the fourth industrial revolution, and Industry 4.0 is prevalent in how we guide and participate in the public sector ecosystem. Our DIB partners are leveraging the superpowers to meet needs for computing power across military platform designs, edge and comms devices, and low-code/no-code applications. These capabilities will bridge access to data in milliseconds to support the warfighter.
We’re also working with our DIB partners to foster innovation brewing within Intel Labs and the emerging growth companies of the Intel Capital portfolio. These innovations include quantum computing, neuromorphic computing, photonics, deepfake detectors, and a lot more.
We predict that every human will have the potential to have one petaflop of computing power and one petabyte of data less than one millisecond away. The possibilities are endless in terms of what our DIB partners can provide with that volume and velocity of data.
But while technology is a powerful tool, it’s our trusted relationships with partners and customers that bring solutions across the finish line. Building one-on-one people relationships and mapping our partners’ strategic direction to the superpowers — that’s been the most awesome role I’ve ever driven in the IT industry.
The CHIPS Act created an opportunity for Intel’s domestic manufacturing efforts. What projects did it launch for the DIB and systems integrator market team?
The CHIPS Act shone a spotlight on U.S. manufacturing fabrications and the need for action plans to address geopolitical and global economic trends. We’ve been working diligently for this idea of a geographically balanced, more resilient supply chain in the U.S. The CHIPS Act is launching a whole new era in silicon packaging.
We have several initiatives in play to take advantage of a national network of onshore prototyping and lab-to-fab transition in semiconductor technologies for DoD-unique applications. We’re also following the R&D budget allotment and new appropriations to work closely with our DIB partners to fund collaborative research and help grow top- and bottom-line revenue.
The CHIPS initiatives are incredibly important, because as new technologies emerge, we can rapidly prototype, test, and accelerate them into the marketplace and defense industrial base. In the context of our DIB partner program, this will drive what we call Rev Max – maximizing our partnerships, maximizing our capabilities, and maximizing the benefits for the nation’s military strength, national and global security, healthcare advances, and citizen services.
This is only our first year igniting the DIB program, and we’re already making meaningful progress. We’re really looking forward to the impacts we’ll drive in 2023 and beyond.
