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It’s hard not to come into contact with something powered by Intel chips. Close to 90 percent of notebooks and desktops depend on them.
And while the world’s biggest chipmaker often takes a lot of criticism for falling behind the market for smartphones and tablets, Intel’s advantage in the mobile world lies in the part of the ecosystem you don’t see. Every time you start an app on your smartphone that connects to the Internet, the chance that it’s talking to a server in some data center somewhere with an Intel processor inside jumps to over 90 percent.
Data centers are so central to all of the changes affecting how large companies do what they do that it makes Diane Bryant, the Intel senior VP in charge of this side of its business, a natural fit on the roster of speakers at our Code/Enterprise Series event in San Francisco on April 21.
Bryant oversees Intel’s $14 billion business in selling chips for use in data centers, making this its second-largest business after PC chips. Its 51 percent operating margins make it far and away Intel’s most profitable business. Customers that build data centers like Facebook or LinkedIn or Amazon all buy Intel chips in huge quantities.
Her responsibilities extend to Intel’s high-performance computing products. If American pride suffered a blow by the fact that the world’s most powerful supercomputer has been in China for nearly two years, that it relies almost exclusively on Intel chips to achieve that prowess should serve as something of a salve. These too fall into Bryant’s portfolio.
It’s a long way from the waitressing job Bryant took while a student at Sacramento’s American River College in the early 1980s. She hadn’t initially planned to go to college — neither of her parents did. She became an engineering major after a classmate mentioned that students in that field of study graduated to the best-paying jobs. A few years later she transferred to UC Davis where a class on “Principles of Device Physics” changed her life. It was a tough class, but she “fell in love” with the subject.
She completed an electrical engineering degree in 1985 and went straight to work for Intel that year. Since then she has held numerous senior titles, including corporate vice president and chief information officer and she holds four patents. She has also funded the Diane Bryant Endowed Scholarship for Women in Engineering at her alma mater.
Clearly there will be a lot to talk about. Bryant is one of four speakers we’ve lined up for our first Code/Enterprise event. The others are Aaron Levie, the CEO of the cloud storage and collaboration company Box; Kevin Mandia, the COO of security company FireEye; and Josh James the CEO and founder of Domo, the business intelligence software company.
We’re meeting up on the evening of April 21 at the Dogpatch Wineworks in San Francisco, and we hope to see you there. Tickets are sold out, but there is a waiting list. If you can’t make it, we’re hosting another event in New York on Sept. 29. More details about that coming soon.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
