Dive Brief:

• Intel’s new president of Client and Internet of Things Businesses and Systems Architecture Group says Intel is "the only company with all the hardware and software assets needed for the new cloud- and IoT-centric world."

• Venkata "Murthy" Renduchintala, a former Qualcomm executive, said Intel’s IoT strategy will be integral to the company’s future.

• Intel normally hires from within, but brought Renduchintala on from Qualcomm last November. As part of an effort to shift the company's culture, Renduchintala recently told employees there needs to be more focus on the customer and competition. 

Dive Insight:

The declining PC market has wreaked havoc on Intel’s revenue, forcing the company to look elsewhere for future growth. In April, Intel announced plans to cut 11% of its global workforce—up to 12,000 positions—by mid-2017.

CEO Brian Krzanich recently wrote a blog describing how Intel plans to shift its business strategy toward cloud and IoT technology.  

"Intel will focus on autonomous vehicles, industrial and retail as our primary growth drivers of the Internet of Things," Krzanich said in his blog. "Similarly, we view our core client business of PCs and mobile as among the many variations of connected things, which is driving our strategy of differentiation and segmentation in the Internet of Things business."

Renduchintala wrote in his own blog post that the company predicts there will be more than 50 billion connected devices that will make up the IoT by 2020.

"All of those devices will need connectivity and generate massive amounts of data," he wrote. "That is the direction Intel is headed in."

Renduchintala is not the only industry executive discussing the volumes of data IoT technology will generate. Within two years, IoT will be the "single greatest source of data on the planet," said Neil Postlethwaite, director of IBM Watson IoT Foundation platform and Device Ecosystem Offering Management.

While companies like Cisco and IBM are looking to more dispersed processors to handle all that data, Intel appears to be focusing on 5G. "5G is the inflection point from network needs driven largely by PCs and smartphones to an entirely new platform that connects a broad range of 'things' to each other, to people and to the cloud," said Renduchintala.