Intel IT is modernizing our enterprise architecture (EA) to accelerate Intel’s business transformation. Our goal is to simplify processes, more tightly manage IT assets, and drive EA innovation through AI. Initiatives include establishing federated governance, formalizing evaluation of emerging technologies, increasing EA resiliency, infusing various forms of AI into our EA workflows, and using capability-based planning to prioritize and optimize capability evolution. Our new approach to EA will reduce technical debt, improve business agility, and support Intel’s strategic growth imperative.

Intel is entering a new era, with Intel Product and Intel Foundry as separate business entities. Through activities such as accelerated adoption of AI capabilities, data transformation, and ongoing modernization of factory and data center alike, Intel IT plays a pivotal role as a resilient change agent. We are aligning IT investments and initiatives with Intel’s strategic business objectives and are building resilience into our IT systems, processes, and organizational culture to support enterprise-wide resilience.

This year’s Intel IT Annual Performance Report chronicles Intel IT’s recent efforts and achievements within four categories: enabling the business to thrive, driving operational excellence, delivering an amazing employee experience, and shaping a resilient workforce.

The report includes an opening letter from our CIO, Motti Finklestein, and numerous success stories. Here is just a sampling:

Read the entire APR for the details of these stories and more.

Modern electrical grids incorporate redundancy and automated rerouting to maintain a reliable electrical supply during equipment failures or natural disasters. Plants have coping mechanisms to deal with adverse conditions like drought. Similarly, it is important that IT systems, including applications, infrastructure, platforms, and services, can withstand or recover quickly from difficulties. Resilient technology helps companies thrive, and when disruptions occur, enables them to emerge stronger than before.

In 2024, Intel IT launched our OneIT Resiliency Program, geared to instill resiliency across technologies, operations, and culture and organizational entities. In addition to defining these three pillars, we codified resiliency through a unique combination of framework, principles, standards, maturity model, and roadmaps. We focused first on applications, closing 100% of all resiliency gaps in Tier 1 applications by the end of the year. We also successfully weathered a major incident caused by one of our security software vendors: Despite widespread PC failure across the company, we restored functionality in just a few hours for Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications and under 1.5 days for all applications at Intel.

During 2025, we will extend our efforts to infrastructure and data centers. We hope that our resiliency framework, standards, blueprints, recipes, and maturity model will inspire other IT departments to pursue a similar path to IT—and enterprise—resilience.

Intel’s manufacturing landscape is evolving rapidly, driven by digital transformation and automation. Intel’s manufacturing facilities generate vast amounts of data that must be efficiently processed, analyzed, and secured to optimize operations and maintain competitiveness.

In 2013, we deployed an “ultra” data warehouse that replaced our older fragmented and siloed databases. It has stood the test of time, easily scaling as we added yet more data and data domains. As Intel transitions to a foundry model, its factories will become more complex and will generate even more data than before. Plus, security is becoming even more critical—Intel must not only protect its own manufacturing data from unauthorized access; it must also ensure that Intel Foundry customers have confidence that their data is in safe hands and guaranteed to be separate from Intel’s data. We have implemented process-specific security (PSS), which helps prevent unauthorized data access while still delivering efficient query execution.

Our highly secure and high-performance data warehouse, running on modern Intel architecture, helps unlock important insights hidden in massive manufacturing data volumes. This solution has shown that it can reliably scale to handle not only today’s data challenges but also grow with Intel as it expands its factories to support its foundry model and IDM 2.0.

Training models on Intel Gaudi accelerators is helping improve efficiency in Intel’s factories.

Intel’s smart manufacturing environment relies on AI to improve yield, perform root-cause analysis, and accelerate anomaly detection. As Intel transforms to an internal foundry model, it is crucial that the Manufacturing Automation team helps improve factory efficiency by enabling faster, more cost-efficient deep-learning (DL) and machine-learning (ML) workloads.

We recently benchmarked a manufacturing object detection DL model training workload. We compared the performance of our legacy GPU-based system, a vendor upgrade to the GPUs, and Intel® Gaudi® accelerators. Our AI-based solution using Intel Gaudi accelerators produced the following benefits:

• A 20% improvement in DL model training time

Intel’s AI hardware and software ecosystem is a competitive and efficient solution for high-volume manufacturing (HVM) use cases. The manufacturing efficiency offered by Intel Gaudi accelerators will help us improve production yields and increase Intel factory revenue.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is helping Intel IT keep up with Intel’s business expansion. We regularly experience an annual 25% increase in demand for data center network capacity. Furthermore, business pressures necessitate that new capacity be operational within 24 hours. As early as 2014, we acknowledged the potential of SDN to help address these challenges.

After evaluating the components and architectures of SDN, we opted for an open, standards-based architecture rather than a supplier-centric solution. As our SDN architecture has evolved, we have established a standardized and scalable data center network architecture that extensively uses automation. The open interface provides the flexibility to integrate additional business-driven automation, enabling us to meet our growth objective and timeline requirements.

Our network architecture strategy relies on five pillars:

Over the past five years, we have migrated the majority of our data centers to a new SDN architecture that employs a leaf-spine underlay combined with overlay networks. By utilizing Industry-standard components and protocols, we have significantly improved network delivery times while reducing the need for human resources, thereby enhancing overall efficiency. Additionally, we have increased the stability and reliability of the network and consolidated multiple dedicated customer networks onto a common infrastructure that’s integrated with enhanced security controls.

Intel IT adopted a “right workload, right place” multicloud strategy nearly 10 years ago. This strategy has accelerated application development and deployment agility, achieved cost-responsible scalability, and enabled our business partners across Intel to achieve their business goals.

A decade of validation has underscored that emphasizing business value in cloud hosting decisions is advantageous. However, we continue to adapt our multicloud strategy as both business needs and the IT ecosystem evolve.

Some of those adaptations include the following:

But the cloud journey is never finished. New trends in the enterprise—such as the increasing use of AI, as well as innovations in the IT landscape—mean that we must continue to evaluate and evolve our multicloud strategy to consistently support the business in the most cost-efficient manner possible.

To benchmark the end-user PC experience, Intel IT uses tools that clarify PC power consumption and applications’ effect on battery life. This helps us optimize the IT build and answer one of the most common questions we receive from users: “Why doesn’t my corporate laptop battery last as long as my laptop at home?”

We know employees want to be as productive as possible, and battery life is crucial to Intel’s highly mobile workforce. On the other hand, our IT build includes several components that help keep Intel’s data and intellectual property safe. Necessarily, these additional software components consume their fair share of power. To fully understand what users are experiencing with their laptops—as well as how the Intel IT build introduces power consumption overhead—we rigorously benchmark the corporate PC experience.

In collaboration with Intel’s Client Computing group, we recently overhauled our PC experience benchmarking methodology and toolset. We adopted new benchmarking tools that more accurately represent the applications that Intel employees use. We also now use the Intel® Battery Life Diagnostic Tool (Intel® BLDT) to identify specific background processes and applications that are responsible for excessive power consumption.

We use these tools to reduce power consumption rates on users’ PCs and help the Client Computing group drive improvements to client devices and meet customers’ expectations. By sharing our benchmarking approach and results, we hope to encourage other IT departments to take a similar approach.

Intel IT’s Information Security (InfoSec) group has adopted capability-based planning (CBP) because it provides a framework for aligning our group’s strategies with Intel’s overall business strategy. CBP helps us prioritize projects and resources, communicate more effectively with business stakeholders, reduce complexity, and become more agile and responsive to changing business needs.

CBP is a planning methodology that drives business-focused outcomes by providing a systematic, objective, and holistic view of a group’s capabilities. In our case, these capabilities center around InfoSec, such as digital identity and access management and privacy management. Using a four-phase cyclical process of alignment, assessment, planning, and management, we can:

This comprehensive method of capability mapping and scoring delivers a unified view of capabilities and objectives so that teams can collaborate and optimize cross-functional efficiency.

Adopting CBP has provided several benefits to the InfoSec group:

As other Intel IT groups—and even business units—see the positive outcomes of CBP, we hope they also begin to adopt it, which would multiply the benefits across all of Intel. Furthermore, CBP has already fostered collaboration across departments and teams.

Our comprehensive method of capability mapping and a formulaic scorecard captures the strategic importance, business goal importance, capability maturity score, and quantified risk. It highlights what is required to execute initiatives successfully. Our solution addresses our longstanding InfoSec planning challenges but can also be applied to other IT groups and even other industries. Adopting CBP is an excellent way to align every decision with its strategic vision and capabilities and drive sustained enterprise success.

“Learn how Intel IT is gaining operational efficiencies resulting from a 5G private network in Intel’s manufacturing environment.

Minimizing factory downtime and improving operational efficiency have always been the driving forces behind Intel IT’s push to digitize equipment in both factory and subfab environments. Now, we’re expanding these efforts by working with Intel’s Corporate Services (CS) team to connect critical factory-support infrastructure, including surveillance systems in guardhouses, electrical supply equipment, water systems, and more.

Connecting equipment in remote outdoor areas to the corporate network has always been a challenge. Wi-Fi coverage is limited; hard wiring is costly and time-intensive; and relying on public networks introduces concerns with cost, performance, and security. After reviewing the options, we chose to roll out 5G private networks at Intel factories to extend wireless connectivity for key use cases in Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, operations, and security. This deployment, combined with 5G-enabled IoT Gateways and an array of sensors, lets us reach further and deliver more robust connectivity where it’s needed.

With our 5G private network in place, CS technicians can tap into sensor data to gain deeper visibility into equipment health, enabling predictive and preventative maintenance. This enhanced connectivity also allows technicians to connect field devices, like tablets, directly to the corporate network to increase efficiency. Currently, our 5G private program supports only 13 use cases—a fraction of the potential applications. Our 5G deployment spans five factories and is projected to generate a net present value of USD 35M over the next five years.

We hope that by sharing our 5G private network journey, we can inspire other IT departments to explore using this technology to continue the digital transformation of their previously unconnected environments.”