Intel appoints VMware’s Pat Gelsinger to replace Bob Swan as CEO
Intel has announced that VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger will lead the company once current CEO Bob Swan steps down in February.
The chipmaker has appointed 40-year-old technology industry leader Gelsinger as the company’s new CEO and will also join the board of directors once he takes the role.
The move makes a lot of sense for Intel, as Gelsinger began his career at the company where he worked for 30 years before taking the role of president and COO at EMC and becoming CEO of VMware in 2012.
Independent Chairman of the Intel Board Omar Ishrak praised the company’s new CEO in one press release and explained how Geslinger can leverage his technology and technical expertise in his new role, saying:
“Pat is a proven technology leader with an outstanding track record of innovation, talent development and deep knowledge of Intel. He will pursue a values-based cultural leadership approach with a hyper focus on operational execution. After careful consideration, the Board concluded that now is the right time to make this leadership change and leverage Pat’s technology and technical expertise during this critical period of transformation at Intel. The board is confident that Pat, along with the rest of the leadership team, will ensure a strong execution of Intel’s strategy to build on its product leadership and take advantage of the significant opportunities ahead as it continues to transform a CPU towards a multi-architecture. XPU company. “
Changing the course of Intel
Bob Swan was named Intel CEO in January 2019 after serving as the company’s interim CEO for seven months.
However, during Swan’s tenure, the company faced fierce competition from its closest competitor AMD and UK-based chip designer Arm. Intel took a major blow to its chip business in the fall of last year when Apple announced it would use its own M1 chips in its Mac computers after a 15-year partnership with the company.
While Swan has a corporate background and served as the CFO of Intel and eBay before becoming CEO, Geslinger is of a more technical background, having become Intel’s first-ever CTO in 2000. Because of this, Geslinger will likely use his technical background to help guide the company well once he takes on the role of CEO.
In its press release announcing that Geslinger will take over from Swan, Intel emphasized the fact that the announcement is unrelated to the company’s financial performance in 2020 and that it expects fourth-quarter revenues to exceed previous expectations.
Through CNBC