Intel Cloud Boss Raejeanne Skillern Departs For Top Post At Flex
'Raejeanne was instrumental to driving Intel’s cloud business from a multi-million dollar segment, to a [$10 billion] growth engine for Intel, and I’d like to personally thank Raejeanne for her outstanding leadership at Intel,' an Intel executive says of Skillern's departure.
Intel's top cloud executive, Raejeanne Skillern, is departing the company to lead the enterprise computing and communications business for tech manufacturer Flex.
Flex, based in San Jose, Calif., said Wednesday that Skillern will start her role next week as the head of its Communications and Enterprise Compute Group, an $8 billion business that sells data center and telecommunication networking solutions.
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An Intel spokesperson confirmed that Skillern is leaving the company and said her last day will be Friday. Jason Grebe, corporate vice president and head of Intel's Cloud Platforms and Technology Group, will become the interim leader of Intel's cloud business.
"Raejeanne Skillern recently decided to leave Intel to pursue a new and exciting career opportunity," Grebe said in a statement provided to CRN. "Raejeanne was instrumental to driving Intel’s cloud business from a multi-million dollar segment, to a [$10 billion] growth engine for Intel, and I’d like to personally thank Raejeanne for her outstanding leadership at Intel."
Skillern was vice president of Intel's Data Center Group and general manager of its Cloud Service Provider Group, which provides solutions to cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. According to her LinkedIn profile, Skillern has been at Intel since 2002 and became director of marketing for big data and cloud computing in 2008. She took over the cloud business in 2014.
Skillern did not respond to a request for comment.
Her departure comes as Intel's revenue from cloud service providers has slowed down, which Intel CEO Bob Swan has attributed to cloud providers reaching capacity for their current computing needs. The company is also experiencing a slowdown in purchases from customers in China.
The previous year had been momentous for Intel's mission to become a data-centric company. The company's Data Center Group capped off 2018 with $23 billion in revenue, a 21 percent increase from year before, and cloud service providers played a major role in that growth.
"The cloud service providers through the first nine months of the year last year were up almost 100 percent," Swan told CNBC last week.
That fast data center growth in 2018 has made for a "tough compare" to the slowdown the Intel is now experiencing, according to Swan. However, he said, there is still high demand for data-centric solutions.
"The demand for data, and the need to store, process, analyze that data — those end-demand signals are as strong as they've ever been," Swan said in the CNBC interview.