As Intel India president, Kumud Srinivasan is responsible for general management of Intel?s operations in India, which includes location?s overall strategy, business-enabling operations, organisational development, engineering and innovation for market development, as well as managing relationships with government, industry and academia. She leads a team of over 3,500 employees, making India the largest non-manufacturing site outside the US. Her team here contributes to almost all major Intel products from smartphones to the high-end servers. In a conversation with Nandagopal Rajan, she explains roadmap for this tech giant in India. Excerpts:

You have been here for a year. Have you shortlisted your focus areas?

I can capture all of the different thrusts that I want to lead into one?to build on the strong foundation of execution that we have. We have a reputation of being able to execute credibly on projects. My challenge is to take the organisation beyond execution to thought leadership. That would mean not just the ability to execute the work assigned and allocated to us by decision makers, but also play a leadership role in terms on influencing product road maps. It would also mean helping Intel identify new ways in terms of expanding its market in India.

A lot of companies say India throws up unique scenarios that will work in other geographies. Is that the same for Intel?

We would love to get there. One of the challenges is to take Intel?s standard products and through cost reduction work enable those products to come in at a lower price point in India. Such a product would also work in other countries as well. We have begun partnering with Intel China and Malaysia to identify ways to reduce costs of products we are manufacturing.

How are you going to take on rivals who have a better cost proposition, especially in the smartphone space?

That is where the partnerships will come in. Given our geo-proximity, we can leverage the system that is very strong now in China. We are beginning to have conversations with the government here to have the global supply chain move to India. That will be a win-win for everyone. We could replicate what India did in the auto industry. In 2013, the government started talking about manufacturing sector. It seems 2014 will be the year it will all start coming together. There has been a lot of promising steps. We have already begun talks with local OEMs and ODMs to see the potential here.

What are your efforts in big data and data centre adoption here?

India is still in the nascent stages, even in cloud services. But we are doing very well in super computers and high performance computing (HPC). India is very strong in the HPC market, so cloud is just the next stage. It is just an evolution to get these services going. As former telecom secretary R Chandrashekar, who will take over as Nasscom president, told me recently: ?The last two decades of growth has come on the shoulders of corporate giants, but the future is going to be the rise of the entrepreneur.? When you think about that the growth of cloud-based services is inevitable as these small businesses won?t be able to invest in their own data centres.

How are you tackling the lack of growth in the PC eco-system?

Our strategy has been to play in every market segment. Even in PCs there is huge opportunity in India as the penetration here is the lowest. So there is a huge opportunity here. We are working very hard to make people more aware of the value of PCs. There is optimism that this is going to turn around. For the mobile segment, we are going to be an important player in tablets and phones. In phones we have refined our focus and in tablets we are going all out.

India has a tendency of skipping stages. So is there a fear that we will skip PCs and go directly to mobile devices?

To some extent you could argue that this is already happening. But the smartphone and the tablet are largely consumption devices. So we believe the PC and its value will recover. We have a lot of confidence in the two-in-one PC-tablet form factor. That will sort of bring it all back.

You came back to India after a long stay abroad. How different was the India you saw when you came back?

India is going through a very exciting technology phase. It is not just the adoption of technology, but the implication that technology has in respect to commerce, education and social values. As devices are becoming cheap you have all segments of society in India being able to access the internet. The implications of that are huge. We have only just scratched the surface?IT in many ways can become the great equaliser. India has the potential to leverage this IT revolution in a very inclusive manner.