Intel postpones Innovation event in wake of poor financial results, product problems

Less than two months before one of its biggest events of the year, Intel announced it is postponing Intel Innovation 2024, originally scheduled for September 24-25 in San Jose, Calif., until next year.

“Intel Innovation 2024 has been postponed until 2025,” the company said in an emailed statement to Network World. “Fostering a developer ecosystem continues to be a priority for Intel. After careful consideration, we are pivoting from hosting a single, large-scale event this year to focusing on our current smaller, more targeted events, webinars, hackathons and meetups worldwide through Intel Connection and Intel AI Summit events, as well as presence at other industry moments.”

Those “industry moments” will include a scheduled keynote at the IFA 2024 conference in Berlin on September 3. In an announcement about the session, Intel said it will unveil its next-generation Intel Core Ultra processors, codenamed Lunar Lake, during the livestreamed event, 

The postponement comes after Intel was hit with a one-two punch of unhappy financial results (with subsequent slashes to headcount as the company shifts focus to AI) and issues with some of its Raptor Lake desktop CPUs.

After the second-quarter earnings announcement on August 1, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s message to employees said that the company plans on $10 billion in cost savings in 2025, which includes cutting headcount by 15%, amounting to about 15,000 employees. Most of the cost-cutting measures will be completed this year, he said.

Gelsinger wrote in the message: “Simply put, we must align our cost structure with our new operating model and fundamentally change the way we operate. Our revenues have not grown as expected – and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI. Our costs are too high, our margins are too low. We need bolder actions to address both – particularly given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected.”

The Innovation event is likely a casualty of the cost structure realignment. It remains to be seen if finances improve enough for the event’s resurrection sometime in 2025.

The postponement makes sense, according to John Annand, research practice lead at Info-Tech Research Group. “Intel has been the king of general-purpose processing for easily the last 40 years, if not more. That spectacular success and the massive profits that have come with it have allowed them to dabble in all sorts of areas over the years,” he said in an email.

But, Annand added, “This isn’t the 1990s anymore, and Pat Gelsinger knows they’re behind the curve in AI. Intel’s whole go-to-market message on AI is best price/performance ratio! When you look at it this way, it makes perfect sense that Intel would reevaluate the communities and events they chose to support to maximize their own cost efficiency.”

Larry Dignan of Constellation Research agreed that putting off the Intel Innovation event is a good move, but for a different reason.

“Intel just reported a disastrous quarter and needs to reset before holding a big event,” Dignan, who is editor in chief of Constellation Insights, said in an email. “I think this is more about pacing the roadmap and news than cost-cutting per se. It’s hard to have events, the sales parties that go with them and a bunch of happy talk when you’re laying off thousands of people. The best move here is for Intel to take the second half of 2024 to rebuild and come back in 2025, and hold smaller events to keep contact with customers, analysts and investors.”

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