Intel Data Center Exec Guido Appenzeller Leaves After Short Stint

Guido Appenzeller’s departure is happening a few months after Intel ousted his former boss, Navin Shenoy, who led the chipmaker’s data center business before it was reorganized. He played a key role in introducing Intel’s vision for the infrastructure processing unit, a new class of data center chip.

Intel executive Guido Appenzeller, a former lieutenant under ousted data center leader Navin Shenoy, is leaving the chipmaker after working there for less than 10 months.

Appenzeller, who was CTO of the Data Platforms Group that reorganized in June, confirmed to CRN Friday that he is leaving Intel this week. An Intel spokesperson added that Appenzeller is departing to “pursue opportunities outside the company.” Appenzeller had joined Intel near the beginning of the year after announcing his new role on LinkedIn on Jan. 27.

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Appenzeller’s departure is happening a few months after Intel ousted his former boss, Shenoy, as part of CEO Pat Gelsinger’s reorganization of the Data Platforms Group in June. At the time, Intel said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it “determined” a few days prior to announcing the reorganization that Shenoy “will separate from Intel.”

As part of the reorganization, Appenzeller was moved under the Datacenter and AI Group, one of the two new business units formed from the Data Platforms Group, Gelsinger said in a memo at the time.

Appenzeller isn’t the only former lieutenant under Shenoy to leave after the reorganization in June. Remi El-Ouazzane, who was chief strategy officer of the Data Platforms Group, announced last month that he was leaving the chipmaker for a “new exciting opportunity.”

During Appenzeller’s time at Intel, one of his major focuses was the infrastructure processing unit, a new class of data center chip that is meant to offload infrastructure tasks from server CPUs for cloud service providers so that CPUs can be fully utilized for revenue-generating applications. He introduced Intel’s vision for IPUs in June and served a key role in communicating the value IPUs will play for hyperscalers and eventually the broader data center market.

“If a bank builds their own data center, typically today they want to achieve all the same goals that the hyperscalers want to achieve in the sense of they would like to have a stronger separation between the infrastructure and the workload,” he told CRN in July. “They want the acceleration. They want to have the maximum number of [CPU] cores available for the actual workload and don‘t want to take any of those expensive cores and use them for infrastructure overhead.”

Intel most recently announced Google Cloud as the co-development partner for Mount Evans, the company’s ASIC-based IPU that will help cloud service providers “maximize data center revenue by letting them “rent 100 percent of their server CPUs to customers.”

Prior to joining Intel, Appenzeller was chief product officer at hardware authentication device maker Yubico. But before that, he worked under Gelsinger as CTO of VMware’s cloud and networking business. He was previously CEO and co-founder of Big Switch Networks.