E107 - Eric James at Intel Corporation

On this episode of The Route to Networking podcast, we were joined by our Head of Enterprise USA, Harry Green and Eric James, the Cloud Partner Manager at Intel Corporation. We hear Eric break down to us what AI is and how it can be used to help a business produce more sales. He also delves into the benefits of transitioning into a sales role if you’re from a traditional networking background.

When he was growing up, Eric always had an interest in technology and initially kickstarted his journey in college with his Computer Science major. He realised that he didn’t want to be a developer and felt like it wasn’t his forte. He knew he enjoyed the infrastructure and networking side so decided to change his major. At the time, the school he wanted to go to was full so had to do his major in business and his minor in computer technology.

He finished college and ultimately ended up landing a job at CDW. He vowed to himself that he would never go into sales but ended up being in a sales role for 12 and a half years. He started to notice a disruption in his infrastructure business so from there spent 2 years researching and understanding the cloud delivery models. A new evangelism-type role opened up at that time for cloud, so he took that on and branched out as a public cloud specialist.

After spending over 17 years at CDW he decided to make the jump to Intel Corporations. Intel’s mission statement is to create world-changing technology that improves the life of every person on the planet. By pushing forward in fields like AI, analytics and cloud-to-edge technology, Intel’s work is at the heart of countless innovations. Some of the trends he’s seen from when he first started is finding out what persons are going to be the best consumers of AI. Figuring out what the best tools and platforms to use are and who the best people in the company are to run those.

How will AI and cloud develop in the next 10 years?

“My default response is flying cars because who knows where it’ll lead to”.

Jokes aside, when it comes to the cloud, a lot of cloud usage is going to be driven by AI workloads in the future. It’ll become more focused on application-level workloads whereas before more or fewer people moved their virtual environment into the cloud.

If you were considering getting into the AI or software sector or were even considering a role at Intel Corporations, first and foremost you want to have an interest in this field. If you are passionate and curious, there are many tools at your disposal that won’t break the bank. If you are interested in a sales role, then relationship building with a foundational knowledge of AI will come in handy.

Eric shares some great advice as well as the benefits of going into a sales role if you come from a traditional networking background. Tune in now to hear the full episode.