‘There is no blink on the importance of partners. Our direct buyers are very limited. All the rest of our business goes through partners, and it’s significant,’ says Intel Global Channel Chief Dave Guzzi.
While Intel’s channel efforts have gone through many changes over the past several years, some of the biggest have come since last year—even before CEO Lip-Bu Tan took over to steer the chipmaker through its latest comeback attempt.
For instance, Intel Global Channel Chief Dave Guzzi told CRN in January 2025, roughly two months before Tan started as CEO, that the company had reduced sales coverage for an unspecified number of channel partners as it ramped up overall channel funding.
This reduction in sales coverage, which resulted in Intel moving some partners to a distributor-led coverage model, was tied to the massive job cuts the semiconductor giant started making in 2024 under former CEO Pat Gelsinger.
Once Tan entered the picture, more changes followed, including an outsourcing of marketing and sales operations jobs, the restructuring of the Intel Partner Alliance program, the move to an outcome-based MDF model and the introduction of a deal registration program that creates new requirements for benefits like volume-based rebates.
The chipmaker then followed these shifts to benefits and resources with an increase to the channel budget for this year, which Guzzi said is reflective of Intel’s commitment to the channel as partners continue to “grow as a percent of our overall revenue.”
“There is no blink on the importance of partners. Our direct buyers are very limited. All the rest of our business goes through partners, and it’s significant,” he told CRN in February.
To Christopher Cyr, CTO of top Intel systems integration partner Sterling Computers, North Sioux City, S.D., it makes sense for the chipmaker to require more input from partners to receive investments and incentives with the outcome-based MDF model and deal registration.
Times have changed significantly since Intel was the undisputed leader in computer chips and commanded big profits several years ago. These new expectations fall in line with what the chipmaker’s closest competitors, Nvidia and AMD, are starting to ask of partners, Cyr said.
It also behooves Intel to get more data on customer deals from partners because of the growing competitiveness and complexity of the semiconductor industry.
“I can understand what they’re trying to do because partnership has to go both ways. And when you have a big logo like that, it tends to not happen that way. A lot of hands tend to be out, and I think that that needed to change,” said Cyr, whose company won Intel partner awards for the past two years and is No. 64 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500.
All these changes are part of Tan’s larger transformation of Intel into a leaner and faster-moving company that is central to the future of computing, from the edge to massive data centers.
To Intel’s Guzzi, advances in the company’s technology road map to satisfy “ever-increasing” expectations for the chipmaker to grow revenue will create an “even deeper reliance on partners to be able to effectively communicate the benefits to end customers.”
“Our products are only going to become more complex. We want it to be simpler for our partners to do business with us, but the technology is screaming forward, and certainly Intel sellers are not going to be able to cover the world,” he said. “And so I think the importance of partners—there’s no question that it’s increasing.”
What follows are overviews of eight big changes that Intel has made to channel benefits and resources as well as its channel organization since last year.
Intel Increased Channel Funding For Two Years In A Row Despite Budget Cuts
Intel increased its channel budget for two years in a row, although Guzzi said 2025’s boost was a “little bit” larger than the one it made this year.
“It’s not quite as big an investment in ’26 as it was in ’25, and I can’t share the percentage or the dollar amount, but we make substantial investments. We’re starting from a very high base,” he told CRN in the February interview.
The decisions around last year’s funding boost were made before Tan became Intel’s CEO in March 2025.
Guzzi said the semiconductor giant has been “consistently investing in our partner ecosystem,” with last year’s funding boost yielding “really good results.”
The global channel chief noted that this happened even as Intel said last year that it would cut $1.5 billion in operating expenses through 2026.
“At a time when Intel is making significant reductions in operating expenses so that we can deliver an even greater return to our shareholders, we’ve continued to invest in the channel, and I think that will continue to be the case going forward as well,” he said.
Intel Reduces Direct Coverage Of Channel Partners
While Intel boosted its channel funding last year, it also reduced direct coverage of channel partners, resulting in an unknown number of parters losing Intel sales representatives and moving to a distribution-led coverage model.
In a CRN interview in January of last year, Guzzi said the reduction of coverage was tied to job cuts the company started making in 2024. CRN reported in August 2024 that Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group, which houses its channel organization and was recently renamed to the Sales Management Group, planned to cut costs by more than 35 percent by the end of that year.
“There’s probably a fewer number of accounts that are covered when we had this downsizing. We certainly lost some sales folks, and so there may be some customers that were directly covered in the past that won’t be now,” he said.
This meant that with Intel providing direct coverage to fewer partners, “there’s even more money available to each of those that are still participating,” Guzzi added.
“It’s very much just a financial expansion of the existing programs, in some cases, with a smaller number of partners, which means, of course, there’s even more money available to each of those that are still participating,” Guzzi told CRN in January of last year.
The global channel chief did note, however, that the increased partner funding will help distributors cover gaps with some partners that lost direct coverage by Intel. For the past several years, Intel has funded programs for distributors to provide Intel-related resources to partners that do not have Intel salespeople calling on them.
“They cover all our customers, but what we ask of them for some accounts will increase because those accounts may have lost their Intel salesperson, so there’s some additional incentives in place for distributors,” he said.
Intel Narrows ISV Investment Focus To AI
Guzzi said early last year his team also decided to narrow Intel’s investments in ISVs through the Intel Partner Alliance program to those whose primary focus is AI.
This meant that Intel’s global partner organization would stop investments in other ISV areas, like security, the global channel chief said in January 2025.
“[It’s a] critical market, no doubt about it, but for our work, we felt that to execute against the best opportunities with our channel partners, AI today was going to make the most sense for us for some of the broader ISVs,” he said.
An Intel spokesperson said the narrowed investment focus in ISVs was about moving “away from one-off custom software optimizations for niche applications, focusing instead on scalable solutions that benefit a wider range of partners.”
“On that note, partnerships for workloads with minimal growth potential or limited alignment with Intel’s road map, such as legacy or highly specialized use cases, have been scaled back,” the representative said at the time.
Intel Outsources Many Marketing, Operations Roles To Accenture
Intel last year moved to outsource many marketing and operations roles within its sales organization to global IT consulting giant Accenture in an effort to embrace AI-driven work.
The Oregonian reported that the chipmaker informed marketing and operations employees in June of last year that the move would result in “significant changes to team structures, including potential head count reductions, with only lean teams remaining.”
An Intel spokesperson told the publication that the move was done as part of CEO Tan’s push to turn the chipmaker into a “leaner, faster and more efficient company.”
In a June 2025 memo seen by CRN, John Kalvin, who was head of Intel’s global operations and support organization until earlier this year, said the outsourcing of operations roles would “empower [the global sales organization] with modern tools, data and agentic AI capabilities.”
“We’ve made great strides, but we must move faster to remain competitive. Our customers are telling us our decision-making is too slow, our programs are too complex and our competitors are outpacing us,” Kalvin wrote as a preface. “In [the sales group], we’re addressing these challenges head-on by taking decisive actions aligned to our culture—speed, boldness and focus—to fundamentally transform how we operate.”
In the February interview with CRN, Guzzi noted that through this managed services relationship, the chipmaker can tap into Accenture’s experience of advising “some of the biggest, most complex enterprises on the planet.”
“The knowledge they gain, the experience, the approach, the development work they’ve done, the resources they have, the experience that their people have to be able to take all of that and apply it to our business—I was like, ‘This totally makes sense to me,’” he said.
While Guzzi said the outsourcing of marketing roles has been a “very positive experience,” the operations side was “much more difficult to hand off” to Accenture, adding that “it’s a little bit more visible to partners” as Intel sought to improve the new arrangement.
“They feel our pain a little bit more there than maybe some of the great strides we’ve made in marketing,” Guzzi said in February. “[There’s] still work to be done there. There’s probably some partners that have had some bumps that say, ‘I’m not sure how it’s going,’ but in its totality, we feel very good about where Accenture has taken us.”
Intel Restructures Partner Alliance Program With Various Changes
Intel last year restructured the Intel Partner Alliance program in a move that the chipmaker said is meant to give partners “more value” and “more benefits.”
The program changes, which went into effect in October of last year included a move to a two-tier member system from its traditional three-tier system, an increase in the number of points partners can earn on Intel products and other activities, the introduction of volume-based point multipliers for high-priority products as well as the removal or consolidation of some program elements, among several other changes.
Andy Marsee, general manager of Intel Partner Alliance, told CRN in an interview in August of last year that while it’s moving partners from a three-tier system that consists of Member, Gold and Titanium tiers to a two-tier system that will consist of the base Partner and premium Prestige tiers, no partner would lose benefits as a result.
He said “no partner left behind” is Intel’s mantra with these changes.
Intel also reduced the number of roles in Intel Partner Alliance from eight to five. The company said it was combining a few roles to simplify the experience for partners. The OEM and ODM roles merged into the new Builder role while the Solution Provider and Service Integrator roles became the Solution Integrator role.
As for points-based incentives, Intel raised the cap for points partners can earn by selling Intel products and participating in other activities to 300,000. With the volume-based multiplier, partners that sell certain levels of high-priority products will increase the multiplier for the base number of points they earn.
Other new benefits include access to the Intel corporate badge for Prestige partners doing co-marketing, the availability of custom training programs for Prestige partners that commit 100 or more employes to such efforts, and the opportunity for Partner-tier members to get a listing on the Intel Partner Showcase storefront.
The company also consolidated or removed some aspects of Intel Partner Alliance that it said would be replaced by other elements of the program in some cases. This included the removal of the product and solution offerings feature from the Intel Partner Showcase storefronts, the end of support for communities like Intel Cloud Insider, and the merger of multiple satellite programs like Market Ready Solutions and RFP Ready Kits.
Intel Moves To Outcome-Based MDF
Intel moved all channel partners to an outcome-based MDF model this year after saying it would shift the impetus on generating customer leads to partners.
The new MDF model, available by default to Prestige partners but by invitation to Partner-level members, moved away from the company’s traditional compliance-based model. Under the traditional model, Intel reimbursed partners for spending a preapproved amount of money on marketing activities related to Intel’s products.
“It’s radically simpler, and it also gets Intel and our partners focused on measuring the results, the effectiveness [and] the outcomes of the investment rather than the details of how we got there,” Marsee said.
Intel Starts Testing Deal Registration With Select Data Center Partners
Intel last year started testing a deal registration program with select data center systems integration and ISV partners in a move that Guzzi said would create new requirements for partners to receive benefits like volume-based rebates or engineering support.
In his February interview with CRN, the global channel chief said the program, called Intel Deal Incentive, “is going to be transformational for the way Intel manages incentives going forward,” calling it the “next iteration” of co-selling.
While co-selling has “always been an important part of Intel’s motion,” Guzzi said, “we haven’t always had as much detail or information as we would want.”
“Rather than just paying rebates on volumes that are sold out, in deal [registration], we get involved before the decisions are made, and we can impact the actual win rate of the deals that our partners are working on,” he said.
In addition to serving as a requirement for participating partners to receive volume-based rebates, Guzzi said the program would also unlock Intel engineering resources.
Saying the program has been “very successful” so far,” Guzzi noted how deal registration can help partners determine which CPU is the best fit for a certain workload or project.
“So by registering it with us, telling us what they think it is, our sellers can then get involved with the partner to say, ‘Look, Xeon 6 is absolutely the right product.’”
While Guzzi said Intel expanded the number of partners participating in deal registration this year, he wasn’t sure at the time when it would become more broadly available. “Part of that is, how effectively can we scale it? We need to learn and determine that as we go,” the global channel chief said in February. “But we’re excited about the results, which means that we’re pressing to make sure that we can scale rapidly, but I don’t know when we’ll be able to make it a core [Intel Partner Alliance] benefit.”
An Intel spokesperson did not say whether Intel Deal Incentive has expanded to more partners since CRN’s interview with Guzzi in February.
Guzzi Sheds Enterprise Responsibilities To Focus On Global Channel Role
Intel shed Guzzi’s job responsibilities for leading the company’s enterprise go-to-market efforts earlier this year so that he can focus on his role as global channel chief.
Guzzi, who became Intel’s global channel chief in 2024, had announced in August of last year that he was given a new position as vice president of global go-to-market for enterprise and partners in the company’s sales organization.
In his February interview with CRN, he said this happened as the result of a reorganization that brough together Intel’s go-to-market teams for enterprise and partners.
However, Guzzi said at the time that the sales organization was likely going to “change that back and keep [the enterprise and partner] teams separated.”
“Generally, the go-to-market groups are very aligned to the business units, to the products. And, of course, the partner team is very focused on hundreds of thousands of partners all over the world,” he said.
This means that the global partner organization is meant to support go-to-market teams since the channel represents one of Intel’s go-to-market motions, Guzzi added.
But with enterprises, multinational corporations and cloud services providers representing distinct go-to-market motions, the executive said he wasn’t sure if it was the best approach for him to lead the global partner organization and enterprise efforts at the same time.
A few weeks after the interview, an Intel spokesperson told CRN in March that Guzzi’s title had been changed to global channel chief.
