Hillsboro (OR) - Intel rings in another round of leadership changes - most significantly filling the vacant position of the chief technology officer: Justin Rattner is not just taking the job in the midst of one of the most critical technology transitions in the firm's history, but he is expected to add a more enthusiastic and emotional touch to the Intel product portfolio as well.

Intel's latest executive shuffle includes four promotions to senior vice presidents and four more to corporate officers. The lucky executives include several names that surfaced in more recent times - such as Mooly Eden (now corporate vice president), who is credited with leading Intel's mobile processor efforts, David Perlmutter (now senior vice president and also closely connected to mobile processors), Anand Chandrasekher (now senior vice president) who was leading sales and marketing efforts. The firm also chose Eric Kim, who joined Intel just over a year ago, as its first chief marketing officer.

However, most importantly, Intel filled the position of the chief technology officer, which has been vacant for almost a year, when Pat Gelsinger left the rank to head up the company's enterprise products division. Since then, Justin Rattner has taken on many of the responsibilities as director of the "corporate technology group" of a CTO, but without carrying the actual title.

Justin Rattner after his keynote at IDF Fall 2005

Intel sources speculated that Rattner may have been hesitant about becoming CTO without knowing exactly how his everyday life may be affected. Plus, being a corporate officer also brings restrictions in how certain types of compensations, such as stock options, can be exercised. But, in the end, CTO is one of the most attractive positions Intel can offer. "The CTO is a pretty cool job, and being CTO for one of the most spectacular technology companies has to be the way coolest job that could possibly exist," Pat Gelsinger told us in an interview earlier this year.

Rattner, who joined Intel in 1973, is not only considered to be one of the smartest people the company has, but is expected to spice up the Intel product line with more visible enthusiasm. Other than traditional marketing executives who typically are "highly excited" when announcing new products, Rattner is Intel's über-geek and has the talent to spark excitement through his knowledge and affection for technology. Sources at Intel told TG Daily, that the company hopes that with the help of Rattner, consumers one day will see Intel products with the similar level of excitement as Apple devices.

Just a few minutes after his appointment was announced, Rattner joined a few journalists in a phone conference to discuss the challenges of the new job and how will the firm's technology differently than Gelsinger did.

Overall, he sees his position as a "more tech-rooted approach" than his predecessor. "Pat is fantastic at a broad range of topics. It's going to be hard to match his breadth," he said. Instead of trying to continue Gelsinger's view of the job, he said that he will be "focused on a smaller set of issues that Intel faces late in this decade and in the next decade." Compared to be job he has done so far, he expects to travel more, and to become more visible to promote Intel technology.

At this time, he considers the current transition of the company as his greatest challenge. "We are changing from being a microprocessor company to become a platform company. This is not just a transition for the technology. It's a change of the mindset," he said. "This is the most critical issue for the company. So it must be the most critical issue for me."

Down the road, Rattner said he envisions technology to become more aware of its user and behaves in a "more natural" way. He outlined this vision at the Intel's spring and fall developer forums when he gave keynotes that provided an outlook of Intel products for the next 10 to 15 years. In March of this year he asked the audience to "imagine a phone that can translate languages in real time so you can talk to people in other countries more easily, or finding a photo of your children playing with a pet from among the thousands of photos you have stored in multiple computers in your house" - in August he demonstrated such a "visual filter" application and other software ideas such as a learning anti-virus protection that are designed to know the user's needs.