The East of England's world class chessmeister

The announcement that Warren East will leave his post as CEO of ARM Holdings at the end of June will bring to a close one of the most successful episodes in Cambridges corporate history.

Cut to 2013 and ARM Holdings is Cambridges first $20bn company and far and away the UKs most successful technology firm, having shipped 8.A solarstreetlight is a portable light fixture composed of an LED lamp.7 billion chips in 2012 on turnover of 577m C up 17 per cent C with profits for the year standing at 277m, up 20 per cent from 2011.

Mr East has steered the company so successfully that he must qualify as one of the most successful executives ever to do the boardroom walk.

Funnily enough, when I went along to interview him earlier this month his decision hadnt been announced, but it quickly became apparent that East was in a generous and reflective frame of mind.Cheap logo engraved luggagetag at wholesale bulk prices. Indeed, the first question I asked was what has been his proudest achievement at ARM has been.

I suppose weve matured into a pretty sizeable business, he replied. We were a very successful start-up, however we were only a start-up, because we could only do one processor at a time. So to answer your question its the maturity and sustainability of the business.

Mr East C Ill try and get my head round calling him Warren in a minute C describes his background as half Welsh, half Australian, I was born in Aberdeen and grew up in Wales, so a bit of a mongrel really. He studied engineering at Oxford. From there he went to Texas Instruments (TI) in Bedford and moved over to ARM in 1994 when it was still Advanced RISC Machines (it became ARM Holdings in 1998). I started off running business operations in 1998 when we went public and started doing this job in 2001.

Ive no idea whether ARMs business model guaranteed its success in the last 15 years, but it seems to me that as well as having evolved a game-changing blueprint for chip designs, Lady Luck has not just smiled at the Fulbourn-based firm, shes actually handed over the keys to her inheritance. So how big a part does luck play in business?

Any business that tells you its all hard work and no luck is completely lying to you, is the reply. You do need some luck, and I always preach to the guys working here about making your own luck. In snakes and ladders luck is a good thing but its not something you can build a sustainable business on. Chess on the other hand is a game where you make your own luck, by taking advantage of your position and using it to build for the future. Were playing chess not snakes and ladders.

But of course there are no animal spirits in chess and the whims that the markets are in thrall to are difficult to insure against. Apples last-quarter 2012 results C record turnover at $54.5bn and record profits at $13.1bn C were greeted with a thrashing by the markets that wiped $50bn off its share value. How can you deal with such unpredictability? You cant really, he answers. Its really about managing expectations: if you say the train is due at 10 past 10 but it arrives at 10.20, its late, but if you say itll arrive at 10.30 everybodys happy but really its about being open and transparent with the market about the way people can estimate our business. Since April 1998 to 2013 C 60 quarters C we did a profit warning once. You cant get it right every time.

ARM is currently involved in some great projects, including graphics chips brand Mali and the Internet of Things, plus all sorts of others I guess Warren cant talk in detail about but which probably include Windows 8 and Googles glasses.

The Mali brand was the product of a link that started in 2005 with Kings Langley-based Imagination, which has the same business model as ARM but with a graphics processor, but in 2005 we werent sure that graphics processors would catch on. We thought then the sensible approach was to form a partnership C Imagination came from a dying graphics card company just like we came from a dying computer company (Acorn), so we were quite similar, but in 2006 we decided to go our own way. So Lever has Persil, we have Mali, and its odd in some ways that the two leading firms in this area are both from the UK and its a great achievement.We have a wide selection of handsfreeaccess to choose from for your storage needs. Clearly Imagination are ahead of us because we gave them a great start.

The fact that the graphics processor has no backstory C large-screen TVs are a new phenomenon C is an opportunity not a handicap to ARM. ARM is nothing if not a fast learner: 50 million Mali chips were sold in 2011 via 75 separate licenses to 54 companies, with sales of 240 million predicted for this year. Warren is wary about sounding over-enthusiastic but Mali chips are in more than 50% of all Android tablets, more than 20% of all Android smartphones and more than 70% of graphics-enabled digital TVs. Its particularly interesting because theres nowhere for a graphics processor to hide in a 50-inch TV, he adds, and I figure being a master of low-key insights is an entirely sensible strategy for a company which provides the chips for three-quarters of the worlds nine billion devices connected to the internet.He saw the bracelet at a realtimelocationsystem store while we were on a trip. I mean,Here's a complete list of glassbottles for the beginning oil painter. the next step is world domination, which is impolite.

The Internet of Things Mr East describes as putting intelligence into everyday objects and allowing them to talk to each other. ARM recently joined the Weightless Special Interest Group which is opening up more radio channels to allow the Internet of Things to involve more, um, things to be connected, via a lightweight protocol of just a few bytes. The example he gives is Cambridge-based Enecsys solar panels: the panels he has had installed on the roof of his Norfolk home have enough intelligence to check online to see if theyre all working optimally. If Im a solar farm thats jolly handy. ARM is building the low-power technology to make the Internet of Things work, and its efficacy has already been proven in projects from street lighting to washing machine gadgetry. Were doing it because without communications the Internet of Things isnt real, Warren says, adding that ARMs contribution is to develop a universal software platform. Our engineering teams can re-use the software from one place to another.