Getting the message
Marketing is a dark art. Ultimately it’s about optimising the perception of your product by those people you would like to sell it to.
One of the big advantages Intel has over AMD is in marketing spend. There are areas in which Intel’s products are superior to AMD’s and the vice-versa, but, on the whole, Intel tends to get its message over more emphatically than AMD.
This appears to be one of the reasons behind the launch of AMD Business Class (ABC – our acronym, not theirs), an initiative designed to make it easier for AMD and its partners to deliver the benefits of AMD-based business-focused desktop platforms.
We spoke to Sherwin Aziz who, as one of the lead product marketing managers for AMD’s channel operation, has taken ABC on as a speciality. We started by asking him why Business Class was created.
‘Around three years ago we launched our commercial stable image platform (CSIP) in response to demand from the channel for greater image stability and platform longevity’ said Aziz. ‘Intel already had its Stable Image Platform, but back then we didn’t produce our own chipset. So we worked with motherboard and chipset partners to enable an image-stable infrastructure’.
‘Business Class sits on top of AVS and also gives us a marketable brand to put money behind and assist in end-customer market generation.’‘We subsequently created AMD Validated Solutions (AVS),’ said Aziz, describing the evolution of CSIP that provided validated and tested platforms for commercial system builds. ‘Business Class sits on top of AVS and also gives us a marketable brand to put money behind and assist in end-customer market generation.’
ABC was launched last Monday and, as we reported at the time, is designed to optimise energy, stability and manageability requirements associated with desktop clients.