Watch this space…
Any regular reader of HEXUS.channel will know that AMD has had, let’s say, a challenging time of it over the past couple of years and that at the root of a lot of it has been its channel relationships.
There’s no need to go over it all again as we’ve already covered it comprehensively in the above link, other than to say that the repair job on the channel is on-going and was one of the principal reasons for AMD hosting its first ever Channel Summit at its Fab 36 in Dresden Germany.
The channel media-only event was designed primarily to re-emphasise AMD’s commitment to the channel. Secondary aims appeared to be to explain how it is trying to “evolve” the way AMD products are presented, marketed and sold and to correct any assumption that AMD is struggling and down-trodden.
We will be bringing you a series of stories based around the presentations and interviews attended by HEXUS.channel, but this first piece is intended to serve as an introduction and overview of what was discussed.
Communication
AMD has a communication challenge. It has a good story to tell at product level, but it’s not a straightforward one. It basically wants you, the channel, to not think of AMD as a component supplier, but as a solution provider. In other words it wants to focus attention away from Hertz and Bytes and on to usage models and the complete systems that service them.
Of course, any moderately sceptical person tends to reply “well, you would say that with Intel tending to hold the CPU performance leadership and Nvidia tending to do the same with GPUs,” and that’s a fair argument.
AMD’s response to that is that it is targeting the middle market, for whom bang-per-buck is more important than outright performance and it intends to demonstrate leadership in this area.
Alberto Macchi, who heads up AMD in Europe, presented an overview of AMD’s plans for the EMEA channel. The slide below shows its current overall priorities.
