Industry Voices: AMD's Henri Richard Puts Priority On Servers
March 10, 2006 3:00 PM ET
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CRN: What is your top priority vis a vis the system builder portion of your channel for 2006?  RICHARD: This is really completely in line with the strategic priorities for AMD as a whole: first and foremost, to expand our success in the server space to commercial clients. I believe that the system builder community has a large role to play in that regard. They serve a lot of the government/education opportunity, either at the regional or the federal level sometimes. They, of course, also cater a lot to the SMB and in some cases even to the Fortune 500, which will customize certain things. So the system builder channel is going to be very important in supporting that initiative that we’ve stated, which is: In 2006, for AMD, this is the year of the commercial client.In fact, we’re launching a new initiative called CSIP, which is the Commercial Stable Image Platform, which is new to the AMD environment and I think will be very interesting to the system builder community. CRN: Can you go into that a little bit? What’s important about it? RICHARD: Well, maybe I should finish by going through our three priorities and then get into the specifics. The second priority for us is the high-growth markets. We are enjoying phenomenal growth in those markets around the world. One of their characteristics is that in many of these markets, the established tier-one players in our industry are not the dominant players in many of those countries. Those countries are really developing themselves, thriving on very solid local players, local system builders. So that’s the second aspect of AMD’s priorities that is particularly focused on the channel and the system builder community. Our third priority is really to ensure that in the consumer space, where system builders also have a very important role, particularly at the very high end in the gaming and prosumer area, we continue to provide leadership technology and differentiated solutions to the system builder community. So, even though our main focus is the commercial push in 2006, we’re not forgetting our very solid and, I would say, perennial position in the consumer space. We want to continue to support the channel in consumer solutions, but with an eye on differentiation and offering an ability for them to bring some value add to the market in what I consider to be an ocean of lack of differentiation, due to either the Centrino marketing campaign or the Viiv marketing campaign. CRN: If we could start with the commercial objective: What is it that you feel AMD really needs to do this year and moving forward to really drive into that corporate channel? Why is that such an important channel for you? RICHARD: It’s an important strategy because, first, it’s a vast market. There’s only so much we can go and grab in the consumer space. We have, you’ve seen probably in 2005, achieved some interesting milestones in terms of market share. We found ourselves in a situation where we were shipping more than 50 percent of the consumer PCs sold in retail. Although there’s always room to grow, we have to be responsible and understand that this is a market where there are certain natural limitations to how much market share we can grab. When you look at the commercial space, we have a huge opportunity for growth, and I think that the value proposition that customers are seeing on the consumer side are equally valid for the commercial side. It’s well known that we bring more value to the market, and the opportunity of choice and differentiation, as well as—because of our open ecosystem strategy—a better solution all around. It’s not just the processor. It’s the processor, it’s the chipset, it’s the configurations. By bringing more value to the customer, I think we can have an equal opportunity to grow in the commercial space as we did in the consumer space. Our limitation in the commercial space has been the fact that we did not offer one-stop shopping like the competition does when it comes to the total platform, meaning the motherboard, chipset and the processor. So, partnering with companies like Nvidia and ATI and people in Taiwan such as Asus and MSI and Gigabyte and others, we decided to put together a commercially stable platform that would bring exactly the same attributes that the competition could offer with still the variety and freedom of choice that the AMD open ecosystem offers. That’s the CSIP initiative, and it’s being launched right now as we speak. It will bring a lot of value to the system builder community because, frankly, today, they’re all feeling the pain of Dell. And it’s very difficult, as everyone knows, to compete against Dell with an Intel offering. So, by bringing to the system builder community an equal or better quality platform, with more variety and more opportunity for differentiation on the AMD ecosystem, we’re going to give them an opportunity to sell what Dell can’t sell. |
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