AMD Ryzen Pro Boss Talks ‘Phenomenal’ Lenovo Partnership, H-Series Expansion

Intel announced that it’s expanding its vPro platform to cover small- to medium-sized businesses with some but not all of the vPro features that enterprise customers have access to, which will include some basic PC management. I’m curious what your take on that is, because I know that for AMD, Ryzen Pro is made for more of the enterprise side of customers and for SMBs, you mostly point to the regular Ryzen processors. Is that still the right approach for AMD? And do you think that Intel is going the right direction with providing more features to SMB-type customers?

What I’ll say first and foremost is with our Ryzen Pro solution, I think at that enterprise level, I am extremely confident that we have a very compelling offering there as we think about our security, manageability and the pieces that come with our Pro products around stability and reliability. So very, very confident in the capabilities of that enterprise solution.

We continuously have discussions with our partners, and in the SMB space, we talk about what is the right set of solutions to play into that market. I think SMB customers, they do care about things like security. And we’re working with our partners to ensure that when those customers on those platforms want the right security solutions, that we’re finding a way to deliver that. In terms of whether or not we want to proliferate the branding and the different variants, we will always evaluate what’s the right thing to do there. But as I look at our business right now, I look at the growth trajectory we’re on. I think, with our Ryzen Pro products, we have the products and the solutions needed for the enterprise and for the SMB customers that we’re working with. And as things change, we’ll always reevaluate.

Are there any new things that AMD is doing from a business perspective to encourage more adoption of Ryzen Pro systems, whether that’s new sales and marketing initiatives, things like that?

What I’d start with saying is demand for our products right now is extremely strong. We continue to see strong growth in the demand for our Ryzen and Ryzen Pro products in the commercial space. And as we see that demand grow, we continue to make investments on the product side to ensure that we’re continuing to deliver leadership product. I think that more than anything drives the desire and the demand for the product.

But tied to that, we continue to make incremental investments in key sales and go-to-market areas as well. And I think the thing that’s more important than anything is that we’re not doing that on our own on an island. We’re driving these discussions and these engagements in partnership with the OEMs. And so ThinkPad Z is a perfect example of that. We have just this phenomenal platform we brought to market, and now we’re working very closely with them to make sure that there’s a strong pipeline for demand and interest in that product. That may be the most visible opportunity, but certainly as we think about our other partners, with HP and others, we’re embracing that model as well.