Gain The Ecosystem Advantage With AMD: A Partner Strategy Designed For Customers And The Road Ahead

The pace of change in the technology industry has never been faster, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the data center. AI workloads, cloud-scale demands, and evolving customer needs are reshaping the landscape almost daily. In this environment, how a company engages its partners and customers matters just as much as the product it builds.

CRNtv's Jon Alba sat down with Matt Unangst, senior director of enterprise solutions at AMD, to talk about how AMD is strengthening its partner and customer relationships, the critical role the channel plays in AMD's go-to-market strategy, and what's on the horizon as the company builds momentum in an era defined by AI and rapid innovation.

Jon Alba: The industry continues to see an incredibly rapid pace of change and innovation. How is AMD addressing that?

Matt Unangst: The rate of change and pace of new technology adoption right now is probably at the highest level we've ever seen. It's critical that all of us within the channel ecosystem are ready to respond to those needs from our customers and our partners. From an AMD perspective, we're approaching that through three key areas of focus.

The first is that we're getting closer to our customers than we've ever been in the past — understanding their needs, the workloads they're trying to deploy, and the challenges they're facing in this world of rapidly expanding AI utilization and the need to modernize their data centers.

The second piece is building out what I'll call an ecosystem of solutions. AMD has been very focused on making the transition from selling silicon to selling solutions, which means building out partnerships with ISVs and application partners focused on the most common and most needed applications, use cases and workloads across different industries and verticals.

And the third piece, which is critically important, is delivering a full portfolio of solutions for both compute and AI. AMD is uniquely positioned today with a full complement of solutions across laptops, desktops, workstations, as well as data center solutions both in the cloud and on-prem that meet the needs of our customers.

Jon: You mentioned how AMD is focusing on industry verticals. How can the channel play a role in supporting those motions?

Matt: The need to focus on solutions by industry or vertical is more important than ever. There are a lot of commonalities in the market right now. Customers across all industries need to modernize their data centers, and they're all facing challenges around budget, both in terms of dollars and in terms of power budget and space to deploy solutions. But we also see, more than ever, a need for customers to have solutions tailored to their industry and their space.

Whether you're talking about retail, manufacturing or customers designing automotive or aerospace products, they have unique and specific needs. And that's not even getting into what's coming with the rapid expansion of agentic flows.

The real opportunity is for AMD and our channel partners to work together to be that trusted advisor for our customers, helping them navigate what is a fast-paced and, in some ways, complicated environment. That's where the opportunity is within the channel.

Jon: AMD takes a lot of pride in the partnerships it fosters. How are those playing a role in advancing AI solutions?

Matt: Partnerships are the foundational piece for everything we're doing at AMD. At the core of that, AMD is a firm believer and backer of open-source solutions. We believe open source, along with the partner ecosystem we build out, is critical for delivering the best innovation while also giving our customers choice. As we think about partnerships on the AI front, there are three critical pieces where AMD has focused on building those out.

The first is hardware deployment, having the right platforms available. With our latest generation EPYC processors, AMD has the broadest and most advanced portfolio of solutions we've ever had, and we've continued to expand our offerings from a cloud perspective as well. Building on that, AMD has focused on expanding partnerships within the software ecosystem.

When you think about AI solutions, you need the hardware, then what we call the orchestration layer, and then the ISVs. At that orchestration layer, AMD has put a strong emphasis on building partnerships with companies like Nutanix, Red Hat, Broadcom with VMware, SUSE and Canonical, to deliver an orchestration layer for enterprise AI solutions that's open source and gives our customers choice.

The critical last piece is the ISV ecosystem. Our customers are buying an outcome, and that outcome is often arrived at by deploying an application for the use case they're targeting. AMD has put a lot of focus recently on building out our relationships with ISVs, and this ties back to the vertical orientation. Many of these ISVs are targeted at different markets and industries, and we've been very intentional about building those relationships out. At the hardware layer, the orchestration layer, and the ISV and end-customer layer, we're building partnerships holistically across the entire solution set.

Jon: What are you most looking forward to over the next six to twelve months?

Matt: Anybody who can predict exactly what the world of compute and AI is going to look like on that time horizon probably isn't being completely honest. But that's part of what makes the current environment so exciting.

As I talk to customers and engage with our partners, the one thing I see right now is that AI deployment is just starting to deliver dividends to customers. They're really just now getting their heads wrapped around how to deploy these solutions in a way that improves productivity, improves decision-making and delivers value to the organization. We're at the very beginning stages of this rollout, and what's exciting about that is the opportunity to work with our customers to optimize those solutions and optimize the tokens per dollar they can get out of their compute. And all of this is predicated on organizations being able to modernize their data center, free up space and make sure their general compute and IT foundation is solid.

Whether on the AI side, which is moving at an incredibly rapid rate, or the classic IT side of things, there's a lot of opportunity for us over the next year.

To learn more about AMD Enterprise Solutions, click here.