AMD gets closer to SIs with Connect program

Archana Swamy

Mumbai

July10, 2008

System integrators (SI) said that they expect a more proactive approach from
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) India. And the vendor decided to lend ears to the
constant complaint. In a move to get better buy in with SIs, AMD India launched
the Connect channel outreach program last quarter.

Sandip Naik, Head-Sales, AMD India said, “Initially there was no direct
interaction with a large section of the SI community that use AMD products,
because we were in touch with only the big partners. We realized the need to
have more feet on the ground using these partners and that is why we launched
Connect program where we give training and certification to partners in smaller
cities. Besides this we have created an interactive portal which gives
information on the latest schemes and product launches to all our channel
partners.”

In the past AMD has been criticized by the channel fraternity for not being
very communicative with them. Given the fact that the company has seen a major
management upheaval recently and is facing stiff competition from Intel, it had
to ensure that it took a more bottoms-up approach with reference to its partner
initiatives.

This realization hit home when AMD India started the groundwork for the
Connect program and learnt that it was missing out on a huge chunk of partners
who were selling its products but were not part of its official network. Naik
said, “The data collected from our survey showed major involvement of SIs in
reaching to the end-customers. It also showed there are around 3,000 partners
who were selling our products but out of these we were in touch with only 1,000.
There we felt the need to close this gap so that all of these partners were
fully aware of our products and its uniqueness when they talk to the
end-customers.”

Since the launch of Connect three months ago, AMD has been educating and
certifying SIs in 36 cities. Naik mentioned that these workshops are interactive
sessions where partners are encouraged to ask questions about the company and
its products and plans. At the end of it, they are given a certificate.
"Even a certificate stating that he has attended an AMD workshop boosts the
partner's morale," added Naik. Shortly, AMD will have specialized workshops
based on partner profiling depending on the technologies offered by a certain
section of the channel. This year, Naik has set a mandate of expanding AMD's
channel network to 5,000 partners and is banking heavily on the Connect program
to make this happen.

AMD was earlier working with its three distributors - Rashi Peripherals,
Ingram Micro and Avnet Max - in India to reach out to the customers. It has now
moved to a more regional approach and is working closely with its regional
distributors to come up with localized programs in each of these regions.

AMD recently demonstrated the ability of its ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI
Radeon HD 4870 graphic cards to achieve ultra-realism and interactive visual
computing in graphic applications through the processing power of its teraFLOPS
(trillion floating point operations per second). Besides this, it has been
making sure that enough noise is created about the tri-core Phenom processor.

The company has also signed up Grand Master Vishwanath Anand as brand
ambassador and has rolled out the 'Ask Vishy' promotions.