Sales and marketing
As we mentioned earlier, the reshuffle is designed to rationalise and strengthen the ‘platform' message. This message appears to be that there is an intrinsic advantage to be achieved if the CPU, chipset and graphics are all produced by the same company.
The challenge AMD faces with this message is demonstrating that advantage. That responsibility will fall as much to Nigel Dessau, who heads up the marketing group and Emilio Ghilardi, who heads up the customer (i.e. sales) group.
Ghilardi is pictured below (right) at the launch of the Shanghai CPU last year with Leslie Sobon, VP of product and platform marketing at AMD (centre) and Damian Schmidt, CEO of giant datacentre STRATO (left). You can see his exclusive interview with HEXUS at the event here.
While AMD will continue to try to drive consumer demand, it has to sell the platform concept to OEMs. This is where Ghilardi, coincidentally or otherwise snatched from the world's biggest OEM - HP - last year, comes in. He continues his meteoric rise, having been initially appointed to head-up EMEA.
The last new group created by AMD is the ‘advanced technology group'. This is run by another relatively new signing: Chekib Akrout, who was most recently at Freescale but has spent most of his career at IBM. This further emphasises how dependent AMD and its principal manufacturer GlobalFoundries are on the IBM alliance for R&D.
