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AMD, ever looking to gain an advantage over bitter rival Intel, has decided to simplify the way in which it will deal with its entire fleet of partners.
In a wide-ranging new initiative, known as the Fusion Partner Programme, all of AMD’s partners will be pigeonholed into one of three tiers.
The idea is that – as terms and conditions can vary wildly between just a handful of AMD partners – if there’s just three different types of partnerships that a company can subscribe to, business will be more straightforward and able to progress quickly.
Of all AMD’s global partners, only around 60 will be allowed to become Elite Partners.
On the other end of the spectrum, thousands of companies will be AMD Global Partners.
Between the two is AMD Premier Partners, which the chipmaker foresees will serve hundreds of businesses.
Each tier comes with its own range of benefits. Elite Partners will, for example, be the only of the three groups that will be part of the AMD Partner Advisory Council.
AMD was of course quick to state that its Global Partners will benefit from this system as well.
“Most of our sales come from our smaller channel partners that are closer to the end users,” said David Kenyon, VP worldwide channel marketing.
“We were not spending enough time with our smaller partners and we wanted to make some investment further down the channel. We found we were spending a lot of time, money and effort on the distribution tier, but we wanted to make sure that focus was evenly split,” he added.
“The aim was to combine multiple programmes into one consistent programme that still had some flexibility regionally. It has been completely rebuilt from the ground up to allow our partners to get traction in the market.”
