AMD Appoints Thomas Seifert CFO - Update

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD: NEWS) on Thursday announced the appointment of Thomas Seifert as senior vice president and chief financial officer. Seifert succeeds Robert Rivet, who was previously promoted to chief operations and administrative officer. Seifert will report to Dirk Meyer, AMD's president and chief executive officer, and would be responsible for leading the company's financial operations.

In a statement, Meyer said, "Thomas is a talented industry veteran with a wealth of knowledge and experience managing the operations and finances of companies in the most difficult and competitive sectors of the semiconductor industry. This knowledge and experience will enable him to further strengthen AMD's financial foundation and help accelerate our transformation into a product design and marketing leader."

IBM Preparing Self-Service Software Infrastructure

IBM has been investing in cloud computing for several years, although Willy Chiu, VP of IBM Cloud Labs, acknowledges it may be difficult for those outside IBM to develop a picture of what its cloud initiative will finally look like.
That's because so far IBM has chosen to make point announcements of limited cloud products. Its CloudBurst appliance was announced in June, a blade server that can be loaded with IBM software and used as cloud building block.
At Structure 09, the June 25 cloud computing conference sponsored by GigaOm in San Francisco, Chiu said: "Cloud computing is a new way of consuming IT." That's a radical view, a step ahead of the evolutionary view that the cloud will start out as an IT supplement. That is, it will absorb specific workloads, such as business intelligence or a new consumer facing application. In the long run, Chiu said, it will host many IT activities and services.

In a recent interview, Chiu elaborated. IBM systems management software, Tivoli, has been given a set of services to administer the cloud. They include: Services Automation Manager, Provisioning Manager and Monitoriong Manager. So far these services are designed to provision and manage workloads running in VMware virtual machines, but there is no restriction that limits Tivoli to VMware file formats

AMD’s channel programme now called Fusion too

It's now clear how serious AMD was when it changed its slogan from "Smarter choice" to "The future is fusion". With Fusion already the company mantra, as well as the name given to AMD's plan to combine the CPU and GPU on one chip and several types of software, AMD has decided it pretty much sums up its channel programme too.

The new partner programme was presented by worldwide channel marketing VP David Kenyon in a teleconference chaired by AMD's effusive EMEA corporate PR manager Chris Brown. Kenyon started by explaining the background for the new programme: "We did a very detailed analysis of the performance of our current component channel," he said.
The long and short of it is that AMD realised the vast majority of its channel sales go through the little guy, and yet it was devoting relatively little of its time and resources to smaller channel partners. "We weren't spending enough time with our smaller channel partners," confessed Kenyon.