Today, August 19, 2002, is a date that will surely go down in AMD history as the date that the company commenced an all-out assault on the lucrative IT market. As has been said many times before, in order for AMD to move forward, they needed to gain a foothold in the corporate IT arena. Our own Omid Rahmat talked about this issue in his recent Second Hand Smoke columns, Second Hand Smoke - Stop Smothering AMD! & Second Hand Smoke - RE: Stop Smothering AMD - Part II .

IT managers have historically given their AMD-enthusiast employees excuses when said employees suggested that the department consider changing to AMD systems in their enterprise. Much of the reason for the lagging adoption of AMD products in corporate environments is due to the lack of a major IT system vendor offering a corporate IT-configured PC that contains an AMD processor. This is not to dismiss specific industries and companies that do use AMD products in corporate America, but the fact remains that, at this time, the majority of corporate PCs still carry an Intel processor.

This fact has not been lost on AMD, and, as AMD likes to quote, "You can't sell the concept until you can get past the OEM name plate on the front of the computer." Many companies' IT Departments are entrenched in deals where they can only purchase from a branded tier one OEM, such as Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway, or IBM. Although most people understand that the OEM name is simply a name plate, the well-known and establisheded name brand lends significant influence and credibility to the IT budget decision maker.

To many corporate minds, the name brand on the front of the computer is consistent with the level of service and support associated with that name brand. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. Often times, name branding contributes to a "smoke and mirrors effect" when the decision maker authorizes the purchase order for the IT purchase. The corporate IT market is so critical to the revenue stream that most manufacturers have sales teams and project managers assigned to manage the accounts of these important customers from an enterprise computing standpoint. Even more crucial is the fact that many of these large companies replace their products frequently, thousands of computer systems at a time. Thus, the business relationship established with large corporate customers who purchase and replace systems by the thousands is the crème de la crème for OEMs.