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AMD taps gamer and ex-Nvidia exec to run its channel

Interim CFO given job full time

Chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices continues to rejigger its executive team to reflect changes it is making in its business to attack new markets and get its channel partners peddling current and future products.

On Monday, the company said in a statement that it had tapped Roy Taylor to head up its global channel sales.

Taylor comes to AMD from Rightware, a Finnish software startup that peddles a user interface programming tool called Kanzi, where he was chief sales officer. Taylor studied at Maidstone College in England with a variety of study areas including finance, computing, ethics, and law. In 1994, he was one of the founders as well as the managing director at Addtron Group to help semiconductor companies in the United States and Asia break into the European market.

One of the companies Taylor helped was Nvidia, and in February 2000 he took over running that GPU chip maker's European operations. Over the next decade, Taylor held various positions at Nvidia and was put in charge of GPU sales, PC gaming alliances, and relationships with telecommunications suppliers.

"Roy is well known in the IT industry for his energy, his ability to identify new opportunities and his focus on delivering results," said John Byrne, who is Taylor's new boss in his role of chief sales officer at AMD. "I am extremely excited to have him join our team to take our channel business to the next level. Roy's enthusiasm and passion for technology evangelization will help strengthen our channel business as we bring new low-power APUs and discrete GPUs to market in 2013 that provide outstanding value, unmatched graphics capabilities and immersive user experiences."

Byrne, who came to AMD in 2007, was in charge of AMD's sales channel a few years back and ran AMD's Fusion partner program ahead of and during the launch of the hybrid CPU-GPU products that bear that brand name. And like Taylor, Byrne has experience in building local channels in Europe, having been CEO at Advanced Technologies, which helped set up European channels for graphics chip-maker ATI before it was acquired by AMD, among other companies.

Separately, as the new year was kicking off last week, AMD announced that it had tapped Devinder Kumar to be its chief financial officer. Kumar was named interim CFO in September when Thomas Seifert, who was hired as CFO from the outside in 2009 and was interim CEO for a spell, was shown the executive door. Kumar has been at AMD for 28 years and was most recently corporate controller working for Seifert, a post he took over in 2001. ®

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