By Tony Fernandez-Stoll, vice president of Americas Regional Marketing at AMD.

As summer comes to an end – everywhere except here in Texas, that is – so does the award season and all of its glamour. Before we bid a final farewell, I’d like to take a minute or two to send special congratulations to a few hardworking channel partners who took home some hardware late last month at AMD’s inaugural North America Executive Commercial Channel Summit.

I can honestly say that the community of channel partners surrounding AMD is second to none, yet a select few stood out this year by working closely with AMD and sharing in mutual success.  While I wish we could acknowledge all of our incredible channel partners, a special thank you goes out to the following award winners:

• VAR of the Year: Compucom
• DMR of the Year: PC Connection
• Distributor of the Year: Synnex

Events like the Summit that we recently held in Napa Valley are a great reminder of the importance of meeting face to face and getting honest feedback about what AMD is doing right, what we can do better, and how we can be the best vendor possible. Not only do we get to celebrate a great year, but we get invaluable insight into how we can improve for next year.

The feedback I received at the Summit was extremely encouraging. Most channel partners I spoke with noted the effort we put into activating the global AMD Fusion Partner Program to include all levels and types of channel partners, and how we expanded commercial resources, increased OEM alignment, and increased co-marketing funding.

AMD has grown our field sales organization by increasing our enterprise sales team, as well as adding DMR, VAR, Distribution, and Midmarket field coverage.  We’ve also formalized our programs from a regional VAR-only program to the AMD Fusion Partner Program, which opens up a number of resources to the commercial channel (sales enablement, product/sales training, marketing campaigns, etc.).

At AMD, we work hard to be a strong industry partner to our channel community, and we pride ourselves on delivering superior products, services and marketing resources to help our channel partners differentiate themselves in the increasingly competitive marketplace.

Combine these new resources with the AMD Fusion Family of APUs, and our channel partners have all of the makings for a great year with AMD. Keep a lookout for even more updates to our commercial channel partner program. Congratulations again to Compucom, PC Connection and Synnex for their hard work, and I look forward to handing out even more hardware next year!

Tony Fernandez-Stoll is the vice president, Americas Regional Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.