Archive for the category Neil Kelly

First of all, I’d like to take a moment to thank Margaret Lewis for letting me use her blog as an outlet to flex my blogging muscles. I am just back from the Parallels Summit in Las Vegas and to say it was a great show would be an understatement. While a lot of conferences are experiencing reduced attendance this year, the Parallels conference actually doubled attendance over last year.

Parallels, a worldwide leader in automation and virtualization software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and service providers, and a valued AMD technology partner, each year hosts this Summit to discuss the virtualization trends affecting tech companies and how they will impact businesses over the coming year.

I think it’s always fun to hear from people who are using our products - and for me, the Parallels Summit was a great opportunity to speak directly with customers. A highlight was meeting Jörg Lennhof, Senior Produkmanager at 1&1 Internet AG, who has deployed tens of thousands of AMD Opteron™ processor-based servers!  It was interesting to learn that they’re still using older AMD Opteron processor-based systems side by side with the new by offering value services on legacy systems for student customers.

I had a chance to talk to a number of attendees about our recent release last week of the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE processors, our new 55-watt ACP part, and I could just tell these guys get it. They realize that some customers don’t need or want our fastest and hottest (and most expensive) processors when their average load may average 50-60% -they need an efficient processor that consumes less power and is reliable.  The bottom line - AMD works for them because we drive innovation that solves their business problem.

AMD not only works for attendees of Parallels Summit, it works for Parallels itself. I had a chance to meet with Nick Dobrovolskiy, VP of product development at Parallels, to talk about their new bare metal server hypervisor, named Parallels Server, and to see a demo of their soon to be released Workstation update.  He told me that server development continues to go well and he and his team are having a great experience with AMD Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology.  At AMD, we’re looking forward to the release of the Parallels Server; we expect it to be a great tool and a great fit for AMD processor-based servers.

While the show was a bit of a whirlwind, I came home feeling proud to work for AMD. It’s kinda cool to know we’ve made the right product and technology decisions to help our customers and our industry partners weather these tough economic times.

Neil Kelly is the Director of Developer Relations at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.