Advanced Micro Devices Inc. or AMD has been steadily growing its datacenter business for the past two years, and the year 2019 saw even bigger progress on this front, with EPYC processors and a slew of new announcements. The American tech major is bullish on India’s digital ecosystem and is looking to increase its market share in the datacenter space. In an interview with CXOToday, Vinay Sinha, MD, Sales, AMD India, throws light on how datacenters are addressing the needs of modern enterprises in the digital age and AMD’s ambitious datacenter growth plans for the Indian market.
CXOToday: The year 2019 saw a slew of launches and initiatives from AMD to bolster its datacenter business. Could you throw some light on this?
Vinay Sinha: Businesses across sectors are focused on improving customer experiences as they innovate and scale in this age of digital transformation. In line with this, at AMD, we believe that setting up a comprehensively agile and reliable data center ecosystem will significantly empower dynamic businesses to make smarter decisions.
For AMD, 2019 was a big year in terms of growth and opportunity and we are confident of riding on this momentum. We have a huge growth opportunity in the data center market with our AMD EPYC processors. With our launch of 2nd Generation AMD EPYC processors in August, we are bringing revolutionary capabilities to server performances, thereby setting higher standards for the datacenter market. This is the world’s first high performance x86 7 nanometer led server CPU with up 64 Zen 2 cores. AMD is bringing a new wave of exciting innovations in the datacenter space, combined with better power efficiency, optimization, scalability and security, without compromising on the total cost of ownership (TCO).
The 2nd Gen EPYC processor has already achieved over 140 performance world records with the capability to address a number of modern datacenter challenges through big data, virtualized environments and HPC workloads. With performance similar to competing dual-socket platforms in a single-socket, EPYC delivers on three strong pillars of energy efficiency, workload balance and security.
CXOToday: What according to you are the datacenter growth and market opportunities in India?
Vinay Sinha: India is a key datacenter market for AMD owing to the rapid increase in adoption of emerging digital technologies by not only technology focused companies but also traditional legacy companies. A close second after China, India is poised to become the second in APAC. Nasscom predicts, growing adoption of Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is pushing the cloud spending to 7.2 bn by 2022. With global and new local cloud service providers growing their presence in India, AMD EPYC based server platforms are positioned to help them deliver higher workload performance with power efficiency and density optimization.
The growth of the datacenter market has also led to opportunities across industries such as conventional defense, meteorological studies, manufacturing, BFSI, research and development efforts, etc. As India gets ready for 5G network, we believe that the Telecom sector will be one of the key sectors that will adopt high-performance server CPUs over the next 2-3 years. They will have to put in place the data processing infrastructure that will allow faster delivery of internet, content and seamlessly roll out a host of next gen 5G applications. In order to refresh their datacenters, enterprises are looking at a software-defined infrastructure to help them drive down operational costs and differentiate their products and services. AMD is tapping this opportunity by working with ecosystem partners to highlight the value proposition of EPYC server processors for the “New Datacenters”.
CXOToday: What are some of the datacenter related challenges faced by CIOs today?
Vinay Sinha: With heavy workloads on multiple applications led by a deluge of data, CIOs are seeking innovations that reimagine datacenters and offer higher performance alongside improved efficiency. In line with this, IT leaders have to meet business challenges by matching the right infrastructure to the right workloads.
Higher compute requirements, security and increased complexity of software within the environment, performance and flexibility are some of the key challenges faced by CIOs today. In addition to this, cost continues to be a challenging factor for enterprises, especially traditional organizations who are in the process of digital transformation. “Doing more with less” is becoming the norm as IT becomes critical with digitization. At AMD, we work closely with the CIOs to address these challenges in a collaborative and sustained way to drive development without compromising on resilience.
Having said that, we also believe that Indian CIOs are far ahead of the curve in addressing these challenges as India is among the core IT and innovation hubs in the world. This puts CIOs and key decision makers in a unique position to have visibility on the latest industry trends and act upon them.
Likewise, over the last decade, we have seen that the datacenter market has gone through significant transformations. We believe that this is largely driven by three factors – Data Deluge, AI/MI led applications and Edge Computing. While performance continues to be a concern with growing volumes of data, applications and technologies, IT leaders are seeking newer ways to overcome these barriers through collaborated approaches within the IT ecosystem. In addition to this, CIOs today realize that traditional security is no longer enough as data is rapidly moving outside the enterprises’ cloud and datacenter.
CXOToday: What are some of the key priorities for a robust IT infrastructure – security, scalability and cost savings?
Vinay Sinha: Businesses today are extremely dynamic and IT infrastructures must be flexible and extremely agile to meet the changing demands of traditional and modern workloads. With the growing demands, organizations must ensure its hardware, software, network resources and services are in place and work in tandem. It is essential to collectively empower an agile and robust IT ecosystem and also fuel high performance computing capabilities. A strong IT ecosystem is further powered by a modern and strong security solution which is hardened at the core that helps an organization guard their most important assets and data while helping CIOs reduce their TCO.
CXOToday: How is AMD bringing HPC for the datacenter in India?
Vinay Sinha: With our mission to deliver choice and innovation for the modern datacenter across high performance computing, enterprises and the cloud, we made a strong return to the datacenter market in 2017. Changing demands in workloads in the backdrop of rapidly evolving technologies, led AMD to launch the 2nd Generation EPYC processor, based on industry leading 7 nanometer process technology. We have combined leadership performance, architecture, and security features to enable IT leaders solve complex challenges facing the datacenter.
AMD’s EPYC processors are engineered to address the modern datacenter challenges through big data, virtualized environments and HPC workloads. With this, we are not only bringing new levels of server performance along with industry-leading efficiency to help reduce datacenter carbon footprint and performance leadership at every price point, but also reduced total cost of ownership that bring better return of investments to our customers.
CXOToday: What is AMD’s 2020 strategy and way forward to increase overall market share in the datacenter space with EPYC in India?
Vinay Sinha: With datacenter being a key focus for AMD and India being a significant market to elevate growth, EPYC is a key growth driver for revenue in the region. With critical wins with top cloud providers and OEMs, AMD will continue to focus on bringing EPYC to very large to SMBs as modern datacenters become more prominent in our region. Our channel partners, major OEMs and SIs will play an important role in our go-to-market plans as we continue to grow our market share. With our roadmap and continued execution, we have an opportunity to seize unquestioned leadership in data center computing.
