nVidia’s Quadro and Tesla sales manager defects to AMD

Earlier this year, KitGuru broke the story that Manju Hegde, nVidia's VP for PhysX and Cuda moved across to AMD. We've just heard that the person managing nVidia's professional product sales across a massive region (including the UK) has also defected to Team AMD. Interesting development. KitGuru investigates.

Originally with Seimens, Rob MacDonald is a seasoned veteran with almost 14 years experience in tech. From what we can gather, Rob took over nVidia's UK graphics sales operation around 2002 and was then given control of graphic card sales into the Nordic region (Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway).

nVidia then promoted Rob across into Quadro sales and he's been expanding that role ever since. Why is this move significant?  Well, simply put, professional products are the cash cow of the graphics industry.

To understand why the Quadro/Tesla udders produce such sweet milk, you need a little background maths.

GTX460 cards sell for around £150. After we take off sales tax and a profit for both the store and the distributor, we then need to deduct some money for the AIB (Add In Board partner – for example Zotac or EVGA), then we have £90.

Finally, there is packaging (box, user guide etc), the GDDR memory, the actual printed circuit board itself and the various plugs, driver disks and adapters we all know and love. In terms of component cost, this is all educated guesswork, but when all is said and done, nVidia would be lucky to get up to £50 for a graphics processor.

Imagine now that you can take the same chip, control most of the production process, package it as a professional solution and take £500 for the same processor ?   Moo Moo. That's what we say.

Back to Rob MacDonald. He was nVidia's point man into all of their key accounts across the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, India and the Middle East countries. If you wanted to launch new AMD Fire Pro cards etc into the market, then knowing exactly which customers are buying what product – would be a huge advantage. Cue Rob.

While AMD might be almost twice as big as nVidia overall, its sale of Fire Pro etc is far smaller than Quadro. Again, cue Rob.

Will be interesting to see if one man can make a difference. Cue Rob.

On the basis of ‘all roll over and one falls out' logic, if you're in the market for a sales management role and fancy Fermi, then you're in luck.

KitGuru says: In the wake of partners like XFX moving across, we're now seeing some key personnel move. Will this be the start of a pattern or is it a short term anomaly? We'll have to wait and see.

Comment below or in the KitGuru forum.

Become a Patron!