by Colin Brix, VP Marketing and Communications, AMI
After more than 25 years in the industry, Colin Brix went from his last day at Intel to his first morning at AMI in the span of 24 hours. In this blog, he shares why this moment in the industry is an exciting inflection point, and why, for AMI, partnerships are key to enabling the ecosystem.
I’ve been in tech for more than 25 years, and I like to think about this moment the way I think about the start of the dot-com era. There’s all this innovation happening upstream and downstream at the same time.
Generative AI is moving toward agentic AI. The pace of hardware development needed to support these different types of AI models is faster than anything I’ve seen. Post-quantum cryptography is reshaping security. Europe has passed the Cyber Resilience Act. So now, as a company, you’re legally bound to follow a whole new set of requirements that changes how firmware is built, tested, and supported across its lifecycle.
Adding to all this, the new chiplet economy is pulling different types of silicon together to enable very different workloads. There are so many inflection points happening at a very rapid pace. For AMI, that’s exciting, because we touch so many parts of that value chain.
From silicon to rack, and every layer in between
One of the things people miss when they think about AMI is that our work doesn’t stop at firmware boot.
As data center buildouts scale up, you have to think beyond silicon to server and server racks as well. Each layer adds complexity and issues such as power and cooling. AMI plays a really unique role, because we’re in both spaces: the base-level BIOS controlling the silicon and the hardware, and the rack level on top of that.
Partnership is the only way forward
The only way we can enable all these new ecosystems is through partnerships.
That starts with understanding the challenges our partners and customers are facing downstream. What are their pain points? How do we solve them together? If we’re not working together as partners, we’re missing opportunities to address those solutions downstream.
AMI already has deep engineering partnerships to enable hardware platforms. The question today is how we can enable new solutions downstream and work together as new verticals are being developed. The environment is moving faster than our partners can normalize and it will take industry collaboration to respond quickly in this fragmented market. Partnerships are key to all of it.
Enabling an open-source community
One of the things I’m most excited about is AMI’s role in the Partnership Forum for Open Compute. The goal behind this event is to build a community of partners working towards solving the right problems.
Companies need to be working together to make sure that the pain points customers are facing downstream, such as platform fragmentation, cross-layer security complexity​ and power and thermal instability,​ get solved. AMI has a unique position here, because we work with so many of the different players in the value chain. So, the question becomes: how do we unite us all together? How do we show up together and tell these exciting stories as a community?
A lot of the innovation happening today is through the open-source community and we want to support and enable that. The knowhow AMI brings from being in the industry for so long is really valued by the open-source community.
Forty years of being the quiet player
One of my first eye-opening experiences at AMI was finding how humble everyone was about their work. They’ve built critical platforms but hardly make a fuss about it. I was surprised by just how important AMI is at protecting and interconnecting the complex compute environment that exists today.
AMI has been in the market for 40 years, and for most of that time we’ve been the quiet player enabling the success of other companies both upstream and downstream. The challenge I have as the new marketing person is to shift that mindset a little. Not the work, as the work is already world-class. The mindset about how we talk about it and share the successes of our partners that we’ve helped enable.
Pulling out these stories of customer successes and the platforms we quietly made possible, is going to be a big part of what I do here. Showing those solutions in context inspires other companies to do unique things together. It helps bridge the gap between all the different players who need to be working together.
AMI is the glue that holds a lot of this together. I’m excited to finally tell that story, and to be the one helping lead that charge.
Still excited, 25 years in
A personal note to close. I’m writing this just back from a visit to AMI’s Taiwan office, where some old colleagues threw a Taipei Tech Club. Some fifteen years ago, a few of us started a little monthly tech club in Taiwan, marketing folks, engineers, anyone in the hardware industry who wanted to get together, have a drink, and talk about what they were building. Apparently, they kept it alive.
Sitting in that pub last week with engineers and marketers from companies I’ve worked with for two decades and feeling the same excitement about the ecosystem that I felt when I started in this industry, was a real reminder of why I do this.
That’s the community AMI sits inside, and we now have a chance to help lead.
