Rajshekhar Bhatt is the Sales Head for ATI and Chipset, AMD India
Based in Mumbai, Rajshekhar, 40, heads the sales team and is responsible for maintaining ATI’s leadership position in the PC graphics segment by nurturing strong relationships with ATI’s board partners and their channel partners.
Rajshekhar brings along a wealth of experience to his position at AMD. He has spent more than nineteen years in the IT industry of which more than fourteen have been in sales. Prior to joining ATI, Rajshekhar looked after national sales & marketing at Creative Technologies for a little more than 3 years where he helped set up a national sales team and increase Creative’s turnover 10 times. Raj helped Creative achieve the numero uno position in speakers in the country, winning lot of awards from various media & end users. Simultaneously, he also elevated Creative’s web cams to become the second largest brand in the country. At Creative, he also introduced a range of products including MP3 players, graphic cards, Input Devices, DSC etc.
His stint at Creative was preceded by his role at Asus, its first employee in India, where he managed to double Asus’ turnover in one year.
Before ASUS, Rajshekhar was Regional Manager- West for Samtel India. Having a knack for growing businesses, here too, Raj used his first employee opportunity to grow the team into four branches in the Western Indian region and build a 25-member award winning sales team.
Raj’s IT career also includes various positions at L&T, HCL Tech & Zenith Computers.Raj has a total work experience of 19 & 1/2 yrs, all in IT industry and of these 17 years is
been sales & marketing.To his credit, in the year 2002, Raj also won a very sought-after award in the IT trade- ‘360 Magazine – Most Favourite Channel Manager’
We caught up with Rajshekhar to give us insights about AMD ATI and the role that it plays in the industry.
Q. What scope do you think Workstation Graphics Cards have in the Indian market?
The first thing that I wanted to clarify is that the workstation cards are the professional range of cards, these cards are certified for a certain application. Now coming specifically to your question, the scope of workstation graphic cards which are the Fire GL and Fire Pro, we see immense opportunity, largely the target segment for these graphic cards are the DCC animation, CAD/CAM manufacturing, and applications like ,Oil and Gas, GID but specific to DCC, we feel there is a huge opportunity, though there is no industry that has not been impacted by the slowdown but at the end of the day the kind of creative ideas and the cost at we can do the job in comparison to certain European countries is 15-20% of the cost hence we see so much outsourcing happening in India for animation and VFX, so its just the tip of the iceberg. |
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Q. Tell us a bit more about ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 series graphics chips?
It’s a new series of graphic cards which we launched almost about 3 quarters back. It usually happens that first the desktop version is launched; here the mobility stands for the laptop space. Though not in India but laptop gaming does have a huge market, on a laptop it is not a separate card that goes. It’s like the HP and Dells of the world will decide what graphics they need to incorporate on their higher end laptops. Though in India no one manufactures laptops, when people here found out that a laptop could provide them with the graphics which was earlier restricted to a desktop, the response was good. All those who we interacted with were very happy and keep to use laptops for gaming now. |
Q. What is ATI's vision to service the gamer CPU market in a still nascent Gaming country like India?
I am glad you asked this question, Gaming is very important for our ATI product line. And with the merger we have a unique advantage, if you ask a gamer they will always prefer an AMD, with the over clogging capacity, the cost effectiveness so now we are the only company which can offer the CPU and the graphics, hence the marketing strategy also becomes easier to implement. We have partnered with some one our likes of Asus, Kingston and a few others. We are in process of launching a gaming system using ours and their components. We are also catering to the budget conscious gamers with our AVID technology where when you are using a graphic card your onboard processing is not disabled so you are using both. We are also concentrating on gaming Cafes; we have set up various gaming cafes in Mumbai, Chennai, Pune and Nagpur. |
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Q. How can AMD ATI help support the animation and gaming community in India and help encourage and develop more gamers around?
As I told you about the cafes, we definitely don’t own these cafes but work with them to see what configuration should the desktops be, we brand the Cafe, with that we keep holding competitions where more people get attracted, the prizes are our own hardware like CPUs and graphic cards. I mentioned about our association with our eco system partners. We build these machines and take them to various colleges, in the last quarter we have done approximately 20 gaming competitions. Infact at IIT Tech fest we had 50 computers with AMD with ATI. I personally do not want to restrict this to youth or a male adult, some of the competitions in colleges we had a separate one for girls and we saw a good response. In one of the IT events we even encouraged senior citizens to come and play and we had 8 senior citizens come and play who enjoyed it. |
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Q. Please tell us in brief about ATI's foray into Cross Platform GPGPU computing and what exactly is Open CL and how is it going to benefit the end user and developers?
You mentioned about three things, Open CL. GPGPU and developers. Over a period of time how the technology has evolved is ofcourse your graphic has not been restricted to just doing a better graphics job but with the advent of new software, developers are keen to use Graphics to also do a CPU's job. GPGPU is General Processing Graphic Processing Unit, which is definitely also doing a computing job. Now AMD has taken a stance to work on an industry standard instead of restricting itself to only the users of ATI, The developer working on a certain application which uses the ATI Radeon or maybe the ATI Fire GL or the Fire pros or even the ATI stream, now the ATI stream graphic card which is being used by the Research and development and the defense organisations in India, they are using the graphics to design the software. |
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After the software has been designed it can be used at any platform, it is not restricted to be used only on the ATI product line whereas what our competitors have done is that they have restricting it to be used to used only on their GPU product line. As an organisation we always believe in providing the smarter and a better choice for the customer and at a better price hence we have kept it at the industry standards. And also it is not restricted to a very basic neesh user.
Even our ATI Radeon presently restricted to 4600 series and above where one can use our ATI Stream software which is free downloadable software and take advantage of the graphics to develop a program and offload the CPU from doing the computing job and allow the GPU to do the same. |
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Q. What do you see as being the biggest achievement ATI have made on a software level?
There is more than one actually, difficult for me to quote one. Now the first and the foremost in that we have Catalyst software which is essentially a driver and a free downloadable software. For your graphic card you can download the latest version and the best part is that it is updated every month. Secondly in line with the ATI Catalyst around a few months back we launched ATI Avivo Video Converter, which for example when you are using an Ipod, or lets say you downloaded a video from Youtube on to your PC but your Ipod is not supporting the format, now the conversion will take time however the Avivo Video converter will do that effortlessly with a 20% reduction in time. . |
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| Though this is not a job of a graphic card but this is as a value addition that we are providing to our customers and the third thing I have already told you the ATI Stream, so these are the 3 big key steps on the software side that we have done. Ofcourse the important thing is to work with the ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) like Autodesk which would be under Professional graphics, when it comes to consumer graphics working with EA sports and like wise people who are developing the games and even Microsoft. We were the first to introduce DX10 and DX10.1, the competition is nowhere, we will straight away jump to DX 11. We believe we will again have the edge here as and when Microsoft announces the support for DX 11 |
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Q. What other applications besides Gaming and Animation/VFX does AMD ATI cater to?
When it comes to consumer products gaming is ofcourse one of them however with Vista coming up you operating system itself turns into a graphic resource and with Windows 7 being launched this year we do believe that graphics is going to be immense. Talking of mobile phones there was a time when the display used to be monochrome now it is as good as what your digital camera or a Handy Cam would give, so graphics have become an integral part of our life today
'We touch graphics every day'
Another key thing is the HTPC, you are buying a PC at home not just to do the computing but also provide entertainment. Now look at the Blue ray Disk, If you want to go for an independent Blue Ray disk console based device you need to go for a player, your drive and the Amplifiers and speakers. Here just add a blue ray disk player and assuming you have a good set of speakers and your home theatre is ready. It’s less noisy, less wired, and ready to support all the formats in the world; right from the VCD to the blue ray |
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Q. What is the biggest USP would you say ATI has over competitors and why?
One single thing is the consumer, better value to the customer, I am mentioning specifically to when we launched the 4800 series. Quote unquote, our competitors say that the product at a higher price. All the features we have devised and given to the market are with keeping the customer into mind at a right price. So that is the USP, I can really keep talking about this. If you see the gamers they keep on upgrading their systems, but while upgrading they also need to upgrade the power supply and other things,
However we design the product keeping the power supply in mind very much catering to the green effect of not consuming too much power, not producing too much heat, so all that is taken care of during the design process hence coming back to the single focus being the consumer. That is where the essence of AMD lies. |
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Q. What is your message to the Visual Computing and Gaming Community?
From the students and the community point of view we recommend people to use the right hardware and the software. We have seen that students who actually the gaming card so called the Radeon or a GForce from our competitors and not getting the right output, it is like running Mercedes on kerosene. Hence you end up have the hardware but not the right software or vice versa, hence it is very important to use the right combination specifically for animation. A very simple example is that Game concepts were earlier restricted only to Hollywood but now we see games being made on Bollywood and being designed in India, from the gaming section again we have the AMD CPU, AMD Chipset and ATI Radeon graphics, again the best solution can come from AMD, ours is the only company that provides the Graphics and the CPU, both products are competitors on the graphic side and the CPU side. From the gaming community point of view as long as you play in a controlled way, it is a good stress reliever, we keep having competitions at our office in the lunch times. Gaming has grown, there are companies that support gamers participating in international competitions representing India, and the kind of hardware that is made available now we don’t have the huge technology lag, and a product launched yesterday can be made available by next week here. There is a market in India for every product; I have seen the average selling price increasing in the last 3 years. Let’s hope the industry keeps growing.
Content Team
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