Company: AMD, Sunnyvale, CA
Entry Submitted By: Edelman
Company Description: AMD designs and integrates technology that powers millions of intelligent devices, including personal computers, tablets, game consoles and cloud servers that define the new era of surround computing. AMD solutions enable people everywhere to realize the full potential of their favorite devices and applications to push the boundaries of what is possible.
Nomination Category: Information Technology Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Information Technology Executive of the Year

Nomination Title: Jake Dominguez, Chief Information Officer

1. Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since January 1 2013 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Jake Dominguez is responsible for leading AMD’s global IT organization, and in doing so, he spearheaded the company’s initiative to use the cloud to build the cloud.

AMD recently completed Jake’s vision of a major datacenter consolidation effort, which began in November 2012 and focused on transitioning more than 3,500 servers from Austin, Texas to Atlanta, Ga. under one roof. Under Jake’s leadership, AMD’s IT department decommissioned 76 percent of the company’s physical servers and 72 percent of its virtual servers, compressed rack space by 45 percent and reduced engineering grid storage by 30 percent. Overall, the project compressed from 289 racks from its Austin datacenter into 160 racks in Atlanta, with a corresponding electrical reduction from a 2.8 MW facility in Austin to 2.0 MW (1.2 MW is currently being used) in Atlanta, all under Jake’s leadership.

Jake took AMD’s IT department from maintenance to mission, by transitioning the company so that it could generate greater business innovation activity.

The initial challenge was that the Austin datacenter was outdated. In addition, power was expensive, as were the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) licenses. AMD was spending a tremendous amount of time trying to support business-specific applications that didn’t fall under the IT department’s management.

Jake’s team operated under a tight timeline to execute the project and had to take risks to stay on schedule; for example, they didn’t build in excessive safety factors for slippage and push back. Communication for Jake and his team was crucial in order to ensure that outages were kept to a minimum.

Due to expert IT planning, the consolidation effort was completed two months ahead of schedule, without the use of external consultants. The consolidation effort upgraded more than 75 percent of applications to take advantage of newer hardware, newer OS versions, newer DB versions and in some cases, newer application versions.

The project successfully virtualized 87 percent of non-engineering GRID servers, an increase from 60 percent, allowing AMD to recover valuable rack and floor space. The consolidation upgraded the corporate services infrastructure to take advantage of newer platforms, routers, networking and firewall equipment. The transition to a larger private cloud helped AMD increase productivity and efficiencies for its engineers, as projects that used to take weeks are now on average taking only a few days.

AMD’s data center consolidation resulted in several innovative efficiencies, including greater employee productivity and information security with the use of internal transactional zones and firewalls. In addition, the datacenter consolidation project helped AMD improve power and cooling efficiency, reducing its PUE to 1.56 in Atlanta from approx. 1.7 in Austin.

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Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the nominee:

Jake Dominguez is CIO and Corporate VP at AMD and is responsible for leading the company’s global IT organization. He brings over 26 years of engineering and information technology experience, with a diverse background in academia, semiconductor, computer services, and manufacturing industries. Previously, he was interim CIO and prior to that, vice president for the AMD Corporate Services IT organization.

Before joining AMD in September 2011, Dominguez was the executive leader of the Product Development and Engineering IT groups at HP. In addition to leading these groups, he supported HP’s enterprise data warehouse and eCommerce platforms.

Prior to his leadership positions at HP, Dominguez spent more than six years at AMD, with roles ranging from senior automation engineer to senior manager of Personal Computing Services.