Qualcomm: Snapdragon X Partner Program Is ‘Hyper Competitive’ Against Intel, AMD

In an extensive interview with CRN, Qualcomm’s vice president of global enterprise and channel sales says channel partners face a ‘significant services opportunity’ to convert 14,000 customers testing Snapdragon-based PCs into large commercial deployments.

With Qualcomm plotting to make $4 billion in revenue from its PC processors by 2029, a top sales executive at the company said channel partners are “super important” to that goal, which is why it has designed a “hyper competitive” partner program to challenge Intel and AMD.

In an interview with CRN, Jeff Monday (pictured), Qualcomm’s vice president of global enterprise and channel sales, elaborated on the company’s strategy to grow market share for its custom Arm-compatible Snapdragon X Series processors after the company revealed in February that it is doubling channel funding and quadrupling its global commercial channel team this year.

“If consumers are starving for innovation in their PC, employees are starving even more, and so we felt that it was super important for us to go to market through the channel,” said Monday, who was previously an enterprise and SMB sales leader at Apple, in late March.

Representing a revitalized effort by Qualcomm to become a serious player in the PC market, the Snapdragon chips were adopted by Microsoft last year to power the first wave of consumer and commercial Copilot+ PCs that hit the market. There are now more than 85 Snapdragon-based PCs available from OEMs such as HP Inc., Dell Technologies and Lenovo. That number is expected to surpass 100 by next year, the company said last month.

An executive at Merrimack, N.H.-based solution provider Connection, one of Qualcomm’s early channel partners, told CRN that the chip designer has been making a splash in the channel with competitive resources such as volume incentive rebates and market development funds.

“They have been probably investing at a higher level to try to build that market share, that mind share that they’re after,” said Camden Haley, vice president of production management at Connection, which ranked No. 29 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500 list.

Qualcomm’s channel team was very small when the partner program kicked off roughly a year ago, according to Haley, but “they have been building quite steadily over the 12-month period, not only in terms of dollars and cents but also in resources.”

“That has really made a big impact,” he said, citing the access his company now has to sales and technical people at Qualcomm, including a dedicated representative.

“Not only do we have somebody who’s dedicated to our account and working with us on planning and executing, but [there are] other resources that we can call on,” Haley said. “We can do co-selling motions, which we weren’t able to last year. We can do more of those technical proofs of concept [POCs] where a customer shows a lot of interest.”

While Haley said his company doesn’t yet consider Qualcomm as strategic a vendor as Intel or AMD, he thinks the chip designer is making the right moves to change that situation.

“I wouldn’t say that they’re top tier, but they are definitely headed in that direction as long as they maintain their strategy in the channel,” he said.

CEO Has Made ‘Massive Commitment’ To The Channel

Monday said Qualcomm’s CEO, Cristiano Amon, has made a “massive commitment” to supporting and funding the company’s partner programs for Snapdragon, which is allowing it to expand to more than 100 commercial channel partners globally this year after it grew the roster from 13 partners in five regions to 40 partners in 12 regions over the past year.

Kyle Houser, the leader of Qualcomm’s global commercial channel team, told CRN that there are now more than 65 people dedicated to commercial channel partners “on a daily basis” between his team and others—a contrast from what Monday called a “skeleton crew” last year.

“Now it allows us to get to a place where we can cover partners. Sometimes we’ve got multiple people from Qualcomm calling on the same partner, operating in different segments within their business,” Monday said. “Before, we were at a place where it was one person from Qualcomm calling on multiple channel partners, and so we knew that that wasn’t the long-term way to guarantee our success in the channel.”

These investments are critical to Qualcomm’s stated goal last year of growing its PC processor revenue to $4 billion by 2029, according to Monday, because the company expects about 40-50 percent of unit sales to come from the commercial market by then.

To ensure that the company can “pull those financial levers that really help us grow and scale our business,” Monday said he reports directly to Qualcomm CFO and COO Akash Palkhiwala.

“Making sure that we had the breadth and depth to be able to properly engage and inspire our channel sales team and our channel sellers and channel partners, it’s super important for us, and we know that funding and head count go a long way towards that,” he said.

Compared to Intel and AMD, Qualcomm’s partner programs and funding are “hyper competitive,” according to Monday. At the same time, he said, the company wants to remain humble and continue to learn from partners about “how we can help accelerate their business.”

“So we continue to be aggressive and humble while driving a pretty significant value proposition in the market,” the executive said.

Houser said Qualcomm aims to be “the fastest, most flexible” silicon vendor a channel partner can have, which he sees as an opportunity for the company.

“We come to this with a fresh approach of looking at each partner to understand their business and where we fit into that versus putting a bespoke global program on top and saying this is how it’s done and how it will be done,” he said.

14,000 Curious Customers Represent ‘Loaded Slingshot’

With Qualcomm still in the early innings for Snapdragon X Series sales, Monday said an important part of its channel and enterprise strategy is to get Snapdragon-powered PCs in the hands of customers and partners. The goal is to get customers to switch to large fleets of PCs using Qualcomm’s chips instead of Intel’s or AMD’s by showing them how Snapdragon chips can enable better experiences, such as extended battery life or improved performance.

“When we put a Snapdragon device in someone’s hands and they can actually see, touch, feel the user experience, they don’t want to give it back,” he said. “So I think our biggest opportunity there is, how do we accelerate putting Snapdragon devices in the hands of more employees, more executives, both at the channel partner, and then through their customers as well.”

The company’s global commercial channel team started working toward this goal in the first several months of Snapdragon X Series availability last year, running over 36 campaigns that led to more than 6,000 customers testing Qualcomm-powered PCs and building Snapdragon migration programs that led to over 400 channel-led POCs.

Using telemetry, Monday said, Qualcomm has now identified 14,000 unique commercial customers who are using Snapdragon-based PCs. Such customers are “purchasing one to four units, which means they’re testing or getting ready to deploy Snapdragon,” he added.

To Monday, this represents a “loaded slingshot in terms of how that business performs over the next three to 12 months,” which means that Qualcomm will continue to grow its teams, including an enterprise team he oversees, to support this sales push.

“The biggest opportunity we have in the next 12 months is how do we convert those 14,000 customers we know have gotten a device in their hands and are testing, and we’ve got an incredible set of partners already that can help us go and convert that demand,” he said.

Monday said Qualcomm is already starting to win customer deals with “some pretty big name brands based on battery life and performance.” The company also got its “first global” request for proposal “that locked in Snapdragon for 30,000 devices within a large enterprise customer.”

That large request for proposal came together in large part because the Snapdragon processors can do code generation at the edge, Monday said, which points to the opportunities the company sees in getting businesses to move their AI workloads from the cloud to PCs.

“As AI workloads continue to become more pervasive across the enterprise, CIOs are going to have to decide, ‘Do I want to put that in the data center and compromise my carbon goals, compromise my IT budget, or can I look at putting this on device, declutter my GPUs, actually leverage the power savings that Snapdragon brings into the enterprise and actually accelerate my carbon goals while achieving my AI goals as well?’” he said.

Haley, the executive at Connection, said it’s hard to say what overall interest is in Snapdragon among his customers due to the whiplash caused by President Trump’s tariff policies, but he is noticing interest from customers who are looking at the platform for certain types of employees, particularly those who are on the go and could benefit from longer battery life.

“I would say that there’s definite interest by user type or by persona,” he said.

Snapdragon Represents ‘Significant Services Opportunity’

Monday said Snapdragon represents a “significant services opportunity” for the channel in part because of how the underlying Arm instruction set architecture is new for most customers who have comfortably relied on x86-based chips from Intel or AMD.

“Because it is a new technology entering that B2B space, it’s going to require some investment in it, and we felt that the channel was best positioned to take the great services that they’ve got, wrap that around our new product set and help the enterprise all the way down to SMB customers get Snapdragon-ready,” he said.

The first step channel partners can take with customers in many cases is a POC with Snapdragon-based PCs, which “they can monetize in different ways depending on how they want to set up access,” according to Houser, who reports to Monday.

Once customers decide to adopt Snapdragon, partners can focus on more of the traditional life cycle services inherent to the management of PCs, he said.

“When you look at those POCs and how you create scale from them, the big focus with partners right now of the slingshot is, what’s that next layer of services to go from POC to a scale deployment, and you start to see some of the traditional life cycle services come into the environment, things like zero-touch deployment [and] multi-country, international support agreements that play into the service offering,” Houser said.

Houser, who was named to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs list, said his team has developed other resources, such as total cost of ownership calculators and carbon footprint calculators, that can help enhance partners’ service offerings “even further.”

Qualcomm is also working with OEMs to enable services related to “what’s the most cost-effective way at the right time to get those devices back and refresh,” according to Houser.

“When you look at it, we’re tied into each of those different service mechanisms a partner has in place, making sure that we’re enabling them around our platform and how that increases margin and ultimately revenue for them, while still saving their customer in the long term,” he said.

Haley, the executive at Connection, said his company is seeing the kinds of services Monday has described for Snapdragon POCs.

“It’s not just sending a demo to send a demo. It’s an actual strategic opportunity for us to show the value that we can provide on a Snapdragon-powered device,” he said.

Addressing Concerns About Commercial PC Capabilities

While Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Series chips rely on the Arm architecture and not the tried-and-true x86 platform that businesses have relied on for decades, Monday said the company has made “significant progress” in enabling applications to run natively on Arm.

The company said last month that it now has more than 750 applications running natively on Snapdragon, including over 100 for the enterprise. Native applications include Microsoft 365, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Adobe Acrobat, Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Slack, Google Drive, Microsoft Intune, Ivanti LANDesk, Zscaler and CrowdStrike.

This has resulted in users spending 93 percent of their time in native Arm applications, Monday said, citing research by Microsoft. The remaining time is spent using x86-based applications in an “emulated environment,” he added.

“We’ve done some impressive work on that emulator, such that even if you look at our competition and you spec it like-for-like in terms of [the processor] emulated on Snapdragon, many benchmarks prove [that] to be better than Intel-native,” he said.

Monday said Qualcomm is now “spending a lot of time and effort [on] that last 1 percent” of non-native applications that the company views as the “long tail of enterprise apps.” This work includes partnering with Microsoft’s App Assure service to create an “escalation path” for commercial customers running into challenges with applications.

“But we’re finding that window of non-native experience is closing pretty rapidly. We forecast by the end of June, we’ll be close to [roughly] 97 percent of [user] time [being] in a native experience. So it’s a [razor-sharp] focus for both us and Microsoft as we’re scaling this new technology in the market, and I’m pretty confident about where we’re at,” he said.

Beyond the work Qualcomm is doing to ensure applications run fast on Snapdragon, Monday pointed to the way the company’s chips have led the market in being the first to enable Copilot+ PC features like the newly improved Windows search, Recall and Click To Do—all of which take advantage of Snapdragon’s neural processing unit (NPU).

The NPU is also allowing Qualcomm to reduce the negative impact background processes like endpoint protection software can have on a laptop’s battery life, according to Monday. The company is accomplishing this by moving these processes from the processor’s CPU or GPU to the NPU, which requires less energy for workloads that are constantly running.

“What that means is you’re going to take a 20-hour battery life PC, you’re going to put the tech stack on it, and you’re still getting it 20 hours of battery life,” he said. “And so we see some really great advances in terms of the user experience we can create as the ISV community continues to embrace our NPU.”

Another potential area of concern for commercial customers is the availability of enterprise-grade management and security features that have become standard offerings through Intel’s vPro platform and the AMD Pro Technologies.

Monday said Snapdragon takes full advantage of Microsoft’s chip-to-cloud security stack with Microsoft Pluton, but he added that the company plans to introduce “some really compelling things coming on that front as well.”

“As we evolve our capabilities, the channel is going to become increasingly important as well in terms of how our product will develop to serve enterprise and SMB customers,” he said.