IBM Read spent 23 years at
IBM serving in various global leadership roles. He worked in IBM's Asia Pacific region as general manager, Business Innovation Services for Asia Pacific. As managing partner for IBM's Business Consulting Services Industrial Sector, Read led the division through a turnaround that significantly improved gross margins, drove new customer acquisitions and generated double digit revenue growth and operating profitability. He was vice president of IBM eBusiness Transformation that produced more than $1 billion in company-wide savings and $21 billion in sales.
Lenovo Read served as president and chief operating officer of
Lenovo Group, Ltd. During Read's five-year tenure at Lenovo he was responsible for driving growth, execution, profitability and performance across a global $16 billion enterprise encompassing over 160 countries. At the time of Read's departure, Lenovo had just marked the seventh straight quarter as the fastest growing PC maker in the world and had become the world's third largest global PC manufacturer.
AMD Read is the former CEO and president of AMD, where he followed
Dirk Meyer. Appointed president and CEO in August, 2011, Read served on the company's board of directors. Rory was followed by
Lisa Su. At AMD, Read inherited a company that had approximately 95% of its revenue driven by the PC market. Read diversified the portfolio to produce revenue of 50% from five new high growth markets, building over US$2 billion in new businesses. Under Read, AMD lowered costs by over 30% (primarily due to employee layoffs) while restructuring AMD debt, strengthening the balance sheet, and returning to non-GAAP profitability. He was responsible for attempting to implement an ambidextrous X86/ARM architecture and the clean sweep of AMD
GPUs or
APUs in new game consoles during his tenure (with Nintendo being the exception). Read also served as an executive advisor for AMD.
Vonage On June 8, 2020, Read was named the next CEO of
Vonage, a business cloud communications provider. He assumed the role on July 1, 2020. ==Personal life==