American Megatrends

American Megatrends

American Megatrends Incorporated (AMI) is an American hardware and software company that specializes in PC hardware and firmware. The company was founded in 1985 by Pat Sarma and S. Shankar, who was chairman and president as of 2011. It is headquartered in Building 200 at 5555 Oakbrook Parkway in Gwinnett County, Georgia, United States, near the city of Norcross.

The company started as a manufacturer of complete motherboards, positioning itself in the high-end segment. Its first customer was PCs Ltd, later known as Dell Computers.

As hardware business moved progressively to Taiwan-based original design manufacturers, AMI continued to be a BIOS firmware developer for major motherboard manufacturers. The company produced BIOS software for motherboards, server motherboards (1992), storage controllers (1995) and remote management cards (1998).

In 1996 AMI produced MegaRAID, a storage controller card which was adopted by major OEMs including HP and Dell. The RAID division assets were sold to LSI Logic in 2001.

As of 2011 AMI continued to focus on OEM business and technology. Its product line includes AMIBIOS (a BIOS), Aptio (a successor to AMIBIOS8 based on the UEFI standard), diagnostic software, remote access firmware, motherboards, SGPIO backplane controllers, driver/firmware development, service processors, and NAS and IP-SAN storage systems for SMBs.