5 Ways Lenovo Has Upped Its Enterprise Game

Channel Focused

There is no question about it: Lenovo is upping its enterprise game.

For years, Lenovo has been known to U.S. channel partners as a PC powerhouse that made a big move in 2005 acquiring IBM's ThinkPad business. But over the past year Lenovo has put itself in makeover overdrive, inking deals with enterprise power player EMC, buying Google's Motorola handset division and acquiring IBM's x86 server business.

Don't blink, because you might have missed one of Lenovo’s latest blockbuster moves. In case you did, here is a quick breakdown of some of the recent big strategic moves Lenovo has taken.

Lenovo Opens A High-Performance Computing Center

Lenovo opened its first high-performance computing center in Stuttgart, Germany, on March 25. In partnership with Intel, Lenovo said the research and development facility would focus development around x86 infrastructures based on the Xeon E5 2600 v3 processor and Mellanox EDR 100-Gbps InfiniBand interconnect. Other partners include IBM and Nvidia as well as ISV partners ScaleMP, Allinea and PathScale.

Earlier this month, Lenovo said it was forming a new internal business unit dedicated to developing products and solutions for doctors, hospitals and university medical centers.

Executive Shuffle And A Hotshot Hire

Lenovo revealed sweeping changes to its executive team as it lines up its enterprise ducks.

In a major reshuffle of its executive team, Lenovo named former Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci (pictured) as corporate president of Lenovo effective April 1. Lenovo also promoted Gerry Smith to executive vice president and chief operating officer, and promoted former president of North America Jay Parker to senior vice president, Enterprise Business Group.

Parker is now responsible for the company's server and storage business, along with 2,500 Lenovo engineers and developers.

Lenovo, EMC Partner On Converged Infrastructure

Lenovo and longtime storage partner EMC said in January that they would work together to combine Lenovo's Flex Systems with EMC's VSPEX storage hardware. The efforts would create a road map for the two to create solutions for private cloud and VDI environments.

At the time, Lenovo and EMC said the move would allow enterprises and midsize businesses to more affordably deploy converged systems and build out their data center infrastructures.

Channel Leadership Rejiggered For Major Enterprise Offensive

Chris Frey in January took on an expanded role responsible for both SMB and Lenovo large accounts.

With the promotion, Frey is now vice president and general manager of Lenovo's North America commercial business. Frey told CRN earlier this year that a major focus in his new role will be accelerating growth in Lenovo's large commercial accounts business.

In February, Lenovo said Sammy Kinlaw (pictured) will take the North American channel helm starting April 1, in a promotion that puts the nine-year Lenovo veteran in charge of the company's server, PC and storage channel business. The promotion, Lenovo said, would be key in helping it put even more focus on the channel as it aggressively battles with Dell and Hewlett-Packard in the server, storage and PC market.

Lenovo Ups Its Data Center Chops With IBM x86 Server Buy

Last fall Lenovo closed its $2.1 billion deal to buy IBM's x86 server business, which it originally announced in January 2014.

The acquisition gave Lenovo IBM's System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches; x86-based Flex integrated systems; NeXTScale and iDataPlex servers; and associated software, blade networking and maintenance operations.

The deal became official in October, positioning Lenovo to be a global server powerhouse and empowering its partners to go head-to-head with Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Cisco. The deal immediately made Lenovo the third-largest global server vendor.