Lenovo Taps Partners To Help Make Its Name In U.S.

Lenovo this week rolled out its first U.S. products under the Lenovo brand, including a series of notebooks and desktops jointly developed by its teams in the United States, China and Japan. Executives said Purchase, N.Y.-based Lenovo also is headed toward significant upgrades to its channel programs--upgrades that the vendor has been signaling in meetings with solution providers since late last year.

"We're substantially enhancing the business partner program," said Craig Merrigan, vice president of strategy, market intelligence and design at Lenovo. The enhancements will be formally announced next month at the vendor's PartnerWorld conference, he said.

"They've been very strong," said John Marks, CEO of JDM Infrastructure, a Rosemont, Ill.-based Lenovo solution provider. "They've been aggressive. I think they know they have to make a name for themselves, and they don&'t have a lot of time to do it."

Though Lenovo has the right to use the IBM brand in its ThinkPad and ThinkCentre product lines for another four years, company management has signaled its intention to start introducing the Lenovo brand it built in Hong Kong and China. The new products include the Lenovo 3000 family of systems, which will feature chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

The Lenovo 3000 notebooks and desktops also target what company executives have said is key customer segment: small and midsize businesses. The notebooks, including the Lenovo C100, will depart from ThinkPads not just in name, but also in appearance. The systems are silver and weigh a hefty 6.2 pounds. Initially, they will run with Intel Pentium M or Celeron M chips.

Lenovo executives also said the company plans to begin shipping Lenovo 3000 N Series widescreen notebooks, with 14.1-inch and 15.4-inch displays, in March and the Lenovo 3000 V Series laptops, with 12-inch displays, in the second quarter.

The Lenovo 3000 desktops include the J100 and J105 models, which will run on Intel Pentium 4 or Celeron chips or AMD Sempron or Athlon processors. It's the first time Lenovo is introducing U.S. products with AMD chips.

Also with the new computers, Lenovo announced Lenovo Care, a system management feature geared toward small businesses. It provides one-button disaster recovery that restores a system to a previous level, as well as offers auto bios and driver updates plus IBM service and support.

"We all know that [small businesses] do not have IT shops," said Bob Galush, Lenovo's vice president of desktop marketing. "We want to provide something to make it easier for them to function, easier for them to use their system."

Galush said he expects 75 percent to 80 percent of the Lenovo systems globally to ship through business partners in the channel, with the rest being sold direct. That number could vary depending on geography, he said.

Also with the systems, Lenovo will bundle the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop and Picasa software plus Roxio Digital Media, Norton Internet Security and Corel Small Buisness Center applications, Galush said.

The new computers bring the most aggressive pricing that Lenovo has offered. The C100 notebooks have an entry-level street price of $599, with the J Series desktops at $349. Solution providers were intrigued by Lenovo&'s pricing, especially in terms of how it positions the company against Dell.

"We need not only a price point that is extremely competitive to Dell's laptop and desktop family, but we also need some steak sauce added to the vanilla machines that have been rolling out over the past couple of years," said John Riddle, president of Information Networking, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider.