Lenovo Unveils Partner Hub To Offer Unified, Personalized Online Partner Tools

The Partner Hub site aims to simplify life for Lenovo partners by bringing together all tools and portals while covering both the PC and data-center businesses.

Lenovo is aiming to simplify and personalize its online partner engagement with the soon-to-debut Lenovo Partner Hub, which will unify all tools, portals and business lines for solution providers.

The Partner Hub launches July 27 and will cover both the Intelligent Devices Group and Data Center Group, signaling a key step in Lenovo’s effort to drive greater synergy between the two businesses.

[Related: Lenovo Partners Reaping Benefits Of New Channel Charge]

“We are going from 13 or 14 different portal platforms to a single global platform,” said Jeff Taylor, executive director for North America channel strategy and operations in Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group. “And we‘ve integrated a number of tools into the portal itself. So things like our performance dashboard, our order-tracking capabilities, deal registration--it’s all going to be in one spot. So everybody’s going to be able to have access to one single location, a single point of contact through our Lenovo Partner Hub, to manage their business and their relationship with us.”

The Partner Hub will also present information to partners in a more useful way, Taylor said.

“We‘re integrating our services tools and our options and accessories tool--so if you’re interested in a particular product, it’ll be really easy for you to find and identify the associated services and options and accessories. That whole experience is going to be transformed,” he said. “We think that we’ll be making a huge leap forward in terms of the engagement aspect of it.”

Bill Birdwell, Lenovo relationship manager at CompuCom, No. 41 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500, said he got an early look at Partner Hub and found that it offers “a new fresh look and everything in one place--the time savings will be huge.”

“I especially like having everything on one site—for our rebates and payments as an example, before I had to go to a separate site with a separate login credential for every site,” Birdwell said in an email to CRN. “In addition, in the past I had to request a report on our deal registrations, which took several days. Now I can pull this report myself.”

Ultimately, “it is always nice to see an OEM investing in our channel,” he said. “Lenovo has always been a great partner and has always invested in our channel, and this refresh has been long overdue.”

Personalization is another key element of the Lenovo Partner Hub, as the site will be able to show a different view to users based on their role, Taylor said.

For instance, if you’re in sales, or marketing, or vendor management at a partner, “the experience that you‘re going to get is going to be different depending on your self-identified persona,” he said.

Additionally, the Partner Hub will include a new pricing platform—the Lenovo Bid Platform—where partners will go to submit special pricing requests and deal registration requests.

“The pricing tools are going to create a whole bunch of flexibility--in terms of how quickly you can get pricing from Lenovo, and how quickly you can get various levels of protection depending on the opportunity,” Taylor said.

While the portal revamps are a global project for Lenovo, North America will be the first geographic region to go live, he noted.

Currently, about 25 percent of Lenovo partners sell both PC and data-center solutions from the company, and more cohesion between two the sides is in the works, company executives have said.

“I think [the Partner Hub] is a great prelude for that,” Taylor said. “Moving forward into the future, you will see tighter integration programmatically between the two organizations. And then of course, the engagement model being the same through the Lenovo Partner Hub certainly demonstrates the ‘One Lenovo’ story.”