Lenovo Channel Chief Rob Cato Steps Up To Take On Global Infrastructure Role
‘He definitely was that perfect fit. We trusted him. We formed relationships with him. I’m sure he’ll go on to do bigger and better things. He felt very authentic. He definitely did what he said and said what he did,’ says Michael Goldstein, CEO of Lenovo partner LAN Infotech.
“It’s been probably the best seven years of my career,” Cato (pictured) told CRN about the job of channel chief. “I’ve built amazing relationships. Have built an amazing team. We’ve transformed our North America channel business into a real destination for a lot of our Lenovo employees. Partners are always talking about the fact that we’re honest and transparent and all the things that we wanted to be as a company. So we built a great culture here, and that’s something I feel really proud about.”
Michael Goldsten, president and CEO of LAN Infotech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Lenovo partner, said Cato will be missed by the channel although he is relieved Cato will remain at the company.
“He definitely was that perfect fit. We trusted him. We formed relationships with him. I’m sure he’ll go on to do bigger and better things,” Goldstein told CRN. “He felt very authentic. He definitely did what he said and said what he did. It keeps all of us happy. It looks like he’s just moving on to better things.”
Cato—who started with Lenovo in 2005—has been channel chief for the Morrisville, N.C.- and Beijing-based company since 2018, overseeing its legion of indirect sellers as Lenovo has maintained its global market leadership in PC sales and seen a recent resurgence of the company’s server business, which grew 63 percent last year.
Cato’s new title is vice president of business transformation for Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group. He will work with Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, Lenovo’s president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, as the company hopes to build on the momentum it has generated in its server and storage businesses.
“For me, there was that moment that said, ‘Hey, now’s a good time to go move into something else,’” Cato said. “I didn't have this one on the Bingo card at the beginning of the year.”
Cato sees his new job as helping to build the velocity inside Lenovo's infrastructure business and change the customer mindset around Lenovo’s products to capture new business as well as that which is due to be refreshed.
“It was an opportunity to impact the part of our business that has been good, but it needs to be maybe a little bit more stable, a little bit more consistent, and we need to get the channel motion going,” he told CRN. “I think that’s what attracted me probably the most, it was really focused on channel and customers, and how do we deliver the right value to them in our infrastructure business over a sustained period of time?”
Lenovo achieved $69.1 billion in annual sales last year, up 21 percent, with much of that coming from its PC and smartphone business, which generated $50.5 billion. Its infrastructure unit saw a record high $14.5 billion in revenue, with particularly high growth of 68 percent in the sale of its liquid-cooled Neptune servers that incorporate Nvidia’s GB200 chips.
Lenovo competes with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell Technologies across the data center infrastructure landscape, particularly in entry-level to enterprise servers, but has not been able to take advantage of its high-end server business to be a significant player in enterprise storage.
In January Lenovo announced its intention to acquire storage vendor Infinidat. Founded by former EMC employee Moshe Yanai—who worked to develop EMC’s flagship Symmetrix storage system in the 1990s—Infinidat is focused on developing storage technology for high-performance workloads, particularly for AI.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Cato will carry the responsibilities of channel chief until a replacement can be found, but he said no matter who assumes that role, the channel is at the foundation of Lenovo’s business, he told CRN.
“If you look at our go-to-market, if you look at how the company was built, that’s how we deliver our solutions, our products, our services,” he said. “It is with and through the channel and that’s got to be at the forefront and in the bones, if you will, of Lenovo.”
Cato pioneered the company’s partner program, Lenovo 360, and built deep connections within the partner community. In May, Cato told CRN that the Lenovo 360 platform has seen greater adoption with partners around the world, with 57,000 training certifications created in 2024, a 55 percent jump year over year. The program is also expanding to add more AI training by the end of the year.
“It’s in our DNA at Lenovo,” he said. “I’m going to continue to be the biggest advocate in the world for the channel and what they do and how they do it, so that’s not going to change one bit.”