Meet The Man Behind Lenovo's Growing North American IT Empire

Faced with a huge challenge to drive a new enterprise business, Lenovo is mounting a high-stakes drive to become No. 1 in the cutthroat server business. And, now, here in North America -- the most lucrative IT market in the world -- Lenovo has a new executive to lead the charge.

Aymar de Lencquesaing, a 30-year IT veteran and former Packard Bell CEO, was named two weeks ago president, Lenovo North America. De Lencquesaing reports directly to Gianfranco Lanci, president and COO of Lenovo, overseeing sales and daily operations for North America, a market worth $43 billion in total IT spending by Lenovo's estimate. De Lencquesaing wants a big piece of that market and, for starters, he wants to double Lenovo's current market share, starting with PCs, servers, storage and IT services.

"I want to see us double our business," he said. "I see opportunities in all key Lenovo IT segments of the market. Today, 90 percent of the market is not ours. Doubling our share, if we had 30 percent would be a tall order. But doubling it from where we are at today shouldn't be a problem."

[Related: Lenovo Channel Chief Q&A: Kinlaw Spells Out Bold New Enterprise Strategy]

Lenovo owns 11.65 percent of the worldwide server market, making it the third-largest behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Lenovo is the worldwide leader in PC shipments with 20 percent market share, but in the U.S. it is No. 4 behind Apple with 10 percent share.

Doubling Lenovo's share of the market won't be easy, de Lencquesaing said. But it's something he and Lenovo are committed to pulling off with the help of the partner community. He said an influx of IBM System x partners that are now Lenovo partners will get the attention they were denied at IBM as it was looking to divest from the x86 server business.

"Doubling our server market share should not take five years," de Lencquesaing said. "Becoming No. 1 isn’t something we are going to do in one year. It will take somewhere between one and five."

For de Lencquesaing, Lenovo is not his first rodeo. He was CEO of Packard Bell and after that was a senior executive at Acer. He joined Lenovo from IT services firm Capgemini in 2011, where he served as president EMEA.

"I've been fortunate to get to where I was in my 20s," said de Lencquesaing of his stint with Packard Bell. "Packard Bell was a great experience because it was running a company from soup to nuts and surviving in a very competitive space. I've learned a lot since then and will take the best of what I have learned at those jobs and bring it to where I am today."

Lenovo's enterprise push comes as the market is in rapid change. Dell has gone private. HP is splitting in two. And more companies are eschewing hardware during refreshes and going straight to the cloud. But de Lencquesaing sees growth in SMB, where the drive to the cloud is still just getting started. He also believes that Lenovo has a differentiated offering that puts it in a better position than Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

"Lenovo bucks that trend," he said. As competitors offloaded manufacturing to ODMs and shed engineering staff, Lenovo kept its own factories and supply chain. "When you outsource a significant amount of your business, you can't help but let go of a little of your R&D and ability to innovate. At the end of the day, if it were not Lenovo keeping those assets, we would not have Lenovo's successful Yoga product line."

To that end, Lenovo is trying to shake off its image as a one-trick pony that can sell PCs. Lenovo has consistently defied gravity and, amid a down and flat market, has increased laptop shipments by 12.9 percent versus a 5.8 percent downturn for the industry as a whole.

Lenovo is hoping to do for its server business what it did with the PC market. But to get there, the company needs to change industry and partner perspectives on who it is today and what it will be tomorrow.

Part of Lenovo's image makeover includes its acquisition of IBM's x86 server business. "Who would of said five years ago that Lenovo would get to the top of the PC food chain? So I would like to think that history can repeat itself," de Lencquesaing said.

In February 2014, IBM said its x86 server business was 85 percent sold through the channel, translating to $4 billion sold through business partners. De Lencquesaing said today about 70 percent of its IBM x86 acquired servers are sold through the channel, and it has a goal of driving sales to $5 billion by October 2015.

"How can we do it?" he asked. De Lencquesaing said that there are no shortcuts to hard work. "Enabling partners to have the tools, channel incentives and field support they need, coupled with hard work by channel partners to go deeper and wider into their territory -- that's a good start,’ he said.

PUBLISHED APRIL 29, 2015