Lenovo Must Up Its IT Game After Year Of Massive Change, Partners Say

Lenovo said its Accelerate partner conference, which starts Monday, is its first rally point for its channel designed to ignite an enterprise battle cry for new PC, server and data-center sales after a year of unprecedented change.

’We told partners a year ago, 'We are going to change.' And now we have done it,’ said Sammy Kinlaw, North America channel chief, Lenovo Channel Sales, who oversees PC and System X channel teams. He said this year’s Accelerate, in Las Vegas, is focused on unifying the extended Lenovo family of solution providers and distributors under one roof and bringing the fight to rivals Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco.

’Our message is leveraging the power of one Lenovo,’ Kinlaw said. ’For the first time, whether a reseller is buying PCs, phones, servers or building out a data center, Lenovo is the company that covers all of that for our partners.’

[Related: Lenovo Partners Are Hungry For Higher Margins Up The IT Stack, And The Company Is About To Deliver]

Since its last Accelerate partner conference, Lenovo has been on an acquisition binge, buying both IBM’s x86 server business and Google’s Motorola handset division. It also created an enterprise group and a division dedicated to health care, and has undergone a major overhaul of its executive leadership.

That massive change has come with a price, say some partners, who said they are anxious for the dust to settle on Lenovo’s ambitious year.

’Things have calmed down and gotten more predictable,’ said David Stone, executive vice president, at Solutions-II, a Littleton, Colo.-based services-focused Lenovo and IBM partner. ’There is no question Lenovo has had a monumental job integrating IBM’s System x. We have encountered some bumps transitioning our System x business from IBM to Lenovo.’

While some partners say they are headed to Las Vegas to learn how Lenovo will integrate System x with Lenovo’s ThinkServer brand, other partners want to know how far up the stack Lenovo is going and how fast it’s moving to go there.

’New technology drives business,’ Stone said. ’I want to hear what Lenovo’s IT and product vision is over the next 24 to 48 months, and how they are going to lower my costs to clients and increase my profitability.’

Over the past year, Lenovo has upped its enterprise game, adding System x solutions for SAP HANA and inking a deal in January with EMC to bring its VPEX converged infrastructure appliance to partners. Experts say the timing is right to see Lenovo take its relationship with EMC to the next level.

’Lenovo's biggest challenge is defining itself in the market,’ said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group. ’They bought IBM’s x86 server business and made a lot of staffing changes. Now they have to convince people they are everything IBM wasn’t, without the cachet of being IBM.’

But for Lenovo’s longtime faithful, it’s less about the company's enterprise push, and more about driving sales and winning margins when it comes to Lenovo’s bread-and-butter business that helped it become a $40 billion global IT Goliath -- SMB client, ThinkServer and storage sales.

’With Windows 10 coming out later this year, I want to hear what new hardware and software upgrade paths Lenovo is [planning] to help me grow my business,’ said Joe Lore, sales director of Sunntech, a Lenovo partner based in Woburn, Mass.

’We are going to move at a fast pace, but at the same time, we have a huge, 30,000-reseller base, and we are not going to leave anyone outside the tent,’ Kinslaw said. ’Yes, our partner makeup is changed right alongside our product mix. But we are growing as a company, and that includes both the enterprise and ... a long tail of traditional resellers.’

Since October, Lenovo said, the number of partners actively reselling its servers has grown 40 percent, reflecting an influx of new partners attracted by its broadening System x and ThinkServer portfolio. Over the past year, Lenovo said, the number of net new Lenovo partners actively buying server hardware from Lenovo grew by 1,500 in North America.

PUBLISHED APRIL 24, 2015