Built For Outcomes: Lenovo’s Channel Vision For 2026 And Beyond

The channel landscape is evolving, and it's evolving fast. AI investments are accelerating, customer expectations are shifting from hardware to outcomes, and the partners best positioned to win are the ones with a clear strategy and a vendor that backs them up.

CRNtv's Jon Alba spoke with Wade McFarland, vice president of North America channel at Lenovo, to talk about how Lenovo's channel philosophy translates into real support for partners, what's new inside the Lenovo 360 framework, and where the biggest growth opportunities are for partners over the next year.

Jon Alba: What is your general channel philosophy, and how is Lenovo prepared to best support partners in 2026?

Wade McFarland: Great question. Pretty straightforward, right? What I love about this, and as I said, ten months into the role, we are a channel-centric company in everything we do. I think that starts with collaboration, trust and consistency. Trust is hard to earn but easy to lose. In the past, success was measured by transactions: volume, certifications, moving product efficiently. Those things still matter, but they don't define the most successful partners anymore.

I view that as table stakes now. The partners that are winning today are focused on solving real business challenges: modernizing infrastructure, enabling AI, improving productivity and helping customers build more resilient environments. Our role is to support that shift, which means giving partners the tools, the programs and the support they need so they can grow in a scalable and profitable way. Profit is very important to me, and I know it's very important to our partners. At the end of the day, we win when our partners win.

So everything we're doing is centered around helping them build stronger, more viable businesses. Being channel-centric and outcome-focused is really a win-win for our partners and for Lenovo.

Jon: Lenovo recently made changes to its Lenovo 360 framework. What exactly changed, and how are those updates going to better support partners?

Wade: Same theme here. The feedback from partners was very consistent: they wanted more clarity, more predictability and a more straightforward way to grow with us. So that's exactly where we focused. We streamlined the framework, we simplified the tiering structure and we made the progression path much clearer so partners really understood how to move forward. We also evolved how we think about incentives, how partners make money, because it's not about transactions anymore, it's about total partner value. That's growth, that’s capabilities, and the long-term investments we're making in partners, and that partners are making with us, to go drive the business.

We put more emphasis on areas like services and technical enablement, because those are key to helping partners move up the value chain. Ultimately, it's about reducing friction. Partners need to know where they stand, what matters and how to grow, and we want to give them the tools so they're not unnecessarily navigating through complexity.

Jon: I want to talk a bit about the One Lenovo strategy. It's designed to unify PCs, infrastructure and services. How does that approach help partners build more complete customer solutions?

Wade: At the end of the day, customers are looking for solutions, not individual products. Historically, those conversations were fragmented. You had devices in one place, infrastructure in another, services somewhere else.

What One Lenovo does is bring all of that together. It connects our devices, infrastructure, services, and AI capabilities into a more unified experience across one partner ecosystem. We often talk about going from pocket to cloud, giving partners the ability to engage across the full portfolio with one vendor. There are very few vendors out there that can offer that full stack. For us, and for partners, it opens up a much broader conversation, helping their customers across the full life cycle, from endpoint to data center, and the services that tie it all together. It allows our partners to play a more strategic role. They're not just responding to individual opportunities, they're helping customers plan and evolve over time.

That One Lenovo strategy makes it easier to align to the portfolio, align to the programs, and align to the partner experience, so they can deliver more value with less complexity.

Jon: Over the next six to twelve months, there's a lot changing in the industry. In your opinion, what are the greatest growth opportunities for partners, and how is Lenovo helping them capture that?

Wade: I think the biggest opportunity for us is around AI and hybrid AI. Customers are investing heavily in AI, data center infrastructure, and security, but those investments depend on having the right foundation in place. That's what's driving the growth, particularly across infrastructure and services, and we're accelerating that through the channel.

But success in AI depends on making that opportunity easier for our partners to consume, sell and deliver. Innovation matters, but so does simplification. That's where we're focused: helping partners turn the demand we're all seeing into real solutions they can deliver quickly, confidently and at scale. We're seeing large neo-cloud and GPU-type deals, and the question is how can you deliver those at scale?

A good example of that is our Top Choice Express. Partners consistently tell us they want simplicity and predictability, and Top Choice Express makes it easier for them to identify the opportunity, quote it and deliver the right infrastructure solution with less friction and faster. We're averaging somewhere between 9 and 12 days in delivery, and we're expanding that. As you think about the approach to AI, we've added AI-ready Super SKUs, which are pre-configured solutions.

The goal is to help partners identify the right platform, the right AI workloads, quote with confidence and move faster from opportunity to deployment. When you combine AI and hybrid demand with infrastructure modernization, services, and things like Top Choice Express and Super SKUs, there's a significant opportunity ahead. Our focus is how we help partners capture that opportunity, give them the confidence and reduce the complexity.

To learn more about Lenovo’s Partner Hub, click here.