Lenovo pledges to fix channel process issues

Lenovo has responded to criticism that its channel processes are not up to scratch revealing that it has made investments to improve the situation.

At the Canalys Channels Forum the performance of all of the leading vendors from a partner perspective were reviewed with most coming in for criticism of making life too difficult for resellers.

Steve Brazier, president and CEO of Canalys, said that when it quizzed resellers about vendors they did have criticisms of Lenovo.

"For Lenovo, you have told us many times, their channel tools are poor, and many of which seem to have come from the IBM heritage of old. Their decision-making around special bid is too slow. The challenge for Lenovo is to improve the channel tools, and make decisions faster," he said.

The firm responded with Gianfranco Lanci, corporate president and COO of Lenovo, highlighting the investments that the vendor had made to improve the situation.

"We will be investing $100m in velocity to develop new tools, and transform the entire way we interface with the customer, and channel in a digital way. We will do pricing, quoting, not only automatically, but using that analytics and machine learning. You will get the very short period of time, and there's a logic behind the answer. It's going to be maybe at the last managed by humans, and it's mainly managed by machine. Today we have all the data in order to make sure that we provide you with a good - unclear. It would be 100% utilised. It's going to be within the next six months," he said.

He said that in response to the comments from Brazier it was going to fix the situation and it recognised it needed to because almost 100% of its business went through the channel.

"We cannot grow without you and we are going to fix these tools. It's true it's coming from IBM in some cases and we never change, and it's time to change. In six months you will see the difference," he said.