sheelamohanachandran - Fotolia
SMB the focus for Lenovo's fresh UK channel boss
Even after a few days it has become clear to Lenovo's UK channel boss that the firm's commitment to working with partners to reach the small business market will remain a priority
Lenovo's fresh UK channel boss has talked of the vendor's ongoing commitment to the small business market and deepening reseller relationships as her first priorities.
Jane Ashworth joined the vendor a couple of weeks ago, taking up a role of SMB & channel director UK, having come from educational player SMART Technologies.
"There has been a huge amount of investment in programmes and systems from Lenovo in the past few years and a I have come in and need to build on that," she added "I'm trying to leverage that as Lenovo to better equip the partners to succeed."
"But it is also about further developing partner relationships in the channel with our existing partner base and creating new relationships as well, which we don't have today," she added.
She said that one of the focus areas was SMB and in the UK there was a lot of resource to support partners and it would continue to invest in head count to make sure partners could get help targeting those customers.
Her first 30 days will be spent getting educated about the cutlure at the vendor and meeting with key partners and her previous channel experience, at both HP and at Smart, meant that here were existing relationships.
"I have got a lot to learn and work with existing partners and also the different areas of Lenovo to understand exactly what the starting point is for me," she said.
The firm used the Canalys Channels Forum last week to address some criticisms with the way it works with partners 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.
