Mid-market the target for Lenovo DCG

Lenovo has identified the mid-market as a key segment where its datacentre business and channel should be enjoying strong demand.

The vendor has been investing in its Data Centre Group (DCG) back-end capabilities with teams to support partners as well as identifying fresh customers for resellers to target in the mid-market space.

Ian Hume, general manager of Lenovo's datacentre business in the UK, said the firm was trying to encourage partners to take on more of its DCG portfolio, which included servers, storage, networking and software, and gain new customers.

He joined Lenovo’s UK operation at the start of the year, after having worked for the vendor in Australia, and has come in with a determination to increase the business with the channel.

“My focus, both in terms of the investment and headcount, is very much around new partner acquisition, new customer acquisition, and net new logos,” he said. “Right. The wraparound is supporting that with much richer programmes that reward our channel partners.

“We have a mobile business, PC business and a datacentre business. So we have many partners. All the major partners are working with us today, and our task is to expand that solution.”

Lenovo held an “Accelerate” event a couple of weeks ago, where it invited partners to come and hear a message about the importance of providing a more complete solution, and Hume said it was supporting those who wanted to expand their expertise with incentives and technical support.

Hume said there would be rewards for those that did make the effort to develop a solution approach, particularly one that would target the mid-market, where Lenovo has been working for a couple of years to drive more business.

“A lot of our competitors are focused on the high end and that’s great and we have an enterprise team that is very successful in academia, finance, health, and so on,” he said. “But we recognise that there is an opportunity in that tier below, so mid-tier. That’s why we have taken this stance, specifically focus on what we term mid-market and the rebates programmes are centred on that.

“As a business, we are growing by 67% year on year and the UK is growing by up to 50% quarter on quarter. In the datacentre, we are selling over 20 million servers.”

Hume said cloud and digital transformation are driving a lot of the spending and customers are looking for channel partners that can help them with their IT challenges.

“They want answers to the problems and our role is to support that,” he said. “We’ve taken that strong technical community and have been dedicated to manage our managed channel partners. Distributors have dedicated resource that we didn’t have before to help.

“We have invested in people and continue to invest in people that will support channel growth. We want partners to be profitable with Lenovo and therefore see the value. We want partners to find this new business and we will reward them.”