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Lenovo DCG turns to channel veteran to run EMEA
Hardware player brings in former Riverbed channel executive with a history of working with partners to drive growth across the ecosystem
Lenovo has turned to a channel veteran to step into the role of president of it’s data center group (DCG) across EMEA with a brief to grow sales across the vendor's ecosystem.
Giovanni Di Filippo will be looking to foster relationships with data centre partners and customers across the EMEA region and has a CV that includes plenty of time working with the channel.
Before stepping into this Lenovo position he was most recently VP of EMEA for channels, sales & strategic alliances at Riverbed Technology. He also held several global vice president-level positions in SAP’s global channel & sales divisions.
Di Filippo is not just a manager that enjoys smooth running sales departments but has gone further and invented his own approach - the rapid operational sales and partner quadrant models.
He is a firm believer that a vendor's entire ecosystem has to be involved in driving growth, which should be a benefit for the firm's channel base.
“For me, technology has the potential to do so much for the digital society if we think more about the people at the centre of it all, and encourage greater collaboration- how technology should work smarter for everyone, how it can truly enable us to make everyday life easier, even how it can help solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges," he said.
Earlier this week, Lenovo DCG and intelligence player Smartia pooled forces to get Ai and HPC technology into the hands of those users that are looking to bring improvements to their on-prem infrastructure.
Smartia comes with its industrial intelligence platform MAIO, which will work with Lenovo's servers and workstations, which should add to the options that partners can take out to the market.
Michelle Gulrajani, UKI Channel Sales Manager, Lenovo, said that it would hand partners a decent pitch for those customers looking to get on with digital transformation projects.
“Working together with Smartia will catapult the Intelligent Transformation of the manufacturing industry and further enable breakthroughs in smart manufacturing," she said.
In response, Chris Price, CMO of Smartia, said that the software and hardware mix would meet customer needs.
“Many industrial companies are using dashboards and business intelligence tools to visualise and explore their data. They are now looking to take the next step and enhance their processes with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. However, developing, deploying and running these types of applications requires new IT hardware solutions, especially if it is on-premise. This is where Lenovo comes in, by combining their hardware technology and our MAIO software platform, we can provide a complete AI solution package ready to deploy with very little fuss," he said.
