Lenovo ISG VP on how Lenovo 360 is better servicing Australian partners

Charles Ferland discusses the new and improved opportunities for partners.

After rebooting its partner program nearly four years ago, Charles Ferland, VP infrastructure group (ISG) category at Lenovo is pleased with how it its fairing in Australia.

It’s program, Lenovo 360, has made it easier for partners to transact in various sectors. In Australia, Lenovo has more than 100 ISG specific partners.

He said the feedback to the Lenovo 360 program has been positive, as previously he said it was “overly complex” to transact with the company.

Previously, a partner could sell laptops but not servers, making the system quite complicated.

"We have the now, the same framework really simplifies and make it a lot easier for them to do business with Lenovo. It's one framework, one terms and conditions, there are not various contracts to sign, requirements to hit; it's one single framework,” he explained.

Last year, Lenovo launched subcategories specifically for AI partners, MSPs, and GSIs.

"These are subcategory of the program that are really addressed to a special niche of the market. But the partner feedback has been very positive because of the simplification of the program,” he said.

“You can now, under the same terms and condition, transact with Lenovo in various part of the portfolio, granted you have the right credential to sell them basically. It's a lot easier for them to keep track and set expectations as well.”

Lenovo has a portfolio of 165 solutions for Australian partners. Ferland said the company is finding their products are helping their partners make money, especially as more organisations move to the cloud and implement AI solutions.

"There's a lot of other equipment that IoT sensors, cameras, that comes into the play for the partners to show their value to the customers by bringing all of these elements into a final solution,” he said.

“We provide the physical server infrastructure, we can help with the software and take a lot of the heavy weight of creating these solutions up front, but the final delivery is really within the partners, and there's a more opportunity for them to shine by doing these complex, more complex installations.”

Opportunities in Australia

Ferland said the company has been “growing nicely” in Australia.

“We've been in the top three, depending on how you look at different metrics and quarter from IDC. We're ranked constantly in the top three, depending if you're looking at units, revenue,” he said.

The excitement Lenovo has is within the opportunities presented by the public sector, Ferland explained.

“This is where we've seen our fastest growth, where we have been able to provide the right product offering at the right price to a lot of the public sector from an industry standard,” he said.

They’ve also invested into Australian universities where they have deployed some of the largest supercomputers in the world.

“This is an area where we are very good at deploying and developing high-quality, high-performance type of supercomputer. If you're familiar with that type of technology, a lot of that know how translated super well into the AI space, and that helped us gain some competitive advantage,” he said.

“The enterprise customers are asking us about AI and how to deploy AI. A lot of the learning that we have captured in developing these supercomputers applies as well to these AI server cooling, for example.”