Video: Talking One Lenovo, One Channel with Stefan Bockhop

SPONSORED CONTENT – It’s been a busy few months for Lenovo Canada, which in short order closed two blockbuster deals – the purchase of the System x x86 server business from IBM, and the acquisition of Google’s Motorola mobility business.

On top of those acquisitions – or perhaps at least partly because of them – the company’s Canadian team has just moved into a new headquarters facility in the Toronto suburb of Markham, Ont. Lenovo Canada recently held an open house to officially open its new home, and we used the opportunity to sit down with Stefan Bockhop, director of channels for Lenovo Canada, to talk about how the company plans to integrate its existing channel partners and programs with the new additions to the family, particularly legacy IBM partners who may be new to the Lenovo brand.

The new facility gives Lenovo a much more modern face and some much-needed growing room, a 37,000 square-foot location just north of Toronto. Colin McIsaac, managing director of Lenovo Canada called the new facility the culmination (at least for now) of “one heck of a journey since May 6, 2005 when we first became Lenovo” with the acquisition of IBM’s then-struggling PC business by a Chinese PC vendor then little known on this side of the Pacific.

“We can’t get comfortable or complacent,” McIsaac told attendees of the open house. “We sill have so much to do to take our rightful spot in the industry.”

The new location was in fact directly impacted by the System x acquisition. Bockhop said the company was very close to a new location that would have done for the time being when word came down from leadership that the acquisition was happening. Suddenly, they needed a new location to bring all those new employees under the same roof with the existing Lenovo team.

The new facility is very open concept – as Bockhop put it, for every chair at a desk, there’s another chair at a meeting space or another type of location, to allow for greater collaboration. The facility also is much more open for the company’s partners and customers – while it previously had just temporary space for showcasing its wares, it now has both a showcase for its client devices, and a raise floor section housing both ThinkServer and System x servers.