Lenovo’s Don Frame and Stefan Bockhop discuss the vendor’s growing data centre business group, and Lenovo’s advantages in the cloud infrastructure market.
Chris Morgan assessed his success in executing on his priorities in this first year on the job, and considers the channel impact of Nutanix’s emphasis in 2016 of the big picture beyond simply saving money through hyper-converged solutions.
Nutanix is making changes to its channel strategies around this product, including deal registration, to avoid channel confusion. Lenovo and its channel will also play a key role taking Xpress to market.
The Lenovo announcements included three joint offerings with integrators around SAP HANA, SAP-related data warehousing and memory announcements, and a hyper-converged sofolution r SAP Business suite applications stemming from their partnership with Nutanix.
The new models include Lenovo’s first Yoga form factor for the K-12 market. Combat kits for the new offerings are also coming to channel partners.
A month ago, Robert Yelenich moved from country manager of Commvault in Canada over to Nutanix, replacing Anton Granic, who had been promoted. Yelenich recently sat down with ChannelBuzz to discuss Nutanix’s Canadian plans for 2016.
Juniper becomes Lenovo’s strategic networking partner, to build out new data centre solutions and strengthen Lenovo’s growing hyper-converged and converged presence. Lenovo also says the deal will have a strong channel play, and won’t be limited to Lenovo’s highest-end partners.
Lenovo channel chief Sammy Kinlaw said raising System x server sales is his top priority for the year, as some partners still don’t sell these at all.
Lenovo also announces an entirely new Special Bids system, and the delay of the replacement of the IBM services contract tool with a new one from Lenovo.
Details are pretty high level at this stage, and a Chinese cloud solutions venture will be China-focused — at least in the short term. There are, however, other elements which Lenovo channel partners will find of interest.
ChannelBuzz has learned that Lenovo, which has been assessing its distribution options for its commercial Motorola business, since it acquired the mobility vendor a year ago, has decided on SYNNEX for its U.S distribution. The deal does not apply to Canada, and Lenovo said it has no comment on Canadian distribution plans at this time.…
Lenovo sees strong momentum in its server business, with its core server business showing signs of beginning to scale growth, and its roster of hyperconverged partners offering significant potential in that space.
Nutanix sees the Lenovo deal as equal in importance to the Dell one inked last year and said its announcement shortly after Dell’s purchase of EMC is a coincidence. The plan is to get jointly branded products to market through Lenovo in Q1 of 2016.
Hyper-converged vendor SimpliVity will seek to grow its market in Canada with an exclusive distribution pact with Tech Data Canada.
D&H Canada adds Chrome Device Management console, says it will focus on SMB opportunities as new platform comes of age.
Lenovo announces its second hyperconverged partnership this week, which like the first is focused primarily on the SMB space, where Lenovo is initially focusing with its hyperconverged strategy.
Lenovo teams up with software-defined storage vendor StorMagic to offer three new hyperconverged offerings. They are unlikely to be their last.
The company has put measures in place to drive North American server sales through the channel, and while it is still a distant fourth in server revenues, they are eager to make up ground this year.
The new offerings include new four and eight socket X6 systems, Lenovo Flex System X6 Compute Nodes, and both Lenovo X6 and joint Lenovo-EMC solutions optimized for SAP HANA.
Atlantis is adapting its high-performance USX software defined storage platform into a hyperconverged appliance that is easy to deploy and use, and is much less expensive than existing competitive offerings.
