Ashok Nair becomes the new sales head for Lenovo

Lenovo India has merged its SMB Business to form a unified commercial business unit. The merger took place with the end of first quarter of the current and Ashok Nair has taken charge as the Sales head and will drive channel business.

"We have figured over a period of time, that SME exhibits both characteristics of the home business and the large enterprise business. By restructuring the three sales motions into two, we are able to optimize both staff strength and our customer engagements," said Amar Babu, MD, Lenovo India.

Lenovo will bill directly to just around 15 customers, majority of which are global accounts. "We are moving of hundreds of enterprise accounts to partners. While we will manage the relationship with about 1000 accounts, the billing and deployment of many services will be delivered through partners," said Babu.

He added that while margin pressures will continue for both Lenovo and channels, Lenovo will ensure that the services business remains with partners. "Systems integrators and solution providers must not ignore PC business. PCs still remain integral to enterprises of all sizes, and we assure channels that Lenovo will not compete them on services." Meanwhile Lenovo has decided to stop expanding the SMB retail outlets primarily targeted at SMB clusters.

Lenovo unveiled plans in July in Sri Lanka where it held a meeting for its channel partners. "We like the idea of Lenovo routing business through channels. While there are no expectations on margins, this certainly opens up our chances to win business on services and other enterprise products such as storage or virtualization," said Vasudevan Subramanyam, CEO Newwave Technologies, Bengaluru.