Lenovo is seeking to help customers feeling the financial pressures brought on by the recession by launching smaller, low cost options of its ThinkCentre A58 and ThinkCentre M58e desktops.
Stefan Bockhop, director of channel sales for Lenovo Canada, said partners generally have three general concerns about the economy and what it may mean for their businesses.
“(They’re concerned businesses) may defer or decide not to initiative IT activities,” he said. “Second, partners are wondering if there will be enough credit or capital to stay afloat before they get paid from their customers. The third concern is with businesses downsizing, there’s a lack of continuity with the customer set, which is a personal problem because people have to re-establish those relationships again.”
To help ease these strains, Bockhop said Lenovo’s overall go-to-market strategy remains based on the simplification of its solutions, programs and policies to make Lenovo easier for partners to do business with.
With the introduction of the new ThinkCentre business desktop PC portfolio, which includes the ThinkCentre A58 model for small to medium-sized businesses and the ThinkCentre M58e for larger enterprise customers, Bockhop said the company’s objective is to make it easier for partners to sell and customers to buy.
“We want partners to maximize on the opportunities that are out there,” he said. “With the ThinkCentre A58 and M58e, we’re entering into new price sells in the marketplace where Lenovo may not have been in or played too strongly in, in the past.”
Especially with the recession, Bockhop said it’s essential that Lenovo be in the desktop space, offering smaller and lower cost options to customers, who are now watching their budgets and spend more carefully.
“Before, partners may not have had the choice of manufacturers in this price sell that our new A58 and M58e play in,” Bockhop said.
The M58e also offers green features and when paired with Lenovo’s L1940pW monitor, Bockhop said on average customers can save about $40 a year on their power bill.
Bockhop also stressed that even though the IT industry is hearing a lot of buzz around notebooks “replacing” desktops, he said at least in the foreseeable future, desktops will continue to have a home in almost any business.
“There are a number of functions a desktop will do better than a notebook,” he said. “From a security point of view, sectors such as legal, medical, insurance and financial (companies) would want to have a device that doesn’t leave the four walls (of the workplace).”
The desktops come either in traditional tower or small form factor models and are available with choices of Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) Core 2 quad and Intel Core 2 duo processors, support for up to 1TB of storage, up to 4GB of memory, and more. Both models will be available starting next month from Lenovo and its channel partners at a starting price of $519.