SUSE and Lenovo – New Dynamics in a Long-Term Alliance

The following article has been contributed by J.B. Smith, SUSE Engagement Manager at Lenovo.

*J.B. is responsible for Business Development and Channel Sales efforts for the SUSE product line within Lenovo.

After the first quarter of FY 2018 at Lenovo and we are off and running!  With Sales Kickoff and Accelerate behind us, the path is set, the priorities ranked and we are ready to dig in and exponentially grow SUSE sales in North America this year. In Q1 we grew our business over 25% from Q1 FY2017!

Lenovo as an organization is very entrepreneurial and dynamic – change is constant as we reinvent ourselves to optimally service our customers, support our alliances and accomplish our mission of delivering an ecosystem of devices, services, applications and content for people to seamlessly connect to each other and to web content. FY 2018 will be no different as we’ve moved in several areas to improve our ability to execute.

The Lenovo-SUSE relationship will be positively impacted by several of these changes.

1. Lenovo has optimized is structure into three distinct business units. Mobility, Personal Computers (Tablets, devices, etc.) and Data Center Group (DCG). This will give us a much greater ability to focus on growing the business lines and solutions which our core customers are most concerned with. We are rapidly building our capabilities in the Data Center Group side and increasing our abilities to assist our customers in implementing full end-to-end solutions
2. Lenovo has created a partner program which rewards partners for the amount of sales they make. Software is included in the formulations. This will be a great driver to sell more SUSE products thru the Lenovo Alliance. If you are one of Lenovo`s Channel Partners you can get more info HERE
3. Lenovo is investing in expanding the SUSE footprint to customers. While SUSE currently enjoys default status in all things SAP related, we are working on bringing education and awareness of other SUSE products in the portfolio, such as SUSE Enterprise Storage, SUSE Manager, SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching, to the end customers and partner eco-system.
4. At Accelerate 2017 (Lenovo’s annual partner conference with over 1000 partner organizations in attendance), we identified some high-potential partners who will work closely to enable their sales forces around key SUSE sales plays.  We will then leverage these successes to strengthen our capabilities in other areas.

We are committed to executing in all of these areas and driving the SUSE-Lenovo Alliance into new spaces to benefit the entire SUSE Community eco-system.

FY2018 promises to be the best year ever!

Learn more about our strategic alliance at suse.com/Lenovo and follow @LenovoServers on Twitter.