Lenovo pumps money and staff into the channel

Lenovo’s new channel director, Callum Eade, is pumping resources and boosting staff numbers to accelerate the vendor’s indirect strategy on the back of rebounding global profits.

Eade was formerly the director of small business and consumer and began his channel role in October. He said his department would be Lenovo’s key Australian focus for the next 12 months.

“In the last eight weeks, we have hired 12 staff for channel support and infrastructure. We had that based in KL and we’ve brought it back to Sydney,” he said. “For us to have that locally means we have Australians speaking to Australians, Kiwis speaking to Kiwis.

“Our highly experienced channel account executives are able to sit down with our key channel partners and really become strategic partners with our business.”

The director’s comments come after Lenovo’s decision to retrench almost 3000 staff in 2009 started paying dividends. Profits have returned, with China’s domestic demand playing a major part in the rebound.

Eade acknowledged Lenovo had been through tough times but said the company was looking to grow despite the maturity of Australia’s market.

“I’ve been mandated to hire more staff, so with the economic climate we’re in we couldn’t be in a better place. The challenge is now on me to turn that into results,” he said. “There’s no question, it’s going to be successful.

“I have two new sales managers and the difference is recognising who the key partners are. Instead of having an account executive or business development manager [BDM] covering 20 resellers, the idea is we identify what their core competencies are as an SMB and we focus them at the partners we see as key to our business.”

The appointment of Alan Munro as country manager following the departure of Phil Cameron was a major boon and would lead to closer ties between top executives and the Australian branch, Eade added.

“Alan Munro has worked in Europe and the UK. He’s a vice-president and we’ve never had someone of that executive level running the A/NZ region,” he said. “This gives us an enormous amount of mindshare.”

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