ChannelThinking

Wes Towns, Director, Americas ThinkServer and ThinkStation Product Marketing

I wrote in a recent post about some of the trends we’ll see in the PC industry in 2010. Another one I think we’ll see is more small-to-medium businesses making the move to servers. Now is a good time to make that move given today’s server technology offers dramatically improved performance over servers from just a year ago.

Value and convenience are big factors today, so to sweeten the deal, we’re working with Red Hat and Tech Data to give resesllers rebates when they purchase select Lenovo ThinkServers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced.

Here are the quick details:

• Qualified Red Hat resellers can buy a ThinkServer from Tech Data with a $75 instant rebate, or they can buy a ThinkServer with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a $150 instant rebate, or they can buy a ThinkServer with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced for a $250 instant rebate.

• Resellers do not have to be Lenovo resellers.

Lenovo ThinkServers and Red Hat Linux are a good fit for entry-level file/print servers all the way up to high-performance virtualization servers.

These rebates are an attractive incentive for Red Hat resellers to try out the ThinkServer brand.  We think they’ll like what they see in terms of performance, quality and overall value. Plus, packaging the software with the hardware through distribution makes it easy for resellers to simplify their purchasing.

We know the SMB market is here to stay and grow. Just look at servers in this space. The X86 server market is forecasted to go up to 6.8 million units just this year. And that’s just servers! We’ve spent a lot of time over the past year building an ecosystem for our SMB resellers to help them grow their business with Lenovo. We’ve simplified our programs, expanded our product portfolio to reach never before price points with new products like the ThinkPad Edge laptops, and we’ve added new marketing tools to help save partners time.

We’ll be expanding our server portfolio this year to offer even more value, with new servers that combine entry level pricing with business-class remote management technology.