Lenovo To Recruit Up To 5,000 New VARs

“I want 3,000 to 5,000 globally next year,” said Mark Enzweiler, vice president for worldwide business partner sales for the PC maker.

"We’re going to go to our distributors and ask them to help us recruit. We’d like to recruit Acer resellers; we’d like to recruit Hewlett-Packard resellers. We want guys who are focused in the small business space.”

Enzweiler also said Lenovo will pursue inactive Lenovo resellers using the new, low-priced 3000 line to bring them back into the fold.

Lenovo is also looking at Web resellers and is targeting large systems integrators “now that we are not joined at the hip with IBM Global Services," he added.

The recruitment effort was revealed at PartnerWorld in Las Vegas as part of the PC maker's coming out of IBM's shadow. IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo just over a year ago.

Donn Atkins, IBM’s general manager of global business partners, outlined a similar effort Monday saying that IBM seeks 5,000 new partners globally, 1,500 of which will come from the U.S.

Atkins said that Lenovo and IBM likely won’t be recruiting the same partners. “If some of them are just PC partners, they are not likely to be on our list [of solution providers] that would have an interest in our current portfolio,” he said.