Lenovo To Drop Iomega Brand On Joint EMC Products

Lenovo announced at its Accelerate 2013 partner conference in Las Vegas this week that it will drop the Iomega name this month on network-attached storage (NAS) products jointly owned with EMC.

Last fall Lenovo and EMC formed a wide-ranging partnership in the server and storage market that included the computer maker taking partial ownership of Iomega. The two tech giants also formed an alliance around joint server technology development and an agreement for Lenovo to resell many of EMC's NAS products in China.

EMC acquired Iomega in 2008 for approximately $213 million in a move to bolster its consumer and small business storage play.

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Chris Frey, vice president of North American commercial channels at Lenovo, said during his keynote address that the Iomega name will be replaced by LenovoEMC on May 20. He also said Iomega NAS products for small and midsize businesses will be available for channel partners starting July 1.

Lenovo plan to push those storage products hard once they're available to partners. Sammy Kinlaw, executive director of North American channels at Lenovo, said the LenovoEMC products will soon have spiff incentives attached to them in an effort to attract more reseller partners.

"That's one of the biggest ways we get new partners into our program -- cash spiffs," Kinlaw told CRN. "We have around 10,000 partners using the SMB Advantage spiff program so we're excited about what adding these products will do for us and our channel partners."

Lenovo and EMC had begun to phase out the Imoga name earlier this year by replacing it with LenovoEMC on most websites and market materials. But many of the storage products still carried the Iomega name. Lenovo said it expects those few remaining products still carrying the Iomega name to be out of the supply chain in the near future.

Lenovo partners at the conference applauded the move, as many solution providers felt the Iomega brand had a negative impact on customers because the name was associated with consumer-level products and ZIP drives.

"The EMC partnership has given Lenovo the missing storage link," said Ashley Harms, owner of Sanity Consulting, a Lenovo partner headquartered in Winnipeg, Canada."Putting Lenovo heads on storage arrays seems to solve the problem."

PUBLISHED ON MAY 2, 2013