Servers: A Rose is a Rose

Lenovo was the #1 choice as the enterprise server vendor for partners; it won as IBM the year before. An ideal brand transformation has succeeded in India IT Inc.

Enterprise servers is one category in the Channel Satisfaction Survey that shows a successful brand transformation happening during the year. Lenovo, that emerged the #1 choice of channel partners and SIs, is actually the erstwhile IBM (IBM’s server division was sold to Lenovo during the year) who was the most popular vendor amongst channel partners the year before. HP and Dell gave Lenovo strong competition and swapped positions from the year before to finish as #2 and #3 respectively.

Like what happened with IBM last year, Lenovo too gained traction amongst partners majorly on almost all fronts except after sales support.  Partners overwhelmingly endorse Lenovo's technological leadership, product diversity, price vs performance ratio and overall product reliability; the IBM lineage is still a strong point for Lenovo and will continue to remain so for years to come.  Partners also endorse Lenovo’s innovative market development programs, judicious co-op funding and availability of point of sales materials.  Product pricing from Lenovo, flexibility in commercial terms and profit margins given to the channel also came in for special praise from the partners.

Dell, who pipped HP to the #2 spot, scored the highest amongst all vendors on the after sales support parameters and consistently across the other criteria. Most partners are satisfied with Dell over its competent account managers, its technical expertise to resolve partner problems, presence of service centers in most cities thereby ensuring prompt stock replacement and satisfactory repair and replacement services.

Though HP is a close third behind Dell, it has consistently lagged behind Lenovo and Dell in maximum parameters.  Only when it comes to issues like credit policies and settlement of back-end schemes and incentives, is where HP scores some brownie points with partners. One surprise is despite its aggressive push with the erstwhile Sun servers, Oracle has not cut much ice with partners (#4 overall in the survey)