Lenovo, With IBM and Motorola Deals, Caps Busy January

by Jeffrey Burt

Once the deal closes, Lenovo will go from being the sixth-largest server vendor in the world to number three, behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

As analysts have mentioned, Lenovo—with IBM’s x86 server business in hand—will be able to rapidly grow its server business in its home country of China, a booming market where both HP and Dell are working hard to grow their presence.

It will take as many as nine months to close the IBM deal. In the meantime, the two companies are still competitors, so Lenovo days after the agreement was announced unveiled four new ThinkServer products, including two rack servers—the 2U two-socket RD440 (pictured)—and the two-socket TD340 tower server.

The ThinkServer SA120 is a direct-attached storage enclosure that offers businesses a tiered-storage solution, featuring both 2.5- and 3.5-inch drive bays in a 2U enclosure.

With its proposal to buy Motorola Mobility from Google, Lenovo is making a $2.91 billion bet that it can be as good in smartphones as it is in PCs.

Lenovo already makes smartphones, like its K900, but much of those sales are in its native China. With Motorola, Lenovo will become a larger player in regions like North America, Western Europe and Latin America.

Among the company’s smartphones is the Vibe Z, introduced in early January as Lenovo’s first Long Term Evolution (LTE) smartphone that includes gesture controls and photo enhancement software. At the same time, Lenovo also rolled out three other smartphones.

Between announcing the deals with IBM and Google, Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yang Yuanging said the company was reorganizing, with four new business units that focus on PCs, mobile devices, enterprise technologies, and the ecosystem and cloud services.

As in past years, Lenovo was active at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), introducing new consumer PCs, including the Y40, Y50, Z40 and Z50 (pictured) clamshell laptops, and the C560 all-in-one (AIO) PC.

Also at CES, Lenovo unveiled additions to its portfolio of “multimode” products: the MIIX 2, a detachable three-mode laptop (pictured); the Yoga 2 convertible laptop; and the Flex 14D and 15D dual-mode convertibles.

Lenovo is embracing new form factors, and at CES, unveiled the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 12-inch Ultrabook (pictured) and the ThinkPad 8 Windows tablet. There also was the OneLink Dock Pro, an enhanced docking solution for tablets.

Also at CES, Lenovo rolled out its new ThinkVision Pro2840m (pictured), a 28-inch 4K professional display, and the ThinkVision 28, an ultra-high-definition monitor that also is an Android-enabled entertainment center.

Lenovo at CES came out with a number of consumer devices aimed at enabling users at home to connect and interact with their media and content. The devices included the Beacon personal storage device, N308 Android home computer, Horizon 2 Table PC and A740 AIO PC (pictured).

LenovoEMC, a partnership with storage giant EMC, debuted the px4-400d Network Storage offering, a four-bay desktop network-attached storage (NAS) device, aimed at early adopters, small and midsize businesses, and workgroups with up to 75 users.