Lenovo's Next Move

The VAR Guy has been watching Lenovo — maker of ThinkPad laptops — and scratching his head in confusion. While HP has successfully targeted small and midsize businesses, Lenovo has remained focused almost exclusively on large enterprises and corporate executives.

That strategy made sense when IBM, king of enterprise computing, owned the ThinkPad line. But Lenovo is a pure PC company. And ignoring the SMB sector just doesn’t make any sense.

Apparently, Lenovo CEO Bill Amelio agrees. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published yesterday, Amelio conceded that Lenovo has to push into the SMB sector–fast. And for good reason. Lenovo’s profits have been falling. And the SMB space–as any VAR will tell you–is rich with PC opportunities.

Still, targeting the SMB sector won’t be easy. HP has HP has rebounded strongly this year, Dell seems to be regaining its footing, and even Apple is earning attention from business customers.