Shaping the Future with Lenovo and Microsoft

By Lenovo Guest Blog 2

Shape the Future is old news. But Microsoft’s overhaul of the six-year-old program is certainly not. Reduced purchase costs to VARs and ease of implementation mean that selling into the public education space is easier and more lucrative.

Shape the Future

If you’re unfamiliar with the program, Shape the Future is a partnership between Microsoft and OEMs that offers resellers lower hardware and software prices when they sell into public K-12 schools.

The initiative was launched in 2008 as Microsoft’s campaign to reach the billions of users who didn’t have access to the Internet. The first accounts targeted were public education customers, and they remain the segment that Shape the Future continues to address.

The Shape the Future updates introduce a single letter of eligibility for all K-12 public schools and in addition, the size of the deal required to activate Shape the Future pricing has been reduced from 10,000 units in a year to 3,000 units in a year. An RFP/Tender will no longer be required to leverage the pricing.

The Education Market

Shape the Future makes it easier to attack the education market, already one of the largest verticals in IT sales. Today, there are 20 million devices installed, according to Microsoft.

To give you an idea of scale, in the United States, there are 18,000 school districts, 3.2 million teachers and 60 million public and private school students. Twenty percent of the U.S. population is involved in schools. The entire market spends $20 billion per year on IT and textbooks. In total, there are 50 million devices at stake.

Besides the numbers of devices installed and yet to be sold, there’s the opportunity to build relationships in education accounts, leading to consistent purchases and increasing your return on investment. Education spending on IT rollouts is growing every year, and the value proposition of VARs—a complete IT solution comprised of hardware installation, networking and post-sale support—resonates with public school officials, who are interested in simplifying their IT needs.

The definition of post-sale support has broadened, with Microsoft’s education and development apps constituting an increasing part of schools’ curricula. Regular training sessions for Windows’ app marketplace, the use of those apps and for the Microsoft Office Suite could become part of your value-add sale to the customer—and part of your bill.

Microsoft & Lenovo Partnership

To offer a comprehensive toolkit to its partners, Lenovo has teamed up with Microsoft to provide aggressive pre-approved pricing when selling into U.S. public sector K-12 customers. Lenovo is the perfect choice to pitch alongside Microsoft: Our history of durability and reliability appeals to school administrators and teachers. When a nationwide survey of school CIOs asked whether ruggedness of a device played an important role in their IT purchasing decisions, almost all said, “yes.”

Lenovo notebooks are the most reliable in the industry, and have the lowest failure rates. Lenovo offers a comprehensive portfolio of hardware and services for education. Lenovo’s quality means that our computers are less likely to go down when drinks are spilled on keyboards, laptops are dropped or tablets are shoved into overflowing book bags.

Lenovo has created 17 Topseller, or pre-built, models to make it easy for you to order and more profitable when you sell. Prices start at $399. ThinkPad, ThinkCentre and ThinkStation are among the systems available. You can find the list of products available here.

How to Take Action

You must confirm the end user is a publicly funded K-12 institution, preferably by checking the end user’s name against the approved list Microsoft has provided, which you can find here. Your distributor can give you the special Shape the Future pricing after you’ve confirmed the school’s public status; just contact them and reference special bid #6500180504.

Sam Liebl is Inside Channel representative, Southern California, at Lenovo. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly, and are part of The VAR Guy’s annual platinum sponsorship.