Lenovo’s Rajesh Thadani wants partners in APAC enabled to capture AI opportunities

Since taking over his new role, Rajesh Thadani, Lenovo’s Asia Pacific One Channel Leader, is now focused on ensuring partners are ready to capture the AI opportunity in the region.

While Lenovo continues to lead the PC market, both globally and in Asia Pacific, the big focus for Rajesh Thadani, Lenovo’s Asia Pacific One Channel Leader is to now capture the opportunity around AI in the region. A veteran at Lenovo, Thadani started his new role in June 2025 and remains optimistic of the opportunities in the channel for the vendor.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Thadani shares his vision and hopes for the channel ecosystem as well as how Lenovo is working with its partners to ensure everyone achieves success in the region.

According to Thadani, as a channel first organization, the Lenovo 360 platform continues to enhance the motions around Enable, Connect and Grow for the partner ecosystem.

“Enable is more about providing our partners in terms of a solution, marketing content, pricing platforms, solution hubs, bid portals. So that's been the big motion. And the Connect part is more about how we help to connect our business partners with various communities so that they can collaborate and also learn from each other. We have various initiatives around these where it is Lenovo 360 circle for sustainability. We have a partner advisory board, and we have partner events from a Connect perspective to make sure we really get our partners up to the speed. And the last motion, Grow, is all about learning and earning, which is about scaling up our partners in terms of providing them accreditation, certification, and then linking it back to the tiering structures and incentives,” Thadani explained.

At the same time, Thadani also pointed out Lenovo has announced several pathways to help partners further enhance their capabilities. For example, there is a Lenovo 360 pathway of specialized partners around storage, workstations and such. Within these pathways, Lenovo is enabling partners not just with better incentives, but also in terms of commitment, and in terms of what can be done to help them expand the market, whether it is market development funds, marketing content and so on and so forth for them to become a lot more enabled to sell these solutions.

“We have specific vertical pathways like Lenovo 360 for education, which is the other piece that we have just recently announced to basically help support partners in those specific verticals as well. And then, to drive this whole One Lenovo motion, we have Lenovo 360 Top Choice and Top Choice Express. Now, clearly the vision of our infrastructure business is to drive a lot more velocity business scale. We have done reasonably well in our enterprise business, in our larger enterprise business, in the CSP business, but when it comes to velocity and scale, especially in the SMB side, there's a lot more that we can do and enable our partners better. That's where the capabilities around Top Choice Express comes in. We provide this curated list of components on ISG, where the partners can reconfigure those components and we have forecasted them back at the factory, and we're able to ship and deliver in about 10 business days. So that's a huge commitment. And we continue to fuel that,” Thadani said.

For the services offering, Lenovo 360 TruScale is Lenovo’s definition of as a service offering, where there are devices as a service and infrastructure as a service. Thadani said this is a key pathway for partners to collaborate with Lenovo.

“It's quite flexible, modular in terms of what services partners bring to the table and what Lenovo has to offer. So, we do a mix and match of the capabilities. The whole idea is to complement what a channel has in terms of services, not to compete with them in that space, but to complement what they have and create a more scalable and as a service model for our customers as well. So those are the enhancements that we have done, and we continue to fuel those so that we can capture these opportunities.”

“And if you look at it as a result, we have like almost over 50 solutions now which have been available to our partners to take to the market. We have almost 72 members in our Lenovo 360 circle. We have almost six and a half thousand partners having Lenovo 360 certifications and growing,” Thadani added.

Growing the Enterprise SMB business

Looking at Lenovo’s cloud service provider revenue, Thadani mentioned that the vendor continues to diversify its customer base, expanding into tier one, tier two accounts. But another area which he is really hoping to see growth is in the enterprise small and medium businesses (ESMB).

“If you look at our last year's results, we have grown by double digits, even on the ESMB space, and we are growing at premium to market. But clearly, when you see the opportunity and the market share, I feel there's a lot more opportunity for us to scale in the ESMB space. And within that, if I look at mid-market, definitely would be a key area for us to go gain momentum on,” he said.

For Thadani, the mid-market opportunities would be a lot more about how Lenovo drives low-touch frictionless buying.

“When we talk about infrastructure business, it's all about customizing our solutions and offering those tailor-made solutions for our customers. Hence, through Top Choice Express, we're able to possibly provide that experience to our customers, which we're already seeing a very good adoption and scaling as well. That would be the big focus for the organization as we move forward,” he explained.

Thadani also pointed out that partners are keen on how to adapt to this growing trend and want to become part of this journey.

“We are seeing them investing in enabling themselves to be ready for it. When I look at it in terms of the AI readiness, it's going to be critical. And then, our whole focus is how do we leverage this opportunity and enable as a set of partners. We have the various pathways – connect, enable and grow, as well as the various initiatives that we're driving within that support this whole rhythm. At the same time, when I look at it in terms of beyond that, we're also looking at developing these playbooks. For example, we have collaborated to create this CIO playbook with IDC. The playbook provides our partners assessment tools to assess the customers on where they are in terms of their AI journey, what are the benefits that they would possibly want to see, and then leverage those findings. We will recommend AI solutions,” said Thadani.

“If you look at the pocket to cloud, we have the complete solutions to offer in this whole AI era. We have almost 80 plus AI optimized infrastructure products. We have almost 165 plus solutions available through our AI innovator program. So, there are lots of tools available. We need to get these to our partners and who can adopt it and take it to our customers to be able to leverage joint success for this.”

The right distribution model for partners

Thadani said there is also focus on enabling partners with the right distribution model on the infrastructure services. This includes getting feedback from partners to say which are the components that they feel makes a lot more sense from driving this whole mid-market opportunity.

“From the constant forum feedback that we have, we involve them in the decision-making through our various forums, whether it is roundtables or partner advisory councils to make sure that we have those critical inputs coming in for us to make the whole piece a lot more inclusive in terms of the coverage of the components. And to be very frank, the important piece in this all piece is the supply chain. We are leading in this space. We are number one in the Gartner Asia-Pacific supply chain report that was published among the top 10, and number eight globally as well. We have diversified our factories in 30 locations, spread across 11 markets. That's making us even better in terms of enabling and providing this supply to our partners and helping them to deliver to our customers as well,” said Thadani.

When it comes to AI readiness, Lenovo has products like pocket to cloud and other complete solutions to offer to customers.

“We have almost 80 plus AI optimized infrastructure products. We have almost 165 plus solutions available through our AI innovator program. So, there are lots of tools available. The focus is how we can get these to our partners and who can adapt it and take it to our customers to be able to leverage joint success for this one,” he said.

The future with partners

Since taking over this new role in the channel, what excites Thadani is the engagement with the business partners. hearing from them and taking feedback and acting on feedback.

“I believe building trust, and credibility is so key in any business. And if I look at my success factors, I owe it to that because I've been able to successfully take and act on feedback. And that is what business partners need. Nobody is perfect. Partners expect us to be able to respect some of the market operating challenges to see how we can support them and how do we continue to support them in terms of new opportunities. So, to me, engaging them, being with them, hearing them, taking the feedback, acting on feedback has been the most exciting part. It would be the most exciting part of this job as well,” he said.

Thadani’s vision for partners is just as Lenovo is hoping to capture the AI decade.

“From our perspective, we have a strong foundation in terms of the brand perspective. We clearly want to become a brand of choice for our customers and business partners. And we are continuing to invest in the brand, whether it is being a technology partner for FIFA or whether it's F1. We want to continue to be a brand of choice. While we are leaders in PC, we have the growing ISG business. How do we leverage that? To me, from a business partner perspective, the advice is it's important for us to adopt to that scene.”

“And because Lenovo is partner centric and we are channel first, we continue to invest in the brand. We continue to have this pocket to cloud portfolio. We are already seeing a lot of investments from the partner themselves. We see them as very inquisitive about how they can become one part of the journey. They feel we have the right brand to support them in that journey. So, my one advice would be, let's go capture this whole AI opportunity, let's go capture this whole PC refresh opportunity together. And let's be ready in terms of enablement and in all accreditations for us to be able to capture that together,” he concluded.