Competition or Cooptetion
We all know about IBM's recent deal with Lenovo to allow the cloning of its Intel servers. Early 2009, Lenovo will manufacture and market IBM xSeries servers under its own brand.
Now Shadow Ram has caught hold of an internal memo circulated by IBM to its sales team enumerating its strategy on combating Lenovo in the India market once it launches its server range.
The memo admits that there exists a large number of enterprise and SMB customers who still associate Lenovo Think Pad with IBM and this could create a confusion once Lenovo launches its server business. Also, till now IBM and Lenovo jointly executed deals which required PCs (Lenovo) and servers (IBM).
The memo also urges the sales team to think of ways to ensure that they don't lose market share to Lenovo.
Now thats real coopetition. IBM will get royalty from Lenovo for cloning their server technology and at the same time both will compete in the same market.
Heads to roll at Microsoft India?
Channels are buzzing with the speculation that many key Microsoft India employees could face the stick from the US management as they have fallen terribly short of meeting their targets for 2007. Particularly, the government sales team has done an extremely dull business. Even some of the teams that did well are unhappy as they didn't get their incentives due to shortfall in revenue. Many Microsoft resellers have speculated that Neelam Dhawan's recent exit from the company may have something to do with the underperformance of the sales organization. If these speculations are right than we could see many more heads roll at Microsoft in the coming months. |