Las Vegas, NV – While the healthcare industry is perhaps no stranger to being courted by the channel, few technology vendors may be pursuing the education sector as aggressively as Lenovo.
At its fifth Accelerate event in Las Vegas, the PC maker identified the two verticals as the biggest market opportunities for partners, but touted education as the vertical in which it leads the industry.
“We’re beating Apple with capability and serviceability, beating Acer and Samsung with ruggedization, reliability, innovation, failure rates, and beating Dell and HP with product design, innovation, and anticipating customer needs,” said Jason Mooneyham, vice president of public sector sales at Lenovo.
Specifically, Mooneyham cited the company’s tablet and laptop PC solutions for education as leading the industry in solutions designed for the education space.
In its latest models, Lenovo has implemented such design features as the latest Gorilla Glass, rubber bumpers that protect device corners from damaged, reduced keyboard gaps, and reinforced top covers.
Meanwhile, in functionality, Lenovo also offers multimode, which allows certain devices to switch between laptop, tablet, and hybrid modes, photo, video and audio editing capabilities, classroom management functionalities for teachers. All this is then combined with what the company says are the lowest failure rates as well as Chrome OS options for lower costs of entry.
It now wants partners to get on board to help acquire customers, both in the US and in Canada. According to Mooneyham, in the US in 2015, JK-12 alone will be over $1 billion market, which was the public sector revenue for last year.
With many schools purchasing for the first time, he anticipates a “spike in demand” in hardware sales as well as classroom management solutions. Even in higher education, workstations, graphics intensive PCs and servers with big data analytics and research capacities should see huge opportunity, he said.
“I really don’t think we’ll go down the path of ‘let’s just get everybody the same,’” he said. “I think we’ll get into a more personalized approach. We want to be prepared, we want our team to be prepared.”