Lenovo servers to hit Oz in Sept

Lenovo's global chief executive Bill Amelio this week said the Chinese hardware specialist would start offering its ThinkServer line in Australia from late September.

Amelio made the comments during a rushed visit to Australia this week. Yesterday he spoke with partners and customers near the company's Australian headquarters in St Leonards, before conducting a brief interview with ZDNet.com.au this morning.

"I think it's an important product category for all of our large accounts, it's important for us to demonstrate to the mid-market and below that we're a one-stop IT shop for our client base," Ameilo said about the server launch, planned for 30 September locally. Thus far the company has mainly sold PCs and laptops locally.

According to the firm's website, the servers will be available with one or two Intel Xeon processors, offering a maximum of 48GB of RAM in 12 DIMMs. ThinkServers offer a maximum of eight hard drives. The servers will be available as either rack-mounted units or towers, and can be fitted with either 2.5- or 3.5-inch hard drives.

According to analyst firm Gartner, Lenovo is currently the fourth largest PC vendor in the world, behind Dell, Acer and current market leader HP. Gartner estimates the firm's 2008 market share at 7.8 per cent of all global PC shipments. However, Gartner listed Lenovo as the biggest PC vendor in the Asia-Pacific region, with strong growth in its home country of China.

David Nicol, the firm's director, small business and consumer technology in Australia and New Zealand said more information on the servers would not be available until closer to the release date, but noted that the servers would be pitched at small and medium business.