Dive Brief:
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Lenovo announced Friday the appointment Kim Stevenson as its new senior vice president and general manager. Stevenson will oversee Lenovo’s core data center products and solutions portfolio, according to the announcement.
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Formerly at Intel, Stevenson served as its CIO, then chief operating officer for the Client and IoT business and Systems Architecture group.
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Stevenson will lead Lenovo’s new Data Center Infrastructure (DCI) business segment, which was formed to help push Lenovo into five new market segments: data center infrastructure; the software-defined data center; high-performance computing and artificial intelligence applications; "hyperscale" systems; and data center services, according to the announcement.
Dive Insight:
Lenovo, like other PC makers, is looking to find new revenue streams as PC sales continue to slide. Worldwide PC shipments dropped 3.7% in the fourth quarter of 2016 from the fourth quarter of 2015, according to Gartner. Although Lenovo is currently the biggest PC seller worldwide, the changing market still presents significant challenges to their business.
In 2015, Lenovo proactively enforced a number of cost cuts, including trimming 3,200 jobs. But with Stevenson, the company can work to enter new areas of computing, focusing on infrastructure rather than just consumer technology.