Notebook giant Lenovo, which is struggling to compete with rivals Hewlett-Packard and Dell  in the U.S. market, promoted channel veteran Stephen DiFranco to lead its U.S. charge.

DiFranco, who has 21 years of channel experience, joined Lenovo four months ago as the U.S. consumer channel boss after two years working on chip maker AMD (NYSE:AMD)'s consumer channel efforts. Before that, DiFranco was a top channel executive at storage player Maxtor.

Lenovo confirmed DiFranco's promotion, which comes as Michael Bruemmer, Lenovo vice president and general manager, Americas SMB Sales, is set to leave the company.

Solution providers, who did not want to be identified, said they have complained vociferously about competition from Lenovo's telesales team. They hope that DiFranco's appointment is a sign of a new channel era at Lenovo.

Lenovo finished fifth in a six-vendor notebook and mobile computer field in the 2008 CRN Channel Champions rankings based on a survey of solution providers.

Source:ChannelWeb