Lenovo and IBM announced today that conditions for Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business have been satisfied and the parties anticipate they will begin closing the transaction effective on October 1, 2014.
The acquisition will make Lenovo the third-largest player in the $42.1 billion global x86 server market.
Lenovo is acquiring System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, x86-based Flex integrated systems, NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software, blade networking and maintenance operations.
IBM will retain its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, PureApplication and PureData appliances.
The agreement builds upon a strong history of collaboration that began in 2005 when Lenovo acquired IBM’s PC business, including the ThinkPad line of PCs.
Lenovo’s pending acquisition of Motorola Mobility from Google will make it the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, while further strengthening its position as a top-three maker of smart connected devices — PCs, tablets and smartphones.
As described in the January announcement of Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business, Lenovo and IBM have also established a strategic alliance where Lenovo will serve as an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to IBM and resell selected products from IBM’s industry-leading storage and software portfolio.
That includes products from IBM’s entry and midrange Storwize storage product family, Linear Tape Open (LTO) products, IBM Flash storage arrays and elements of IBM’s system software portfolio, including Smart Cloud, General Parallel File System and Platform Computing solutions.
This strategic alliance means Lenovo can now offer these products as part of a more comprehensive enterprise IT solution, allowing it to support a greater range of customer needs in data centers.
The transition will begin Wednesday in countries that are part of the initial closing, which includes most major markets. The transaction is expected to close in most other countries later this year, with the few remaining countries following in early 2015.
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