Good week/Bad week

We take a peek at who's set fair and who's had a mare over the last seven days

Good week

Lenovo
Against the backdrop of Acer's inventory woes and boardroom musical chairs and HP's will they/won't they PSG saga, Lenovo has become the forgotten man of the PC market.
But the Chinese outfit's work behind the scenes paid off this week, as it soared to number two in the global PC market, overtaking Dell in the process.
And chairman Yuanqing Yang has the top spot - currently held by HP - in his sights. One can only imagine a broad smirk danced across his lips when he pointed out: "Our customers know we are fully committed to the PC market for the long term."

Onyx
Onyx has joined the growing ranks of the channel's nouveau riche after bagging a £42m investment from ISIS Equity Partners. IT services is undoubtedly a hotspot for private equity lolly right now and the Stockton-on-Tees-based datacentre, business continuity and cloud specialist is the latest to benefit from the trend. Some £15m will be ploughed into strategic acquisitions, Onyx promised.
Mark Advani, who led the investment in Onyx on behalf of ISIS, said: "We are looking forward greatly to helping [Onyx] accelerate their growth while building upon their high-touch, local-service proposition."

Redstone
London-listed reseller Redstone admitted it was close to hanging up its boots in 2010 following an awful three years that saw its share price plunge from £1 to less than a penny.
Now, it appears the Cisco Gold partner can do no wrong as it bagged yet another eight-figure contract. After scoring a £22m banking deal in September, Redstone has won preferred-bidder status on a managed WAN deal with an unnamed customer, worth a cool £10.2m. Its pallid share price has also recovered slightly this year.

Bad week

Torfaen County Borough Council
The Welsh council confirmed last week that 8,600 laptops it acquired through the Value Wales framework earlier this year have yet to been deployed.
The deal, awarded to XMA in March, had already upset rival VARs who complained the tender information was confusing. In a statement to ChannelWeb, a council representative confirmed that none of the laptops were in use at the moment, but will be by April 2012. "An innovative learning management system is being procured by a tender and the laptops will be distributed when the software is ready for installation," they said.

Acer
It might be more accurate to say this has been the latest in a succession of bad weeks for Acer. At the start of 2011, the Taiwanese vendor looked to be on the fast track to becoming the world's biggest PC maker.
It now lies in a distant fourth after a year in which its chief executive was ousted and the vendor had to write off $150m (£94m) because of excess stock in EMEA.
During Q3 2011 Acer's EMEA PC shipments dropped 39.3 per cent, said Gartner. The analyst reckons the inventory issues will have a "permanent effect" on Acer, with channel partners leery of placing big orders. One can only assume they've migrated to reliable old HP.