Deepak Advani
Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer > Lenovo
As senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Deepak Advani’s responsibilities include building the Lenovo brand globally and strengthening the ThinkPad brand. In addition to brand development, his scope extends to demand generation, product marketing, channel marketing, product design and seller enablement. He is also responsible for activating the sponsorship of the 2006 Torino Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Before joining Lenovo, Advani spent 13 years with IBM, rising to become a member of the firm’s senior leadership team. In his previous position, Advani served as vice president, marketing and strategy for IBM’s Personal Computing Division. He was also on the IBM Global Marketing Board, which was responsible for driving marketing across IBM.
Advani’s earlier assignments included a stint running the high-end server business for IBM. Under his leadership, IBM became the number-one provider of high-end servers. He also designed some of the early strategies and tactics for Linux and open source during his time as vice president of worldwide Linux strategy and market development for IBM.
In addition, Advani served as director of the scalable parallel (SP) system software development organization. The SP supercomputer, also known as Deep Blue, garnered international headlines when it defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. Advani was a key part of the leadership team that turned SP systems into a billion-dollar business in only five years.
Advani earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Michigan State, a master’s degree in computer engineering from Wright State, and a master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of Business.