Lenovo announces U.S. development center

Chinese PC maker Lenovo Group, which bought IBM's PC business earlier this year, will open a development center in North Carolina to collaborate with partners on new personal computing technologies, it said Tuesday.

The Innovation Center will be opened with partners Intel, Microsoft, Symantec, LANDesk Software, and IBM. The center will be located at Lenovo's facilities in the North Carolina technology hub of Research Triangle Park and staffed by engineers, programmers and product developers from the partner companies.

The center will be dedicated to technology incubation, partner collaboration, product development, imaging, and training, Lenovo said. It will also feature a technology showcase.

Construction is expected to be completed early in the third quarter of this year and initial customer projects are already being accepted, Lenovo said. It did not reveal how much it is investing in the center.

Chip maker Intel said that its interest in the center lies in platforms, and research and development areas such as virtualization and active management technology. Partners such as security vendors Symantec and LANDesk are aiming to incorporate their technologies in various systems, while Microsoft said it is interested in creating and maintaining secure infrastructures and will use the center to give customers hands-on training with new technologies.

Lenovo completed its $1.75 billion buy of IBM's PC business earlier this month, promising a wave of new products to be sold outside of China. These are expected to include new ThinkPad notebooks, with features such as rotating screens that would allow them to be used as tablet computers.