Cloud and hyper-converged infrastructure will intensify the growth of the datacenter market - Lenovo

Lenovo’s aim is to become the most trusted datacenter advisor to its customers. Whether it is from a product reliability and customer feedback, or from a security and product innovative perspective, Lenovo has always been at the forefront in the datacenter business. In fact Lenovo as a datacenter player controls its own manufacturing and supply chain, featuring among the top 25 Gartner Supply chain companies in the world. Speaking to VARINDIA, Vivek Sharma, Managing Director - Lenovo Global Technologies India throws more light on some of these aspects - 

Lenovo has made a big transformation from where it was a few years back. The IBM x86 business that Lenovo acquired almost 3 years ago is considered a wonderful legacy. It brought Lenovo not only a strong customer base but a team of excellent engineers and R&D centres across the globe. But from a GTM perspective, Lenovo preferred to continue with a hybrid structure. 

“So our GTM for both the DCG (datacenter group) and PC business are the same,” says Vivek Sharma, Managing Director of Lenovo Global Technologies India. “We tried to focus on future-defined datacenters, and so we have split the business into 4 clear focus areas – hyperscale, hyper-converged and software defined datacenter, HPC (high performance computing) & Artificial Intelligence and lastly datacenter infrastructure. So the DCG has become an entity on its own now and the 4 areas are the ones that we will focus on dedicatedly. We have services spanning across all these 4 segments and each of them run worldwide. This is the structure we have created from a datacenter perspective. These 4 segments have a new leadership team that has been roped in from across the industry,” he says.

A bigger focus on datacenter business
This brings the focus on what alliances to work on, which partners to work with and the services it will offer that will bind them all together. Besides, Lenovo has also created a separate sales & marketing team for the datacenter Group that focuses only on the datacenter business. 

“As a consequence of this, we have done the largest launch in Lenovo’s history in New York – we call it the Lenovo Transform. The launch has been described as taking “the best of the x86 heritage”. Simultaneously we have done a number of roadshows across the globe, where we launched 26 new platforms in the areas of server, storage and network - about 14 new server platforms, 7 storage platforms and 5 network. We also introduced 2 brands – ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. While ThinkAgile addresses the hyper-converged and software defined datacenter space, ThinkSystem caters to the datacenter infrastructure area, which is storage, server and networking. Since there has been a slow and steady shift to software defined and hyper-converged infrastructure, our whole focus will be on consolidation and transformation,” explains Vivek. 

In fact as Vivek puts it, there is no more ‘Rip and Replace’ of datacenters, but in the last 5 years Lenovo instead ripped and replaced the infrastructure. Customers are slowly and steadily moving workloads to software defined or hyper-converged environments. Hyper-converged has given the customer the freedom of creating a virtualized and a hybrid cloud environment and the datacenter can be controlled very well now. And this trend is seen happening within both the mid-market and enterprise customers. 

In terms of segments, BFSI and Government will continue to be strong markets for Lenovo. Mid-market is seeing a huge explosion in terms of cloud adoption – whether it is pharma, airlines where there is a lot of action happening. “In fact they are early adopters than most of the large corporates,” points out Vivek.  “We have a wonderful story to tell from a HANA perspective, because for SAP HANA, Lenovo is one of the largest datacenter infrastructure base. They do lot of R&D with us and they do endorse us openly.” 

As a matter of fact, Lenovo also happens to be one of the fastest growing supercomputing companies in the world; from 0 in 2014 it has risen to #100 in 2017 according to Top500 listings.  “We are doing a lot of innovations in this area,” supports Vivek. “We have recently completed the delivery and implementation of the world’s largest, next-generation Intel-based Supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. This new system is listed at #13 on the latest TOP500 list.”

And as Vivek sums up, everything Lenovo does has to revolve around customers and keep them happy. The next focus is to work with partners and the channel to focus on expanding the business with a specific focus on future defined datacenter. 

Samrita Baruah
samrita@varindia.com

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