Innovation plays the role of catalyst in Lenovo’s growth

Sumir Bhatia, President Asia Pacific, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo 

Lenovo has been at the forefront of innovation and technology, and it is the core of the company which has helped in its growth trajectory. To make innovations happen Lenovo has labs and POCs across the globe with some finest engineers in high-performance computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. It invests a lot of money in R&D, which is very close to Lenovo. The company also has a purpose-built infrastructure. Also, for Lenovo, the ecosystem is so important that together they want to grow and thrive with the partners. In a chat with VARINDIA, Sumir Bhatia, President Asia Pacific, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo, and Amit Luthra, MD, India, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo discuss the reasons behind the company's growth, how it is bridging the partner and customer gap, overcoming supply chain constraints, deployments, innovation, and R&D, etc.

Lenovo’s growth story 

The digital transformation era has boosted the growth of Lenovo ISG. The growth is attributed to its customers by helping them to sail through their digital transformation journey. Elaborating on this, Sumir Bhatia, President Asia Pacific, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo explains, "First of all, when we talk about growth, from an ISG standpoint, our latest results are 48% year-on-year globally. This growth has come by helping our customers in the digital transformation era. Now we are focusing on specific areas and helping our customers grow and thrive. One is cloud repatriation. There is a level of cloud repatriation undergoing and this helps our customers in the hybrid environment, providing them the solutions with our partners, whether it is Nutanix, VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat, and others. The second part of the digital transformation from where we are seeing growth is on the edge. We at Lenovo have a wide portfolio, which is purpose-driven right  from security to ruggedness, and depending on whether you just want to compute or go to the extent of using GPUs."
 

Bridging the gap between partner and customer

While talking about the gap between the partner and customer, Sumir says, "First of all, bridging the gap is all about value and making it easy for our partners and customers to adopt the technology. One of the gaps that customers have, as they move into adopting technology, is the availability of funds, availability of plans, and capex, so we provide solutions to them leveraging as-a-service. Bringing this all together in a service model - TruScale gives them the ability to plan and be able to take all the opex models as-a-service of a cloud on-prem. We are committed to bridging any gaps that exist, and our top priority is to collaborate with our customers and offer them innovative solutions that support their digital transformation journey." 

Demand and supply gap

During the pandemic when the entire world was reeling under the contagious Coronavirus which hampered normal life and due to the strict COVID-19 rules, the entire supply chain had gone for a toss. The entire industry faced these severe constraints but  gradually with time, everything has come to normal.

Uttering the good news that the global supply chain has normalized, Sumir states, “I know there are many partners who have   a   concern   about   the   ongoing   supply   chain.   During the pandemic, there was a global supply chain constraint, and everybody in the industry faced what we had to face too. Today, I am pleased to tell you that our supply is on a pre- pandemic basis and back to normal. So rest assured, when you are ordering with us, expect speedy yet secure; cost-efficient yet reliable delivery. And I'm really happy to share that with you.” 

Elaborating on the same, Amit Luthra, MD, India, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo says, "As we all know when the pandemic struck us, most organizations wanted to have their digitization up and running, and with supply chains being constrained across the industry. Most organizations went lock stock and barrel into the cloud because they wanted their applications to be live and running. Now they realize that there are many things, be it cost, performance, or data sovereignty, which are   bothering  them and they are bringing some of these workloads back to the on- premises. We do work with the complete ecosystem with hyper scalers who are powering cloud - be it cloud service providers who are helping the Indian enterprises and SMEs to give cloud-like service for them or the customers who are building these large private clouds across the ecosystem. We are helping them on the supply side with cutting edge technology making digital transformation real with the most intelligent infrastructure that we have." 

SUCCESSFUL DEPLOYMENTS

Lenovo has helped many organizations transform to digitally abled businesses. Among many deployments, there are a few which are worth mentioning. Amit pointed out two deployments in the high performance computing area. He highlights, “High performance computing is very close to our heart leveraging the new age emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In high performance computing, two such cases - India's premier Institute IIT is one of them. So, we recently had a successful installation and deployment of refreshing many older technologies that IIT Jodhpur had. We went in for a new fresh deployment which can actually bring down the time of research by offering a 100% higher performance. Since research becomes very close and we talk about human progress, one thing which is again very close to our heart is about genome sequencing, where we have our own IP around it. On genome sequencing, we helped India as one of the largest premier institutes CSIR-IGIB to do improve time to research and accelerate human progress and mankind.” 

“Now other solutions I would like to talk to you about is around smart cities and the city of Barcelona is a great example of that. The city of Barcelona sees a lot of tourism and business. We have actually implemented an edge solution in Barcelona. Servers right at the edge gives them insights into all the data and you can use those insights in various ways - tourism, commercial organizations, crime, law & order to make it truly a smart city. We at Lenovo are able to implement that in Barcelona. We have many smart cities around the world, including here in India and we continue to be the leaders in helping cities be smarter,” says Sumir while talking about global deployment. 

Innovation & R&D makes Lenovo an obvious choice

Lenovo earns its stripes through innovation and technology. The company has labs and POCs across the globe. Lenovo possesses the best engineers and is proud of it. Lenovo's customers and partners have access to these world-class resources and infrastructures.

“So Lenovo is the number one company in the supercomputer 500, a list of top 500 installations around the world. Lenovo has been number one and every month it changes anywhere between 178 to 180 - Lenovo continues to lead that patch. We lead that because it is all about innovation. You really have to earn your stripes in that and that involves a lot of innovation, technology and we at Lenovo are absolutely leading that.

Talking about labs and POCs, we do these across the world. In Asia Pacific, here in India based on the requirements needed by customers we do POCs and benchmarks. In these labs, benchmarks can be done remotely and leverage all the equipment that we have. It is not just the infrastructure that you can leverage, the most important thing is the skilled talent. The skills as we all know are a big shortage. At Lenovo, we have the best engineers   around   high-performance   computing,  AI,   and ML for professors, PhDs, weather specialists, and benchmarking specialists, which is something we are very proud of. If you are our customer or partner, you have access to these wonderful resources, infrastructure, and labs that we have around the world," highlights Sumir. 

To Conclude

Amit feels technological innovation makes Lenovo stand out of the crowd. It spends a lot of money on R&D and it builds purpose- built infrastructure. He adds, "We do not just take any general- purpose hardware and make it relevant to the edge. We have a purpose-built infrastructure for the edge. Most importantly, it is the ecosystem play; edge is not just about supplying the hardware, IoT or computing. It is all about making the complete ecosystem work." 

Message to VARS

“One message that I would like to communicate to all the VARS & customers is: change in digital technology will actually help you. In this constrained world where there are currency fluctuations, there are uncertainties around the most important thing that will help you change is digital technology. And to be able to have that change, I would advise to keep an open mind. Just remember there are two states you and your customers can be in - either you will be disrupted, or you will be the disruptor. Having an open mindset will help you and your customers be the disruptors in this digital era. Keep growing and all the best.” Sumir Bhatia, President Asia Pacific, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo.