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| Bhatia (left) and Lappin (right) at the media Q&A session as part of Lenovo Transform. |
It's no longer about hardware-specific solutions and x86 volumes at Lenovo. The company has pivoted to focus on data centre solutions and services that help customers harness the potential of the fourth industrial revolution, facilitated by new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), high performance computing (HPC) and big data analytics.
At Lenovo Transform: Harness the Intelligence Revolution Roderick Lappin, Senior VP, Global Sales & Marketing, Data Center Group, Lenovo said that the company has been moving from shipping boxes over the last 12 months to becoming a trusted data centre provider.
Lenovo has acquired the resources and built up an end-to-end organisation for data centre solutions. It now has dedicated sales and marketing functions as well as a dedicated supply chain for data centre products. The company is building more consistency around its global channel programmes and entering into new systems integrator relationships, Lappin said.
"We're transforming the customer experience and entering the next phase of Lenovo's data centre growth," he said. "Forty-two percent of business leaders today recognise that digital transformation or digital-first is a key priority but less than 50% of them actually have a strategy around that."
Lappin added, "We're focused, paid and bonused on customer experience, not just revenue and profitability. It's not about trying to protect investments in the past. We don't have any legacy that we're trying to sell to you. We really are the largest startup organisation in our industry."
In his keynote Lappin announced the largest data centre portfolio launch in Lenovo history, featuring the new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands. The new portfolio features 14 server platforms, seven storage offerings, and network switches, and is targeted at an addressable data centre market that is worth US$93 billion by 2020.
Of this pie public cloud hyperscale infrastructure is anticipated to have a CAGR of 17% while software-defined infrastructure features a CAGR of 10%. HPC and AI will together account for 11% in CAGR, while classic solutions-based data centre infrastructure - the private, non-cloud market - is shrinking at -4%. ThinkAgile is designed for applications in the first three segments, while ThinkSystem addresses the private non-cloud segment.
Even with the private non-cloud segment slowing, Lappin noted that it is still a significant segment of the total market, accounting for about 40% of the total in 2020. “It is still a US$42 billion addressable market in that space,” he said.
ThinkAgile will be playing a large role in the Asia Pacific region, as organisations are focused on data centre consolidation and implementing hyperconverged solutions, as well as software-defined networking and HPC. “These are some of the key areas where we have started to implement really well,” Sumir Bhatia, VP, Asia Pacific, Data Center Group, Lenovo said.
Lappin explained that buying behaviour is changing among customers. Instead of buying servers and then hiring a network administrator to patch them customers now want plug-and-play systems that require less manpower to maintain, he said. "I've got everything from compute and storage to the network already preconfigured. That's the service they want," he said.
John Boey, Country GM, Singapore and Malaysia, Data Center Group, Lenovo, added that the company no longer sells customers a box and leaves them on their own. The Data Center Group has experts who help customers size a server and tune applications, he said. Lenovo has also ensured that there is data centre-related expertise in every country in the Asia Pacific region.
“With our x86 acquisition we brought in a lot of experts into our business. We looked at retraining a lot of them, into this new IT area,” Bhatia shared, adding that Lenovo has seen several healthcare wins the region, and also made inroads into the aviation and BFSI markets.
Lappin added that HPC, a space formerly owned by large government institutions and institutions of higher education, has become wider globally. Lenovo will be investing more in experts for industry verticals that use HPC. “Every company is a potential HPC customer,” he said. “In the aeronautical and automotive industries specifically they're using HPC to number-crunch, to specifically understand their customers better."
Lenovo has 52,000 employees in 160 countries, seven data centre research centres as well as five global data centre manufacturing facilities.
Interested?
Read the TechTrade Asia blog posts about Lenovo's new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands,
the new world record benchmarks that ThinkSystem has achieved, and
Lenovo's commitment to AI
posted from Bloggeroid
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