FACE TO FACE
Lenovo - The Challenger Brand
Sumir Bhatia
Vice-President, Data Center Group, AsiaPacific, Lenovo Enterprise Solutions
Lenovo is aggressively looking at
growing its Data Center Group (DCG)
and its objective is to disrupt the market
through its extensive portfolio and
strategic partnerships with Nutanix,
SAP, Microsoft, VMware to name a few.
With these partnerships, it has and will
continue to jointly roll-out a wide range
of disruptive and innovative solutions
geared to address the data center
market.
In India, most CIOs are driving their
organizations towards next generation
IT – cloud based, open sourced, and
software-defined offerings that operate
on a tightly integrated hyperconverged
infrastructure. There is a shift towards
cost efficiencies, while demanding a
far higher degree of customization –
modularity and scalability.
Lenovo’s
portfolio
will
help
organizations avoid getting stuck in
older, closed architectures. For Lenovo,
to help its customers innovate and bring
efficiency in their data centers, it needs
to have a close connect with the CIOs.
So that’s where it is headed and it has
had good progress so far.
How have you structured your organization
to target data centers?
We are proud of the fact that our
DCG business uses focused resources
that understand data center requirements
and system efficiencies. We also have
specialists across servers, storage and
engineered solutions for all our partner
products.
A key focus for us is enabling our
teams to be updated on the best of breed
technologies as well as enabling our
50
November 2016
www.varindia.com
Rahul Agarwal
MD & CEO
Lenovo India
channel partners to help our customers
transform their data centers.
How do you associate the channel in the
server sales?
We are a ’channel First’ company. In
India 95% of our commercial business
runs through channel partners. Needless
to say, it’s an important part of our
business and we are dedicated to our
‘channel first’ strategy of focusing on
partner profitability as a route to holistic
growth. Our comprehensive portfolio
and the fact that we have no legacy to
tie us down, makes Lenovo an attractive
choice to partners.
What is your Storage strategy?
We have a three pronged strategy
focused on various segments. Firstly
our traditional SAN products deliver
unbeatable price, performance and
simplicity with our S Series and V-Series
portfolio.
Secondly our Software defined storage
(SDS) strategy under our StorSelect
portfolio with first to market with
object (Cloudian) and file (Nexenta)
SDS appliances. These appliances are
a cost effective and massively scalable
storage option. Focused workloads
include DevOps, Back up, Archive and
Repository to name a few.
Lastly our global partnership with
Nimble covers all flash and hybrid
architecture to consolidate storage
and scale on demand. Customers can
reduce their data center footprint by 5x
through utilizing predictive analytics,
capacity forecasting and virtualization
dashboards. Flash is the fastest growing
storage segment globally and this
partnership will help position Lenovo as
a leader in this segment.
How is the DCG market doing in India
Market?
The DCG market is changing. Legacy
non-virtualized infrastructure will shrink
from 50% to 20% in the next four years.
The converged, hyperconverged and
virtualized markets will grow from 20%
to 40% in the next four years globally.
Similarly, the hyperscale market will
grow from 20% to 40%. In summary, the
New IT will grow faster than traditional
IT. This is a segment that Lenovo plays
in and it will continue to be a key
focus for us. Our partnership strategy
will help to bring in more innovative
technology to continue to disrupt the
data centers, in turn boosting efficiency.
With this strategy Lenovo is the only
true challenger in the date center market
aiding customers in their move away
from Legacy systems.
What kind of a positioning does Lenovo
enjoy?
In the Commercial PC business,
we are positioned as the most reliable
vendor and Think devices are virtually
service-free.
In the data center space, Lenovo is a
challenger brand.