Lenovo this week launched a series of initiatives including a partnership with NetApp that collectively are intended to add fuel to the company’s resurgence.
Announced at a Transform 2.0 event, the alliance with NetApp adds an array of storage offerings to the Lenovo portfolio from NetApp. In addition, the two companies have agreed to collaborate on the development of hyper-converged infrastructure platforms for the network edge as well as form a joint venture to build and sell products in China.
That alliance complements existing software-defined infrastructure platform Lenovo has developed in collaboration with Cloudistics, Nutanix, and VMware. Lenovo executives vowed at the event that Lenovo would soon become the largest provider of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platforms based on Nutanix software. At the same time, Lenovo previously revealed it is working on a Dimensions project in collaboration with VMware to deploy HCI platforms at the network edge.
This week Lenovo also unveiled AirStack, a set of IT management tools designed to make it simpler to simultaneously managed multiple stacks of software.
Lenovo this week also promised that in 2019 it would make the platforms it sells available on usage-based licensing models to those organizations that want to consume on-premises hardware as if were a true cloud service.
Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing told event attendees these alliances are all part of a Lenovo strategy seeking to combine hardware, access to data and advanced algorithms to create a platform for artificial intelligence applications that will drive waves of new opportunities for the company. Those efforts are designed to accelerate a recent return to focusing on market expansion after a two-year period of depressed profits.
“Lenovo has turned the corner,” says Yuanqing.
In general, Yuanqing notes that Lenovo now views PCs, smartphones, and cameras as the primary devices through which data will be collected for advanced AI applications, many of which he says will be deployed on supercomputers built by Lenovo.
One the PC side of the house Lenovo also unveiled a lightweight workstation and Lenovo ThinkShield, an extension of the Lenovo PC brand that focuses on adding additional layers of security at the BIOS and firmware level. Lenovo also promised it would deliver a range of PC devices optimized for augmented reality applications for business use cases beginning next year.
Overall, Lenovo claims to have 11,000 partners that have the potential to sell its complete portfolio. It’s not clear how many of those partners are selling both PCs and server infrastructure. But after several years of restructuring, it’s clear Lenovo is counting on the channel to gain share across a much wider range of products and services.
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