In an age of increased digitalisation and the emergence of AI solutions, the data centre is once again companies’ most vital tool in staying competitive.
Which is why Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), with its range of data centre infrastructure solutions and services, is rapidly becoming the partner of choice for resellers and customers around the world.
Bevan Lock, Senior Sales Engineer: ISG Africa at Lenovo, explains how Lenovo has expanded its offerings since it launched the ISG division 10 years ago.
“When we started out, we offered just servers. But we have transformed the business, growing our own storage and hybrid cloud solutions – and most of all, changing to a solutions focus.
“We were already good at the underlying infrastructure, offering great reliability and performance. We quickly realised that the next step was to build solutions with our customers, which we do by understanding their business needs and building out ecosystems with them.
This ability to build real solutions for customers comes out of Lenovo ISG’s services-led approach to the market, which includes consulting and co-creating.
In South Africa, enterprises are naturally the biggest focus for Lenovo ISG, but there have been some surprising wins with startups and academia as well.
“There is a lot of innovation happening in the startup space,” Lock shares. “And we are finding a lot of the innovation in new technologies like AI is coming from academia.”
Lenovo goes beyond just the hardware offering, with a range of products that includes servers, storage, and networking equipment, along with related services like cloud computing and analytics.
In addition, ISG solutions span data management, edge computing, analytics and AI, cloud, and infrastructure modernisation. These solutions are delivered to market in alignment with Lenovo’s priority pillars of transformation, innovation, and citizenship.
And the transformation has clearly been successful. “When we started out, we had a base of traditional customers that bought Lenovo because they had bought IBM,” Lock explains. “But we have been able to expand well beyond that base, into retail, financial services and even some success in the public sector.
“As Lenovo, part of this success is because we offer the whole solution, from pocket to cloud.”
New-look data centres
Today’s data centres are being called upon to handle more – and more complex – workloads than ever before. But they are battling to scale efficiently.
The traditional data centre is quickly becoming inefficient in the way it handles today’s more powerful chips and increased density, leading to problems with power and cooling.
Lenovo’s ThinkSystem Neptune family of servers allows IT organisations to reconsider their data centre designs, increasing density and raw compute power while reducing their power and cooling requirements.
Lock explains that Neptune is a server range that offers solutions for various requirements.
“These could include systems that use liquid to complement air cooling, where we would still use fans, but liquid would cool specific components either passively or with pumps. This offers better efficiency and less power usage for the same number of computations as before.
“Then there is Neptune direct warm water cooling, which enables IT organisations to double or treble their computation power while significantly reducing their power requirements.”
These solutions are finding ready interest in the South African market, Lock adds.
“In South Africa, we are constrained in terms of electricity supply. When there’s an intermittent supply, companies are having to provide their own power – so, if their usage can be cut to a third, that’s a win.
“It lets customers make more efficient use of the power they have, with more process cycles, more storage but less electricity usage.”
The shift to AI
The whole world is looking for ways to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and South African companies are no different. But, like organisations around the world, they are coming up against resource limitations and infrastructure complexities.
Tikiri Wanduragala, EMEA Senior Consultant at Lenovo ISG, explains that requirements vary from customer to customer. “We see customers coming in with large data sets, some of whom require speed, others more focused on management or security. Some of our customers are innovators and startups, others are enterprises.
“Many of them are realising the value of AI for the first time. I’ve seen customers get a real eye-opener when they suddenly realise what they could be doing, and the power of what they could achieve.”
For all customers, Lock stresses that data is key. “We used to talk about GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. Now we have to realise it’s garbage in, garbage multiplied.
“For any organisation, their AI solutions will only be as good as their data.”
As a leader in IT modernisation, Lenovo offers AI-ready servers and storage solutions that are designed to run even the heaviest high-performance workloads, to make fast, accurate, sense of data.
Lenovo has already achieved over $2-billion in revenue from its $1-billion investment in AI hardware. Four Centres of Excellence (CoEs) in the US, Europe and Asia help customers successfully employ Lenovo’s full-stack hybrid AI.
For Enterprise AI, Lenovo’s full-stack hybrid AI infrastructure, Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage and continued innovation leadership in energy efficient liquid cooling and GPU cloud models uniquely position it to help businesses of every size achieve AI transformation.
The portfolio of more than 80 AI-optimised infrastructure products goes beyond the AI servers that support all major architectures to include AI devices like AI PCs as well as rich AI native and AI embedded solutions. Importantly, more than 165 pre-validated AI solutions with leading AI software providers address key use cases across industries through the Lenovo AI Innovators program.
Underpinning its AI strategy is Lenovo’s Smarter AI for All philosophy.
Channel focus
The channel is key to Lenovo’s success in the South African market, Lock emphasises.
“We do nothing unless it goes through the channel. There is not a single South African customer that doesn’t buy through the channel – we are very firm on this, and there are no grey areas.
“This builds trust and is part of the reason we do so well with the channel. We do what we say. If we are working with a reseller, we work with them, and don’t chase short term expediency.
“We are in it for the long haul and have built relationships that will last.”
The channel benefits from having access to the full range of Lenovo products and services and one channel programme, while customers benefit from having one partner that can fulfil all their needs.
Wanduragala points out that the company’s relationships with partners and customers are all long-term.
“We are not simply selling servers but providing a full infrastructure including services. Customers are not buying products as much as they are buying roadmaps.
“So, we need to have long-term thinking and relationships.