Express Computer in a joint interaction with the ISG group leaders of Lenovo, Sumir Bhatia, President, Lenovo ISG Asia Pacific and Amit Luthra, MD, Lenovo ISG India, understands how Lenovo is navigating its customers through these challenging times and emerging trends in the IT infrastructure
Excerpts from the interview:
Can you share the recent performance of the ISG group of Lenovo?
Sumir: Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) in Asia Pacific ISG offers end-to-end infrastructure requirements for businesses ranging from servers, HPC/AI, edge, cloud, and services, all under an as-a-service model. We recently came out with Q3 results, and the ISG revenue recorded was 48% year-on-year to a historic high of US$2.9 billion. Much higher than any of our competitors in the market. The other group that’s also growing is our solution and services group, the SSG, and this is all the solutions and services that we’re providing for customers, because it’s not just about hardware, but it’s all the solutions to help enable our customers for their digital transformation journey. Now, the overall revenue share of non-PC business, that is Lenovo ISG and SSG contributes 41% of the business. So that’s really growing.
As a head of ISG business Asia Pacific, how do you navigate uncertain times and balance out the need to digitise the business as you continue investments in growth areas?
Sumir: If you look at the world today, the macroeconomics of things such as currency fluctuations, uncertainty in the market has a lot of organizations worried. For an organization, there’s two states that they can be in – they can either be disrupted or they will be the disruptor. And for them to be the disruptor, they need to have the power of smarter solutions to transform intelligently. Many have transitioned into a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. However, this also requires them to manage their cashflow efficiently and leverage consumption-based models to achieve business objectives. This is a journey for most customers, and we are excited to be part of their transformation. We are seeing a lot of customers moving a lot of their workloads from the public cloud to the on-premises or hybrid cloud. We call it the repatriation of the cloud. So, a key focus is the hybrid cloud environment, and that means HCI solutions, software defined infrastructure solutions and so forth, which help them to keep things on-prem and also on the cloud and manage efficiently. Lenovo plays in both. The other area of focus is data intelligence. It’s very important to have the right amount of data and the insights around the data. Organizations in verticals like retail, manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals and smart cities are all looking at Edge where they want to reduce the latency time, make decisions right at the edge and improve the overall customer experience. Another growing business is supercomputing associated with AI and ML.
India is becoming region conscious giving more focus on ‘Make in India’. Being a Chinese technology brand, where do you see India in the overall scheme of things for Lenovo? Are you satisfied with the progress here?
We do have a Chinese heritage, but we’re truly a global organization. We operate in 180 markets around the world. We have more than 35+ manufacturing facilities around the world. We have R&D centers all over the world, including R&D professionals in India. Nearly 74% of our business is outside China. We are quite a well expanded company outside China too and we’re really growing very well. We have a double digit growth in India. In fact, in Asia Pacific, India’s my fastest growing market, more than any of the other markets. It is growing faster from a worldwide perspective as well. The Indian market is an extraordinarily interesting market for us. It’s the third largest technology market now and the pace of digital adoption is remarkable. We’re very bullish from a long-term perspective in India in the growth opportunity that it provides us.
With recent supply chain disruption, how is Lenovo looking at strengthening the supply chain? Have the supply chain problems normalised?
We have manufacturing units of the PC, mobile and tablets in India. But for server manufacturing, we are constantly evaluating the best way of how and where we want to go and there are many factors. Lot of data centers are coming, and the cost pressure on organizations is very high. They want it for the real cost. We are able to meet that with our global supply chain. From our perspective, what we see right now is that for us the supply chain is back to normal , as it would have been pre-pandemic.
Can you share how High-Performance Computing as a Service (HPCaaS) is growing. Any use case?
Amit: Our TruScale High-Performance Computing as a Service (HPCaaS) is delivering the power of supercomputing to organisations of all sizes through a cloud-like experience. The Indian Institute of Technology – Jodhpur (IIT-J), one of the country’s premier technology institutes, selected Lenovo’s new HPC platform, which is based on our ThinkSystem SR645 and SR665 servers, to build a future-ready HPC platform to meet the long-term requirements of their researchers and accelerate their AI/ML research outcomes. At Lenovo, we strive to develop innovative solutions that can empower businesses to keep up with the pace of constantly emerging trends.