Enterprise networking and devices company Lenovo revealed its strategies for tapping the telecom and IoT market.
Lenovo will compete with existing networking companies such as IBM, Cisco, Oracle, HPE, Dell, Juniper Networks, among others. Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei and ZTE are already making inroads into the IoT market.
Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) made revenue of $1.2 billion (+16.7 percent) – driven by double-digit growth and margin improvement in all geographies in Q3. North America and EMEA saw their third straight quarter of revenue growth. China returned to revenue growth and margin improvement was another encouraging factor for Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang and his team.
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Lenovo’s global data center business focuses on the needs of hyperscale customers, high performance computing (HPC) customers and enterprise customers by accelerating their cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives with the latest technologies.
Lenovo needs to sharpen its focus on data center business because its mobile phone unit is facing huge challenges from China-based phone companies such as Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Huawei, among others. Lenovo’s phone business including Motorola posted 5 percent dip in revenue to $2.1 billion in the third quarter.
Lenovo’s next phase of the transformation is focused on the telecom infrastructure and IoT requirements, said Kirk Skaugen, executive vice president and president of Lenovo Data Center Group.
Lenovo’s telecom organization will focus on creating joint innovation platforms to deliver customer-centric solutions. Lenovo will build and partner on NFV hardware and software solutions based on The Open Compute Project and other standards to look for 5G opportunities.
The new IoT division from Lenovo will help customers turn their traditional end-points into smart and connected devices, transforming them into analytical engines to drive productivity and efficiency.
Lenovo will focus on embedding server-class equipment in IoT solutions to enhance connectivity and build edge platforms that can analyze data for real time decision making.
Lenovo at MWC
Lenovo is unveiling a performance optimized offering based on ThinkSystem SR650/SR630 servers and switches, Red Hat OpenStack, and Mellanox ConnectX-4 NICs for accelerated packet processing.
Lenovo is also joining the ‘Intel Select Solution for NFV’ program and offering a solution specially optimized for encryption and compression based NFV workloads. The solution is comprised of Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) and Intel XXV710 NIC enabled on Lenovo SR650/SR630 servers.
Lenovo will demo the industry’s first 5G-ready base station with software and virtualized implementation of the centralized and distributed units (CU/DU) in collaboration with China Mobile.
Lenovo strengthens team
Robert Vrij, who earlier worked with Alcatel-Lucent and HPE, will join Lenovo as senior vice president, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) president and head of worldwide global accounts including global communication service providers for Lenovo Data Center Group.
Wilfredo Sotolongo, an IBM veteran, will be the new vice president of the IoT segment for Lenovo Data Center Group.
Kim Stevenson will expand her role by overseeing all data center businesses, including IoT and telecom.
Renee Ure, another IBM executive, has joined Lenovo as vice president of global supply chain for Lenovo Data Center Group.
Beverly Crair will be the vice president of product development and quality for Lenovo Data Center Group.
Baburajan K
