Lenovo adds teeth to its datacenter business in India: Vivek Sharma

Lenovo is rapidly scaling its Data Center Group (DCG) business globally and in India as well. 

The tech giant might be a late entrant in the datacenter domain, but the portfolio acceptance, brand recall and differentiated strategy has been resonating well with the enterprise market, says Vivek Sharma, managing director at Lenovo DCG India. 

Elaborating on the company’s GTM in India, he says, “We primarily look at the market from multiple perspectives, mainly from large enterprise and global accounts. Lenovo also caters to the huge opportunity in mid-markets and SMBs. There is an increased focus on the distribution model of datacenter solutions through our distributors to help us reach the hinterland Tier2 and Tier3 cities in India. This segregation of different GTMs has been paying off well.”

From a market share perspective, Lenovo DCG has increased by leaps and bounds, says Sharma. He highlights that the company has seen a consistent growth from the last eight quarters, accelerated by its dominance in HPC market, recent alliance with NetApp and innovation around emerging trends like AI, IoT and others. 

  Lenovo DCG team helps its customers by offering latest solutions and data scientists’ expertise to simplify their digital transformation journey empowered by AI. They can test their uses cases in our innovation labs and not go the ‘big bang’ way. Vivek Sharma Managing Director, Lenovo DCG India

In a short span of two years, Lenovo DCG’s market share has grown over 2x times globally. However, in India the company’s business in the datacenter group has grown over 3x times, he adds. 

Channel ecosystem in India continues to play a critical role in Lenovo DCG’s overall growth, according to Sharma. “In APAC region, over 90 percent of our business is channel-centric as enterprise channel partners give us the reach to their customer base.” 

“Channel partners in India have the technical expertise, business acumen and project management skillsets to implement our end-to-end DCG stack,” he adds. 

Test before you adopt

As Sharma talks about the about AI projects getting expensive for the organizations, he projects the biggest obstacle for AI implementation as memory, CPU and network utilization allocation in the IT infrastructure.

Sharma shared interesting uses cases of AI, both from industrial and innovation perspectives (details in box). 

However, Sharma says, “Companies can adopt a modular (step by step approach) while implementing AI projects. Lenovo DCG team helps its customers by offering latest solutions and data scientists’ expertise to simplify their digital transformation journey empowered by AI. They can test their uses cases in our innovation labs and not go the ‘big bang’ way.”

Sharma suggests CIOs should identify the most suited infrastructure for their organization based on what workloads go on the public cloud and the private cloud depending on the vertical. “It’s not just the financial services industry who are concerned about data today. Protection of customer data for the retail industry is equally important and regulations for different industry do come into play. For example, the regulation announced for data localization and RBI directives in India makes datacenter security a priority for CIOs and CSOs of Indian organizations,” Sharma adds. 

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