IT giant Lenovo continues to steadily carve its niche into the global datacentre sector nearly a year after its acquisition, for $2.3 billion, of IBM's x86 server business, effective on 1 October 2014.
The acquisition swiftly catapulted Lenovo into the global top three in the datacentre space, its biggest competitors being HP and Dell.
Now battling for supremacy in a market segment in which it did not previously engage, the hardware company has nonetheless set its sights on becoming the world's number one datacentre player within the next seven years, according to Wilfredo Sotolongo, Lenovo VP and GM for EMEA Enterprise Systems.
Having inherited a strong channel ecosystem from IBM, Lenovo remains confident, Sotolongo asserts.
"Our role [as a new top datacentre player] is to be the rebel, the disruptor: the one who has nothing to lose who can make bets and take risks. When you're new in a space you can do that," he says.
Lenovo's disruption plan centres around accelerating the reduction of total cost of ownership as well as focusing on products that integrate well into clients' ecosystems to sufficiently reduce management costs, Sotolongo explains.
In contrast with the shared goal of major datacentre players to build their own end-to-end capabilities, "We are going to be completely open," says Sotolongo. "We're going to partner with all the major players in storage, in network, and provide choice to the client, so we are able to provide whichever architecture they choose," he elaborates.
The company plans to invest in technologies and relationships that will allow them to play a facilitatory role, he adds. "We're happy to stay primarily a hardware company."
Looking to the future of the datacentre, "we do not believe there will be a dominant player, [although] we believe there will be some dominant stacks," for example VMWare, Microsoft and Linux, Sotolongo puts forward. Lenovo plans to capitalise off each of these by developing hardware and software and the accompanying support services to "plug into" dominant stacks, he continues. "So our vision is that we'll be at the heart of the datacentre, but in a partnership mode."
Starting from the bottom
Sotolongo's biggest concern moving forward is that despite its market position, Lenovo does not have a brand reputation to speak of as a datacentre player.
This will take time, he says, although the company's market position means it appears in analysts' studies of datacentres, which could assist with branding.
Lenovo aims to move from number three to number two in the world within the next five years, although this ranking might come sooner in SA, he hopes.
A legacy of investment in growth markets from IBM means that Lenovo's server business tends to hold a higher share in these than it does in mature markets, Sotolongo notes.
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