Reimagining the future of Enterprise Tech Infrastructure space

CHARLES FERLAND
VICE PRESIDENT - ISG CATEGORY, LENOVO

Lenovo has always been known for bringing out world class high quality products in the market. The Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) team at Lenovo is focused around marketing the 4P principle - having the right Product at the right Price, and Promoting it the right way, at the right Place. Lenovo makes sure that its channel and its customers benefit from this marketing principle.

Charles Ferland, Vice President - ISG Category, Lenovo shares about the unique perspectives that Lenovo’s ISG team is bringing to the enterprise tech landscape with its products and solutions and aligning them with the broader interests of the channel ecosystem with offerings like Top Choice Express -

KEY PRIORITIES FOR LENOVO'S INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTION

There is a large velocity of growth happening in the SMB and at the large and small enterprise space. These businesses are seen creating workflows on the cloud or some AI projects that they are benefitting from, because of which they need IT infrastructure. So the ISG category team always positions itself to be closer to the customer by having the product placement through the right channel. India is largely a channel driven market and so the market is compatible with Lenovo’s channel first strategy. Lenovo is focused around bringing more and more innovations from India. The company has an R&D lab in Bengaluru and will be soon opening a factory in the country to better address the current IT requirement.

TOP CHOICE EXPRESS VS TRADITIONAL CHANNEL PARTNERSHIP MODEL

Lenovo’s infrastructure solution portfolio is diverse in the sense that it offers a lot of options for every business. However, the Top Choice Express model provides a curated list of options from Lenovo and its industry-leading partners that are the best of the lots for small and mid-level enterprises. The options specially hand-picked by Lenovo offer the best price with the best delivery times that proves to be beneficial for both customers and channel partners. It is designed to drive sales volume for partners and subsequently reduce costs. It is something new and unique in the sense that partners can have top choice inventory with a wider range of industry solutions to choose from and with quick delivery options. The order to ship date has drastically been brought down, with Lenovo optimizing a fast delivery option to deliver its solutions to market in very less time. The price has also been negotiated with Lenovo’s suppliers to have the best pricing possible.

“Since this is a new initiative, we have started promoting this with new marketing campaigns for our partners,” says Charles Ferland, Vice President - ISG Category, Lenovo. “Lenovo partners who already use our DSC too will automatically land in the Top Choice category. Partners can always go back to the full mode and have all of the options available at any time. However, a partner who has been doing business with Lenovo will have the default Top Choice Express model to be a part of.”

REDESIGNING AGILE IT SOLUTIONS

Lenovo has developed a set of best practices that is available through the Partner Hub so that they can benefit from pre-tested, validated design reference architecture around most of the workloads that are supported in the industry today. So for partners looking at selling AI solutions, might require very specialized resources that are rare in the market. Lenovo has therefore tapped into the network of ecosystem partners to its own data scientists inside Lenovo in order to create these validated reference designs and making them available in the Lenovo Partner Hub. That is one of the benefits that can accelerate the Time to Market for the partners.

LEVERAGING THE POWER OF AI

“Outcome driven is the name of the game here when it comes to leveraging AI. AI is a wonderful technology but what outcome does it provide. About 3-4 years ago, we invested over a billion dollars into our AI ecosystem and recently extending that to a hundred million more into AI innovation. As a result, Lenovo has today four AI innovation centers around the world, where we have brought in data scientists. We asked them to initially test and validate if whether this technology will bring in any financial stability to the company in future, and this was done vertical wise – retail, manufacturing, healthcare and education. Of course, we realized that there is a lot of risk as this is a very dynamic ecosystem, but we wanted to validate the foundation first. And once these criteria were met, the AI innovation lab put together an outcome based solution. So, for instance, the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with Nvidia helps customers turn data and intelligence into outcomes faster, while enabling them to benefit from pre-validated and industrialized solutions for accelerated deployment. So we are not just selling a technology but we are reinventing computing and accelerating businesses and industries globally with the help of AI,” explains Charles.

AND SO

Lenovo believes in leading in the market through partnerships and collaborations. As an innovator and a technologist, Lenovo has always worked alongside the channel with a profound understanding of the local market and their needs and delivered ground-breaking solutions as a solution to those problems.