TruScale: A unique service to help customers truly scale their solutions

Amit Luthra, MD - India, Lenovo ISG

In a chat with VARINDIA, Amit Luthra, MD - India, Lenovo ISG talks about partner transformation, business goals, key priorities, pocket to cloud and much more

How Lenovo is focusing on partner transformation? Can you elaborate on your Partner Transformation program?
Channel ecosystem is the key to growth for our business in India. In fact, 90% of business in India happens through channel partners. So it is very important that as industry is transforming into the digital world, we also enable our partners to be well equipped to help their customers transform in this digital world. We have launched a program called Lenovo 360, which is an unique program wherein our channel partners will be in a position to have access to all our information and programs right from pocket to device to edge to core to cloud, because the journey today is not just from edge to cloud, the journey is from pocket to cloud with mobility becoming more mainstream. So we do have this Lenovo 360 common program which focuses on enablement, rebate programs, training to help transform our partners to meet the needs of digital transformation.

What are the business goals and key priorities for Lenovo-ISG in India for 2022-2023?
The key goal is to get growth but we need to know clearly where we are positioned to bring this growth. So the first thing that we see is mission critical workloads like HPC, AI, Machine Learning, helping the cloud service providers, customization of infrastructure for service providers, which have been our core competency over the past few years. So we are definitely going deeper to secure more wins in SAP, hyper-converged infrastructure, cloud, the service provider space, the HPC and AI/ML space to get more business. We have rolled out this service called TruScale. It is a unique service wherein we actually help our customers to truly scale their solutions while infrastructure and device is there. We are not talking just as a service, it is also about scaling their solutions at the demand that they want, whether they want to top up or to bring it down, giving them the right infrastructure at the right time within the control and security. So these are our key priorities, driving growth from our core competency areas and also building up new areas of revenue in future which is TruScale.

Kindly elaborate on TruScale as a service.
Many customers have actually gone back and taken a cloud first strategy. Now cloud first strategy is good and it can be actually private, public and hybrid cloud but we have seen over the past few years that some of them want to come back, they want hybrid flows as reality. Cloud is not just a product that we go back and set up in any of the data centers, it is very important for us to give cloud kind of consumption model to them, because they have been habituated to them. So that is where we see an increase or pent up demand in as a service. Now, as a service gives the customers to actually be very flexible, because no organization can say that they have got the data predictions for next four to five years. In fact, I have seen customers who have said that and within six to nine months audit for upgrades, right. I have seen customers who have actually gone back and planned for three years and ended up having utilizations which are less than 15%. So in this scenario where they want to actually have their solution very dynamic to their needs, it is important that they actually go back and build as a service model at a cloud kind of consumption thing. This is where we help our organizations to truly scale solutions we call it TruScale. So it is again from device to the cloud, any kind of a solution, infrastructure can be looked up as a service from Lenovo.

Kindly elaborate on pocket to cloud.
Today, if we go back and see our journey we access our corporate infrastructure on our mobile or tablet or laptop. Then we do have applications that are running on server, storage, hyper-converged infrastructure, private and hybrid cloud in office and data center space. So the journey of an employee is across these streams so it is very important to get differentiated and also help organizations to help them across the stream because a lot many times we see an envelope of services that is required to build it from pocket to cloud. We do have seen many unique requests that are coming in because not all organizations want or are ready to make a solution or a product kind of thing that they want to deploy. This is where we actually differentiate ourselves. So while you have pocket to device and then from device to edge, we are witnessing a lot of prominence being taken over in Edge space. We are doing phenomenally new requests on edge and then edge to core to cloud. So the journey across the workload is a journey where we want to help our customers the way workloads are moving from mobility to cloud.

What are the mega-trends you are expecting, as India is on the path of digitisation?
As India is going towards digitization the first step towards it was actually bringing in basics like computerization etc. I think we have gone back behind those ways. So in fact, social media mobility analytics, cloud computing have not only changed the way we live today but also have changed the way businesses are done. So this is something which has been happening in the last few years. So as India picks up on digitization, they are important tenets of businesses like they actually go back and make it real. Today we have discussions on Metaverse, digital doing with our customers. They want to see how they can build digital showrooms, and be ready for the biggest revolution in the IT industry which is going to come – 5G and Edge.  So organizations have moved from the journey of social media, mobility, analytics and cloud computing to new workloads which might actually redefine the way we live today. We have seen one phase of redefining the way we live and definitely with 5G, Edge and other newer technologies coming in it is another journey wherein we work towards redefining the way.