October 31, 2023
By Bob O'Donnell
When a company is particularly well-known for one category of product, it is often challenging to get people to better understand the company’s broader strategy and perspective. Such is the case with Lenovo, a company that is primarily known for its PC business. In fact, Lenovo is the number one selling PC brand in the world and has been every quarter for more than the last five years.
What many people don’t know, however, is that it has a big data center and storage business as well. In fact, it’s now the third largest server vendor in the world. Lenovo is also a big player in smartphones (because of its purchase of Motorola back in 2014) and has a growing services business as well.
Part of the problem is historical. Lenovo started in the PC business nearly 40 years ago and has long been viewed as one of the top PC brands in the world, particularly with its purchase of the ThinkPad business from IBM in 2005. The data center business, on the other hand, only got started 9 years ago and, coincidentally, was begun when Lenovo bought IBM’s server and storage business.
On top of that, until recently, Lenovo has treated its various businesses separately, with what often appeared to be little connection between them. About a year ago, however, its founder and CEO Yang Yuanqing (commonly referred to as YY) pushed the launch of a One Lenovo story. The idea was not only to highlight the non-PC parts of the business more but also to enable collaboration across all the different groups.
At a recent Lenovo analyst event, it was clear that this effort is starting to make a significant impact. The company told a much more unified story about its various product offerings by describing some of the shared technologies and other synergies that have occurred between groups. From its new range of edge-focused devices that leverage technologies from both PCs and servers to its ThinkPhone branded smartphone, to software that better links its phones with its PCs, Lenovo is clearly looking for ways to leverage its technology and personnel assets as effectively as possible.
The company continued that theme at last week’s Lenovo Tech World event. There, Lenovo introduced a range of products and concepts, and it unveiled an AI strategy it is calling “AI for All” that clearly demonstrates the benefits of these more unified efforts. AI for All integrates elements from smartphone and PC client devices, through servers, other data center hardware and even services in a strategy the company cleverly call “from pocket to cloud.”
In particular, the company announced that it plans to invest $1 billion dollars in AI Innovation across the company’s various product and services groups. One area of particular focus is called Enterprise AI Twins—a type of future application that can leverage the knowledge of the given company’s organizations and policies to help individuals within that organization make smarter decisions about everything from travel plans to supply chains and more. From a PC perspective, Lenovo also talked about the concept of personal foundation models that can be combined with public and company-driven private models to help build something they referred to as a “personal twin.” On the mobile side, the Motorola division also showed a new type of foldable smartphone prototype with a bendable display that can morph into a variety of different form factors.
For enterprises, some of the biggest news was about the expansion of partnerships with chip giants AMD and Nvidia. AMD’s CEO Lisa Su talked about her company’s work to bring its Epyc CPUs and AI-optimized Instinct GPUs into upcoming Lenovo data center products. And, following a tactic that’s becoming increasingly common among tech companies, Lenovo also had Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang discuss a new partnership between them.
In Lenovo’s case, the partnership brings together Nvidia GPUs with specially designed and configured Lenovo server hardware, as well as the bundling of Nvidia’s AI-focused software solutions, including its NeMo framework, Nvidia AI Enterprise, and Omniverse digital twin platform. The idea is to allow companies to purchase systems with all the hardware and software elements they need to be able to build or customize their own foundation models and then run them on those devices. In addition, Lenovo is offering a new AI Professional Services Practice that was specifically created to help organizations make the most of these generative AI-capable systems. The goal is to help companies create hybrid AI models that can leverage their own data centers as well as the cloud. Given how much education and training needs to be done around real-world GenAI applications, it’s great (and important) for Lenovo to do this.
Between the two events, Lenovo was able to paint a much broader picture of its product and strategy vision. It also made it clear that the company has moved well beyond just being a big PC vendor. Some of its own software concepts still need more refining and clear value distinction from competitive offerings by other large tech vendors, but it is good to see Lenovo moving in the direction of a more unified technology company. Its long history in the tech industry along with its very strong manufacturing base gives Lenovo some unique advantages that should be interesting to watch as it continues its evolution.
Here's a link to the original column: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4645322-lenovo-unites-businesses-ai-strategy Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on LinkedIn at Bob O’Donnell or on Twitter @bobodtech. |
