Lenovo’s Tech World 2023 event is underway in Austin this week where the company shows off the latest innovations from its wide range of product teams. Despite its expansive portfolio, the clear focus for Lenovo is on capturing mindshare around enterprise AI while also riding the wave propelling most of the growth in the IT industry.
New: AI Focused Products
Lenovo makes excellent servers in which the IBM engineering legacy continues to shine through (Lenovo acquired IBM’s server business in 2014). That engineering excellence translates well to the performance and reliability-focused AI and HPC markets. It’s here where Lenovo is aggressively focused.
At Lenovo Tech World this week, Lenovo and NVIDIA announced an expansion of their collaboration, focusing on integrating generative AI across enterprises. The enhanced partnership aims to deliver AI-powered computing solutions from edge devices to cloud platforms tailored to help businesses innovate and transform various sectors.
The Lenovo AI Professional Services Practice will back the newly introduced solutions. Enterprises can use a hybrid cloud strategy to build custom AI models via NVIDIA’s cloud service and run them on-site using Lenovo systems equipped with NVIDIA’s advanced hardware and software for generative AI. Lenovo’s solutions, including the ThinkSystem SR675 V3 server and ThinkStation PX workstation, are optimized for production AI running NVIDIA AI Enterprise. These systems are designed to harness NVIDIA GPUs, DPUs, and networking.
In collaboration with NVIDIA, Lenovo plans to introduce future systems based on NVIDIA’s MGX modular reference design. This will allow businesses to tackle the most challenging generative AI tasks and facilitate immersive simulations using NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform. Moreover, Lenovo’s solutions will be compatible with the recently launched VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA.
Lenovo’s focus on the AI and HPC markets is a solid strategy for the company, one that will pay off in the service provider market where Lenovo has success far beyond its larger competitors and where Supermicro is the dominant challenger.
Analysis
The company has found tremendous success in client computing, has the right portfolio across nearly all server bands, is finding good success in HPC and AI, and has one of the industry’s best edge stories. Its services business also sees good growth, which this week’s AI announcements should only bolster.
Lenovo’s strength among the service providers will continue to drive growth above the overall market. AI is primarily a provider-delivered capability today, a market in which Lenovo can easily leverage its strength and relationships to find success where perhaps Dell and HPE can’t. Lenovo is rightfully making strong bets in this space that will pay off.
