Our core objective is to make digital IT real, says Amit Luthra of Lenovo India
Technology major Lenovo sees sustained demand for its Infrastructure Solutions Group business from India market as enterprises are keen to become digitally ready.
Digital first has emerged as the top priority for enterprises, regardless of their size, and this has led to the continuous rise in demand for technology in the form of compute power--be it hardware, software, or services in India.
Given this environment, $62 billion global technology major Lenovo has been making its foray into the Indian enterprise market through its Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) with its array of solutions and services to help enterprises be at the top of their digital journey.
Amit Luthra, Managing Director, ISG India, Lenovo, in a conversation with YourStory, says, Lenovo’s offerings can encompass every technology requirement of enterprises in their digital journey.
Edited excerpts from the interview.
YourStory (YS): How do you view the data centre segment in India?
Amit Luthra (AL): The India data centre market has three primary constituents. One is the data centre real estate in terms of the location of the facility, which is seeing a lot of investments. The second constituent is the key things that go into the data center, which is power cooling and network. The third key aspect is the compute storage and the associated software.
In these three aspects, the two things which are definitely hand in glove are the real estate and associated facilities like power cooling, building management network, etc. Since the demand for workloads is huge, people are investing in data centre space in India.
I personally believe that if digital transformation needs to be real, you need to have a solid IT transformation, and it cannot happen without having a robust compute network, storage, and hyperconvergence infrastructure. However, Lenovo is not into building data centre or associated activity like power network or cooling space.
YS: How is Lenovo’s ISG business addressing the India market?
AL: Lenovo is there where the workload resides. It is there from the pocket to the cloud i.e., from Motorola handheld devices to PCs and infrastructure at the edge or data centre. We have an in-depth portfolio on compute, storage, and hyperconvergence infrastructure to seamlessly manage all the data that is generated.
Earlier, analytics was only restricted to a few segments like scientific, defence, life sciences, weather modelling, etc. The same analytics framework, which used to be actually run on the backbone of high-performance computing, is today brought to the commercial world.
Today, people are asking how one derives insights from the data and that is where analytics play a major role. Our story comes into play by providing the best of the infrastructure, which is for analytics, be it for machine learning or artificial intelligence. I would say we have the strongest portfolio.
Today, the volume of data is increasing as well as the variety of workload. This has resulted in increased demand for data centres and high-end compute infrastructure. We have a true scale offering where we provide infrastructure as a service and we have tie ups with the largest cloud service providers.
YS: How do you see overall demand for Lenovo’s technology and services in the Indian market?
AL: The demand is very strong. The reason is because we are early adopters of technology. Gone are the days where people used to wait for an organisation to adopt technology, take feedback, and wait and see. I think Indian companies today are very innovative, which is seen in the business models of unicorns and soonicorns. The business fundamentals are strong and the need for IT will always be there.
However, there are a few key asks in the Indian market. Simplified management is the first key ask. Second is orchestration tools, which can help them automate a lot of their tasks. Thirdly, they want us to remove a lot of inefficiency in the data centre. Most of the organisations in India want a consultative approach.
The sectors that are driving the demand for us are banking and financial services, manufacturing, and ITeS. We are also associated with the government as they are doing many things.
YS: How do you see adoption of artificial intelligence platforms in India?
AL: I think AI technologies are already being adopted, which were there on high performance computing for a long time. Today people are using AI in two ways: One is they want to lower the number of processes to get faster time to market. Second, they are actually using AI for business generation. There is also a lot of inquisitiveness where organisations have this FOMO (fear of missing out).
YS: What would you say is the USP of Lenovo’s Infrastructure Services Group?
AL: Our biggest USP is helping organisations with better digital IT. In this process, we bring infrastructure, tools, software, and associated services around it. Our core objective is to make digital IT real.
The demand in India is strong, especially with new-age companies who are digital natives. We work very closely with them as they consume IT through our hyper scalers or cloud service providers. Also, traditional companies are leveraging new-age technologies and becoming bigger.
Edited by Megha Reddy