Lenovo’s TruScale Resonating With Partners, Sales Leader Says

“You think about TruScale and what that can bring to them, enabling another area that that they can take to customers and be part of that. It’s exciting. It really is. And I think it’s resonating with them as well,” said Lenovo’s North American Solution and Sales Leader for the infrastructure group Eric Gieszl.

Lenovo is ramping up its TruScale and infrastructure ambitions, adding Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Eric Gieszl as its North American solution and sales leader for the infrastructure group, which set revenue records last year and has every intention to repeat.

Fresh from running sales for HPE’s GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, Gieszl is four weeks into his new job for Lenovo and said he can’t wait to show partners the opportunity with TruScale.

“They’re lining up. That’s the exciting thing,” Gieszl told CRN in his first interview since taking the new job. “You think about TruScale and what that can bring to them, enabling another area that that they can take to customers and be part of that, it’s exciting. It really is and I think it’s resonating with them as well.”

Gieszl spent his career with IT power brokers such as IBM, where he led a business unit in the Middle East and Africa. He was also at Oracle as a vice president of sales and innovation for the tech giant. He said he is thrilled to join the team at Lenovo.

“It’s exciting to be here, exciting to be part of the team,” he said. “You look at how at Lenovo, 40-percent of the revenue is from non-PC parts and that business is growing. You look at what the team has done in services and solutions in North America, right? Demand remains high for us. You look at the data center business, and we’re growing that 37 percent year over year.”

TruScale is Lenovo’s infrastructure-as-a-service offering. Last year, the company ramped up the TruScale solutions available for partners, and debuted TruScale for SAP with Private Edition Customer Data Center.

The market leader in personal computer sales reached annual revenue of $62 billion last year, but grew its infrastructure business at a record clip, the company said in May, with those solutions accounting for $9.8 billion.

“ISG continues to enhance its full stack capabilities that cover both the Cloud Service Provider and Enterprise and SMB segments,” Lenovo told investors in an annual financial update. “At the same time, ISG is investing in infrastructure innovations empowered by artificial intelligence, such as AI-powered edge computing and hybrid cloud.”

Lenovo – which trades on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange – said its AI infrastructure revenue came in at more than $2 billion and the company has added an additional $1 billion to invest over the next three years to accelerate AI deployment in businesses.

Here’s more of what Gieszl had to say about his new role with the company, and what partners can look forward to from TruScale and Lenovo.

After this big transition, what are your plans for the first 90 days, first 180 days. I mean, we don’t have to get too in the weeds, but I’d love to kind of hear a little bit about your excitement about this.

I am definitely excited. I’m four weeks in now.

And I want to thank my friends and family from HPE. I have many fond relationships and friends that are like family over there. I spent almost 11 years of my journey over there, and I’ll be cheering them on and on as their innovation journey continues.

I’m excited to be at Lenovo’s ISG group. Lenovo infrastructure solution groups has expanded to become the next great profit engine at Lenovo. You look at the PC side we’re number one in the business. We’re in the top three server companies in the world.

And their strategy is spot on: accelerating the new IT and driving intelligent transformation with optimized sustainable innovation. They harness the power to transform customers businesses, and to help them solve some of the greatest challenges of humanity.

And you look at that, you think about as big as a Lenovo, the No. 1 PC company, top three server company. I mean, that’s what I’m excited about. That’s the reason I came over here, plus the culture.

What’s your message to partners, when you are out there. What are you telling them about doing business with Lenovo?

They’re lining up. That’s the exciting thing. The ones I talk to on a regular basis and you think about Lenovo 360, which was first launched in 2021, it’s a global partner framework designed to provide easier access for our partners and services and solutions. Now they made an update to it in February, with the next phase of that, and partners are raving about that.

And then obviously, I get in there and I start talking about TruScale. You think about TruScale and what that can bring to them, enabling another area that that they can take to customers and be part of that. It’s exciting. It really is and I think it’s resonating with them as well.

What do you see will be really valuable for partners inside that TruScale ecosystem?

I think the biggest thing is, it’s another conversation that they can go have with their customers. Partners in my opinion, want to be able to take that conversation to the next level with them, drive better outcomes for them.

If you think about, ‘How are they doing that?’ They’ve got to be able to expand the services. And this is where partners are, whether offering our managed services, and offering our professional services as part of that.

Enabling them to go into that and have a conversation around the PC side, have a conversation around the server side, but also put in TruScale to help that whole environment, freeing up time for the CIOs in IT to go focus on more strategic innovations. That’s the message we’re trying to deliver to customers.

You’re saying, technically, they can go to they can kind of lean on their partner in Lenovo to skill up their shops around knowledge workers or technical workers? I just want to make sure I’m getting that right.

Yep, they can definitely scale up their services as part of that, offer managed services as part of that, and we’ve worked on a number of opportunities with them.

With regards to hybrid environments and repatriation of workloads from the cloud, how are you positioning Lenovo to help those partners who are working with customers who are saying ‘Not everything belongs in the cloud’?

Part of that, and we’re having those conversations with partners out there in the environment, it’s driving those conversations, to be able to take them and help customers, figure out what workloads and we have resources that go there and help them figure out what workloads make the most sense.

When they’re looking to bring those workloads back we can help them do that. Our professional service organization has resources to help them do that. And we’re having those conversations with partners.

That’s the biggest message for me to deliver on that. We have those resources at our service organization to go help those partners have those conversations. And I think we’re hearing it consistently, on a regular basis. A lot of those cloud workloads are expensive and they need to bring those back.

There are some solution providers who are talking about saving customers double-digit percentages when they move work out of the cloud. How real and how present is that opportunity for Lenovo partners?

I would say that not to get into specific numbers, but I think we are on par with the messages that are being delivered out there on that. We’re in that area that we can help customers address their needs, drive better customer outcomes.

Some of the things that TruScale can address with that. You look at how it simplifies and optimizes everything for customers. Right and so I think that we’re excited show partners and customers what that can bring to them.

Any messages to the channel here as you take on this new role?

It’s exciting. It’s exciting to be here, exciting to be part of the team. You look at how at Lenovo, 40-percent of the revenue is from non-PC parts and that business is growing. You look at what the team has done in services and solutions in North America, right? Demand remains high for us. You look at the data center business, and how we’re growing that 37 percent year over year.

In revenue and profit. Revenue from the services and solution side grew 22 percent. And so those are the numbers I just want to make sure I leave you with. It’s great to be at Lenovo and be part of that team.