Data center News

Lenovo On Why Its Software-Defined Business Is Experiencing Triple-Digit Growth

Lenovo’s Kevin Hooper, president and general manager of the North America Data Center Group, chats with CRNtv about new innovations around the ThinkAgile HX series.

Lenovo is quickly becoming a major player in the software-defined space.

Hong Kong-based Lenovo says its software-defined business grew at triple digits for six consecutive quarters -- and partnerships with vendors like Nutanix, VMware and Microsoft are playing a big role in that growth. In an interview with CRNtv, Lenovo’s North America Data Center President and General Manager Kevin Hooper discussed plans to continue that momentum with new innovations around Lenovo’s ThinkAgile HX series.

Nutanix is Lenovo’s oldest HCI relationships. Tell us about the power both companies bring to the marketplace and what that means for your channel partners.

Hooper: It’s the largest relationship that we have and we are their largest OEM. We grew 90 percent year-on-year. We have the opportunity to meet in the channel because we both build appliances based on Nutanix software, as well as we produce certified nodes that allow a business partner to satisfy whatever the customer’s infrastructure needs are with our hardware and their software.

What kind of successes have you seen with your ThinkAgile HX products?

Hooper: We are really proud with the ThinkAgile HX series. We are number one to market with Intel’s Cascade Lake newest processors. We reached a number of benchmarks. We’ve done 28 million Hammer DB transactions per minute with a single server consolidation solution. We are really, really focused in being number one in reliability, number one in satisfaction and number one in performance. One of the biggest issues customers are dealing with is how do we modernize from their existing infrastructure to something that really is much more demand, much more cloud like. Our relationship with Nutanix – the ThinkAgileHX appliance as well as the nodes allow us to migrate from project-base, cost-center base IT to something that’s much more demand.

How is Lenovo innovating for the future?

Hooper: Our entire HCI strategy is based on best of breed hardware, wrapped around it with services and support and then lastly we have something called True Scale that actually takes the combination of Nutanix software, our hardware and allows you to do consumption based pricing based on energy consumption – not necessarily the application itself but the energy consumption as you are putting on workloads.

For more coverage, watch CRNtv’s video included in this article.