Lenovo DCG seeks domination in the Indian data center market.
In an interview with BW CIO, Ashish Taneja, Channel Lead, Lenovo DCG discusses the growth opportunities and challenges in the data center market in India. Digital has given rise to large volumes of data making it as or even more valuable than oil.
Lenovo DCG states that they contribute more towards defining an IT infrastructure in an enterprise rather than exposing them to tools and technology alone.
The 2 year old startup has a prominent client base consisting names like Indian Space Research Organization.
Lenovo worldwide has 3 entities namely Lenovo PC, Lenovo Mobility and Lenovo Data Center Group. DCG was designed to be a separate company and on 1st April, 2017 we came up as a startup. It is one of those companies that essentially deal with servers, HPC, HCI, Network and Storage Now (Joint Venture with NetApp). This is what we do as a company and sums up our profile. As a merged entity everybody doesn’t get to focus on all aspects and hence DCG was Lenovo’s intention to delve into this industry. To get more focus on the different pie of the market and a different share of wallet between the customer and the partner portrays our interest towards data. Software defined infrastructure, software and storage are some of our key areas of interest and our product offerings to the customers.
Strategy is a very big word but essentially our focus areas are around channels for sure. We want to continue our poll position with HPC (High Performance Computing) where we are #1 worldwide with 29 points on our market share. 1 of 4 supercomputers sold in the world run on Lenovo. We want to continue this poll position and grow on it with regards to HPC requirements in the country. For example ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) runs on our water cool technology along with many other areas we are working with. We are also working towards being the preferred choice in HCI and AI is another investment that is coming up.
Data is the new oil and you have organizations that know what to do with data while you have some of them who don’t know what to do with it. There are organizations that don’t even know how to store data and sometimes there are organizations that need help in all three sectors. Some organizations claim to mine data for intelligent use and some say that they will mine data and create intel around it for a better purpose. The state of readiness differs from various organizations and it different for different levels of companies in SMBs and their progress with IT readiness or IT maturity. We at Lenovo DCG have different set of modules fulfilling the needs of projects with regards to their requirement of data and infrastructure. We have been involved in many projects over the past where all the requirements are surveyed and have been matched by us depending on the scale and size of the areas we expertise in.
About 10 years back there were around 2.1 Million small entities out of which 75% were fixed in the top 7 cities of India. 50% of them did not even have the first server available to them. That is the journey we have been talking about and today we delve into the IT readiness of small and medium enterprises because they have the biggest crunch towards dedicating man power in IT. They always have a multi-dimensional approach towards what they want. We at Lenovo DCG help MSMEs and SMEs run their IT better in order to empower them to run their data better.
IDC claims that we are the fastest growing server company in the world along with being the #1 HPC company leading the charts. We’ve been growing double digits since the last 4 quarters. We have very aggressive plans this year along with being very bullish towards the market. Our market share right now is very low because we’re like the new kid on the block while the only way we can go is north. Lenovo DCG does have challenges just like any other startup and we have a heavy competition in the market. Some of them have made huge investments and captured some of the key markets along with a bigger sales force than us. But because we are small we are quick and agile and our reaction to market is very high. We do not have a legacy to protect and are more inter-personal driven. That makes us more people driven than system driven. The growth has been very promising, partners have been highly supportive as we provide personalized products to them. This brings in more flavour to our relationships with partners and customers which lacks in many of our competitors.
The next 5 years will see us capture a high double digit market share and see ourselves amongst the top 3 or top 4 companies. I think we will be a trusted choice to deal with partners along with a robust channel ecosystem backed by trust and a reckoning force. There are a lot of channel partner programs we run along with DCG and digital is the new marketing helping us to reach out to more people. We have a lot of tools helping partners adopt our campaigns and build on that. Our partner programs are known as Digital Campaign Studio allows partners to create a campaign, advertisement or mailer on any kind of platform with the technology of their choice. It also helps you track what happens to the campaigns and we’ve built data analysis on this. We have given access to our partners when it comes to pricing and create an autonomous channels enabling them to be more self-reliant and self-sufficient. We wish to build more connections with the people we work and influence our processes to be inclined towards human emotions and relations rather than just analysis and technology.
