The importance of intelligent transformation

Digital transformation means different things to different people, depending on the vertical industry that they come from. Vivek Sharma, MD—India, Lenovo DCG, talks about what they call intelligent transformation and how they are going about doing it.

Getting into the data centre business

Lenovo has made three major acquisitions in the past: The IBM’s PC ThinkPad and System x server divisions, along with the Motorola handset division from Google. Initially the server side was merged with the PC division. After that it was decided to split it all into different entities. That’s why we now have the Intelligent Devices Group (IDG) which encompasses the PCSD (PC and smart devices) and mobile business groups. Then you have the Data Centre Group (DCG), which has transformed from a server based entity to full-fledged solution provider and transformation at the data centres.

If you look at the data centres today, they're transforming workload by workload. Earlier you would do a rip and replace either on hardware or software and that’s how you would expand. Now with the advent of things like software-defined, hyper converged, virtualization, hybrid cloud… a lot of these things are now moving workload by workload. From a customer perspective, they're now looking at partners who can give them service oriented consumption based models maybe spread over a three-year period up to 10 years and they would want to pay as they go.

We introduced ThinkSystem, from the traditional data centre infrastructure with our HPC (High Performance Computing) brands. ThinkAgile is for our software-defined appliances. We have our own private cloud offering called ThinkAgile CP. TruScale is a consumption based model for data centres. We see a moment of balance between public and private. So there's a hybrid cloud model which is very clearly emerging. You have core applications may be behind the customer’s firewall, either on the choice of their data centre or their own data centres and there are workloads that they're clearly working on currently.

Digital or intelligent transformation?

There’s transformation and you can add digital in front of it. But digital means different things to different people depending on the vertical industry that you come from. We call it intelligent transformation. There are three drivers for it. Number one is data, which they call the new fuel. Second is the connecting part, the computing part. You have to be at the Edge and you have to be at the core. Third are the algorithms which you will run on top of it to make sense of the whole thing.

We break down it down further. The first is smart IoT (Internet of Things). We can address this end to end because we have a mobility division which will take advantage of 5G. We've introduced a whole new set of IoT devices like cameras, televisions, ruggedized servers and PCs on the Edge. It's not only the data at the Edge, a lot of processing will also happen on the Edge, it needs compute power. Smart IoT will come from that perspective.

Compute has reached an interesting stage, that's why you see so much of interest from an AI perspective. The data models, the software, the computing power is all merging along with the availability of manpower. AI is not new. It's had its own cycles in the past. The bedrock for running that is going to be supercomputing clusters. Finally on top of that, we have the algorithms and the AI engines and analytics. As a consequence, the cloud moves to the Edge.

IoT devices and the Edge

IoT is already spanning the consumer base to small businesses to large businesses. There's immense potential. The Fitbit watch is an IoT device. It tracks your health, so that’s from a healthcare perspective. There’s the Apple Watch too. It all looks at the health parameters, there's a lot of data which gets collected and then it gets thrown back to you and does an analytics and a prediction. Your heart rate and breathing patterns can be monitored.

If you look at manufacturing, now we have data processing capability at the shop floor itself, because of an IoT device. The nature of these IoT devices will vary. For example, we did the beta testing of a server on the Edge, which slightly than a ThinkPad, with three inbuilt antennas and one for 5G. It has its own processing power. It's ruggedized and you can actually use it on an Indian railway platform and it'll work even in the rain.

Take our partnership for Ducati, for example. They use our Edge devices on the circuit. There's a processing which can be done and then it goes to a core which is again our servers. So it's a marriage of both IoT devices from both a PCSD and server perspective. People will discover more and more applications of IoT devices as we go forward.

HCI and SMBs

Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is one of the fastest growing segments and it is interesting how people have taken to it. The first HCI workload which really took off was VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). That's how the large enterprises tried it on that basis. The SMBs, if you look at the mid-market, have actually used HCI for their own critical workloads. I think the enterprises are now opening more and more workloads to HCI. There will be proliferation due to ease of use and operational flexibility. It also becomes your bedrock from a hybrid cloud perspective, depending on where you are in your journey. HCI can come from a compute only or a storage only perspective or it could be a combination of both. We have customers like that we have customers in the financial space, who are using it for specific bill payment issues.

Green data centres

Infrastructure has to be invisible to be successful and the data centres and as it is moving towards being software defined. But software still needs something to download. It has to be more predictable with more compute power and not a power guzzler. We are focusing on energy saving green data centres. The Neptune data centre is our largest warm water cooling system running in Germany. Water goes in at room temperature and it comes out so hot that they use it to warm the whole building. The energy saving that comes out of that data centre can power 4000 households a year.