The Indian data center Market is growing rapidly and is predicted to be worth $4 billion by the year 2024. The market growth is driven by deeper internet penetration, soaring adoption rates for high-performance infrastructure such as digital data traffic, public cloud services etc.
This shows that India is a huge market and the opportunities for companies to come with services around this is significantly high. One such company is Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG), which is a part of Lenovo Group Limited, that possesses a broad portfolio of edge computing offerings that address the different ways that customers want to deploy edge computing solutions for IoT use cases. In India, the group started its operations in 2017.
In order to know the industry better and how Lenovo DCG is marking its territory in this space, Analytics India Magazine talked to Vivek Sharma, the Managing Director at Lenovo DCG.
A New Entrant In A Highly Competitive Market
The Data center market is one of the most competitive markets and with dominant players like IBM, HP, Intel, it gets a little difficult for new companies to leave a mark. To truly become the data center partner of choice companies need to ensure its customers and partners grow with them.
And this is where Lenovo comes into the scenario. Sharma believes that the network allows the company to deliver a complete solution portfolio that addresses the needs of businesses across a variety of industries. “Though we are a relatively new player, we have established ourselves as a global leader,” said Sharma. “In a competitive space, the ability to offer choice through a strong network also gives us an advantage.”
In fact, according to a report, Lenovo DCG is one of the fastest-growing server companies in the world and as per the Top500 list, the largest global provider of TOP500 installations. Another area of differentiation for Lenovo is the technology and its global supply chain.
While talking about the impact of Lenovo in the industry, Sharma also said that Lenovo runs the most secure, high-quality and high-velocity supply chain in the industry enabled by its scale and manufacturing efficiency. “Lenovo continuously innovates the way challenges of the changing trade dynamics are addressed,” he added.
The Data-Centric Approach
Technologies like AI, machine learning, IoT and big data are exploding into every sector and fueling the need for digital transformation. According to reports, by 2020, around 80% of enterprises will do away with on-premises data centers to keep up with the ever-increasing deluge of data.
Therefore, today, many organisations are looking to make their computing more efficient and cost-effective by using edge devices to mitigate the load at the data center, thus improving operations. Further, hyper-converged infrastructure is also prophesied to become more mainstream and many companies are starting to consider how they can process data at the edge.
In order to make sure that Lenovo DCG is able to support its customers, it has invested heavily in delivering a broad edge computing portfolio.
An example of recent development is its ThinkSystem SE350 edge server, which puts increased processing power, storage and network closer to where data is generated, allowing actions resulting from the analysis of that data to take place more quickly. With industry developments like 5G set to have a huge impact on data capacity, Lenovo DCG is working to develop solutions and services to help consumers prepare for this next explosion of data.
Sharma’s Take On Resolving HPC Requirements For SMEs/MSMEs
Over the past few years, there has been an immense market appetite for software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). Different industries have started to understand the imperativeness and benefits of hybrid cloud and are now evaluating their infrastructure, looking to refresh their data centers from older legacy systems to more workload-centric infrastructure in the cloud.
Moreover, Sharma believes that India and other Asian nations are driving the next wave of hyperscale in cloud and telco. With the emergence of 5G, there are huge chances that more connected devices would emerge, creating a greater explosion of data, going from hundreds of millions of PCs to hundreds and billions of internet-connected devices.
“Our view of the future is that if a device consumes electricity, it will connect and compute. There is going to be so much data available, the challenge for businesses will be to compute it in the most efficient way possible – and that is what we are here to help MSMEs or SMEs do,” said Sharma
Sharma also said that 10 years ago there were around 2.1 million small entities out of which 75% were fixed, while 50% did not have the first server available to them. There are a number of reasons inhibiting the uptake of HPC by SMEs, with the biggest one being a lack of knowledge and expertise in the deployment of HPC. And Lenovo delves significantly into the IT readiness of SMEs because it believes that they have the biggest crunch towards dedicating manpower in IT.
The Roadmap Ahead
Despite being a new player in the space, Lenovo DCG is seeing positive growth tracking towards its aim to be the data center partner of choice in India. Looking into the future, Sharma said, “ Our business is on a journey of growth and the agenda for the coming years is to continue this momentum, keep growing and also, apply our technology to help solve humanity’s greatest challenges like curing cancer and tackling climate change.”
A Piece Of Advice For Professionals To Make A Career In This Area
With the ever-increasing adoption of AI, big data and machine learning – creating value from large and diverse data sets are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Many companies are using forms of advanced analytics on big data for business intelligence, predictive analytics, and more. These technologies are creating an abundance of positions for skilled data scientists and AI professionals.
“My advice to the professionals is to invest in enhancing their skills in deep technologies and everything associated with data, not just to stay relevant in today’s market but also look to how they can best position themselves to pioneer the industry’s future,” Sharma concluded.
