Lenovo offers enterprises access to on-premise datacentre kit on cloud-like pay-as-you-go terms
Chinese PC maker Lenovo wants to make it easier for enterprises to access on-premise datacentre resources without needing to invest huge sums of money in purchasing it
Lenovo wants to bring the benefits of the cloud consumption and procurement model to on-premise environments, by offering enterprises access to datacentre kit on a pay-as-you-go subscription basis through its TruScale Infrastructure Services offering.
Lenovo customers will be able to use TruScale to access and pay for on-premise datacentre hardware and services located within their own facilities or a third-party colocation site on a monthly basis, without ever needing to own it outright.
Users can keep tabs on their resource usage in real time through a dashboard, with Lenovo claiming customers will only pay for workloads that are actively running, which can be scaled up or down as they require.
Products from the firm’s hyper-converged ThinkAgile hardware range will be made available through the service, as well as its ThinkSystem server appliances, with Lenovo overseeing the installation, management, maintenance and removal of the technology once it reaches end-of-life.
Laura Laltrello, vice-president and general manager of services for Lenovo’s datacentre group, said TruScale has the potential to change the face of how IT departments undertake datacentre procurement and refresh projects.
“With our subscription-based model, customers pay for what they use, eliminating upfront capital purchase risk,” she said.
“With our subscription-based model, customers pay for what they use, eliminating upfront capital purchase risk”
Laura Laltrello, Lenovo
“Our offering can be applied to any configuration that meets the customer’s needs – whether storage-rich, server-heavy, hyper-converged or high-performance compute – and can be scaled as business dictates.”
The service will also free IT departments up from having to carry out datacentre systems administration and maintenance tasks, giving team members more time to spend on work that delivers value back to the business in other ways, said Roderick Lappin, senior vice-president and chief customer officer at the Lenovo datacentre group.
“By eliminating the capital expense of purchasing IT equipment and replacing with a subscription model, customers can now focus on supporting their business growth, knowing that they’ll have the right flexibility across their environment,” he added.
Demonstrating datacentre prowess
The Chinese PC maker moved into the datacentre market in 2014 through its acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business, and – in the process – became the world’s third biggest player in that part of the market.
The company has faced some challenges with regards to turning its acquisition into a sustainable source of revenue and profit growth for the firm, which it appears to be overcoming, based on its recent run of financial results.
Indeed, its datacentre business posted 68% year-on-year revenue growth during its first quarter results for 2019, which is the highest it has achieved since the acquisition of IBM’s x86 assets. The unit’s profitability was also up by 11% percentage points on the previous year, marking it out as the third consecutive quarter of double-digit profit growth.
