Chris Docherty, Regional Manager Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), Middle East, speaks to Channel Post MEA about various initiatives taken by Lenovo to provide smarter and sustainable technology solutions for everyone.
With the rapid digitization happening, how has Lenovo performed?
Across the region, IT leaders are driving intelligent transformation using ‘New IT’ solutions – Edge, Cloud, AI, Analytics, IoT, 5G, Supercomputing – which are essential to building a smarter future. The pandemic has also served as a catalyst for digital transformation with technology holding the power to help businesses stay connected with their customers, to innovate and to thrive. This has allowed Lenovo to seize high-growth and high-margin market opportunities driven by accelerated global digitalization.
During the first quarter of the year, Lenovo delivered historic results with profitability doubled year-on-year and continued revenue hypergrowth, reflecting ability to drive sustainable profitability increases well into the future. Our performance over recent quarters, strong supply chain, and operational excellence, reflects our ability to drive sustainable profitability increases well into the future.
How has Lenovo supported its partners in this region during the last one year?
Lenovo’s Global Channel Organization reinforces Lenovo’s channel-first strategy by improving global tools and creating additional benefits for our channel partners. This framework allows Lenovo to address business opportunities in the IT market around Smart IoT, Smart Infrastructure and Smart Services. These changes to our business enable us to build an even more customer-centric organization than ever before and create new growth opportunities for Channel partners to thrive with us. We see our Channel partners as extensions of our Lenovo sales teams – and our goal is to create new revenue streams of opportunities for partners across the portfolio of our core businesses, as we go to market together as a united front.
In 2020, Lenovo was recognized as a leading technology vendor in the Canalys EMEA Channel Leadership Matrix, retaining its status as a ‘champion’ with over 90 percent of our EMEA sales going through our channel partners. In the past year, we also launched a unified partner portal for our data center and PC partners, the Lenovo Partner Hub. Powered by advanced analytics, the integrated portal serves as a one-stop shop to better enable channel partners to grow their business at significantly greater speed and consistency. The Lenovo Partner Hub provides a single access point to tools, resources and intelligent, personalized information that is most relevant to the partner’s needs, geographic markets and past history.
How has Lenovo adapted its product to take advantage of the top technology trends of 2021, such as the AI, VR, AR, etc?
According to the Gartner report “Your Data Center May Not Be Dead, but It’s Morphing,” by 2025, 85% of infrastructure strategies will integrate on-premises, colocation, cloud and edge delivery options, compared with 20% in 2020. This trend means that organizations are looking for data solutions that focus on specific workloads, and data infrastructure that has the flexibility to scale to meet their needs, to move workloads to the right platform, seamlessly integrate across platforms and to reduce the complexity of managing a diverse environment.
Lenovo’s solutions have been designed for these complex deployment scenarios, with features that can integrate new technology and operating requirements, edge computing and different cloud models, so that companies can build infrastructure that is future-proofed and will deliver long-term economic and operational value to the organization.
Lenovo is also helping our customers to deploy edge computing solutions, which brings the business benefits of the data center model – fast, efficient access to data to make decision – in a distributed model. Going forward, as more and more data is generated from smart connected devices outside of the perimeter, edge computing will become essential to continue to provide insight and analysis in a timely fashion.
With the demand for gaming and esports picking up, what exciting features have Lenovo to offer to its customers?
In this region specifically, gaming continues to grow at an exponential rate. As a brand, we have focused on upgrading our Legion lineup, introducing upgraded versions of the Legion 5 and 7 PCs to help gamers better compete at a local and international level. Such devices have been designed based on feedback from gaming communities, introducing new features such as advanced thermal cooling, expanded battery life and more responsive and tactile keyboards.
We have also gone above and beyond to engage directly with gamers through various avenues. We recently launched our own gaming community which provides a platform for gamers in the region to meet, play together and collaborate. The Legion community to date has over 20k members across the Middle East & Africa and still continues to grow.
We just celebrated the International E-waste Day, what is Lenovo doing to ensure that your products and your channels are embracing the ideas of sustainability?
At Lenovo, we’re focused on providing smarter technology that builds a brighter, more sustainable future for our customers, colleagues, communities and the planet.
By 2025, Lenovo will obtain 90% of our global operations’ electricity from renewable sources, achieve 50% improvement in energy efficiency of Lenovo desktop and servers, and achieve 30% improvement in energy efficiency of Lenovo notebooks and Motorola products. Additionally, Lenovo will remove one million tons of greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain.
After setting 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals approved by the Science Based Targets initiative, Lenovo is exploring its own path to net-zero targets after being selected by the SBTi to road test science-based methodology for achieving net-zero emissions.
Lenovo uses closed loop post-consumer recycled (CL-PCR) content in 103 products and has used more than 115 million kgs (gross) of PIC, PCC, and/or CL-PCR, with more than 51 million pounds (gross) of PCC, and more than 9 million kgs of CL-PCR.
By 2025, Lenovo will ensure 75% of products will be vetted by inclusive design experts through our Product Diversity Office to ensure they work for everyone, regardless of physical attributes or abilities.
Under these global initiatives, Lenovo also leverages local facilities and partnerships to drive the key messages and offerings closer to home. One such example is our partnership with the Recycling Hub by Enviroserve, in the UAE. Enviroserve are the world’s largest electronics recycler in Dubai, working towards scientific and sustainable disposal of electronic waste.
