Lenovo Expands Portfolio of Next-Generation IT Offerings

ORLANDO, Fla. – October 17, 2016 – Lenovo (HKSE: 992) today announced a major expansion of its solutions portfolio designed to help clients transform their data centers with next-generation IT offerings that are appliance-centric, pre-validated and pre-integrated for quick time to value, agility and superior ease of use. The company will unify these offerings under a new portfolio named ThinkAgile.

ThinkAgile solutions leverage the capabilities of Lenovo’s industry leading supply chain to provide factory-level pre-installation and pre-configuration of server, storage and networking capabilities, as well as virtualization and management tools. The resulting offerings are pre-validated and come completely configured, provisioned and ready to deploy.

The ThinkAgile solutions will address a wide variety of use cases within the enterprise data center, including server virtualization, private cloud deployment, VDI, databases, big data, telco and High Performance Computing, among others. Lenovo configures ThinkAgile offerings to be ordered as a single solution based on the use case and scale; the appliances are built for rapid deployment, installation and provisioning, and come bundled with Lenovo Services to create a seamless single point of support.

With its ThinkAgile portfolio, Lenovo is targeting a major challenge faced by data centers today –intense pressure to cut planning, design and implementation time in new IT projects and shorten the time needed to capture full value from these initiatives. Supply chain capabilities are crucial to addressing this challenge and Lenovo has the most advanced mass customization capabilities in ‘build anywhere, ship anywhere’ in the world’ to address customers unique requirements with the best total cost of ownership in the industry. This also enables the company to deliver a fast turnaround cycle time, for ThinkAgile solutions, within three weeks from order to shipment.

The first new solution from this effort, called ThinkAgile CX Series, was unveiled today at the annual Gartner Symposium/IT Expo.  These offerings will be coupled with modern All Flash Arrays, as well as flash-based hybrid array solutions, from Nimble Storage, Inc. (NYSE: NMBL) through a new partnership also announced today. ThinkAgile CX solutions integrate Lenovo’s own intuitive management tool, XClarity®, greatly reducing set up and deployment time and lowering overall TCO. The first CX Series offering will be available starting Oct 28, 2016.

In addition, Lenovo is expanding its HX Series hyperconverged appliances, announced earlier this year, within the ThinkAgile portfolio by adding networking capabilities and delivering the offerings as complete, pre-integrated appliances.  Within the ThinkAgile portfolio, clients can mix different HX offerings – storage, compute or performance-heavy configurations – to rapidly customize the infrastructure based on their workload requirement.

Finally, Lenovo plans to develop and deliver ThinkAgile appliances based upon OpenStack environments beginning in the China market. These offerings will deploy Lenovo’s servers and storage technologies combined with OpenSource storage such as Ceph to deliver a holistic solution.  The first offering within Lenovo’s OpenStack environment, called ThinkCloud AIO, was unveiled last month and will be available only in the China market.

About Lenovo
Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) is a $45 billion global Fortune 500 company and a leader in providing innovative consumer, commercial, and enterprise technology. Our portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services covers PCs (including the legendary Think and multimode Yoga brands), workstations, servers, storage, smart TVs and a family of mobile products like smartphones (including the Moto brand), tablets and apps. Join us on LinkedIn, follow us onFacebook or Twitter (@Lenovo) or visit us at www.lenovo.com.

Quote from Radhika Krishnan, GM CI & Networking BU, Data Center Group, Lenovo
“With ThinkAgile, we’re liberating data centers from slow and time-consuming deployments, and helping clients quickly unlock new value in their businesses.  Our pre-integrated and pre-validated appliances are ready to go coming in the door and easily scale to keep pace with growing workloads.  Lenovo’s end-to-end capabilities, from world-class supply chain to high-octane servers to high-quality support, make deployment a uniquely simple process and our ThinkAgile offerings a safe and easy choice.”

Quote from Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc.
“Lenovo’s long history of data center innovation is apparent in its ThinkAgile Series. The new solutions address the increasingly severe time pressures faced by organizations, and are designed permit fast implementation to gain key benefits for their businesses,” said, Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, Inc.  “The company’s global supply chain plays a crucial in ensuring both the quality of ThinkAgile Series offerings, and their fast, two week turnaround cycle time. Those points should appeal to existing and prospective customers around the world.”