The expansion of TruScale into a company-wide offering was part of a major series of announcements, that included the related Hitachi Brain AI service and the Project Unity wireless connectivity framework.
On Wednesday, at its virtualized Tech World event, Lenovo announced a major expansion to their TruScale consumption-based offerings. TruScale has been in place for over two years, but until now has been limited in infrastructure services. With the expansion, the new Lenovo TruScale is committed to covering all of Lenovo’s portfolio, from its consumer phones to the cloud. It was the major announcement in a series of significant ones from Tech World.
“Customers need a simpler way to consume IT, which is why Lenovo TruScale is our most important news of the day,” said Yuanqing Yang, Lenovo’s CEO. “Customers are now choosing the platform for software as a service that meets their needs. We launched TruScaleS two and a half years ago as Infrastructure as-a-Service. It has now become our corporate brand.”
Thus, while the TruScale brand has existed before, in a more limited form, with its expansion to the entire portfolio, Lenovo is formally referring to the expansion as a full launch.
“We have expanded into the full as-a-Service model to leverage commonality and standardization,” Yang said. “This extends from pocket to cloud, and with centralized customer support, and support from our partners. I see as-a-service as a major trend to reshape the IT industry, with every business becoming digital and every product becoming a service.”
The changes include moving existing offerings like Lenovo Device-as-a-Service [DaaS], which provides devices with full lifecycle services and support, under the expanded TruScale umbrella.
With Lenovo TruScale, IT leaders’ infrastructure solutions are fully managed, giving customers the advantages of an on-premise cloud environment. Lenovo says that this transition to a fully integrated as-a-service strategy brings to life the company’s “One Lenovo” vision of addressing common business challenges and providing the performance and flexibility for pay-as-you-grow.
The as-a-service market is growing at four times the overall IT services TAM. The growth is so significant that Lenovo is actually the last of the big OEMs with a presence in PCs, servers, storage and the cloud to signal their commitment to making their entire portfolio available on a consumption model, for customers who want to buy that way, joining HPE GreenLake, Dell APEX, and Cisco Plus. It is still a small minority of sales, but it is growing, especially in storage. Citing joint Gartner, IDC and its own market intelligence, Lenovo says that in three years, as-a-service models will represent 12% of enterprise x86 server spend and over 50% of new enterprise storage spend, growing at 40% CAGR and around 17% of commercial PC spend, up from 1% two years ago and growing at 50% CAGR.
Another part of the new TruScale portfolio is Lenovo Brain, a new service that has been assembled from Lenovo’s in-house developed, industrial-transformation-orientated A.I. platform, which started out being used for their own internal purposes around Smart Factories. It was introduced by Dr. Yong Rui, Lenovo’s Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, during the main keynote. He announced further development of Lenovo Brain to empower other industries with its AI solution construction, deployment and support.
Lenovo also introduced their new wireless connectivity framework, Project Unity, which will initially launch in conjunction with the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro, and is designed to transform the device into a smart companion for a Windows 10 or 11 Lenovo PC, pairing the devices with a simple pin input. Lenovo also announced it will be the first-to-market with VMware’s software solution for the edge running on the resilient ThinkSystem SE350 Edge Servers, as well as the enhancement of Lenovo Open Cloud, and Automation management software to automate the planning, deployment and ongoing management of data centre cloud deployments all the way to edge sites.
