The Lenovo and EMC deal is good business

I had a briefing with the team at Lenovo for further information about the recent announcement about the agreement between Lenovo and EMC. It’s always interesting to hear what the background to such announcements are and what deliverables or benefits they see going forward. The presentation provided some useful background to Lenovo’s scale in the hardware and services space I hadn’t previously been aware of how large Lenovo was in the services space. You can read the official briefing here.

The agreement is composed of three component parts and is very much seen as a long term partnership agreement:

1. Server alliance/sales agreement – a joint lab for innovation of enterprise hardware and the ability for EMC to leverage embedded servers from Lenovo’s portfolio as appropriate for their solutions
2. Storage Agreement – Lenovo gets the opportunity to resell medium and high end EMC storage initially in China and grants further abilities for Lenovo to deliver enterprise grade solutions based on EMC storage platforms.
3. NAS Joint Venture – based on the Iomega brand to deliver small to medium businesses and cloud enterprises to meet growing demand for NAS based solutions for these growing markets.

The volume of growth and demand for servers in China was highlighted, with year on year growth in the demand for servers reaching 11%,  all these servers will need storage of some kind, and with the demand for storage increasing, the EMC and Lenovo partnership not opens up potential markets for EMC and Lenovo, but with the NAS joint venture and EMC’s background in storage and virtualization further empowers Lenovo to expand its services from desktop through to cloud and beyond.

The announcement allows EMC to capitalize on Lenovo’s existing relationships and gain further entry points into markets in China not only for hardware and storage but professional services and cloud solutions.

Exciting times are ahead both for EMC and Lenovo which is not only great news for end users but the industry alike, the more investment and innovation, the more choice there is and chances that we’ll find the right solution for me and my business., well done to EMC and Lenovo on reaching this agreement.

Category: News, Servers