Lenovo’s September Surprise: Servers
Lenovo is leaping from the desktop into the server market, and will launch its first Linux and Windows servers this September, The VAR Guy has learned. Here’s why solutions providers — and rivals like Dell and Hewlett-Packard — should care.
Consider this: Lenovo’s R&D team (the brains behind ThinkPad notebooks) maintains a strong reputation for innovation. Instead of screwing together no-name product components and slapping a Windows logo on the box, the ThinkPad folks focus on security and reliability innovations. Lenovo’s VeriFace security technology, for instance, allows a notebook to “recognize” its owner by measuring certain facial characteristics.
Next Move
Can Lenovo extend its commitment to innovation to the server? J Scott Di Valerio, president, Americas Group (pictured), certainly seems to think so. He tells The VAR Guy that Lenovo will unveil its servers at Interop, scheduled for Sept. 15-19 in New York.
The server effort will leverage a licensing agreement inked with IBM’s server team in January 2008.
Lenovo will offer customers (and partners) a choice of Windows Server or Linux on the systems. Di Valerio says Lenovo is working with two Linux distributions on the effort.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SuSE Linux seem to be the safe bets, The VAR Guy speculates. But our resident blogger wonders if Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux will somehow wrestle its way onto Lenovo’s server systems.
Creating the Perfect Storm?
For Lenovo, the server launch marks the latest step in the company’s business transformation. Lenovo, the world’s No. 4 PC maker, delivered strong quarterly financial results in August. Now, a major marketing campaign at the Olympics appears to be strengthening Lenovo’s global brand.
Still, The VAR Guy beat up Lenovo in May 2008 for lacking a server strategy. Now, Lenovo is finally answering the call for servers. And the company will be working with major distributors to bring the systems to market, Di Valerio says.
Thousands of small business IT managers and CIOs already trust Lenovo’s ThinkPad brand. If Lenovo can extend that trust onto the server, then Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Sun could face heightened competition from
Is it just me, or is there a general perception that Thinkpad quality went rapidly downhill when it moved from IBM to Lenovo? The reputation for robustness and reliability across the board (not just for the high-end models) seems to have disappeared. For that reason I’d be extremely sceptical about a Lenovo Server supporting my small business. I’m still happily running an IBM Netfinity!
RussH: Actually, The VAR Guy has heard good things about ThinkPad quality under Lenovo’s management. However, our resident blogger is mobile today so he doesn’t have any hard facts about product quality to share with you.
RussH – agreed. I’m in IT and I noticed the same quality hit once Lenovo took over. The IBM ThinkPads were much better and the new Lenovo are not so good.
I wonder if your comments about quality are in specific comparison to the older IBM Thinkpads rather than the industry. I own or help maintain several Thinkpads, including Z61M, T61, T60, and T61P. And to me the build quality hasn’t suffered. These systems replaced T40 (IBM branded and built), T42P, T20 and other systems in the past. I would say that the slight hit that may exist, and I haven’t seen it in all the systems I have worked with, may be due to the improved time to market on new technology. The Thinkpad series were often major laggards in bringing new technology to the market, this afforded the Thinkpads time to make sure things were rock solid but often left folks with little choice but to go to competitors to get that technology early.
Lenovo seems to be drawing a line a little closer to getting new stuff out there to be competitive and still building very solid systems. In fact my T60P (technically work owned) has had zero issues since I received it a year ago, and it is used heavily and daily. Compared to the T40 it replaced, this has been even better at holding up to my daily use than that T40 was which after one year had some minor although annoying issues, which IBM addressed.
OOPS I knew I forgot to mention one thing, PC Magazine came out with their best of 2008 mag just this month, and in that they used consumer ratings of computers, and Lenovo ranked number 2 for reliability and satisfaction for business laptops, only behind Apple. And the satisfaction rating actually went up year to year.
One quick note: Contrary to all the conspiracy theory folks out there, PC Magazine truly does independent testing and the sponsors aren’t hanging out in the labs paying the editors for nice reviews. So, generally speaking, The VAR Guy trusts PC Mag’s reviews.
Well its not the quality that took as much of a hit — as the stock and avilablity of Lenovo laptops. The supply chain for Lenovo is just not as consistant on reliable as IBM’s. Lenvos servers will IBM architucture which is great—but will be built useing Lenovos supply chain. —not so good. Better have spares on the self.
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