Lenovo has entered the South African server market with its ThinkServer line targeted at small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that lack dedicated IT staff to manage a server environment.
Lenovo has sold servers in Europe since October last year, but this is the first time its servers will be released in SA, which is expected to be in March this year.
Henry Ferreira has held the position of regional general manager for Lenovo SA since 1 January. He says that going forward into the server space is an opportunity for Lenovo to capture more market share in SA and establish Lenovo in the SME market.
Pursuing SMEs
Lenovo's 2005 acquisition of IBM's Personal Computing Division made Lenovo the third largest PC manufacturer in the world, behind HP and Dell.
In January last year Lenovo signed an exclusive agreement with IBM to use its technology to manufacture servers. This in the hope of capturing a share of the x86 world server market, worth $31 billion, and the x86 server market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, worth $8 billion, according to a Lenovo press statement.
Julian Pienaar, head of pre-sales for Lenovo, says the company had to find the right business model before it decided to release the server line: “We had to find a business requirement from SMEs looking for a hardware solution that fits their needs. The South African market is different to the European market. We decided to launch the ThinkServer line later because we had to have the right marketing model, technical support and the right supply chain in place.”
Assisting businesses
Lenovo's new server offering includes three towers and two rack servers based on x86 architecture for businesses ranging in size from one to 500 employees. The ThinkServer family is available with Microsoft Windows Server or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.
The ThinkServer TS100 Tower and RS110 Rackservers are equipped with Intel Core 2 Duo or Xeon 3000 or 3200 processors and are targeted at small offices where they would be used as a Web server or to run basic applications such as e-mail and messaging. The ThinkServer TD100 Tower, TD100x Tower or RD120 Rack servers are equipped with Intel Xeon 3000 or 5000 processors and are ideal for SMEs that require database applications or virtualisation.
Server strategy
Lenovo's main distributors are Tarsus and Pinnacle. Some of Lenovo's other partners include Intel, Microsoft, Novell, SUSE and VMware.
Hannes Fourie, IDC analyst, says that Lenovo's major competitors are HP, Dell and Fujitsu-Siemens. Fourie states that Lenovo will not compete directly against IBM because IBM targets the higher-end server market for large corporations while Lenovo has firmly set its intentions on the SME server market.
“Overall, it's a very good move for Lenovo as it's now that we are really seeing new technologies like virtualisation and cloud computing infrastructure coming in. And even though the overall PC market has slowed down because of the economic crisis, there's always a need for servers. I don't think that this will put Lenovo in a bad light as this is an opportunity for Lenovo to expand its product reach to SMEs demanding more for less.”
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