Lenovo: Bringing AI To The Edge For All Enterprises Powered By ThinkEdge AI-Ready Platforms

Charles Ferland, VP & GM, ThinkEdge & CommSP, Lenovo We believe that more than 80% of the revenue will eventually come from AI deploying edge innovation here is really that we pivoted from having these underpowered PCs and the ability now to bring the same powerful compute capability that you find in the data center at the edge. And why did we do this? Simply because the massive amount of data is actually created at the edge. The cost of the cloud to ingest all this data is actually pretty high. So instead of bringing the data to the cloud edge, computing is about bringing the compute or the cloud to the data on premise, and that is in stores, in restaurants, in factories. So, if you're a reseller and say, Hey, how do I bring edge computing to my customers? There's two key factors that are driving this industry. The first one is consolidation. Consolidation means that when you walk into a store or a restaurant in a warehouse, there's typically multiple devices around. There's a PC for the point of sale. There's a gateway media for playing music in the store, and there's different IoT devices, each fulfilling a single purpose, and there's multiple management tools to address them. So, the first step number one, is about consolidating all of those devices into a very compact edge server. What many of our customers are telling us is as we've moved everything to the cloud, it's fantastic. However, if I lose my network connectivity from my site to the cloud, my entire operation is on pause. So by introducing powerful edge computing on site at the store or the restaurant at the factory, at the school, basically the applications run locally. And when the network connectivity is restored, the data is re synchronize with the cloud. So it gives an ability for these edge side to operate even in the condition where they lost complete network connectivity to the cloud. The second trend is about acceleration and acceleration. I mean, by using air use cases with a very specific purpose. What we realize is most of our customers say, hey, I'll do this in two step, step number one, I'll get rid of all these little underpowered, devices that I have in the store, and I will install edge computing that my step number one. Step number two, I'll start deploying advanced AI application to help me optimize my operation. Many of our competition only took a datacentre server, made it smaller and called out their edge servers we took a very different approach. Most of the portfolio will operate in very low or very high temperature range, where in the datacenter portfolio, it's a very controlled temperature environment. When you think about warehouses, you know, there's a lot of pallet from trucks being dropped. There's a lot of machinery being operated, so the servers constantly shake a bit. So you need to build them to withstand that type of environment. And retail environment, there's a lot of fabric in the air and most of the time we see with PCs and Tower servers, the fan gets filled with fabric. So, we put some smart filtering that notifies you to say, for example, you have 30% less air coming in. The sound of a server. If you ever visited a data center, you hear that high tone hissing sound right and it is super annoying. We don't care. We never visit the data center. But now you take that compute and you bring it in a manager's office or you bring it in your grocery store, you cannot have 80 decibel of high tone sound like this. So we have about six acoustic engineers that all they do is optimize the sound of the server so that it can operate below 50 decibel. 50 Decibel is a normal office conversation. We've put a lot of innovation into this space. We also understand that security is paramount. How do I protect the device and the data? So we have, for example, encrypted hard drive. We have motion detectors so that if somebody steals a device, there's a sensor inside and recognize there's a movement and automatically delete the data so that your your device is an incident, one of the device got stolen, but the information is protected. Right. So all of these attribute is what we have put into. I mean, we probably have the most comprehensive edge portfolio on the market from very small edge servers. I call the SE10 all the way to our data center portfolio and everything in between. You will find that these products have a purpose for different type of environment, different type of of use cases and different price point. We have very active ecosystem of partners that allows us to bring solution in logistic, retail, quick serve, restaurant, hospitality. They know who does not designed a system, do solution themselves. We partner with hundreds of companies to achieve this. And finally, our services capability in 180 market that we can go and install deploy these technology as you'll find the decision making point might be here in Atlanta. But by its very nature, edge computing is all over the US, all over the world.