Data center News

WATCH: Lenovo Data Center Group North America President Outlines Five Technologies Partners Need To Know At Accelerate

Lenovo’s Kevin Hooper, president of the North America Data Center Group, discusses top trends he sees for the channel as he looks to make Lenovo a leader in the market.

Lenovo’s Kevin Hooper has big plans for the Data Center Group. At Lenovo Accelerate this week in Orlando, Fla., he outlines five technology areas that he says will take Lenovo to the top. He discusses the details in an interview with CRNtv.

Tell us about your vision to make Lenovo’s Data Center Group the most trusted in the market. How will you make this a reality?

Hooper: We want to show up in many more places, solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges and become the most trusted data center provider in the world. The way we do that is by being very curious about our customer’s challenges and about the type of things that get them up in the morning and keep them up at night. We then provide solutions, infrastructure and technology. The sort of things to help them solve those problems.

What are the top areas you want to focus on with your partners and sales team going forward?

Hooper: One of the things that I found is that from a data center vendor perspective, we are really good talking about speeds and feeds and how the technology works, but we aren’t good at understanding how our customers utilize them. So I’m asking my sales team and our partners to get conversational in five key areas: One is virtual desktop infrastructure, then blockchain, then augmented intelligence and machine learning for accessing big data applications, IoT edge—the notion that most of the data that’s going to get processed is going to get processed at the edge of the data center and closer to where the users are—and lastly we want them to bring forward the cultural change and philosophical change around DevOps. These five areas are things that CIOs, CEOs, all of our customers are dealing with. And if we can show up with our channel partners and be knowledgeable, conversational and have an opinion on these sorts of things, our customers are going to listen to us and look at us and [see that] maybe there’s an opportunity for us to solve these key problems.

For more of Hooper’s interview with CRNtv, watch the video included in this article.