Lenovo Aims To Democratize AI With Expanded SMB Access To Infrastructure

‘What we’re announcing here is really the expansion of our portfolio to support small and medium business, really taking and democratizing AI as it goes from small language models to inferencing at the edge,’ Brian Connors, vice president and general manager, enterprise and SMB AI, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo, tells CRN.

Lenovo is launching a three-pronged blitz to help the SMB market get the infrastructure and security it needs to adopt AI with new products and partnerships designed to meet the needs of Main Street.

“What we’re announcing here is really the expansion of our portfolio to support small and medium business, really taking and democratizing AI as it goes from small language models to inferencing at the edge,” Brian Connors, vice president and general manager, enterprise and SMB AI, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo, told CRN.

SMBs face considerable cost constraints, and time to value is critical for customers in that environment. Connors told CRN Lenovo is now offering simplified products that lower the barriers to deploying and managing their IT estate.

“We have this concept of [the] box experience. How do we develop and create a validated, bundled product and solution that can be easily deployed, managed and life-cycle-managed over time?” he said.

To start, the company is leveraging its partnership with Microsoft and its Hyper-V virtualization product to deploy what Lenovo calls Business Ready Infrastructure.

Lenovo said the Hyper-V Ready Node offering is built on the Lenovo ThinkSystem SR635 V3 or Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 V4. It has been validated with Windows Server 2025 Hyper-V and imaged with Windows Admin Console enabled. Connor said this is infrastructure that can quickly deliver business outcomes for customers.

“So this is all tested, validated and ready to go through the SMB channel to our customers,” he said.

The second SMB-focused offerings are two backup and recovery products that Lenovo has created with Veeam Software. Lenovo said customers can safeguard critical data and workloads with Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V3 supporting up to 55 virtual machines, or Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 V3 with ThinkSystem Storage Arrays supporting up to 140 virtual machines.

“You can buy it as an appliance-type of product or with us with a storage device attached, depending on the number of virtual machines that you need to manage,” Connors said.

Lenovo’s third SMB-focused compute offering is AI at the edge, which uses Scale Computing to reach into retail and factory environments. The offering uses a cost-effective Lenovo ThinkEdge SE100, powered by Scale Computing HyperCore for lightweight and on-demand edge deployments, making enterprise-grade edge computing easy to adopt and manage for smaller teams, Lenovo said.

“This now uses the SE100 which is a less-than-140-watt platform, [and it’s] whisper quiet. It’s tamper-proof. It is a true edge product. And it could be put in in remote offices. It could be put in pharmacies, retail, wherever you need something to be remotely managed and just kind of go in there and plug it in and get it deployed,” he told CRN.

In addition, Connors said Lenovo service and support is backing SMBs with XClarity One, which is a console-based user interface that is part of its Premier Plus support. XClarity One has been trained on thousands of tickets and evolved into an IT operations companion for solution providers, Connors said.

“With XClarity One in Premier Plus support, you’ll start to get the preventative maintenance and analytics. So we’re leveraging about five years of data collection of failures that we’ve seen in the field and really instilling that now in XClarity One along with Premier Plus support. So we can actually provide a level of capability for the customer to be preventative in their management,” he said.