Lenovo Exec: New Virtualization Solutions Will Aid Partners In Modernization Push, With Or Without VMware

While Lenovo is not ‘biased towards one [virtualization platform] or another’ because it wants to serve a broad base of customers and partners, the company is nevertheless here to help solution providers who lost their partner status with VMware, an executive tells CRN.

Lenovo is seeking to help channel partners navigate virtualization modernization issues for customers with a new set of infrastructure solutions and services—regardless of whether they are moving on from VMware due to fallout from its sale to Broadcom.

That’s according to Scott Patti, a vice president within Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group who told CRN that the Chinese tech giant is aiming to meet partners and customers “where they are in their ISV selection journey” with the new offerings announced on Wednesday.

“It’s the ability to give our customers choice. We want to have basically as big of a menu for them to pull [from], but we want to try to curate that menu. That’s why we’re doing the solution work. It’s not just like, ‘Here’s a bunch of bits, here’s a bunch of parts, customer, go figure it out on your own,’” said Patti (pictured above), who joined Lenovo last December after previously working at Dell Technologies for 19 years, of the virtualization offensive.

The vendor is making the virtualization modernization push as another way to stand apart from rivals like Dell Technologies and HPE and continue recent momentum for the Infrastructure Solutions Group, which nearly doubled revenue to a record $8.5 billion for its first fiscal quarter that ended in June, largely due to AI demand.

Chris Bogan, vice president of alliances at Houston-based Lenovo systems integration partner Mark III Systems, told CRN that the move is another way Lenovo is trying to grow its share against rivals in the data center market.

“They tend to be pretty innovative with leaning into software providers and ISVs, and I think this is an example of that,” he said.

New Pre-Validated Solutions Could Help With Supply Issues

Lenovo’s new offerings include an Intel-powered ThinkAgile VX server for VMware environments as well as pre-validated solutions for systems supported by rival virtualization vendors Microsoft, Red Hat, Nutanix and SUSE. The company also revealed a set of deployment services for customers with various levels of support.

The new ThinkAgile VX850 V4 system is the first product in the VX series to feature Intel’s Xeon 6 CPUs, and it’s built for customers with “high memory demands” for workloads with structured and unstructured data, including in-memory databases.

Patti said the system builds on top of recent announcements Lenovo made with VMware at the recent VMware Explore event, including around memory tiering.

The new pre-validated solutions cover several competing virtualization platforms, including Red Hat OpenShift, Nutanix, SUSE, Microsoft Azure Local and Microsoft Hyper-V.

These solutions fall under the Lenovo Express Solutions portfolio, which is part of the company’s Top Choice Express program. According to a letter Lenovo sent to channel partners in July, products in this program have maintained a 30-day quote window this whole year, with 90 percent of orders shipping within 10 days.

Patti said this could help partners in what he called a “very dynamic supply market,” referring to the AI-driven components supply crisis that has created long lead times for many hardware products and caused OEMs, including Lenovo in some cases, to cut price quote windows for several months this year before restoring them to 30 days.

Michael Goldstein, market president of Southeast Florida for Fort Myers, Fla.-based Lenovo managed services partner Entech, said system availability has been his company’s top issue because of the shortages, which makes Lenovo’s pitch sound appealing.

“We’d have to see the specs of the express models to see if they fit the mold, but it’s good to know that if someone’s in a bind that those express models are available,” he said.

Lenovo Wants To Help Partners Regardless Of Virtualization Platform

While Patti said Lenovo is not “biased towards one [virtualization platform] or another” because it wants to serve a broad base of customers and partners, he said the company is nevertheless here to help solution providers who lost their partner status with VMware due to program changes made after it was acquired by Broadcom for $69 billion in 2023.

Broadcom has said that it’s reducing the number of partners in VMware’s programs to focus on those who have demonstrated “historical performance levels, technical and other relevant expertise.”

“With some of the dynamics in the industry, even the partner community has been impacted. Who can they resell? Who can they not resell?” Patti said. “So we want to be there for them as well. We want to make sure that when they’re having to maybe pivot from one ISV to another that we have great technology for them to partner with.”

Patti said that sentiment extends to customers who have been forced to consider a post-VMware world. Customers are facing dramatic price increases from VMware after the virtualization giant consolidated its offerings, tweaked its licensing terms and eschewed its traditional perpetual business model in pursuit of subscription revenue.

But the executive indicated that some customers may be looking to move away from their existing virtualization platform—and not just VMware—for other reasons: “There’s sometimes a commercial reason why they may want to switch. There may be some workload or some application that’s just running better in one environment over the other.”

Regardless of the situation, the executive positioned Lenovo as a key technology partner for solution providers and customers preparing virtualization upgrades.

“We’ll walk them through our perspective of their environment and [then] give them [a view of] the landscape of as we see it and help them make a decision on where they want to head long term in their virtualization infrastructure environment,” Patti said.

New Services, Solutions Meant To Help Customers Focus On AI

Lenovo is improving the way it helps customers set up virtualization solutions with a new service it’s calling Lenovo Premier Deploy for Infrastructure.

This offering consists of three deployment options—standard deploy, premier deploy and premier deploy plus—the latter two of which come with implementation and operational handoff support for customers and partners who need additional assistance.

Patti acknowledged that partners may have their own capabilities for helping customers set up new virtualized environments but said the deployment service is there for those in the channel who may specialize in other areas and lack the implementation know-how.

“You meet the partner where they are in terms of their critical skills, where they’re driving their business, and you come in behind them where it makes sense,” he said.

Even if partners don’t need help with deployments, Patti said Lenovo can help them cut down on extra work for customer projects. For instance, he pointed out how the company validates the stability of firmware updates for ThinkAgile systems so that partners and customers don’t have to “put those puzzle pieces together.”

By providing different ways to make virtualization deployments easier, Lenovo is hoping it can help partners and customers devote more time to AI projects, according to Patti.

“AI didn’t come with double the IT staff, so they’re trying to do more with the same,” he said. “And our vision is helping customers modernize their virtualized environments [and] their infrastructure [to] allow them to spend more time thinking forward about AI in the workloads to come, so that’s why it’s so important to us.”