Lenovo Closes Infinidat Acquisition: 6 Big Things To Know

Top company executives talked with CRN about Lenovo’s acquisition of Infinidat, with topics ranging from why it took so long for Lenovo to make a serious play to bring enterprise storage to clients buying its enterprise servers to why a fast-growing Infinidat would even consider being acquired at a time its technology is in high demand for use in AI workloads.

Lenovo, which over a year ago unveiled plans to acquire Infinidat and in the process become a top provider of enterprise storage technology, finally closed the deal last week.

To better understand what will happen to Infinidat under Lenovo, CRN this week talked with Scott Patti, vice president of Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, Infinidat’s new home. Joining him was Phil Bullinger, CEO of Infinidat, now known as Infinidat, a Lenovo company.

Both Patti and Bullinger said the acquisition brings together two complementary businesses, marrying Lenovo’s enterprise server business with Infinidat’s enterprise storage business.

That server and storage marriage is important for both companies.

Patti admitted that storage was a hole in Lenovo’s enterprise portfolio. “If you think about where Infinidat sits in the storage stack, high-end mission-critical, we’ve never had that as part of our enterprise storage portfolio here at Lenovo,” he said. “So from our standpoint, this is something that we’ve been missing for a long period of time. It’s an area of the market that we haven’t been able to play in.”

Bullinger said his company will benefit from the acquisition as well. “Importantly, Lenovo brings to Infinidat global reach and scale, a global presence,” he said. “Infinidat has always done well when we get an at-bat. We just need a lot more at-bats, and Lenovo is clearly going to bring that to us.”

Lenovo has not disclosed the financial terms of the deal. Both Patti and Bullinger declined to reveal a price tag.

There’s a lot going on with Lenovo’s long-awaited entry into the enterprise storage market, including Infinidat moving away from its use of HPE and Dell hardware. Here are six things to know about the deal.

Why Did Lenovo Take So Long To Offer Enterprise Storage

Lenovo has tried entering the enterprise storage market in the past, but was not successful. For instance, it resold EMC storage between 2021 to 2015. 2015 then saw Lenovo launch hyper-converged offerings based on SimpliVity, followed in 2016 with converged infrastructure using technology from Nimble Storage. Both those efforts ended in 2017 when Lenovo arch-rival HPE acquired both SimpliVity and Nimble Storage. The company later signed partnerships with NetApp, Scale Computing, and DDN.

Patti said that because he joined Lenovo only five months ago that he could speak to the history of his company’s storage business.

“I’ll sort of reiterate the complimentary nature of Infinidat technology with the existing Lenovo storage stack,” he said. “I can’t speak well to the past given that I didn’t live through it. But I do look forward to this complementary portfolio we have, the fact that we’re injecting a ton of storage expertise and knowledge into Lenovo quote, unquote, overnight, and bringing a very complimentary storage portfolio to our customer base.”

Patti also said that the lack of an enterprise storage business did mean that Lenovo in the past did miss out on some opportunities.

“I won’t try to quantify the math, but I just want to mention that we do have a storage portfolio today,” he said. “It’s midrange and down. We have never had high-end, mission-critical storage. That’s what Infinidat brings to the table. So it’s hard to quantify because, again, we’ve had a storage portfolio that we’ve been selling. But has there been any high-end opportunities we’ve missed out on? Absolutely. Obviously, every high-end storage array is connecting to a bunch of compute, so there certainly have been missed opportunities for Lenovo in the past. So that’s definitely an area of the portfolio that now is rounded out for us.”

Complementary Businesses

Infinidat brings to Lenovo what Patti called an “amazing complementary opportunity that, from a Lenovo standpoint, really rounds out the company’s storage portfolio.

“If you think about where Infinidat sits in the storage stack, high-end mission-critical, we’ve never had that as part of our enterprise storage portfolio here at Lenovo,” he said. “So from our standpoint, this is something that we’ve been missing for a long period of time. It’s an area of the market that we haven’t been able to play in. This certainly brings some great technology and great people into Lenovo, and makes us relevant in that high-end space immediately. It really gives us an end-to-end spectrum of a storage portfolio. We’re super excited about that.”

Patti said the acquisition of Infinidat reinforces the company’s capabilities for meeting businesses’ AI requirements.

“It’s a critical time with the world of AI, particularly AI inferencing,” he said. “We think that there’s some great applicability of Infinidat in that space.”

Glass globe of North and South America with graph printed documents

Lenovo Brings Infinidat Global Reach

Lenovo’s acquisition of Infinidat may be a bit unusual given that there are no dis-synergies, Bullinger said. Infinidat brings Lenovo an enterprise storage business, platform, and technology, and the ability to execute successfully, oftentimes against much larger competitors while helping the largest enterprise customers place their mission-critical bets, he said.

These bring Lenovo some great opportunities, Bullinger said. However, that works both ways, he said.

“Importantly, Lenovo brings to Infinidat global reach and scale, a global presence,” he said. “Infinidat has always done well when we get an at-bat. We just need a lot more at-bats, and Lenovo is clearly going to bring that to us. Clearly in today’s component market, size matters a lot, and Lenovo brings to Infinidat significant order of magnitudes increase in our ability to capture competitive prices in the market.”

Lenovo will also help improve Infinidat’s global operations and increased its investment in R&D projects that are a bit more audacious and maybe have longer gestation cycles than what Infinidat could pursue on its own, Bullinger said.

“So it’s an exciting future ahead,” he said. “Importantly for our customers, the message today is about continuity of the business. Infinidat will operate as a business unit inside of Lenovo ISG group. I’ll continue to run the business. We’re going to continue to operate largely the way we have been, only with the investment in scale and synergies that I mentioned. So it’s really the best of all possible worlds, at least from an Infinidat perspective. We’re going to preserve what’s great, and we’re going to invest in scale and stand on the accelerator as we go forward.”

Why Infinidat Did Not Want To Remain Independent

While Infinidat has been growing quickly, the enterprise storage business increasingly is a scale game, Bullinger said.

“In terms of enterprise customers looking at infrastructure investments, what we bring to the table is storage,” he said. “But many times we’re involved in larger deals that also have compute and networking and storage and other components, and we’re often competing against system vendors that can bring a fuller portfolio to the table. This [acquisition] gives us the ability to bring a lot more solution value to the table, plus solution value that in the future can be a combination of storage and compute together in different workloads and different applications. I think the possibilities are really almost endless at this point.”

“It’s hard to tread water in enterprise storage,” Bullinger said.

“Either you’re aggressively growing or you’re not,” he said. “Now we continue to grow. I mean, I’m really, really proud of Infinidat’s track record. In fact, we had a record 2025: record bookings, record revenue. This was after we announced the transaction. So it is already creating tailwinds for our business. For me, it doubled down on that primary thesis that the combination is much stronger for Infinidat than Infinidat standalone going forward.”

Infinidat Hardware Focus Shifts To Lenovo

Infinidat is a software-defined storage technology developer, and so when it sold hardware systems, the hardware was standard servers from multiple vendors including Supermicro in the past and more recently HPE and Dell Technologies.

Continuity is critical for the Infinidat product line and for its customers, Bullinger said.

“But as you might expect, solutions going forward will favor Lenovo, of course,” he said. “I mean, that’s part of the value proposition of this. But remember, the particular brand, the variety of server, in our rack is not critical at all to the solution’s functionality. Our customers, frankly, rarely if ever expressed even an interest in what that is. Our software is completely abstracted from the underlying compute platform. It’s a matter of supply chain efficiency more than anything, and not customer choice.”

Patti said Lenovo wants to be in control of as much of the entire customer experience as possible.

“By building on Lenovo products, it allows us to ensure supply continuity and quality of the underlying products. So clearly, that would be a focus for us.”

When CRN pointed out that some enterprises have standardized their data center infrastructures on Dell or HPE servers for support reasons, Bullinger said Infinidat supports all its our own equipment.

“You have to think at a higher level of abstraction about our product,” he said. “We made it. In the history of the company, we’ve made three server transitions, none of which came with customer tails on them, saying, ‘Keep supporting this version for me for a period of time.’ We just don’t operate that way. That’s not the value proposition of our product. It’s not the way you run our business. I can say with confidence, we’ve never been presented with a situation where a customer said, ‘My standard server is this, and I’ll put that server in your in your system.’

Will Infinidat Lead To Increased Lenovo Server Sales?

Lenovo expects the addition of Infinidat to lead to increased server sales, Patti said.

“The goal is that when we’re talking end-to-end solutions, we can talk high-end storage, we can talk midrange, and we can bring compute along,” he said. “My expectation is that when we’re selling into the higher end of storage opportunities that we’ll be able to bring more servers into those opportunities.