Creating solutions to solve business challenges: Trust, Leadership, Innovation, and Ecosystem Will Drive Success
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Creating solutions to solve business challenges: Trust, Leadership, Innovation, and Ecosystem Will Drive Success
Thomas L. Hager, VP Global Accounts Financial Services, and David Weber, CTO Financial Services Global Accounts, at Lenovo, highlight the value of continuous innovation and collaboration with customers and partners.
Driven by the need to continuously innovate, Lenovo is the only global technology provider with an integrated, open choice ecosystem of systems, devices and solutions from pocket to cloud, to deliver smarter solutions that drive business transformation.
ver the years, Lenovo has established itself as one of the leading tech companies in the world, with a reputation for producing high-quality products and services. In this article, we will explore the strengths of Lenovo and what sets it apart from its competitors.
Lenovo’s diversified portfolio allows clients to develop proof of concepts, customise requirements, and choose specifications that best suit their business needs.
Thomas L. Hager, VP at Lenovo, picks up the story; “Lenovo has transformed into a full service
provider, from the desktop end user, all the way to the data centre. With the focus on services, Lenovo has brought three aspects together – the end user business with the PCs, the data centre business with the servers and storage, and the services underpinning everything it is offering, to bring a full-scale solution to its clients.”
Thomas, together with his global CTO, David Weber, is focused on the financial services industry and insurance. Thomas and David design solutions that are industry specific; the technology is contextualised for the operating environment of their clients. There are many
technologies, new and existing, that can be identified as part of a solution, from Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning and AR/VR, to servers, storage, services and security. Lenovo’s purpose is to deliver a solution that is right for its clients.
Using AI as an example, Lenovo has invested heavily in AI initiatives, including enabling products to support and develop inference and training, hardware accelerators, liquid cooling, AI innovation labs
and we are always developing and looking out for the next big thing besides delivering mature and industry-leading technology. It is so exciting to innovate in this space, working closely with our customers and partners.”
One field in which AI is being heavily used is ChatGPT, an advanced AI chatbot which interacts in a conversational way. Thomas says, “It is all about speed and efficiency. We have a lot of repetitive, mundane
“Without AI, we would not have the efficiency and cost reduction that clients are looking for in an increasingly tough marketplace. If you cannot automate, you cannot scale, so we can expect to see huge productivity gains in the industry over the next few years”
and an AI partner programme. For Financial Services Institutions, this enables the rapid development of new use cases for better customer service via virtual assistants, portfolio visualisation and modelling; digital twins for simulating branch or infrastructure operations; or enhanced security such as for computer vision, fraud detection, anti-money laundering (AML), and zero-trust infrastructure.
David explains, “The common thread is around innovation. We are a leader in many different technologies,
tasks that we have to do. How can you bring in efficiency, minimise errors, and find solutions to complex problems? Without AI, we would not have the efficiency and cost reduction that clients are looking for in an increasingly tough marketplace. If you cannot automate, you cannot scale, so we can expect to see huge productivity gains in the industry over the next few years.”
Staying close to clients, its partners, and understanding technology are key to Lenovo’s business strategy.
As demand for compute grow, it’s critical for organisations to get the most performance from their IT budgets.
One of the hottest areas where organisations are looking to improve their business processes is with artificial intelligence (AI) because of the variety of scenarios where AI can find improvements for their business from quality control, improved security, better awareness for equipment maintenance and improving overall efficiency.
For financial services the benefits of AI can range from automating tasks to reduce repetitive requests, improving accuracy for financial modeling algorithms, identifying fraudulent activities quicker and implementing chatbots like ChatGPT to improve customer service.
Taking AI from concept to production at scale has been a challenge. Implementing AI may require specialised hardware, knowledge of advanced skills sets in AI and DL, and access to custom tools that turn data sets into business results.
To help overcome these challenges Intel offers one of the broadest AI product portfolios ranging from hardware to software. Intel software portfolio includes
libraries and software development kits (SDKs) that are designed to reduce the learning curve to speed up development and faster deployments.
The AI reference kit includes AI model code, end-to-end machine learning pipeline instructions, libraries and oneAPI components for crossarchitecture performance. These toolkits are open source and designed to make AI more accessible to organisations. All of Intel’s software and toolkits such as oneAPI, Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit and AI Reference Kits are available at www.intel.com. Intel® also has one of the widest ranges of hardware portfolios that consist of processors, GPU’s, storage devices, network adapters, wireless products, and FPGAs.
Today, there are over 100 million Xeons installed in the market. Building on decades of data center leadership, the 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors have the most built-in accelerators of any CPU on the market to deliver performance and power
organisations budgets. efficiency advantages across the fastestgrowing workload types in AI, analytics, networking, storage and HPC. The builtin Intel Accelerator Engines on 4th Gen Xeon can help improve power efficiency by offloading common tasks from the embedded CPU cores on chip, boosting overall application performance while minimising power usage. Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX) which is one of the built-in accelerators is enabled to optimise deep learning (DL) training and inferencing workloads and can quickly pivot between optimising for general compute and AI workloads. Developers can leverage Intel’s Accelerator Engines through many of the toolkits such as oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library and oneAPI DL engine and these toolkits have been integrated into popular opensource tools such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, PaddlePaddle, and ONNX.
Learn more about Lenovo solutions powered with Intel Xeon processors and speak to a sales representative to find the right solution for your business.
www.intel.co.uk
David continues, “We think, for example, that the branch of the future is going to be more inclusive in terms of addressing the customer needs at each point in their lives. It will go beyond the transaction towards relationship building. Whether it’s visualising your portfolio with AR or VR, or using a smart kiosk in six different languages, there is so much we can do. I believe we will
see the branch be at the front end for increasingly reaching out to customers, bringing them in and building deeper relationships, especially for financial planning and wealth management.”
Regarding human interaction in the branches, for example, how do you use AI in the context of a human relationship so that they
will continue to be important in the future? Thomas answers, “Digital is good, but you still need to have relationships. AI allows you to be more of an expert in the context of that relationship. You need data, and the data needs to be closer to the servers that calculate the data, saving on both time and energy. I believe edge servers are a game-changer here, as ESG underpins everything we do.”
On the topic of corporate sustainability and ESG, David says accessing data and serving it up quickly heavily relies on the technology. He explains, “There are issues in the data centre around cooling because everything is getting hotter. How can you make your system design super-efficient? With the best air cooling and liquid cooling designs, you can take steps to becoming carbon neutral and even carbon negative by reusing excess heat. DreamWorks is a fantastic example because they switched to Lenovo and significantly reduced their computer data centre energy requirements becoming more efficient, more secure, and quieter. We are industry leaders in this space, and many of our clients are waking up to realise that water cooling technology will be the way to go.”
All these technologies and capabilities are great, but only if they can be delivered on time, and with trusted quality. The past few years have really challenged supply chain delivery schedules. Lenovo took many actions to fortify its supply chain, including building new manufacturing plants, expanding existing ones, and making more of the sub-assemblies like motherboards. In fact, Lenovo jumped six spots to number nine on the global supply chain rankings by Gartner.
From a supply chain security perspective, Lenovo makes itself responsible for its entire supply chain, from development of devices to them being in the hands of clients and end users, to ensure a secure ecosystem of trusted partners. David elaborates, “We have a transparent supply chain initiative, so everything manufactured is delivered as expected, and there is an audit trail. We also have a trusted supply chain where we require our vendors to comply with our high
university. He adds, “There is a huge demand for cyber security from our clients, so we have responded by opening up our own cyber innovation centre, in Israel. The partnership with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev underscores the drive to continuously innovate around our ThinkShield security portfolio, and with partners from industry and academia. This illustrates the commitment of Lenovo to help their clients tackle
Hyperview offers a really interesting software and RFID tagging solution that is battery-less and last for 10 years, so customers are able to see where their assets are, at a rack level or by room”
standards, complemented by an everexpanding ecosystem of likeminded partners. It is both a holistic approach and a multi-pronged view requiring constant vigilance.”
In addition to Lenovo’s secure supply chain, Lenovo takes security very seriously. It has a comprehensive suite of end-to-end security management solutions that protect clients’ end points, secure identities, and keep data safe.
Thomas is enthused by the opening of Lenovo’s cyber innovation centre in Israel in partnership with the local
overall security challenges and cyber threats.”
Great technologies, products, and supply chains are critical, but they have even greater value when combined with solutions that drive business value. Lenovo therefore looks for partners that will help create a solution to a specific problem that a client is experiencing. Thomas continues, “We often meet with our clients to discuss their challenges and create full solutions with them by bringing our partners on board with us. We have a comprehensive onboarding
process because we want to make sure everything we recommend is fully vetted.”
David adds, “We use customer engagement to drive our strategy, fill in any gaps, and identify new partnerships. We are very organic in terms of being close to the market, close to our customers, and delivering what they need.”
The company has formed close partnerships with established industry leaders such as Intel, and new partners including ReadyWorks and Hyperview to name a few, around the automation piece, for example. David explains, “Getting rid of manual efforts and
