Storage remains a key area of growth focus for Lenovo

“We have a fabulous storage offering that is not appreciated enough by our partners and customers. So, this is where we're putting a lot of our focus this year and in the upcoming months as well, to accelerate our growth within the storage environment,” said Charles Ferland, Vice President, ISG Category at Lenovo.

Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group provides partners customers with smart infrastructure solutions from cloud to edge, analytics and AI and Everything as a Service. With AI reshaping every layer of the tech stack, Charles Ferland, Vice President, ISG Category at Lenovo is driving the vendor’s efforts to simplify partner engagement, align regionally, and deliver smarter infrastructure outcomes at scale.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Ferland shared that the demand for AI continues to boost Lenovo’s infrastructure growth in the region. Specifically, as cloud service providers continue to support customers in their AI journey, there is the need to have the infrastructure that can support the demand.

According to Lenovo’s first quarter results for the fiscal year 2025/26, revenue grew 22% year-on-year to US$18.8 billion, with net income up 108% year-on-year to US$505 million. The AI infrastructure business revenue more than doubled year-on-year with a robust pipeline and a clear product roadmap ahead. Revenue from industry-leading liquid cooling solutions grew 30% year-on-year.

For Ferland, while the growth has been positive globally, he is still looking to see which segments of the ISG portfolio will continue to drive revenue and which ones will need more support from partners as well.

“I think the opportunities are clear in AI. And people see a lot of benefits and no doubt that everybody has drank the Kool-Aid of AI. There remain operational challenges in the sense that how the data that enterprises generate typically tend to be not optimal for AI analysis” he said.

For example, while AI adoption has been consistent globally, Ferland said that energy remains the number one challenge to deploy GPUs servers at scale. This includes the cost of energy to the availability of energy and the cost of cooling. To deal with this, Lenovo’s Neptune Water Cooling system is seeing increased interest. The sixth generation of the cooling system was released in October last year. The Lenovo innovation enables organizations everywhere to build and run accelerated computing for GenAI while reducing data center power consumption by up to 40%^.

“There are decades of research going into this. Lenovo has its DNA of engineering within the IBM mainframe roots, and now it's our sixth generation of water system. But basically, what we found out is that when we inject warm water at 45 degrees Celsius, and it comes out at 65 degrees Celsius, that delta is enough to have the system being stable, but it also avoids having condensation and dripping. It also avoids having to cool down the water down to 20 degrees and consume energy to cool it down unnecessarily.”

“So, this is where we're working with our partners and offering these solutions, especially specifically for large GPU deployment, because that remains probably the number one hurdle from an infrastructure point of view. As a matter of fact, air cooled system with eight-way GPU, when we measure the power consumption of the full rack, about 40% of the energy is moving air which is not producing any goodness. It's just the big blowers moving cold air to warm air. This is where warm water systems like Neptune is becoming extremely popular with our customers,” explained Ferland.

Growing the storage business

Improving growth in Lenovo’s storage offerings remains on the top of the agenda for Ferland. Acknowledging there is strong competition in the industry, he believes the acquisition of Infinidat will boost Lenovo’s presence in the storage space.

According to Ferland, while there have been some partners pushing it to customers, the reality is the larger established storage players are what most partners are normally pushing.

“Lenovo plays in the marketplace of storage, which is the entry-level type of environment. We have a solid position and a solid offering there. We are augmenting our portfolio capabilities towards more flash and more performance type of story as well,” explained Ferland.

He also highlighted Lenovo’s acquisition of Infinidat. Although the deal is not closed yet and both companies are operating separately, Ferland believes it gives a perspective as to where Lenovo is driving growth if that deal is successfully closed, which he hopes will be this year.

“It's a question of education, in the sense that many of them are not aware of our storage portfolio. The ones that say it's the best of both worlds, where we have fabulous software running on the supply chain and services that can accompany a product like Lenovo. So, it's something that is really a key advantage for us. Every server, every AI deployment, especially AI deployment, requires a storage discussion as well. This is where we don't want to only look and focus on the server business,” he added.

Ferland also pointed out that this is why the Lenovo Top Choice Express not only has the value proposition for the simple, fast, best price for a server but also for a storage product.

Lenovo Top Choice Express

On April 1^st this year, Lenovo introduced Top Choice Express. Ferland explained tha this program curates for partners a smaller subset of options for every of our servers. For example, the Lenovo Think System SR650 servers is the highest runner product and will have tens of thousands of ways to configure in different options.

“We realized that we were pretty much applying the same concept and principle to do business for a very large multi-million-dollar deal or the same for a few hundred-thousand-dollar deal. It can't work. So, Top Choice Express allows a partner to just sell a server. We curated a set of options that are pre-established. They will have the CPU, memory, RAID controller, a few clicks and within a minute, that configuration is validated. There is no need for a technician and no need for a review. That validation will work. And more important, we have an SLA to order to ship in 10 days,” said Ferland

Basically, it’s a value proposition to the channel partners that enables low-touch, no-touch transactional model and have a simple way to order because it was already complicated.

“You have a quick way to obtain the right price upfront, and you have the order to ship in 10 business days. That's what we call Top Choice Express. We launched this on April 1st globally, including Asia. We've seen a fabulous ramp up because it enables the partners to realize that it used to be complicated when it takes a long time to deal with Lenovo and now it's all up front. We're enabling that. We're not moving away from the complex AI, but we say this is a business model that requires people, that requires systems to review and give pricing, and it's okay. If it's an $80 million deal, take five days to do the pricing. If it's a $200,000 deal, give the price right away. This gives an opportunity for the smaller partners to get a piece of the pie as well,” explained Ferland.

Ferland also mentioned that Lenovo is also accelerating the mid-market transactional model using Top Choice Express.

“That's something that's really important for our growth, and when we're meeting partners across APAC, it's all about explaining the value proposition of Top Choice Express. They want technology, but they can do it now with a bit more control. And by the way, Top Choice Express applies for both and for non-AI as well like traditional servers, tower, rack, storage and such,” concluded Ferland.