Yang Yuanqing (Lenovo)
Lenovo has signed a storage alliance with NetApp, in a bid to challenge the market dominance of Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Terms of the agreement will see the tech giants co-develop new Lenovo-branded storage products that combine NetApp’s all-flash data management solutions with Lenovo’s ThinkSystem infrastructure.
Specifically, these new products are designed to utilise core software technology from NetApp and will be manufactured by Lenovo across the world.
“Lenovo is committed to driving the new IT - intelligent transformation - through an expanding customer-centric set of data centre offerings,” said Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo.
“Lenovo is committed to both organic and inorganic growth to meet the needs of our customers, and maintaining the strongest global partnerships in the data centre industry.”
Furthermore, both parties also announced a new joint venture company in China to deliver storage products and data management solutions that are localised to meet the country’s specialised requirements and cloud ecosystem.
The new venture is expected to be operational by spring 2019, pending local approvals.
“In today’s global economy, customers demand new approaches to IT infrastructures that support their digital transformation; through this partnership, Lenovo and NetApp will offer a comprehensive portfolio of products, solutions and service that is unrivalled in the market today,” added George Kurian, CEO of NetApp.
“Combining our complementary strengths in customer-centric innovation, Lenovo and NetApp will establish a new standard to accelerate our customers’ success.”
According to Kurian, the partnership aims to simplify customer experience through modernising IT architectures, from the edge to the core network to the cloud.
“Lenovo and NetApp are uniquely positioned to deliver the next-generation of high performance data management solutions across the globe offering customers unprecedented new performance, value and choice,” added Kirk Skaugen, executive vice president of data centre group at Lenovo.
“Lenovo, now the world’s fastest growing server company, remains committed to our vision of being the most trusted data centre partner for our customer’s digital transformation.
“We are bringing these new storage and data management solutions immediately to companies in more than 160 countries with an unmatched supply chain and services network, and through an ever-strengthening global channel partner ecosystem.”
