UPDATED 12:00 EDT / JUNE 14 2016

NEWS

Architecting IoT: Lenovo’s path beyond PCs | #LenovoTechWorld keynote highlights

During the Lenovo Tech World event recently concluding in San Francisco, hot topics included the company’s positioning in enterprise, as well as how it will compete with Dell, Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. Yuanquing Yang, chairman and CEO of Lenovo Group Ltd., opened the event during a keynote by bringing in guests to share Lenovo’s vision and announce the company’s latest innovations in the consumer market.

Yang began by saying this year’s event would focus on the transformation the company has been making over the past two years to expand beyond its core PC business.

“These are the building blocks for our future. In the past we have been a device company for devices like the PC or the smartphone. This will always be our core business,” he said. However, he explained that as society heads toward the Age of the Internet of Things, everything around us has computing, storage and networking.

Cutting-edge consumer focus

Along with Yang was a whole cast of industry experts, as well as actor Ashton Kutcher, Rehab Addict TV host Nicole Curtis, fashion designer Vivienne Tam and YouTube star Meghan McCarthy, who were there to introduce the company’s latest technology for the consumer market with innovation that will compete in the PC market against players like Dell.

Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, started things off by speaking about a long history of collaboration between Lenovo and Intel. “The most interesting part of this is the experiences we’re creating around these systems,” he said. Yang and Krzanich gave us a sneak peek of how the Oculus VR’s virtual reality system takes advantage of the Lenovo Ideacentre Y900 desktop with the powerful Intel Core i7 Processor to make virtual reality games amazing.

Krzanich also displayed Intel 360 replay technology that allows every fan to view a VR game from any angle. Commenting on the amount of data necessary for the replay, he stated that it takes terabytes of data per minute to do this and the cloud makes all this possible. Lenovo recently launched a platform using the Intel Xeon Processor E7 v4 for advanced security and analytics.

In conjunction with Google’s Project Tango, (now Tango) the company launched the Phab 2 Pro smartphone. Using augmented reality, and the device interacts within a 3D environment using mapping technology geared with cameras and sensors. The Lenovo Phab 2 Pro allows users to create a virtual world around them, but more practically, it allows users to measure their environment and do space planning. Lenovo and Lowe’s will partner at the end of the year with an app for the Phab 2 Pro that will help customers design spaces using room and furniture measurements.

Motorola, a Lenovo company, has had considerable success in China. Now poised to take on the North American market, the company displayed its latest pair of smartphones, Moto Z and Moto Z Force, with a shatterproof screen. Both smartphones boast longer battery life and less time to charge. They can also connect with the Lenovo’s Moto Mods, a magnetic connector that will provide the user with additional capabilities, such as projection screens and sound boosters.

Hyperconverged infrastructure for the enterprise

Back in 2014, Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 server business, and Yang believes the future for the data center business is in hyper-converged virtualized servers and storage. “This is the core building block to the software-defined data center of the future. Hyper-converged architecture will break down silos, enable faster deployment, easier scalability and lower operating expenses,” he remarked.

Gerry Smith, executive VP and Data Center Group president at Lenovo, and Pradeep Sindhu, founder and CTO of the board of directors at Juniper Networks, Inc., spoke to the audience at Lenovo Tech World about the companies’ partnership. “There are some really big things happening, and this is the basis for the partnership between Lenovo and Juniper.  And what’s happening is that computing, networking and storage are going to come together in absolutely unique and novel ways to provide advances that are going to be stunning,” said Sindhu.

According to Sindhu, there are four trends that are completely visible today. The first trend he mentioned was that we live in a hyper-connected world and everything is connected with a latency of less than 100 milliseconds around the world. Secondly, he asserted that devices are not going to get faster and as swarms of devices connect, they will need a stronger network.

The race to the cloud is the third trend he discussed. In this era, data centers of all sizes will connect to the cloud and more than three providers will be interconnecting the ecosystem. Additionally, he said storage will be cached closer to where people use it. Lastly, Sindhu discussed security and protecting the infrastructure and information in an insecure world.

“We are completely complementary. Lenovo has strengths in storage and computing, and Juniper has strengths in security and networking,” Sindhu affirmed.

Overall, the keynote displayed a great deal of the company’s revolutionary consumer technology; however, details were light on innovative products and services lineup for the enterprise. It will be interesting to see what will be forthcoming with Lenovo’s plans for hyper-converged infrastructure and networking, particularly as IoT computing demands span the consumer and enterprise markets.

Make sure to check out SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s live coverage from Lenovo Tech World.

Photo by Lenovo

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