CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Amit Luthra, MD – India, Lenovo ISG
- Please tell us about the CIO Technology Playbook 2023 report. What prompted Lenovo to come out with this report this year?
The contemporary business environment of today demands more than just speed; it necessitates intelligence. Digital technologies are redefining the competitive landscape with innovation enabling businesses to deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences, creating new sources of revenue, accelerating the design and delivery of new products and services.
Lenovo, being a tech leader, has a responsibility to monitor market trends, enabling businesses to make intelligent transformations, improve decision-making abilities, facilitate growth, and progress toward a more sustainable future. To this extent, in partnership with AMD and IDC, we launched the CIO Technology Playbook 2023 with an aim to uncover business and IT investment priorities, key challenges, and spending imperatives. The playbook will assist CIOs and ITDMs in strategizing for another year of a modern IT environment.
The report strongly emphasizes the role of CIOs and IT decision-makers who are seen as disruptors and change transformation agents playing a much more pivotal role in shaping the strategic, tactical, and operational decisions for their organizations. Focusing on key technologies such as Edge, AI, Data Management, Cloud and As-A-Service, the report covers the perspective of 900+ tech leaders from 12 markets in Asia Pacific.
- Could you elaborate more on the report’s findings on the state of technology adoption in India’s and some top factors or reasons of adoption?
India leaps at the forefront of digitalization and adoption of different emerging technologies in APAC. CIOs in the market are also keen on continuing to invest in edge computing, AI/ML, and as-a-Service as part of their IT infrastructure agenda.
Edge:
- 97% of companies are using or intending to use edge computing for their business operations in the next 12 months
- Increasing adoption for real-time customer analytics new and exciting digitally enabled business outcomes and customer experiences
- Uses cases include omni experience, asset tracking, geofencing and management, and remote diagnostics/analytics of equipment
AI/ML:
- 97% of CIOs have reported to using or planning to use AI/ML
- Furthermore, digitalization and growing need to competitive advantage is leading to rapid usage of AI-powered applications
- Deployments by organizations across verticals including manufacturing, travel, logistics, energy, utilities, and healthcare
As-A-Service:
- Finally, as-a-Service models have gained strong awareness and adoption in the market
- Within the APAC region, India leads the awareness of AAS at 91%
- 90% companies in the market are using or intending to use AAS to reduce their IT operational costs, utilize infrastructure resources and have greater flexibility & agility
This wave of rapid adoption of emerging tech puts India on track to strengthen not only its own digital economy but contribute to the Asia region too.
- With such a favorable situation how do you see the role of CIO’s and IT leaders changing?
Data is the new currency and CIOs are the new bankers. That means, CIOs are now responsible for accelerating business revenue using technology. It is reported that by 2026, digital transformation spending is expected to reach US$85 Billion in India; US$1.05 Trillion in Asia Pacific. This indicates a growing appetite, realization, and adoption of technologies to achieve higher ROI. The playbook mirrors this trend as CIOs in the market expect 49% of business revenue to come from digital products/services by 2027.
To take the mantle of disruptors and change transformation agents, CIOs not only require a greater collaboration with the Line of Business but also a much deeper understanding of the business. They need to formulate the right strategies, work with the right partners, and have the right knowledge to drive efficient IT, thus business goals. In another word, they have to become Smarter.
Keeping in mind this rapid digital prowess, Lenovo is focused on its bold vision to deliver smart technology for all by developing world-changing technologies that create a more inclusive, trustworthy, and sustainable digital society.
- Can you tell us more about immediate concerns and priorities for CIOs for 2023 to achieve the digital infrastructure revenue goal?
The dynamic business environment today with its changing economical, geographical, social, and technological factors, has brought forward new concerns and raised priorities for leaders. CIOs in India are concerned about the soaring energy prices, stubbornly high inflation, and growing geopolitical tensions adversely affecting business growth in 2023 and early 2024. To overcome these challenges, CIOs must prioritize having the right infrastructure to improve customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and business agility, for better business growth and ROI.
This also makes it important for CIOs to take a more strategic approach to investing in new and disruptive technologies apart from modernizing their legacy infrastructure and applications to drive digital business success on a sustained basis.
- How is Lenovo ISG helping CIOs to meet this goal?
Lenovo is committed to support businesses in solving their problems and creating new business opportunities in this ever-changing business environment. We have an extensive end-to-end infrastructure portfolio that spans edge to cloud to services. The product advancements with industry-leading performance, scalability, security, and sustainability are built to help customers overcome their business and technological challenges. All of this, offered under Lenovo TruScaleTM – our pay-as-you-go consumption model, is enabling business to keep up with modern technological advancements. With as-a-service model – from IaaS, DaaS, CaaS, HPCaaS – businesses benefit from flexible technology, scalable solutions, latest infrastructure, automated management – all through a single contract with a single partner enabling CIOs to keep up with digital transformation.
Our Lenovo TruScale™ High Performance Computing as a Service (HPCaaS) expands Lenovo’s everything as-a-service TruScale portfolio and enables HPC customers to access greater supercomputing resources, driving a faster time to answer for researchers working on solving humanity’s greatest challenges. In fact, our new HPC deployment for IIT Jodhpur includes Lenovo ThinkSystem powered by AMD EPYC processors, which helps the institute to accelerate its AI/ML workloads. They benefit from a 100% higher compute performance, simple-to-manage solutions, and a single point of contact for support.
Furthermore, Lenovo’s Neptune Cooling Liquid Technology extends industry-leading data center efficiency to a broader range of servers, recycles loops of warm water to cool systems and enables customers to reduce power consumption up to 40 percent. We at Lenovo are committed to our vision to achieve net-Zero by 2050 and positively impacting 15 million lives through philanthropic programs and partnerships by 2025.
