According to the latest global x86 server market tracking report for the first quarter of 2023 released by the market research company IDC, Lenovo Group achieved a substantial growth of 39.9% in the quarter, and its market share ranked third in the world for three consecutive quarters. Among the top five manufacturers in the world, Dell fell 25.1%, HPE edged up 0.6%, Inspur dropped 38.7%, and Super Micro (Super Micro) edged up 0.8%.
It can be said that in the global server market in the first quarter of 2023, Lenovo will stand out and rise against the market.
When the global economy is facing major challenges, Lenovo's server business has maintained a strong resilience, not only ranking among the world's third largest manufacturers for three consecutive quarters, but also achieving a surge of 39.9% in the first quarter of 2023. Today, Lenovo is the world's largest high-performance computing manufacturer and one of the top five global storage manufacturers. It has released more than 60 products supporting artificial intelligence applications such as training servers, inference servers, and edge artificial intelligence gateways...
Today, Lenovo's non-PC business has increased to 40% of revenue, successfully launching the "second growth curve". So, what did Lenovo do right, thus achieving the status of the third largest server manufacturer in the world and surging by nearly 40% against the market?
The sword refers to intelligence: the "first move" of strategic pre-judgment
The timing of Lenovo's ascension to the world's third largest server vendor coincides with the beginning of the second decade of the fourth industrial revolution, which is profoundly triggering changes in the global economic paradigm and productivity. The core of the fourth industrial revolution is intelligence, and the emergence of ChatGPT and AIGC has further deepened the general trend of global intelligent transformation, triggering the outbreak of the fourth industrial revolution.
From China to the world, intelligence is a sharp weapon to cross the economic cycle. In terms of scale, scope of influence, and complexity, the transformation brought about by the fourth industrial revolution is completely different from any previous industrial revolution in human history, and will disrupt almost all industries in all countries. As the core of the fourth industrial revolution, innovative technologies represented by artificial intelligence will achieve a substantial increase in production efficiency and productivity.
At the beginning of 2023, the large-scale artificial intelligence model and generative AI represented by ChatGPT will once again consolidate the prospects of the fourth industrial revolution. Economists believe that generative AI such as ChatGPT may eventually increase global annual GDP by 7% (nearly $7 trillion) and global productivity by 1.5% in 10 years. The outbreak of ChatGPT is also accompanied by the great development of 5G, Internet of Things, new energy and other technologies. The convergence and integration of many technologies has led to the intelligent explosion period of the fourth industrial revolution.
As early as 2017, Lenovo took the lead in proposing the concept of "intelligence" and initiated the 3S transformation with "new IT". The so-called new IT refers to the establishment of a new productivity of large-scale human-computer collaboration with a complete technical architecture of "device-edge-cloud-network-intelligence". Traditional IT is information technology that liberates the human brain, while new IT is the intelligent transformation of human-computer integration.
In the framework of intelligent transformation, the digital base is the "root", the "device-edge-cloud-network-intelligence" infrastructure is an important module of the digital base, and the server is the key infrastructure.
In other words, Lenovo believes that the server is the key infrastructure of the intelligent strategy. As early as 2017, it predicted the general trend of intelligent transformation and began to lay out the global computing power infrastructure, laying a solid foundation for the intelligent outbreak period of the fourth industrial revolution. The computing power "chassis". Through the strategic pre-judgment "first move", Lenovo has laid a solid foundation for today's third consecutive quarter as the world's third largest server manufacturer and the surge in the first quarter of 2023.
Consolidate the strength of products and solutions: the foundation of substantial growth
Lenovo has laid out the intelligent outbreak period of the fourth industrial revolution in advance, and has established the success of today's "new IT" with strategic foresight and strategic determination. As the core of the "base" of new IT, Lenovo servers also rely on 30 years of product and solution strength , created its own "Diamond Diamond", fully prepared for the intelligent transformation.
First of all, Lenovo servers continue to improve their product capabilities, insisting on product innovation for 30 years, and provide the market and users with high-performance, high-scalability, high-reliability, and low-energy consumption server products.
In 1995, Lenovo Wanquan 486/66, China's first IA-based server, came out, ushering in a new era of domestic PC servers; in 2002, Lenovo Shenteng 1800, the first domestic server with teraflops of computing power, came out; in 2008, Lenovo's server "zero "Mistakes" to support the Beijing Olympic Games information platform; in 2012, Lenovo ThinkServer server successfully assisted Shenzhou 9 and Tiangong 1 to complete China's first manned rendezvous and docking; in 2014, Lenovo acquired IBM x86 server business, absorbing and integrating the world's leading technology; In 2017, Lenovo completed the delivery of Peking University’s first warm-water water-cooled supercomputing platform in China; in 2023, Lenovo topped the list of the world’s top 500 computing power for the 11th time in a row.
As of May 2023, Lenovo servers have achieved 463 world records in performance tests. For example, Lenovo servers have achieved impressive world records in performance benchmark tests in areas such as applications, data management, application development, IT infrastructure, and Internet infrastructure.
Lenovo x86 server has won the first place in the world in terms of reliability for nine consecutive years. In ITIC's 2022 annual survey of global server hardware, server OS reliability, Lenovo ThinkSystem surpassed all x86 servers in monthly uptime and availability with 1.1 minutes of unplanned downtime per month, second only to IBM mainframe and small machine.
Lenovo also maintains long-term cooperation and joint innovation with Intel. The engineer teams of both parties work closely together to optimize generation after generation of Lenovo servers, and establish long-term product and technical leadership of Lenovo servers in the fields of general computing, virtualization, analysis, AI computing, and scientific computing. force.
Secondly, Lenovo continues to increase investment in research and development, and continues to develop innovative technologies and energy-saving solutions such as liquid cooling and natural air cooling to meet more segmented scenarios and market needs. Lenovo servers serve intelligent transformation, and the intelligent transformation led by the fourth industrial revolution provides diverse requirements for computing power infrastructure. For example, with the development of ultra-large-scale data centers and edge computing, there is an increasing need for innovative technologies and energy-saving solutions such as artificial intelligence servers, edge servers, liquid cooling, and natural air cooling for these scenarios.
Lenovo has been studying a unique black technology since 2012 - warm water cooling technology. Lenovo's warm water cooling technology brings together scientific research achievements in materials science, microbiology, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, etc., and removes heat from power consumption components through the circulation of warm water at 45°C to 50°C in the cooling plate and circulating water circuit.
Compared with ordinary water-cooling technology, the temperature of Lenovo warm water cooling technology can be as high as 50°C; compared with immersion liquid cooling technology, the heat transfer medium of Lenovo warm water cooling technology is deionized water, which is low in cost, safe and non-toxic; in addition, Warm water cooling does not change the original structure of the server, supports hot swapping, is also compatible with standard racks and servers, and lowers the transformation cost of traditional data centers.
At present, Lenovo's warm water cooling technology has been developed to the fifth generation, which can reduce the PUE to below 1.1, and can meet the needs of high density and low energy consumption at the same time. Lenovo warm water water cooling technology is widely used in Lenovo server products, and has brought the ultimate performance experience to the market and customers: on the global HPC Green500 list in November 2022, the Henri system built with Lenovo SR670 V2 has the highest power consumption per watt It can perform certified performance of 6.5091 billion floating-point operations, becoming the world's most energy-efficient high-performance computing system; in 2022, Lenovo will provide a green high-performance computing system for the Beijing Municipal Meteorological Bureau, which undertakes the Beijing Winter Olympics meteorological service. Through warm water cooling technology, Realize the accuracy of meteorological data to "minute level" and "hundred meter level".
In terms of artificial intelligence servers, Lenovo cooperates with Intel, NVIDIA, AMD and other CPU and GPU manufacturers to provide a rich and diverse product portfolio to the global market. It is worth mentioning that Lenovo and NVIDIA are global strategic partners, adopt the ODM+ business model, and participate in the overall design process of motherboards, systems, and racks in addition to complete machine assembly. When NVIDIA announced the mass production of H100 globally in 2022, Lenovo was one of the first batch of H100 server manufacturers to officially announce, while the other officially announced manufacturers were all major international manufacturers. In China, Lenovo has worked closely with Cambrian and 4Paradigm to successively launch server products equipped with domestic AI accelerators.
Third, Lenovo cooperates with a wealth of ecological partners to provide CSP and enterprise customers with optimized integrated solutions such as high-performance computing, enterprise computing, and cloud computing. It also launched Lenovo xCloud and Lenovo TruScale computing services to deepen the intelligent market.
In the field of enterprise computing, the HANA all-in-one machine built by Lenovo has powerful single-node computing power and world-leading performance records. With 99.999% system stability, it can meet the needs of system upgrades; Lenovo and SAP jointly launched Lenovo Enterprise Cloud Service And enterprise private cloud solutions, providing customers with application-level scenario-based computing power services through a turnkey innovative approach. Lenovo has also reached strategic cooperation with many mainstream software vendors such as Nutanix, VMware, and Microsoft to provide enterprise customers with one-stop delivery, realize servers out of the box, and provide companion services throughout the life cycle.
In the field of high-performance computing, Lenovo, as one of the world's largest high-performance computing solution providers, has a complete ecosystem of high-performance computing products. For example, at the level of high-performance computing software, Lenovo has created an integrated intelligent high-performance computing platform LiCO, which is suitable for high-performance clusters of various sizes and has functions such as deployment, monitoring, control, distributed file system management, and secondary development. Users can use LiCO to realize rapid installation, deployment and real-time management of high-performance computing clusters. Lenovo also launched LiCO-AI, which implements unified resource scheduling, and supports high-performance computing and AI job development platforms.
In the field of cloud computing, Lenovo provides an ODM+ business model for ultra-large-scale CSPs to meet the diversified, customized and global server design, manufacturing, supply chain, delivery and service needs of ultra-large-scale CSPs in one stop. For the private cloud needs of other CSPs and large enterprises, Lenovo provides xCloud based on its own digital transformation achievements, with product lines such as cloud native, private cloud, intelligent operation and maintenance, and hybrid cloud management. ) Integrate the server and other hardware, software, and service decentralized procurement models into a subscription-based, one-stop all-inclusive service model, and the computing power can be expanded and customized on demand.
Through building product strength, continuing to invest in innovative research and development, and launching a variety of solutions that meet customer needs, Lenovo stands out in the global server market and becomes the only one of the world's top five server manufacturers to achieve substantial positive growth in the first quarter of 2023.
Strategic-level layout: the domestic dual-brand layout is completed, hitting the first place in the market
On the whole, Lenovo's server is a part of the 3S strategy and a part of Lenovo's intelligent strategic blueprint, and the linkage of Lenovo's intelligent strategy provides a steady stream of power for the server business.
In 2021, Lenovo established the ISG Infrastructure Solutions Business Group, which focuses on intelligent infrastructure. ISG was formerly known as the DCG Data Center Business Group. In the past, DCG had industry-leading servers, storage, software-defined infrastructure and professional services, while ISG focused on computing power and focused on a wider range of industry infrastructure and solutions, providing customers with various computing power infrastructure solutions , comprehensively promote intelligent transformation.
In Lenovo's 2022/23 fiscal year ending March 31, 2023, ISG's annual revenue increased by 37% to RMB 66.8 billion, and subdivided businesses such as servers, storage, and software all achieved rapid growth, officially entering the performance domain from the transformation domain The performance zone has become one of the powerful engines supporting the future growth of Lenovo Group. In the fourth fiscal quarter of the 2022/23 fiscal year, with the outbreak of AIGC, ISG's revenue increased by 56.2%, officially becoming the third largest server manufacturer in the world, and its storage business jumped to the fifth largest manufacturer in the world.
In the Chinese market, in order to better meet localized innovation, Lenovo launched a new server brand "Lenovo Ask" in early 2023. The products are completely developed by the Chinese local R&D team. In-depth cooperation, products are more customized. At present, Lenovo's server dual-brand strategy has been fully implemented - giving full play to the dual advantages of "local innovation + agility and efficiency" of Lenovo Wentian family and "global wisdom + local delivery" of Lenovo ThinkSystem family, providing customers with full-stack products and full-cycle services.
At present, Lenovo servers have helped a large number of Chinese companies build digital bases, empowering many industries such as government affairs, telecommunications, finance, and manufacturing to embark on the road to intelligence. Many companies are leaders or benchmarks in their fields.
In the automotive industry, Lenovo built the Geely Star Wisdom Computing Center and Intelligent Simulation Platform for Geely Automobile Group through the ThinkSystem server and Lenovo Poseidon warm water cooling technology, which can obtain simulation data faster, help vehicle design safety simulation and calculation analysis, and accelerate new cars. research and development. In the construction machinery industry, based on the Lenovo ThinkSystem SR950 server cluster, Lenovo has created a "steady state + sensitive" digital base for Zoomlion, which meets the customer's demands for multi-variety, small-batch, and highly discrete business digital operations, and core business response The speed is increased by 7.5 times, and operation and maintenance failures are reduced by 30%. In the education and scientific research industry, Lenovo deployed 910 CPU computing nodes for Nanjing University's HPC Phase II project, with a total of 21,840 CPU cores. The theoretical calculation peak value is 870 trillion operations per second, and the Linpack test efficiency of the system's parallel computing capacity is 79.62%.
In China's server SME market, Lenovo has also won a turnaround against the trend: Since Q2 2022, Lenovo servers have been catching up in the SME market and won the first place in the market for three consecutive quarters. Finally, in China's server SME market in 2022, Lenovo's overall server market share will reach 22.97%, with a year-on-year growth rate of 72%, far exceeding the market average growth rate.
With the implementation of the dual-brand strategy, Lenovo has completed the 3S layout and started in China, aiming to hit the No. 1 position in the Chinese server market. Lenovo China has taken the lead in changing its formation: building the One Lenovo GTM system (integrated sales body) for major customer business groups to better penetrate into customer scenarios and accompany customers in an integrated way; at the same time, focus on operators, finance, government, manufacturing, education, For Internet and key industries, set up seven columns to carry out deep cultivation of the industry.
[Summary of the full text] Lenovo's servers have achieved third place in the global market for three consecutive quarters, and achieved a nearly 40% surge against the market in the first quarter of 2023. This is the result of overall layout, accumulation, and partial success. . Lenovo is a long-termist in the server market, closely integrated with the global intelligent transformation, and provides a comprehensive computing base for the fourth industrial revolution. It is foreseeable that Lenovo servers will ride the wind and waves in the wave of AIGC and reach new heights! (Text/Ning Chuan)