“Heavy reliance on cloud data and automation is a big trend”

The unprecedented COVID-19 situation has altered the business world in many ways, including the need to adopt digital- and mobile-first strategy. Organization leaders are now dealing not just with the tough balancing act of surviving the ‘now’ and planning for the ‘tomorrow’, but also the swathe of new solutions like Edge, 5G, HPC, and new data center models that is now within their grasp. In a telephonic interview, Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) Managing Director – India Vivek Sharma talked with Shubhendu Parth about the excitement around cloud and data center technologies, and the solutions for SMBs, specific verticals like Telco, and new pockets like OTT.

- Shubhendu Parth

Shubhendu Parth (SP): The pandemic has impacted on the world immensely, both organizations and individual behaviour. How do you see it impacting the data center business?

Vivek Sharma (VS): Yes, what is happening today is unprecedented. I don’t think anyone in our lifetime has seen anything like this before. People are even comparing it to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and hence, this outbreak has reshaped the world in many ways. From the technology perspective, it is accelerating the shift to a digital world, a new normal, and I expect it to stay even in the post-COVID world.

As an organization or consumers, and as individuals, the pandemic is forcing us to press the reboot button and restart the way we work and live. From an enterprise perspective, we all can see the massive shift towards virtual and remote working models; the pace of change has got accelerated. In fact, these technologies have always been available, but people were not implementing them, citing reasons of security or trust, and concerns of productivity. Cut to today, and we now have encouraging estimates that by 2028, 75% of companies will hire remote employees, of which 33% may become full-time remote workers. However, work-from-home is the first immediate change. As we move ahead, we will see more automation, collaboration, and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI).

SP: What about the data center business, particularly from your company standpoint?