Lenovo Turnkey Solutions: How Lenovo’s art of the practical enables clients to practice the art of the possible

New offerings built on a smart long-term strategy

In advance of Lenovo’s Oct. 18 announcement of Lenovo Turnkey Solutions, executives with the company’s Industry Solutions group briefed TBR on elements of the new offering. In building the turnkey solutions, executives emphasized Lenovo’s continued focus in three critical areas: simplicity, core competencies and smart partnering. Keeping in mind Lenovo’s role in the ecosystem — particularly from the perspective of IT services vendors and consultancies — TBR sees Lenovo’s approach as essential to its promise to deliver the art of the practical while enabling clients and partners to practice the art of the possible.

So, what are those three critical areas?  

• Lenovo’s focus on keeping things simple by “removing complexity of configuring solutions” is beneficial for consultancies and IT services vendors trying to help their clients accelerate adoption, innovation and transformation. By decreasing the configuration to a few key variables, partner enablement and scale through the channel become more manageable. Lenovo’s executives repeatedly emphasized the company brings technology from many vendors to an engagement and “makes the technology practical” to enable a seamless client experience. In TBR’s view, a technology partner that wants to leave complexity to a consultant is exactly the kind of tech partner consultants love.
• That very division of labor connects to the second point: Lenovo focuses on doing what it does well and leaving its clients’ and partners’ market differentiation up to them. As Lenovo executives noted, their clients do not do IT or hardware; their clients do everything else and can leave IT and hardware to Lenovo, while Lenovo leaves everything else to its clients (and partners). TBR has repeatedly observed that vendors that remain focused on what they do well consistently outperform competitors with more diverse and multifaceted strategies.
• Lastly, Lenovo’s willingness to develop and provide both niche and broad solutions indicates the company is taking strategic cues from clients and ecosystem partners, rather than trying to tell the market what it wants. Lenovo is serving clients’ and partners’ needs, not focusing on selling Lenovo solutions — of course, they do that too, very much, but it is a matter of focus and strategy.

In summary, Lenovo’s integrated turnkey solution strategy revolves around having a finger on the pulse of customer demand to identify solution areas that can inherently be simplified down to a handful of configurable variables to enable scale through the channel while playing their well-defined role in an evolving and complex ecosystem. Lenovo removes the complexity of multipartner involvement, while staying close to clients and their needs — a smart long-term strategy with plenty of room for sustained execution.

Additional contributor: Jacob Fong, Research Analyst