Lenovo banks on ‘anything-as-a-service’ to drive growth amid RAMpocalypse

MANILA— Lenovo has pivoted towards offering integrated hardware, software, infrastructure and professional services to drive growth as the RAMpocalypse stalls businesses and consumers from buying new PCs, according to the Philippine head of the IT giant. 

High prices of components, especially RAM and storage, have kept many firms and consumers from replacing their old PCs, said Lenovo Philippines country general manager Michael Ngan during a roundtable with tech journalists in Cavite. This has affected sales volumes for device makers like Lenovo, Ngan said.

Despite this, Lenovo is enjoying a banner year, with revenues hitting a record high of $26.9 billion in the April-June quarter, up 43 percent year-on-year. 

Part of the reason for Lenovo’s surge is the surging demand for AI systems, which is driving the demand for servers, and the company’s pivot to what Ngan calls “everything-as-a-service.”

Lenovo has been offering businesses “TruScale”, its XaaS or anything-as-a-service subscription, as a way for companies to simplify adopting or upgrading IT systems. 

“We have a brand called TruScale, wherein if a company wants to employ our services, [such as] AI, it’s not just the software—it’s a combination of a lot of things,” Ngan said.

He said a TruScale subscription eliminates the high upfront cost of buying new hardware such as PCs and servers, as well as new suites of software, and hiring professionals to support them. 

Lenovo says the pay-per-use subscription model also avoids traditional hardware leasing and eliminates device obsolescence over 3- to 5-year agreement terms.

“Hindi lang sa software because we put servers in the contract. We put devices in the contract. And most importantly, yung professional service ng Lenovo,” Ngan continued. 

One client, which has benefited from Lenovo’s services, is Hollywood animation giant DreamWorks.

According to Lenovo, DreamWorks named the company its preferred compute services, workstation, and solutions provider. 

DreamWorks has used Lenovo high-performance workstations as part of workflows across the studio, while Lenovo infrastructure has supported the large-scale computing requirements involved in creating animated worlds and characters, the company said. 

The Filipino-mythology-inspired animated feature “Forgotten Island” was made on Lenovo technology. 

“Before they partnered with Lenovo, they were like making one movie every two years.”  

“So, ang ginawa namin, we provided them the technology that will allow them to make three movies a year instead of one every two years,” Ngan added.