During a couple of absolute perfectly cool, crispy, sunny days this October in Raleigh, NC about 70 analyst from around the world gathered at Lenovo’s US headquarters for the Global Industry Analyst Conference or GIAC25.
The entire executive team greeted us and their vision for what’s currently happening and what’s next organizationally from a strategy and marketing perspective.
Lenovo’s FY 2024/25 results were US$69.1 billion. Lenovo is comprised of 3 business units IDG or Intelligent Devices. This is the company’s core and largest division, which develops and produces PCs, smartphones, tablets, and smart collaboration and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) solutions.
ISG or Infrastructure Solutions Group. This unit focuses on smart infrastructure, including servers, storage, software, and solutions that support AI, high-performance computing, and cloud services for enterprise customers. Its offerings are also provided through Lenovo’s “as-a-service” subscription model, TruScale.
And SSG or Solutions and Services Group. Created in 2021, this group provides IT solutions and services across PCs, infrastructure, and smart verticals.
My focus area of coverage falls into the ISG Group. ISG finished the FY 2024/25 fiscal year with $14.5 billion.
While ISG is the smallest of the 3 business units, their growth has been phenomenal. The $14.5 billion represents a “hyper-growth” increase of 63% year-over-year. An interesting part of that equation and story is the growth of the SMB (E/SMB) business. The E/SMB segment grew 20% year-on-year. Quick back of the napkin math tells you that 80% of the revenue comes from CSPs.
ISG’s “dual strategy” with Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and ESMBs is designed to drive mid-to-long-term growth and competitiveness.
The strategy allows Lenovo to leverage the high-growth, high-margin potential of small businesses while reinforcing its foothold in the established enterprise market.
The CSP segment business is lucrative but Lenovo faces margin challenges there. A focus on ESMB enables Lenovo to balance portfolio profitability.
The ISG marketing team, lead by CMO Flynn Maloy, sees real opportunity in the ESMB market.
The ESMB market has a strong need for modernization, particularly in adopting AI and hybrid cloud capabilities, but often lacks the resources of large enterprises. Lenovo’s strategy directly addresses this demand by providing AI-ready IT bundles and “Infrastructure in a Box” offerings that combine validated servers and software with guided setups. This approach simplifies implementation and removes the need for deep in-house technical expertise. But maybe the bigger win for this segment, is competitive advantage.
By enabling smaller businesses to adopt advanced technologies, Lenovo helps them stay competitive in an AI-driven landscape. This positions Lenovo as a trusted partner, not just a hardware provider.
Everyone knows Lenovo for PCs but the corporate-wide “One Lenovo” strategy, which integrates its devices and infrastructure offerings. This allows Lenovo to employ a Cross-sell motion to promote ISG infrastructure solutions.
These are the marketing key points that Flynn and his team are moving forward with.
Lenovo is lowering barriers to AI adoption by offering AI Edge Ready Node technology.
These ready-made configurations allow businesses to deploy AI-ready infrastructure quickly without needing extensive IT teams or technical expertise. The strategy focuses on deploying smaller AI models for inference at the edge, making the technology more practical and cost-effective for smaller businesses.
Inferencing and AI’s Moment of Truth
Flynn Maloy took the stage at the Lenovo GIAC25 and talked about some of what he believes to be next in Enterprise AI and one of the things he talked about was inferencing.
In enterprise AI, inferencing is the process where a trained model uses new, unseen data to make predictions and decisions.
It’s the “moment of truth” for an AI model, where it applies the patterns it learns during training to real world scenarios to solve a task, such as image analysis, natural language processing or anomaly detection.
We’re all consumers. Inferencing will show up for us in the consumer spaces we visit in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants that actually respond to our inquires in natural language or in recommendations engines that analyze our behavior and suggest products, or content or services.
Marketers will gauge our emotions from messages and interactions.
For businesses, inferencing is a critical phase focused on speed, cost efficiency, and reliability to deliver real-time insights and automated action.
Flynn is right. Inferencing is the next wave in Enterprise AI and Lenovo is in a really good spot to deliver it. Why? Lenovo is focused on hybrid AI portfolio that span from the datacenter to the edge.
RAG for SMB
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique that directly enhances the AI inference process by providing relevant, external information to a Large Language Model (LLM) at the moment it is generating a response. RAG brings access to current data, reduces hallucinations, provides domain-specific knowledge and is a pretty cost effective way to inform an LLM.
Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) provides the infrastructure, services, and expertise to help enterprises build and deploy their own Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions. ISG supports RAG through AI Starter Kits, Optimized infrastructure and Professional services
These are the kinds of “Easy Buttons” that will move the needle with the SMBs in Lenovo’s E/SMB space. Why? Because the SMB’s face a significant skills gap and rely heavily on external vendors, off the shelf platforms and upskilling to implement AI
The SMB portion of E/SMB often faces a significant skills gap and rely heavily on external vendors, off-the-shelf platforms, and internal upskilling to implement AI.
Lenovo ISG is keenly aware and their go to market includes professional services through an AI Services Center of Excellence that guides businesses through their AI strategy, from development to deployment. This includes guidance on using RAG for generative AI solutions that provide valuable data insights. Training and workshops help companies navigate implementation, establish best practices and accelerate adoption.
Lastly, the partner ecosystem rounds out the learning/assistance mix.
Lenovo ISG is betting big on the ESMB space and from my POV, this is a smart strategy.