(Disclosure: all the businesses talked about are shoppers of the creator)
Behind Lenovo’s very profitable quarter (17% income and internet revenue development of 62% year-over-year), there was one attention-grabbing statistic which was that the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 has reached 60% market share (IDC supply) on the high finish of the skilled workstation market, a section traditionally dominated by Intel. What makes this significantly attention-grabbing is that Lenovo did this with a singular product primarily based on AMD’s Threadripper processor, which was initially focused on the gaming market.
Utilizing a client processor to dominate probably the most skilled group within the skilled workstation area, the very high of the engineering efficiency pyramid is unprecedented in trendy instances. Sometimes, workstations have devoted workstation elements and might use server elements, however workstation distributors have averted gaming elements just like the plague.
Let’s discuss misconceptions this week, one in all them being that final sentence.
Workstation patrons put efficiency forward of all else
A workstation purchaser is extra like a client purchaser than a typical company purchaser. IT specifies, usually with surprisingly little enter from customers, what workers use with one huge exception, workstations. Granted, within the present surroundings, Convey Your Personal PC efforts have lately flourished as firms struggled to provision workers who have been all of the sudden working from residence, however the regular mode of operation is that IT treats most customers like they don’t know what they want, and admittedly, most instances they’re proper.
Nevertheless, engineers can override IT or simply set the specification for what they want and will discover themselves in battle with IT requirements. Nevertheless, they’re so important to the operations of the corporate they’ll usually ignore these requirements if they’ll justify performance-related causes for this variance which are supported by their administration.
I discovered this when taking a look at gaming PC firm volumes and discovering out {that a} important variety of gaming rigs go to engineers and are used as workstations. This was as a result of gaming machines supplied extra efficiency for the greenback than workstations did, and never all engineering functions wanted a few of the distinctive elements, like specialised reminiscence, which have been extra frequent in workstations.
Nevertheless, this did recommend that there was an unmet want for a workstation-class product that was designed round a high-performance gaming core.
Threadripper and Lenovo to the rescue
AMD’s creation of Threadripper was very dangerous. It outperformed each different processor out there from any vendor. However gaming focus had shifted from CPUs to GPUs over the prior years, suggesting the marketplace for this product can be severely restricted to skilled players and people creating gaming content material the place that value delta could possibly be justified.
However Lenovo and AMD acknowledged a chance to handle the engineers that have been okay with gaming {hardware} however nonetheless wished a product that might adjust to IT requirements and have the certifications wanted to run their most well-liked software program. This laid the muse for Lenovo’s ThinkStation P620 and the primary technology Threadripper Professional Workstation, which is basically not a gaming-focused half, and successfully put Lenovo on the map with a product that was not solely well-differentiated however addressed a big, unmet want out there, significantly for these creating digital content material (graphics designers, animators, and many others.). Despite the fact that Threadripper was initially positioned as a gaming half, Lenovo was in a position to work with AMD to create a extra centered Professional half and use it to realize section dominance in a section historically dominated by Dell and HP. It was an extremely dangerous transfer that paid large dividends.
Wrapping up: Fortune favors the daring
I’m a giant believer within the saying “fortune favors the daring,” and Lenovo and AMD’s transfer to embrace Threadripper and switch it right into a Professional half took them from an also-ran within the workstation market to a section chief. It was a massively daring transfer, however the final result for anybody who studied the section wouldn’t have been a shock if that they had simply appeared on the gross sales of gaming machines into workstation segments. It was clear there was an unmet want for a workstation that had an enormous efficiency benefit, given efficiency is the factor that drives workstation purchases.
Lenovo is keen to take dangers. Its acquisition of Motorola, which appeared very ill-advised on the time, is one other danger that’s now paying off, given the present market share and income positive factors by that unit. Lenovo is the one vendor with the product breadth to tackle Apple, and it’s higher positioned geographically with higher world distribution of company management, which can also be distinctive to the corporate. Due to Lenovo’s willingness to make a daring choice, it, together with AMD, now dominates high-end workstations. Fortune favors the daring certainly.
As President and Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group, Rob supplies regional and world firms with steering in create credible dialogue with the market, goal buyer wants, create new enterprise alternatives, anticipate expertise modifications, choose distributors and merchandise, and follow zero greenback advertising. For over 20 years Rob has labored for and with firms like Microsoft, HP, IBM, Dell, Toshiba, Gateway, Sony, USAA, Texas Devices, AMD, Intel, Credit score Suisse First Boston, ROLM, and Siemens.
