Today, at its annual global innovation event, Tech World, Lenovo and VMware announced a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for joint Edge and Cloud Innovation Labs to accelerate business transformation from the edge to the cloud. As part of the MOU, the companies are developing plans to deliver co-engineered edge, AI and multi-cloud solutions that provide seamless management across the full spectrum of today's changing IT landscape, helping customers more easily harness data intelligence across a wide range of industry-specific applications, including manufacturing and retail environments.

The global data economy is expected to double by 2025, representing more data than ever created before in human history. Today, only two percent of this data is properly analyzed and computed. The proliferation of data is fueling the demand for computing everywhere and businesses across all industries, including manufacturing and retail, need IT solutions that help deliver real-time insights from any location, from the data center to the edge and cloud.

"Lenovo is committed to empowering intelligent transformation and accelerating the new era of IT through deep engineering collaboration with the industry's leading software and semiconductor partners," said Kirk Skaugen, Executive Vice President, Lenovo ISG. "This agreement is an important next step in expanding our strategic partnership with VMware, enabling more businesses to seamlessly leverage modern edge and hybrid cloud capabilities."

Edge and Cloud Modernization Without Borders

To successfully source, manage, analyze and store high volumes of valuable data, businesses must bring greater processing power to the edge and leverage a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy to fuel digital transformation. Under the agreement, Lenovo and VMware intend to collaborate to address this need by enabling hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions at the edge, supporting edge-native applications with fully integrated solutions to help overcome barriers to edge and infrastructure modernization.

With more and more data being processed outside of the data center, powerful edge computing solutions are required to generate faster business insights and fuel new opportunities. Additionally, private and edge clouds must be able to seamlessly support hybrid, multi-cloud capabilities from the data center to the edge, with the support of public cloud providers.

"Maximizing customer value in today's multi-cloud world is at the core of everything we are doing at VMware, and the reason is simple: there is no digital transformation without multi-cloud," said Sumit Dhawan, President, VMware. "Combining VMware Cloud and Cross-Cloud Services with Lenovo TruScale and ThinkEdge will provide deep technical solution strength and economic flexibility that can deliver huge value to our customers. This marks an important step in helping our customers better manage the changing IT landscape."

The agreement outlines the intended use of Lenovo ThinkEdge servers, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX hyperconverged infrastructure solutions and Lenovo TrusScale as-a-Service consumption model to broaden the availability of more tightly integrated Lenovo and VMware offerings across edge and cloud computing applications. The offerings will be supported by VMware Edge Compute Stack software, VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Cross Cloud services.

Together, the companies intend to create an on-premises cloud model for modern applications and services and eliminate management silos, which can reduce costs and complexity and maximize cloud and edge-native application solutions.