Lenovo spent $2.3 billion two years ago to buy the X86 server business from IBM. Now it seems that both sides have earned
Editor's Note: At the end of 2014, Lenovo announced that it had completed the acquisition of IBM x86 servers at a cost of US$2.3 billion. However, when it announced the acquisition of the global PC business in 2004, this figure was US$1.25 billion. Such a big acquisition has buzzed up. At that time, everyone was also divided. Now that time has passed, look back at this acquisition and see if today's IBM and Lenovo will have more emotion today. This article first appeared in Forbes, and the author was Paul Teich, a commentator. He reviewed the acquisition two years ago and analyzed the situation of the entire industry from the perspective of both parties. He believes this is indeed a win-win and stable trading. Lei Feng Network (search "Lei Feng Network" public number concerned) compiled, and did not change the original intention of the amendment, without permission may not be reproduced. In business, I always hear the word "win-win". However, it is difficult to find a model in real life. Two years ago, this acquisition closed IBM's x86 server division and began its new journey with Lenovo. Two years later, when I saw IBM's Edge 2016 conference last month and Lenovo's industry conference in June this year (Editor's Note: Global Technology Innovation Conference), I was convinced that I saw a win-win situation. In the past century, IBM has always been an expert in public relations, knowing what the media, consumers and analysts want to know and want to see. At the Edge conference, IBM invited more than 5,500 attendees to come together. Lenovo's Innovation Conference is more like a gathering of executives. It has gathered more than a dozen top industry analysts in the US headquarters. Ye Zhiqiu was also the conference. Different people invited also showed the company's different strategic directions. Although there are different opinions about the industry strategies of the two parties, there is no doubt that the two years ago this transaction allowed the two companies to focus their resources and energy on business strategies. IBM sells the x86 server business in order to focus on its own Power System and retain its strength to compete with Intel's Xeon. At that time, both IBM and Intel believed that they were "in line with industry standards" - and the term itself does not have a definitive definition, which can also be regarded as a sideline. In early 2010, as AMD's market share decreased, IBM decided to use OpenPOWER to create an open ecosystem. IBM believes that x86 servers and OpenPOWER cannot be shared by both. If you want to keep the company going, you can only keep one of them. In August 2013, IBM started a joint OpenPOWER alliance with companies such as Google, Verizon, NVIDIA, and Tran. (Editor's Note: This group aims to jointly advance the development of POWER architecture technology. At that time, there were comments that this Google's interest in the chip industry.) But perhaps everyone at the time did not think that this was the last "reunion" before the x86 server was sold. IBM: Everything for the cognitive computing platform IBM's cognitive computing platform must be no stranger to everyone (Editor's note: The famous Watson Health is a typical example of a cognitive processing system), and the POWER processing system is IBM's big bet on cognitive processing systems. Predictive analysis points out that Intel's Xeon processor performs high-frequency, high-performance, multi-threaded processing tasks. IBM's POWER is fully capable. For me, there is currently no case of a data center customer having doubts about IBM POWER or the performance of OpenPOWER. Likewise, IBM and the OpenPOWER Alliance are also working closely with NVIDIA to accelerate Xilinx's relationship with other neural networks to accelerate hardware vendors and enhance machine learning and deep learning. In the past three years, the OpenPOWER Alliance has also built a cloud service ecosystem from scratch. I would like to point out that the third-party OpenPOWER server system-on-chip (SoC) built on POWER8 and POWER9 processors will not enter the market until 2018, which may be the only factor that hinders the pace of IBM's cloud computing. It is reported that it takes five quarters to achieve mass production. After about three quarters, we may wait for the deployment of samples and tests. By that time, the OpenPOWER server will be the era of POWER8, and of course there will be 2017 POWER9.  Pictured here is IBM's POWER system S822LC. This high-performance computing processor uses an IBM POWER8 processor. And 4 NVIDIA P100 GPU Acceleration Modules Lenovo: Absorb team and stand firm In the two years of buying x86, Lenovo has been relatively quiet in the United States. What was the benefit of Lenovo’s acquisition, which was different from the previous year’s investment in ThinkServer and SKU? IBM has been at the forefront of high-performance computing processors (HPCs) for decades, and the x86 system has the same advantage with Daddy IBM's help. Judging from any standard, IBM is a top server design team. In September 2013, the team launched a NeXtScale system that was built on an x86 server, targeting data centers in intensive companies. This architecture is more suitable for intensive businesses than HP's Moonshot, and it was launched a year earlier than Dell's FX system. In addition, in August 2014, IBM introduced a Flex system with POWER7 and x86 servers. After Lenovo purchased the x86 server business, it also inherited the Flex system and System xM5, and launched a system specially tailored for the Microsoft virtual machine Hyper-V. Lenovo Flex System Chassis and x240 M5 Blade In June of this year, Lenovo and Cineca announced that “Marconi†was ranked 46th in the 2016 global supercomputer top 500, equipped with Lenovo’s NeXtScale nx360M5, equipped with dual Xeon E5 2600 and Intel’s OPA. Currently Cineca owns the world's largest OPA and plans to add KNL and Xeon Phi in 2017. Lenovo's NeXtScale nx360M5 Lenovo In recent years, like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, Lenovo has also provided a series of public cloud services for the country. At the Microsoft conference that ended last week, Microsoft announced their Azure TP2, and three OEM service providers were Dell, HPE and Lenovo. This initiative undoubtedly means that Lenovo has invested a lot of energy in the direction of the private cloud, and the results are abundant. Microsoft also pointed out in its statement that they think that Lenovo's stack function is first-rate and worth Microsoft's investment in resources and time. (Editor's note: For an introduction to Azure Stack and hardware, see here) Win-win Lenovo has already demonstrated its clear-cut goals and ambitious strategies. The integrated x86 server team has gradually improved after two years of integration. During this period, Dell and EMC merged, and HP also separated HPE from the business. By contrast, IBM plans to reshuffle the remaining POWER and OpenPOWER. The success of the IBM POWER system enabled them to share a share of Intel's x86. In terms of market share, IBM's competition is still unknown, but at least it has focused on resources and formed a logical closed-loop strategy. Of all the moves, one thing is certain - IBM sells x86 server business to Lenovo, which is beneficial to both, and it is precisely because of this that both parties are also growing stronger and have accumulated advantages in different areas. . Via forbes & IBM Recommended reading: See how IBM builds a business model for Watson Fujitsu considers selling PC business with continuous losses, Lenovo will take over? Project Touch Panel,Interactive Panel Capacitive Touch,Mounted Flat Panel Touch Screen,Touch Flat Panel ESEN Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd, , https://www.esenlcd.com