Why scalability is the key to platform success

In a recent report by the FT Tech for Growth Forum, “The rise of the platform economy”, I shared my perspective on how every company needs to prioritize a digital strategy in order to expand successfully in today’s modern platform economy.

Most organizations hoping to expand into new markets, either geographically or across product lines, will have no option but to go with an incumbent online platform to grab a foothold and get close to their customers. Other companies with more resources at hand may choose to “go it alone” and build their own proprietary applications or platforms. Regardless of the route that they opt for, both approaches still require an intimate understanding and knowledge of the customer and their needs. In other words, customer needs must be at the heart of problem-solving. ?

This dilemma is a key driver of @Lenovo’s vision of intelligent transformation. Our reputation as the world’s largest PC company provides the solid foundations for growth in the areas of server, storage, mobile, solutions and services.

It is our Solutions and Services Group that could be a game-changer for companies that want to extend their online reach by leveraging the platform economy. This report notes that companies “must also be prepared to beef up their technology capabilities in order to ensure that management of an increasingly important asset, data, can eventually be brought in-house”.

Lenovo TruScale, our suite of everything as a service solutions comprising Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), allows companies to use the latest data centre hardware via a subscription. There is no need to buy the equipment itself and customers pay only for the infrastructure resources they use.

Blue Ocean Technologies, an IT services provider in Peru and Ecuador, uses TruScale to offer its clients the best of both worlds: on-premises security and control together with cloud-like agility and scalability.

Huzhou Central Hospital in China partnered with TruScale to create the secure and scalable IT platform it needs to bring next-generation digital healthcare to people across Zhejiang province. They built a digital solution to help physicians monitor and manage people with chronic medical conditions. This raises a wider issue relating to the rise of the platform economy: we are talking about something much larger than a crude commercial concern focused solely on building the bottom line.

What guides Lenovo’s innovation and creativity is “smarter technology for all”. We believe intelligent transformation has the interests of humankind at heart, and that it is capable of building a more inclusive, trustworthy, and sustainable future. Last month we launched our first global intelligent transformation index. This will benchmark the adoption rates of digital technologies across markets and industries. It ranks market adoption of big data, #AI, and the Internet of Things. The index has already shown that markets in northern and western Europe achieved the highest rates of adoption, primarily due to advanced infrastructure, skilled labor forces and forward-looking government policies that promote trust and transparency in data usage.

But being a market with a high GDP per head is no guarantee of thriving intelligent transformation: Australia and Canada are lagging behind. As stated in the conclusion of the report, it is the forward-looking and technologically enabled companies that will win the race to attract the new generation of talent. By leveraging the platform economy, they will set themselves up for future success.