During VMworld Europe 2015 we had the pleasure of chatting with GIanluca Degliesposti, Lenovo’s Executive Director Enterprise Business Unit EMEA, a most important player in the sector, considering the recent acquisition of IBM’s server division. Gianluca is an important example of Italian top management too, in one of the most important companies of the IT field.

One of the news that have profoundly marked this year’s European VMworld is the acquisition of EMC by Dell, accompanied by a pre-recorded video of Michael Dell which has been played during the first keynote. What do you think about this operation, from your standpoint?

The new situation of the market after this acquisition clearly sees Lenovo as the most interesting company for everybody who seeks an independent partner with whom realizing a convergent or hyper-convergent software solution. As a matter of fact, Lenovo is the only player that doesn’t have a legacy storage, therefore it’s the ideal solution for those who want to implement a real Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) free from any bound with traditional storage solution. As announced also during this VMworld, VMware, with Michael Dell’s speech and Carl Eschenbach’s confirmation on te stage, will maintain an independent position, keep the existing partnerships without binding to any hardware manufacturer, in order not to lose its neutrality, of course.

So, those who want to take advantage of convergent or hyper-convergent solutions, like Simplivity’s -which has chosen us as partner (Editor’s Note: the announcement has arrived from VMworld USA and the partnership has been confirmed for the European market as well)-, or those who are taking into account products like VMware’s VIrtual SAN, now face one single manufacturer which is really independent with respect to the storage solutions.

How do you see, instead, the doubts that unfortunately exist of some italian resellers or companies, regarding the selling of IBM’s solution to a “chinese” company?

There will always be someone that believes in medieval or little rational positions, but Lenovo has been a first-choice multinational corporation for a long time and it’s demonstrating it loudly. It is sufficient to look at the management in Europe, at my position or the current President and COO’s (the Italian Gianfranco Lanci).
The acquisition of IBM also allowed us to increment our product line with an even more rich and complex offering that is suitable for the Enterprise market. We have won several awards on a reliability level and we even made it in the Best Global Brands rank of Interbrand, which is an evident sign of how the band’s perception is changing.

With GURU advisor, we hope to become a new source of information for the whole sector and all of the professionals, considering the few information or reviews about, for instance, servers.

There is, as a matter of fact, a significant and almost complete lack of detailed information about technologies that aren’t consumer. The only source of information is often the Web sites of the manufacturers. And it’s not just an Italian problem, there are very few information in English too. I’m pleased with this new project and I hope Lenovo can be of help.