Lenovo’s main offering in process automation is Lenovo Open Cloud Automation, LOC-A. The solution is used for automating cloud deployment and is designed for telecom providers, enabling communication service providers to accelerate time to value, simplify operations and be cost effective.

LOC-A software solution helps to rapidly deploy, optimise, and manage communications service providers’ cloud infrastructure for bare metal servers, containers and VMs.

Lenovo Open Cloud Automation software streamlines the process and simplifies operations across different clouds.

The cloud deployment process often involves manual processes to benefit from some level of automation tools that exist. However, this process is sequential, time-consuming and error prone. “LOC-A’s end-to-end automation simplifies and streamlines manual, error prone processes. LOC-A provides an automation platform that orchestrates the entire chain of events of tools from hardware configuration to Operating Systems installation to Cloud and networking layer deployment,” explains Dr Chris Cooper, Director and General Manager, Lenovo Data Centre Group MEA.

Talking about the key drivers for the demand of automation of business processes, Cooper says that telecom companies are looking for several benefits from LOC-A including maximising time to value with low touch deployment; simplifying operations and reducing costs; and the ability to efficiently extend CoSPs network with Edge-friendly solutions.

The first challenge is instilling a change in mindset within organisations and breaking down the siloed views of their organisations.

Despite the benefits of business process automation, some challenges remain in its adoption. According to Cooper the first challenge is instilling a change in mindset within organisations and breaking down the siloed views of their organisations, much akin to the needs when customers moved from three tier to hyper-converged architectures.

“Next challenge is around ensuring all systems can communicate with each other, for example gateways are used to translate the protocols of end point devices into a language IT understands at the Edge, at the Core, or in the Cloud. Underpinning all of this is the need for management to recognise the need to digitally transform the business to remain competitive,” he adds.

Among the end users that are using Lenovo solution suite for automation of business processes is T-Systems. T-Systems is the largest IT services company in Germany, operates 30 datacenters around the world, running business-critical applications on 65,000 virtual machines for its large enterprise customers.

T-Systems used LOC-A to reduce the time to provision the entire end-to-end system from weeks to hours, making a huge difference, and not just for the customers who got their private clouds up and running that much faster.

LOC-A is the end-to-end cloud automation platform to plan, deploy, manage operations, and benchmark distributed cloud infrastructure with support for Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, OpenStack and VMware Cloud Foundation. The LOC-A solution decreased T-Systems’ operational expenses by 40%.

LOC-A combines the advantages of a public cloud-like rapid scalability, flexibility, and high speed to service, with the private cloud advantages of data protection and security, the seamless integration that is needed to leverage the full potential of 5G.

Lenovo has a breadth of strong and strategic partnerships and alliances that they bring to bear in delivering automation of business processes.

As a cutting-edge provider, T-Systems can rapidly onboard new customers with various environments. LOC Automation software streamlines the process and simplifies operations across different clouds. In fact, a study by Roy Chua at AvidThink found that communication service providers can see:

• A return on investment of $1.36 NPV over three years for every Dollar spent
• A reduction of up to 81% time on initial deployment lead times
• A labour reduction for cloud implementation of 11x

Customers can leverage the automated deployment of Red Hat OpenStack, OpenShift, VMware Cloud Foundation and Kubernetes to reduce the time to incremental revenue.

Lenovo has a breadth of strong and strategic partnerships and alliances that they bring to bear in delivering automation of business processes. These include global ISV OEM partnerships like VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, Veeam etc, their own in-house developed automation software solutions like LOC-A, and local and regional partners and system integrators.

Lenovo is well suited to help customers figure out how to thrive in this new era of communications by ensuring network deployment, expansions and maintenance perform reliably.