From the feedback I have gotten to "ThinkPad Futures", it sounds like a lot of people are happy that the ThinkPad lives on after the Lenovo acquisition. While there is a large community of individual ThinkPad customers out there, most ThinkPad users are employees of the major enterprises of the world. That has been the primary target of IBM and will continue to be at Lenovo. Enterprise customers are much more demanding than the average consumer. They expect industrial strength, global service and support, bullet-proof security features (like the new ThinkPad built-in biometric fingerprint reader), and ease of integration with corporate networks. Enterprises buy ThinkPads because their employees like them but also because of the ThinkVantage technologies. I have to admit a partiality to IBM on this subject but I think there is good reason for that feeling.
The IBM team started expanding on the concept of the "PC" a number of years ago by challenging some of their top researchers to look at the "enterprise" not just the individual PC user. The result was ThinkVantage, a suite of enterprise goodies that allow companies with a lot of employees to not just acquire PC hardware but also to get the tools they need to manage the hardware. For example, Access IBM (likely they will rename it) helps the enterprise users set up, understand, maintain, and enhance their ThinkPad notebook or ThinkCentre desktop and IBM Access Connections which provides a single interface to enable users to switch from wireless to wired at home, in the office or on the road. When it comes to security, the IBM researchers came up with some really brilliant ideas. The ThinkPad and ThinkCentre have a Rescue and Recovery tool and an Embedded Security Subsystem with software that protects company information, passwords and encryption keys. This is really important stuff and will be much more so as time goes on.
Enterprises have other requirements that most of us don’t usually think about. For example, erasing hard drives. The IBM Secure Data Disposal is like a paper shredder for the data on hard drives. When companies upgrade their PCs they don’t want to dispose of the prior PCs while they still have proprietary company information on them. And what about getting all the data and applications on the new PCs? The System Migration Assistant helps get end-users up and running by quickly and accurately migrating their individual data and settings to their new IBM systems and not having to start from scratch. And finally there is the "roll-out" and management of large numbers of systems. The ImageUltra Builder allows the enterprise to use a single hard drive image and then replicate it across thousands of systems. This is not important for consumers, but for the corporate CIO it is essential. Finally, the System Information Center automates the collection, assessment and reporting of a company’s entire PC inventory — whether users are logged on or not — and provides reports on the status of the systems and what software is being used. Moving forward, the Software Delivery Center allows users to download applications "on demand" or administrators to push software updates without end-user involvement. Some of the more libertarian users (like me) may consider some of these centralized and "rule-based" systems to be draconian, but to the CIO and CFO, they are a blessing.
When you put all these enterprise features together, you begin to see that the cost of hardware is a small piece of the total cost of using the hardware. Enterprises with thousands of systems do not want to use "sneaker-ware" (systems administrators running from PC to PC) to try to manage the systems. They need industrial strength tools to control their costs and at the same time achieve high reliability and security.
It would be wishful thinking by IBM competitors to hope that Lenovo will take it’s eye off of the key enterprise requirements. One reason the enterprise customers will likely start to feel comfortable is that they will quickly find out that there are no real changes in the enterprise strategy for the Thinkpad and ThinkCentre product portfolios. It may be that responsiveness to customer requirements gets even better as Lenovo gets "un-tethered" from the mother ship. The customers will also be comforted by the fact that the entire IBM PC company team, including executives who set the direction, are moving to the new Lenovo venture. Another non-trivial factor is that the sales team at IBM will continue to be compensated for ThinkPad and ThinkCentre deliveries to their customers — and the customers will receive IBM service and support. Of course, the proof of all this will be in the pudding. I, for one, am quite confident. Looks like IBM is too since they agreed to purchase ThinkPads and Think Centres for internal use and will instantly become Lenovo’s largest customer.
