Lenovo and Pivot3 – Partnering for Smart City Security

By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc.  September 5, 2018

Vendors’ routes to commercial opportunities take many forms but for some markets and situations strategic partnerships make great good sense. That’s particularly true in the case of edge computing and analytics where a Tier 1 vendor provides the core infrastructure platform and components that specialist partners use as a foundation for their own software and hardware offerings.

Lenovo has long followed this strategy so the company’s new partnership with Pivot3 to develop smart city solutions comes as no surprise. However, the companies’ individual strengths and expertise suggest that their common offerings should be valuable and robust. Let’s consider that more closely.

The problem and Pivot3

With cities across the world growing larger and more complex, ensuring the comfort, safety and security of citizens and businesses becomes increasingly difficult. How to meet those challenges has resulted in numerous new developments, including technologies for creating, storing, analyzing and managing digital video files. As a result, digital video is becoming a go-to solution for a range of use cases, including improving security in public and private places, enhancing traffic flow and improving workplace conditions.

The emergence of ever powerful, affordable video, compute and storage technologies has opened the door for innovative surveillance, IoT, security and analytics solutions like Pivot3’s smart city security offerings. The company has a solid track record based on successful engagements with private and public sector customers, including Caesar’s EMEA, Charleston International Airport (CHS) and the University of Central Florida.

Unlike some competing products whose limited scope and capabilities resulted in fragmented, difficult to manage, underperforming infrastructures, Pivot3 leverages hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technologies to consolidate video management, IoT data collection, video and data analytics and storage, access control and other related applications. The resulting solutions are simple-to-deploy and manage, thus enabling customers to save money, time and effort.

Lenovo’s solution contribution

What does Lenovo’s Data Center Group (DCG) bring to the partnership? In short, the company’s ThinkSystem offerings will provide the foundation for integrated solutions powered by Pivot3’s HCI software. Lenovo’s involvement will help address three critical issues related to smart cities solutions.

First, is the ability to reliably support resilient, reliable performance across complex, widely deployed IT infrastructures and environments. Resilience and reliability are key attributes that Lenovo’s customers have long associated with the company’s ThinkSystem and other DCG solutions.

Additionally, solutions need to be easily managed. The inherent complexity of smart city and video surveillance systems which store, analyze and archive amounts of data measured in petabytes or, at minimum, hundreds of terabytes is no surprise. But by fully leveraging its own XClarity system management tools along with Pivot3’s offerings, Lenovo is ensuring the quality of customers’ experience.

Finally, Lenovo’s reputation for delivering solutions that are both highly effective and cost-effective adds to these new offerings’ value proposition. By their nature, video surveillance IT environments are likely to grow well-beyond their initial footprint. So, organizations should employ solutions that meet today’s requirements yet can affordably scale to accommodate tomorrow’s. That describes Lenovo’s ThinkSystem offerings in a nutshell.

Final analysis

The new solutions from Lenovo and Pivot3 are designed to measurably improve security in urban environments. The testimonial included in the announcement by the city of Bogata, Columbia, an early adopter, is impressive. Plus, the current/future global market projections (by HIS Markit) suggest that this effort should benefit both vendors and their target customers.

In essence, Lenovo and Pivot3’s innovative approach to smart city security appears to be immediately workable and sustainable over time. As a result, the vendors should do well by their collaboration. More importantly, the citizens of locales that employ Lenovo and Pivot3’s solutions are likely to enjoy greater security and improved quality of life.

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