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Lenovo's quiet Infinidat buy It’s a mystery. Nothing much is happening after Lenovo bought Infinidat. After a big acquisition like Lenovo’s Infinidat buy in January, which the Israeli press put in the >$500 million area, you expect momentum, increased activity of some sort in the marketing, strategy. and product areas. So far, with Lenovo post-Infinidat, there has been … nothing. Nothing, that is, apart from its normal, well-executed cyber-resilience marketing and enterprise performance and dependability marketing. But you generally don't put half a billion dollars into buying a business and carry on as if nothing has happened. The deal closed in April. It’s coming up to six months after that and quiet continuity seems to be the name of the game. It's very reassuring for Infinidat's customer base of course. But they might have expected more. Phil Bullinger, the prior Infinidat CEO, is still running the show as its general manager. In fact, no executive departures have been announced at all. Product changes have been few, and center on incremental updates. Infuze v8.8 announced in August has bucket versioning, Object Lock, and Legal Hold so S3 can be used as an immutable backup/archive target. Okay, good to know, but not earth-shaking. There have been no significant headcount changes either. Infinidat was looking to hire 17 people in its customer-facing teams earlier this month. It’s a steady-as-we-go story. We suggested back in May that the Q1 FY2027 quarter would have Infinidat results incorporated and give us a glimpse at its revenue contribution. That has not happened, as a huge AI-boost to Lenovo revenues has masked any Infinidat-related increase. Lenovo reported [PDF] its “strongest quarter in the Group’s history" in August with revenues of $26.9 billion, up 43 percent year on year, with GAAP net income breaking the billion barrier “for the first time ever,” at $1.1 billion. The revenue boosting driver was AI as “AI-related revenue grew 60 percent year-on-year to $9.3 billion, accounting for 35 percent of total group revenue in Q1." In a canned quote, Chairman and Yuanqing Yang said AI was "emerging as a clear growth engine across every business group. ” What role will Infinidat play in this? It’s in the ISG portfolio, along with OEM'ed NetApp storage, and effectively so far has little AI presence. Back in April we wrote: ‘Regarding AI, it may be noteworthy that Infinidat is not currently an Nvidia partner in CMX terms, nor does it support GPUDirect, the protocol storage arrays use for sending data directly to GPU servers without involving their x86 host.” Looking even further back, November 2024, Infinidat announced a RAG workflow deployment architecture so its customers could run generative AI inferencing workloads on its InfiniBox on-premises and InfuzeOS public cloud environments. Since then … nothing. Getting the Infinibox to take advantage of its 3-controller/neural cache architecture to deliver data fast to GPUs doing AI Inferencing work would require InfuzeOS changes and internal hardware changes, such as adding RDMA/GPU-Direct/CMX-qualified networking support to the array; not a simple job. But worthwhile … don't you think? Surely Lenovo, with its vast resources and now in-house Infinidat, will be doing something with Infinidat’s technology “ to turn private data into insights & business value.” Or is it going to OEM NetApp's AFX product line to get into the AI inferencing storage business and leave Infinidat out of it? We’re mystified. Lenovo Infinidat had no comment to make about this.
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