The annual Lenovo Day Baku forum was held in Azerbaijan, on the discussion platform of which topical issues of the implementation of artificial intelligence, global trends and key tendencies of the IT market, local features of the deployment of innovations in various industries were discussed. On the eve of the New Year, which has already become traditional, the IT forum brought together opinion leaders and industrial experts from the Central Asian region, representatives of international technology vendors Lenovo, Intel, Microsoft, Veeam, as well as participants from the corporate and public sectors of Azerbaijan.
Rasim Bakhshi, Director of Lenovo Global Technology Azerbaijan, welcomed the forum guests and presented the results of the company’s work over the past year in Azerbaijan.
Irene Acedo Rico Gonzalez, executive director for sales of infrastructure solutions at Lenovo in the EMEA region, spoke about global trends in artificial intelligence. According to her, despite the apparent ubiquity of AI, humanity is currently using only 1% of the potential of this technology. Therefore, AI will become a prerequisite for successful business development and the key to its competitiveness in the future. In response to this trend, Lenovo is committed to providing access to AI solutions to as many users and organizations as possible. “We believe that hybrid AI defines the future, paving the way to “smarter AI for everyone,” the speaker noted in her speech.
Continuing the topic, Andrey Kutukov, head of Lenovo Infrastructure Solution Group (ISG) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, spoke about the new opportunities that AI opens up for various industries. He also noted that many companies are facing challenges in implementing AI due to a lack of resources and growing technical debt.
The emergence of large language models and AI-generated content represents a significant leap in the development and application of AI, and is also a catalyst for the explosion of data. “The amount of data generated by artificial intelligence in the next three years will exceed the amount produced by humanity in the entire history of its existence,” he said. Processing data of this scale requires appropriate computing power, technology and infrastructure. “That’s why Lenovo is investing in building a leading end-to-end AI infrastructure portfolio that is AI-ready and AI-optimized to accelerate the modernization of enterprise IT infrastructure.” Today, with a broad portfolio of more than 70 servers and storage solutions to run the heaviest high-performance workloads and deliver fast, accurate data analytics, Lenovo is one of the top three global AI infrastructure providers,” he added.
Marco Pozzoni, Lenovo’s director of storage systems sales in the EMEA region, in his speech touched on the topic of data security in the era of AI. He emphasized that security and information protection must be central to the AI strategy of companies aiming for a sustainable future. At the same time, edge computing, federated learning and homomorphic encryption will play an important role in ensuring data confidentiality.
Ensuring data security may require monitoring relationships with third parties to ensure that external providers adhere to the same standards and practices to protect sensitive data. Therefore, turning to experts and choosing a reliable IT infrastructure provider is important for businesses to easily navigate the ever-changing regulatory and technological landscape, as well as maintain high standards of data privacy.
A separate session in the forum program was devoted to joint infrastructure solutions by Lenovo and Veeam for the smooth operation of AI applications and data protection. By integrating advanced Veeam capabilities, Lenovo streamlines backup, recovery, and data monitoring across multiple systems and environments. This partnership not only enhances the ability of Lenovo’s IT infrastructure to reliably protect critical data, but also helps improve the efficiency and resilience of any business’ IT operations.
There is a growing need for hybrid AI in organizations today. At the event, Lenovo and Intel introduced powerful, scalable and energy-efficient ThinkSystem infrastructure solutions designed specifically for artificial intelligence applications, powered by 5th generation Intel Xeon processors. With reduced processing requirements and lower barriers to entry, such solutions provide opportunities for organizations and businesses of all sizes to harness the power of AI across a wide range of applications, from handheld to cloud-based.
In the practical part of the forum, guests were presented with success stories from Pasha Technology, GigaCloud, Nothreat, clearly illustrating Lenovo’s innovative solutions, technologies and services in the real sector of the economy.