The global travel industry has been devastated by conditions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic but there is hope on the digital horizon. Lenovo Data Center Group APAC President Sumir Bhatia says there are different ways that technology can help, “Tech was and is a key player in accelerating the distribution of vaccinations across the world, but if we take another step back, tech was also very critical in developing the vaccines and developing these aspects of it. Without technology, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Data is a very, very key aspect of it and it’s about how we mine the data, how we make insights of the data, right from the development of vaccines to the distribution of the vaccines.”
Sumir said tech will also be the key to seamless travel with the medical, diagnostic, and track and tracing playing a vital role. Lenovo has a solution for medical researchers. It’s called GOAST (pronounced ghost), which stands for Genomics Optimization and Scalability Tool. “It really combines the power of high-performance computing which is used for a lot of scientific research and development, and artificial intelligence in a CPU-based architecture optimised specifically for genomics analytics,” Sumir said.
He continued, “Imagine that with GOAST, processing a single human genome has been sped up from 150 hours to a record-breaking 48 minutes…which really helps the research world in developing not just the vaccine but any sort of processing they need to do very, very quickly.”
With lots of pent-up demand for travel, tech will again play a role in helping to meet it. Even after the community is vaccinated, travel in the smart normal has been transformed to become more technology-driven. Automation and AI are ensuring safe travel and minimising inter-human contact. Right from buying tickets, to going to the airport and flying in and landing and going to a hotel, a lot of it will be contact-less.
Checkpoints will be using AI to augment health screening. AI’s ability to personalise experiences and streamline processes based on customer data will prove invaluable over the coming months to customers who now want their tailored experience to also be safe.
One of the key assets Lenovo DCG has is infrastructure but their DNA is around partnerships. So, they collaborate with AI solution partners, like AddFor, who provide solutions like FEVERCheck – which measures body temperature automatically without contact. Additional solutions AddFor has are SAFEworkspace and FACEfind. VISIONsentry analyses video streams of surveillance cameras or transmitted by drones that identify or count people at airports. They can determine who is in violation, who is standing close or breaking the close-proximity laws, social distancing, etc.
All these solutions need infrastructure, and these are aspects that Lenovo DCG is helping customers with to transform during this very difficult time.
Sumir acknowledged many businesses found it hard to adopt technology to accommodate the new pandemic inducted protocols. He explained it with an analogy, “When you have a house and there’s a big hole in the roof, and it’s raining, what’s the first thing that you do? You’re running helter-skelter to fix that roof, so the rain doesn’t come in and flood your house.”
And that’s where many organisations were – scrambling to put things in place that would “plug that hole”.
Businesses had no time to strategise when the pandemic struck and he considers those in charge of tech to be the real heroes, “CIO’s and IT departments were suddenly being asked for a ten-fold increase in bandwidth, computing capacity and storage that they didn’t have a budget for or had planned resources for. How do they do that?”
Accompanying all the remote working and transitions online, gave rise to more cyber-attacks than ever before so security also became very critical.
This is where Lenovo made a tangible difference – working with key customers, across segments. Whether it was governments or large accounts, small and medium businesses, health, or education or end-to-end, one aspect that worked well was the virtual desktop interface, the VDI solutions. They were designed to tackle all the challenges by improving overall security and compliance.
Lenovo was focused on a data centered approach and a smart, intelligent transformation. First and foremost, organisations needed to ensure that employees had limited interpersonal contact. People were going into lockdown, so they needed to maintain contact and have full access to business data while working from home. Organisations had to ensure that employees were able to access the information securely and were able to do their work.
Sumir explained, “If you really look at it, these solutions were already there. It’s not that these were overnight builds and let’s go help them. But this pandemic really accelerated the use of it because VDI brings the ability to help people work remotely in a secure manner.”
He recalled that one of the most useful solutions they were able to offer was Lenovo DCG’s ThinkAgile integrated appliances and systems. They are all certified nodes that are designed to make it easier for the customer to deploy and manage the entire workflow from end-to-end. Based on its simplified infrastructure and its accelerated time-to-value, it has the ability to free up the customer to focus on the business. This was very critical at that point in time.
Going forward in 2021 and beyond into the post-pandemic world, Sumir believes prioritisation will be the game-changer. Lenovo DCG’s technologies have always existed, but during the pandemic, they suddenly rose to prominence. He feels that aspects of AI, HPC and Edge Computing will be key. Cloud computing and 5G are trends that will persist. But as consumers are consuming a lot of this data remotely “AI will be very, very key.”
In the post-pandemic world, remote working will continue to be the norm. Consumption of business data will no longer be just in the office, but also from homes, cafés and basically everywhere. This makes security a critical and essential component.
“Tech needs to ensure and reinvent agility, flexibility and security in the way we are consuming and leveraging data. At the Lenovo Data Center Group, it’s people who transform work, and people actually reinvent. Tech needs to support this reinvention and transformation, and help customers grow and thrive,” Sumir concluded.