Lenovo: analytics will help us 'become more like Apple or Samsung'

'To become an Apple or a Samsung in terms of their understanding of the consumer, that's what's expected of analytics,' says Lenovo chief corporate analytics officer Anthony Volpe

Big data and analytics will help transform PC maker Lenovo from being an enterprise-focused business manufacturer to one with such an understanding of consumers that it will be able to compete against Apple and Samsung.

That's according to Lenovo chief corporate analytics officer, Anthony Volpe, who made the comments during an event at SAS Worldwide Headquarters in Cary, North Carolina, ahead of the analytics software company's Premier Business Leadership conference in Orlando, Florida this week.

"Analytics is expected to be one of the key drivers in transforming us into a consumer-orientated business," he said.

"In this marketplace [the US] and often in Europe as well, we are primarily an enterprise-orientated company. That permeates all of our core processes, our products, our marketing and certainly our relationships with supply chains, they're all tied into that business."

Volpe suggested that Lenovo can use its experience as a provider of consumer technology in Asia - one of the company's two HQs is in Beijing, China - as a springboard for challenging the likes of Apple and Samsung in the rest of the world.

"In Asia, in particular, we're a very consumer-orientated company. That's what makes this so exciting. There are so many opportunities to take what's working there, supercharge it with analytics and deliver it across the rest of the world," he said.

Volpe added that because Lenovo is a relatively young company, it can afford to take risks in its approach to markets like the US and Europe, because the company doesn't have a stack of processes it needs to change if it wants to move into the consumer market.

"We have our challenges here [in the US] that we're encountering for the first time and it represents a really important use-case or sandbox, and if we can find things which are working here we don't have to worry about the incumbent process and change management.

"When you're starting from nothing from business going into consumer, there's a lot of opportunity there," he said.

That opportunity, Volpe continued, will enable Lenovo to challenge better established and higher profile rivals in the consumer space, with exploitation of big data expected to help achieve the results.

"It's a challenge and that is why it's so stimulating. What's exciting for Lenovo is, we can do this - and we're doing it now - to really become an Apple or a Samsung in terms of their understanding of the consumer. That's the goal and that's what is expected of analytics," he said.