Beijing, China, August 5, 2020 - Lenovo today announced an end-to-end IoT Smart Building and Workplace Solution for businesses in China. With the rise of the smart office and acceleration of digital transformation due to COVID-19, the solution will help businesses create more intelligent and efficient workplaces through digital services, including solution customization and configuration, rapid deployment, and all-round operation and maintenance.

One-stop solution for smart offices

With increasing rental prices and property management costs, companies must decide how to effectively use their office space. According to Jones Lang Laselle[1], 41 percent of enterprises began to adopt agile working and a combination of working at home and working on site has become the choice of many enterprises today. The large-scale application of 5G, big data, AI, and other technologies has enabled the concept of the smart office building.

Lenovo’s smart office building solution is tailor-made for businesses. By integrating Lenovo’s leading intelligent devices and edge intelligence capabilities, the solution can quickly help companies realize one-stop large-scale deployment. Administrators can select different modules in the solution based on their business needs to build their own smart office building application scenarios.

Lenovo’s smart office building solution focuses on three functions: smart access , smart workspace management and smart meeting solution. With fully connected systems and comprehensive sub-module functions, administrators can easily manage all these functions in a unified way. For employee access and visitor management, the solution combines AI equipment and powerful software systems to improve health, safety, and well-being around occupancy levels. Smart office space management relies on high-precision sensors to obtain real-time occupancy status of the work space while using an AI algorithm to improve the efficiency of office equipment and facilities. Additionally Lenovo’s intelligent hardware equipment for conference rooms complements these capabilities with wireless screen projection, on-site interaction, multi-terminal video conference across a variety of online conference systems.

The solution can be connected and integrated within existing office systems or infrastructure, such as independent APP, WeChat applet, DingTalk, and Microsoft office software, which reduces the cost of switching systems.

Creating, operating, and maintaining smart office buildings

When creating smart office buildings, companies often must consider how to implement, operate, and maintain smart solutions. As Lenovo increases its focus on service-led transformation, Lenovo goes beyond providing smart hardware-based solutions to a systems integrator by operating and maintaining solutions to help customers improve efficiency and realize the value achieved through implementing intelligent technologies.

Lenovo is committed to helping companies realize intelligent transformation through three layers of service-led transformation: The first is attached services that are service attached to hardware products, such as equipment services and software, to help customers reduce costs, increase efficiency, and experience high quality service through intelligent customer service, intelligent spare parts prediction, and intelligent warehousing. The second is device as a service (DaaS), that provides hardware and attached services through a leasing model. The third is complex solutions, which helps customers transform end to end by integrating software and hardware management.

In China, Lenovo is the largest Internet Communication Technology equipment service provider and the largest IT operation and maintenance service provider. In terms of solution services, Lenovo is extensively involved in smart city, smart agriculture, smart education, smart energy and other fields, and has become the maker of beacon use cases. This new smart office building solution can also enable customers to enjoy services covering the whole life cycle, ranging from solution design, deployment and operation to maintenance. With the help of Lenovo’s service network covering all Tier-1 to Tier-6 cities in China and 12,000 certified engineers, users can make the deployment of complex IoT solutions as simple as purchasing and maintaining a computer.

Strong partners for building a smart office ecosystem

Recently, thanks to technology and the changing employee expectations around flexibility, are creating more demand for smart offices, and smart offices are reflecting a combination of those who work remotely at times and who come on-site. Implementing and upgrading this model requires joint innovation through an ecosystem brought together by Lenovo.

While Lenovo created the Lenovo Commercial IoT Group in 2019, the company has focused on creating open and inclusive solutions for smart buildings for some time. Lenovo Commercial IoT Group announced its first set of solutions, ThinkIoT Back to Work Solutions, focused around making workplaces safer in light of COVID-19 in June 2020. Lenovo CIoT has integrated the technologies and products including Lenovo’s own intelligent terminals, edge devices and IoT products from industry partners such as with partners including Relogix, Viper Imaging, LSquared, Openpath, Inpixon, and Kuban Technology.

For the past decade IoT solutions have promised great results but haven’t delivered,” said John Gordon, Lenovo’s President, Commercial Internet of Things. “Our purpose is simple – to overcome the logistical challenges of IoT systems to make them practical at scale. As the #1 PC maker, Lenovo is in the unique position to understand what it takes to manage electronic components spread around the world. We build on our global strength in services and supply chain and layer on industry-first IoT management software and a proven partner ecosystem to help customers finally get the value they’ve always wanted from IoT, quickly, and hassle free.”