Business in sun-baked Kuwait City is booming, thanks to a cultural shift among its younger inhabitants and regulatory changes. The number of SMEs based in the city has rapidly increased since 2020, with notable areas of growth in the fintech and start-up scenes. However, the pace of growth had challenged the capabilities of local IT services, leaving newly founded businesses with limited options for embracing cloud and driving digital transformation.
Just five years ago, businesses in the thriving economic hub could choose to either rely on public hyperscaler clouds located outside Kuwait or face the cost of building their own local data center.
Ambitious local IT firm LEAN launched in 2019 with the aim of disrupting the market with a third option, satisfying local businesses’ demands for data sovereignty across sectors ranging from oil and gas to retail, medical services, and finance. LEAN wanted the best cloud infrastructure so it could offer reliable, protected and locally hosted cloud services to Kuwaiti businesses for the first time – and turned to Lenovo for help.
Fajhan Almutairi, CEO & Co-Founder of LEAN, elaborates: “Our founding vision was to provide local businesses with local cloud services, hosted and managed in Kuwait. By keeping data within national borders, we can ensure data sovereignty and compliance with local regulations as well as rapid data access for clients. Our first step was to build a state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure in our own data center in Kuwait City.”
Clouds you can trust
LEAN wanted to ensure that it selected the right vendor as the foundation for its cloud infrastructure – and evaluated vendors with a focus on reliability (a paramount consideration for cloud services) along with support services.
Having conducted an evaluation of the x86 vendors on the market (x86 servers are a standard computer architecture for enterprise servers) the ‘choice was clear’, says LEAN’s Almutairi. LEAN worked closely with experts from Lenovo to design and build a cutting-edge cloud infrastructure, with LEAN’s team highly impressed with Lenovo’s willingness to work with them to fine-tune their system so that the solution delivered the results they needed. LEAN opted for Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 servers, designed for performance and reliability.
The Lenovo servers run VMWare vCloud Suite, which brings together the VMware vSphere hypervisor and VMware vRealize Suite multi-vendor hybrid cloud management platform. Long-term support was key for LEAN, so the company opted for Lenovo Premier Support for Data Centers offering single-point-of-contact support with agents available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, along with Lenovo XClarity for agent-free hardware management.
Almutairi says that Lenovo stood out among vendors, not just for the reliability of its hardware, but for the hands-on approach of its experts.
He says: “The Lenovo team was more responsive, more knowledgeable, and more involved in the build design. Lenovo, recognizing the potential impact of LEAN in the Kuwaiti cloud service market, extended unwavering support and tailored assistance, playing a pivotal role in actualizing LEAN’s vision. They didn’t just answer the questions we asked but helped to shape the system design to best fit our requirements.”
Thibault Dousson, Director, Lenovo Services and Solutions Group, META says: “At Lenovo, we’re committed to empowering innovative businesses like LEAN across the Middle East with the tools and support they need to succeed. By combining our reliable ThinkSystem infrastructure with Premier Support’s 24/7 expertise, we tailored a solution to LEAN’s specific needs, enabling them to deliver a new standard of cloud services. Our collaboration with LEAN in Kuwait is a testament to Lenovo’s dedication to fostering technological advancement and supporting local businesses in achieving their digital transformation goals. We are proud to play a pivotal role in shaking up the IT market in Kuwait and beyond, ensuring that our customers have access to robust, locally hosted cloud services that drive growth and innovation.”
Deleting downtime, cutting costs
In the five years since LEAN launched, it has become one of the leading players in IT services in Kuwait City, delivering results for clients across many different sectors. In fact, the company now hosts 25 client environments within its cloud infrastructure.
This level of service wouldn’t have been possible without the seamless integration between Lenovo’s XClarity software and the VMware stack. The dramatically simplified lifecycle management has enabled the company to stay ahead of software and firmware updates and to see significant cost savings. Almutairi explains, “Without Lenovo XClarity, we would have to hire two full-time admins just to keep on top of IT operations—a huge cost-saving.”
Since Lenovo and LEAN began this project, the company has experienced zero downtime, which has enabled LEAN to offer performance guarantees to its customers.
Almutairi says, “Lenovo is consistently ranked as the x86 platform with the best uptime; their reliability is second to none. The seamless integration of Lenovo and VMware technology gives us a substantial edge. It simplifies the set-up and management of our IT environment, aligning flawlessly with our operational requirements. We’ve never had any issues with our hardware but knowing that the Lenovo Premier Support team is only a phone call away is very reassuring.”
A foundation for growth
For LEAN, the reliability of the Lenovo Premier Support and XClarity solutions has enabled the company to offer Service Level Agreement-backed performance guarantees – something that will be crucial in landing future business. Almutairi says that the reliability and seamless integration of Lenovo XClarity and VMware solutions have enabled the company to deliver a premium service for clients, underpinned by high performance and responsiveness.
Almutairi says, “Lenovo has empowered us to offer SLA-backed performance guarantees, cementing our commitment to unparalleled uptime, responsiveness, and overall service quality. This integration guarantees our platform’s consistent high performance and reliability delivery, which is critical for our business demands.”
