Lenovo, Nimble Storage Partner to Transform the Data Center

Research Triangle Park, N.C. and San Jose, Calif. Oct. 17 – Lenovo (HKSE: 992) and Nimble Storage, (NYSE: NMBL) today announced a strategic partnership intended to transform data center capabilities by delivering new levels of efficiency and scale, and slashing the time IT teams spend managing infrastructure. Lenovo and Nimble will enable the use of predictive analytics in infrastructure management to automate service activities, allowing data centers to redeploy their resources from maintenance and support tasks to strategic projects that deliver value for their organizations.

According to recent data from industry analyst firm, Forrester, for 2016, U.S. enterprises are allocating only 29 percent of their tech budgets to new project spending and 45 percent of the balance to ongoing operations and maintenance, keeping the lights on, and maintaining the status quo.[1] This partnership brings together Lenovo’s world-class server technology, rated number one in reliability[2] and customer satisfaction[3], with Nimble’s innovative All Flash storage offerings and InfoSight™ Predictive Analytics as a means to address this issue, enabling the IT professional to spend less time on maintenance and more time innovating. In the first wave of these offerings, Lenovo today announced its ThinkAgile™ CX series of converged infrastructure solutions, which has storage capabilities powered by Nimble Predictive All Flash arrays.

Lenovo plans to integrate its XClarity™ infrastructure management software with Nimble InfoSight which leverages predictive analytics to automate the support experience. The two companies will work together in creating “self-healing” system management capabilities across the entire data center infrastructure, including storage, compute, and networking. The alliance promises to increase data center resiliency through early problem identification and automated intervention across the infrastructure stack. The result is expected to provide IT professionals the opportunity to redeploy resources from day-to-day maintenance tasks to strategic revenue-generating projects that will create value and drive business growth.

The first offerings that will benefit from the Lenovo-Nimble partnership will be the ThinkAgile CX Series solution available on October 28.

About Lenovo
Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) is a $45 billion global Fortune 500 company and a leader in providing innovative consumer, commercial, and enterprise technology. Our portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services covers PCs (including the legendary Think and multimode Yoga brands), workstations, servers, storage, smart TVs and a family of mobile products like smartphones (including the Moto brand), tablets and apps. Join us on LinkedIn, follow us on Facebook or Twitter (@Lenovo) or visit us at www.lenovo.com.

About Nimble Storage
Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL) is the leader in predictive flash storage solutions. Nimble offers a Predictive Flash platform that combines flash performance with predictive analytics to predict and prevent barriers to data velocity caused by complex IT infrastructure. Nimble customers experience absolute performance, non-stop availability and cloud-like agility that accelerate critical business processes. More than 9,000 enterprises, governments, and service providers have deployed the Nimble Predictive Flash Platform across more than 50 countries. For more information, visit www.nimblestorage.comand follow us on Twitter: @nimblestorage.

Nimble Storage, the Nimble Storage logo, CASL, InfoSight, SmartStack and NimbleConnect are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nimble Storage. Other trade names or words used in this document are the properties of their respective owners.

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains “forward-looking” statements that are based on our management’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management. We intend for such forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions for forward-looking statements contained in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include all statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this press release, including our current beliefs and expectations concerning our business plans, strategy and objectives, competitive position, industry trends and environment, and the future development and availability of solutions incorporating Lenovo’s server technology and our All Flash storage offerings and InfoSight Predictive Analytics, their features and potential benefits to customers, and expectations of customer interest and utilization.

Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors including, but not limited to, our future financial performance, which is inherently uncertain, unforeseen delays in product development or introduction, uncertainty around market acceptance of our solutions, including recently introduced products, our ability to develop new solutions and bring them to market in a timely manner, pricing pressure (as a result of competition or otherwise), introduction of new technologies and products by other companies, global economic conditions and our ability to continue to expand our business and manage our growth. Moreover, we operate in very competitive and rapidly changing environments, and new risks may emerge from time to time. It is not possible for our management to predict all risks, nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements we may make. Further information on these and other factors that could affect our financial results are included in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by our forward-looking statements.

You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Although our management believes that the expectations reflected in our forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee that the future results, levels of activity, performance or events and circumstances described in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or occur. Moreover, neither the Company, nor any other person, assumes responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of the forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this presentation to conform these statements to actual results or to changes in our expectations, except as required by law.

Quotes
Lenovo
“This strategic relationship with Nimble enables us to deliver a state of the art all flash offering, further extending the industry’s best customer experience by leveraging the predictive analytics platform, InfoSight, all while providing a lower TCO,” said David Lincoln, executive director and general manager of Server, Storage and Solutions Business Unit, Data Center Business Group, Lenovo. “Through this new alliance, we are able to deliver a continuous integration of hardware, software, and analytics support, establishing the means to develop the next generation all flash data center and drive strategic value for our customers.”

Nimble Storage
“Immediate data access is critical to maintaining competitive edge. Unfortunately, enterprises continue to be challenged with complex infrastructure that causes applications to slow down and impact business. We strive to provide simple, self-managing infrastructure so IT organizations can steer their attention to strategic business initiatives,” said Suresh Vasudevan, chief executive officer, Nimble Storage. “By combining our innovative technology with Lenovo’s global footprint and product scope we’ll provide a portfolio of high performance, application optimized solutions that minimize infrastructure management and lower overall support costs.”