Melissa Massa: The Innovator Responsible For Lenovo’s Famous Cloud Services

With 20+ years of experience in server and solution technology, Melissa joined Lenovo in 2014. Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) is a US$60 billion revenue Fortune Global 500 company, serving customers in 180 markets around the world. It is mainly focused on a bold vision to deliver smarter technology for all. The company is developing revolutionary technologies that power (through devices and infrastructure) and empower (through solutions, services, and software) millions of customers every day and together, creating a more inclusive, trustworthy, and sustainable digital society for everyone, everywhere.

Leading the Way in Sales

As the Worldwide Vice President of Sales for the Cloud Service Provider segment within Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, Melissa works with the largest companies in the world that provide public cloud services. She is responsible for building the global customer base with Lenovo sales teams throughout NA, EMEA, and APJ. As a leader, Melissa believes in creating a vision. She started the CSP (Cloud Service Provider) business in Lenovo 6 years ago in North America and before that, the company was not familiar with the concept. It was truly a ground-up approach and initiative that would allow Lenovo to have a new revenue stream within the company. However, to convince the company, Melissa had to share how they were going to get there and that it would take time and investment. Today, the CSP business is one of Lenovo's fastest-growing units in the company and is a multi-billion dollar business.

Mesh of Obstacles in the Way to Success

The CSP business is all about engineer-to-engineer relationship building and ultimately trust-building with volumes at a massive scale.

Initially, it was challenging to identify the right skill set and training within Lenovo. The company needed people to think differently from the traditional approach of designing and selling servers. Soon, Lenovo learned that it needed to hire externally and move people around the globe who had more experience in order to help build the trust they needed with the clients.

Becoming a Transformational Leader

According to Melissa, a transformational leader needs to be the one that has patience but never stops pushing the company forward in an inclusive way. She emphasized, "Selling and business skills are critical to me since I was in sales, but I needed to understand the supply chain side of the business and the services side as well as engineering." For her, becoming close to each of those business units and ensuring their support was the key to leadership.  Transformational leaders must think in a much broader perspective than their own realm of responsibility to be successful.

Presenting Innovation to Customers

As a company, Lenovo is in a unique position where the employees listen to the clients first and then design a product.  Using innovation, the company builds such solutions that are based on the demands and requirements of the clients. The company's customers look across multiple product types from GPU, HPC, to highly dense systems and it is critical to not only understand their direction but also share with them its insight and experience, which allows them to bring the best products to market.

Assembling Disruptive Technologies

Cloud Service Providers will help shape the growth of AI moving forward as access to data is important for companies to grow. People need big data to feed AI, so technology expansion is critical. Lenovo helps the customers by leveraging its CSP engineering team along with its core product development team whereby it employs thousands of in-house engineers and many are focused on HPC, Big Data, and Artificial intelligence. This is an extremely compelling matter.

Future Endeavors of the Company

Melissa is confident that GPU workloads, 5G, and IOT will help the companies solve problems faster and hopefully address more of humanity's greatest challenges. We will see more computational data and storage at the Edge, which will enhance the customer experience and their ability to process faster.  Lenovo is focused on these areas as they have core teams dedicated to each of these technologies with products and services.

Melissa's Advice to Blossoming Leaders

To the future generation of leaders, Melissa says, "Don't be afraid to have a voice." She believes that a leader must be heard as he or she brings a valuable and experienced view to the table. She feels that it is important to have diverse leaders to have the best products and services available.