Lenovo Hires Western Digital Vet to Lead Infrastructure Business

Lenovo has hired Western Digital vet Ashley Gorakhpurwalla to lead its infrastructure solutions business.

Gorakhpurwalla will serve as executive vice president of Lenovo and president of its infrastructure solutions group (ISG). He’ll also serve on Lenovo’s executive committee, the company's leadership team. He succeeds Kirk Skaugen, who left Lenovo in June. Lenovo announced that Skaugen was leaving but did not give an explanation.

The ISG business is a key strategic growth engine as Lenovo implements its Smarter AI for All strategy.

“I’ve long admired Lenovo’s remarkable growth and leadership in the industry, so as someone deeply passionate about systems, I’m thrilled to return to an organization to work with enterprise customers to help transform their businesses,” Gorakhpurwalla said. "Lenovo’s infrastructure business in this exciting era of AI presents a tremendous opportunity to build on the company’s strong foundations and accelerate future growth.”

Western Digital Vet’s Experience

Before joining Lenovo, Gorakhpurwalla was executive vice president and general manager of Western Digital’s hard disk drive (HDD) business unit.

Most notably, Gorakhpurwalla served as president and general manager of server and infrastructure systems at Dell EMC. EMC was acquired by Dell in 2016. At Dell EMC, he led a $20 billion business that included the company’s PowerEdge server, hyperconverged infrastructure and Extreme Scale infrastructure business units, as well as R&D for its storage and data protection platform. He grew the server and storage business to No. 1 globally.

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“Ashley joins Lenovo at a pivotal moment in our hybrid AI journey, where the strength and depth of our portfolio, innovation and ecosystem partnerships are improving the quality of life for individuals and delivering higher productivity for enterprises,” said Yuanqing Yang, Lenovo’s chairman and CEO. "With his diverse industry experience, strong engineering background, proven leadership and success in scaling multibillion-dollar businesses, Ashley is well-positioned to drive profitable growth for the ISG business.”