​Lenovo Australia launches PC-as-a-Service

Lenovo Australia has on Thursday launched PC-as-a-Service (PCaaS), a monthly lease-like offering that combines both hardware and services, including configuration, deployment, asset management, recovery, and refresh.

PCaaS covers Lenovo's desktops, laptops, and tablet devices which the company or its channel partners will configure, deploy, and support for the lifecycle of the device.

"Outfitting an organisation with a fleet of desktops, laptops, and tablets comes as a huge capital expenditure for companies and often have unforeseen costs," Lenovo ANZ managing director Matt Codrington said.

Lenovo's PCaaS is based off a 36-month lifecycle and organisations in Australia can choose out of the company's fully-managed solution or partially-managed solution.

Earlier this year, Codrington told ZDNet that despite increasing competition, Lenovo is focused on making continued investments to grow its market share and position in the Australian market.

According to Codrington, while commercial devices are evolving to cater for the mobile workforce, the PC is still a "foundational" tool for the office and business, and that the PC market is still a $230 billion market.

With a research and development budget north of $1.2 billion for 2016, the regional managing director said Lenovo is determined to deliver results across its broad portfolio. He said Lenovo's success in the PC market has been due to its ability to scale the business' "breadth and depth of products".

Last year, Lenovo found itself in hot water over the preloading of Superfish adware on its consumer line of laptops.

Lenovo's update software was then found vulnerable in May last year.

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing said the company has since worked to clean up its act.

"Definitely we made a mistake," he said. "After that, we will provide a more safe product to our customers, no matter if it is commercial customers or consumer customers.

"We will not pre-install third-party software, only operating system and Lenovo software."

It was revealed earlier this month that a security vulnerability had been discovered in the Lenovo Security Center software that is installed on almost every Lenovo notebook, tablet, and PC.

The software, also known as bloatware, comes installed as standard on ThinkPads, ThinkPad tablets, ThinkCenter, ThinkStation, IdeaCenter, and some IdeaPads that are running Windows 7 and later.

Security firm Trustwave found that a hacker could run malware at a system-wide level, even if the application does not appear to be running. Lenovo patched the software after details of the vulnerability were disclosed.