Lenovo has the green light to see a portfolio of new enterprise-focused devices powered by Esper Foundation – a custom Android operating system – and bundled with a complementary
mobile device management (MDM) platform.
The firm’s first device running Esper Foundation is the Lenovo ThinkCentre M70a, an all-in-one desktop PC fitted with an up to 12th-Gen Intel Core i9 CPU, alongside 16GB DDR4 RAM and up to 512GB SSD. It’ll be followed by the Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q, M90n-1 IoT, and the ThinkEdge SE30 v2 machines by the end of 2023.
Esper Foundation is based on Android 11 and has customizable branding, peripheral compatibility, quarterly security patches, and three years of support. The MDM system, meanwhile, remotely deploys, manages, and updates devices from a single view.
TechRadar Pro reached out to Lenovo to find out why they chose Android rather than Chrome OS. Johanny Payero, Lenovo’s director of global advanced solutions marketing and strategy, told us “The Esper solution is an android based software, it is specifically formulated for device management on an android OS running on an x86 platforms. This creates a unique opportunity for Lenovo to address this market. Specific market segments we are targeting include retail and hospitality, as well as the digital signage appliances for these industries. These segments include an abundance of Android based deployments that require a level of customization.”
