>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone, welcome back, this is day three of theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018, live in San Francisco, California, at Moscone West. We're out in the open, in the middle of the floor here, I'm John Furrier, your co-host, with my co-host to speak, John Troyer, co-founder of TechReckoning, advisory and community development firm, our next guest is CUBE alumni Kim Stevenson, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Data Center Group Solution segment at Lenovo, great to see you. >> Hey, how are you? >> Thanks for coming on, so Red Hat Summit, Lenovo, okay, how does that fit together for you guys, Data Center obviously is cloud now, and you got on-premise-- >> We're both in Raleigh (Kim laughs) >> You moved to Raleigh, news, what's the update? Where's that connection with an hybrid cloud is taking this world by storm? >> Yeah, so, we're a great partner with Red Hat, and we're very focused on enabling that hybrid enterprise through hybrid cloud. So one of the things that we've done, we do a lot of co-development, but one of the things is we've taken our systems management software, which is Xclarity, and we're the first to embed that into cloud forms, so that we can move assets, public assets to private assets, and vice versa, and that wouldn't be possible without working really closely with Red Hat, so-- >> Well Red Hat's been very strong at support, and you go to the RHL side, on the operating system side, very reliable, it's got years and years of experience, but it's always been kind of let's certify the hardware, and now that you have a hardware at the baseline moving up the stack, you have OpenShift, getting huge success, Kubernetes, now you've got multiple clouds, which has other hardware, security becomes a concern, we hear that, okay, security being on top of that's a really big deal. How does that change the game for you guys, how are you guys adjusting to that, because it requires everyone to do more work, but now you got automation playing a role, take us through that relationship between from the hardware all the way up to the stack. >> Yeah, and it is the weakest link issue, right, that every piece of the solution has to be secure in and its own right, and the solution has to be secure, right? So, we do a lot in the hardware environment through our supply chain, we have efficacy of every part and component that goes in, every piece of software loaded through manufacturing, one of the benefits of having your own manufacturing organization, so we know what give is a secure platform when there is ready to go. But then as you start to add the software, this is where things like containers become really important, and the ability to do monitoring of the environment, without having to stop the environment. And, so, we have a lot of investment going in OpenShift, and we've launched recently a DevOps practice, based on OpenShift, to actually accelerate the deployment of more and more containers, to again, figure out the security by design versus security after the fact. The problem with monitoring is it's after the fact. You want to design in, and you need to rethink the application structure in order to be able to do that. >> Talk about Lenovo's strategy and innovation around enterprise and emerging tech, because, consumerization of IT has been topic, we talk about going way back, many, many years, but actually, the role of consumer hardware products is becoming more and more enterprise, as IoT for instance, becomes a critical piece of the network, whether it's new wearables for humans, or a security camera on a network, the edge of the network is now the IoT device, but also the data center can be considered an edge, a big edge, right? So, you have now devices everywhere, that's not so much consumer-ish, it really has to be enterprise, and cloud enabled. What are you guys doing in the innovation area there? What are some of the things that Lenovo's doing to move the needle on really making a seamless IoT edge, secure, and functional? >> Yeah, so, one of the things, if you look back at the last ten years of IT, right, we've spent a lot of time as IT organizations consolidating data centers, and then, basically, getting rid of people in IT, right? The simplicity of an AWS, and Azure Stack, has actually driven down the number of operational people in IT. And now you're hitting this wave where, on-prem private clouds, are becoming more and more important. It could be the analytic workloads, it could be your blockchain workloads, but the workloads that you want to keep on-prem, and you're going, "Holy crap, I need a robust "operational organization to actually "make this come to life." So that was one of my predictions for this year, was operational simplicity rises in importance, and our response to that from a Lenovo solution is to build fully-integrated appliances. So we have fully-integrated private cloud appliances based on Azure Stack, based on Nutanix, based on VMware's vSAN, ready nodes, so that you pick either at the software layer only, or you can pick a fully-integrated appliance where it's integrated in the factory, that's what I call rack-and-roll, comes with white glove support, and you need far less operational people. And if you want to know, I mean, it's mimicking that simplicity that AWS offers, right? So it's really an application team that now can manage this entire operational environment. >> So is that targeted towards folks who are transitioning to cloud operations? One of the things about true private cloud is, they're essentially rebooting their organizations to be cloud operations, essentially. >> That's right, yeah. >> And so they want that plug-and-play, if you will, I use that old term, but, just out of the box, and then it becomes a resource on the network, is that what you-- >> Yeah, well everybody says, they say the hardware doesn't matter, well it matters (laughs), you know, because it what makes everything run. But what they mean by that is they don't want to mess with it, it needs to be a no-fuss, no-muss, it needs to be there like a utility, but not have to have the resource dedication that used to exist, where I needed storage admins, and database admins, and server admins. That level of monitoring and management has to be abstracted to the software layer, and you have to then be able to integrate your resource components to be able to do that, and look at it as a system, not as a component. And that's where we're headed with our strategy. >> Yeah, Kim, that's a great consumption model, right? An increasing part of the market, converged infrastructure, hybrid conversion infrastructure, like you say rack and, what'd you use? >> Rack-and-roll. >> Rack-and-roll, I like that. But the hardware does matter, right? A few years ago, if you'd listen to some people, we were going to be inside public clouds with some sort of undifferentiated pools of x86 servers out there, but it turns out the actual hardware, and the integration pieces, do matter. John mentioned IoT, AI, we've seen some examples of it here at the show, real world examples, and then for that, hardware really starts to matter. Can you talk a little bit about how Lenovo's looking to some of these emerging tech? >> At the beginning of the year, we formed an IoT division specifically to focus on IoT, and it really is bringing the edge to life, that's the mission of that particular organization. And so, we see sort of the remote office, branch office concept that has long since, I mean, it goes back to AS/400 days, right? You had branch office computing. But, reinventing itself in a modern way into these edge servers that can be rugged-ized, for, you know, we have edge servers in windmills, as an example, to manage and monitor a windmill farm, right? To optimize generation with wind shifts, those kinds of things, but it could be a closet, right, and it could-- >> It's not a data center. >> It's not a data center, is in a physical construct of a data center, is in the functionality provided, it is a data center, and so, we have from our PC group one of the things I'm pretty interested about is we have these things called stackables, so they're about five by eight inches of a PC, and then you can magnetically connect a battery to a magnetically projector to it through magnets, and you can get basically a stack of computing power. So, we've looked at that from our PC colleagues, and said, "Huh, that's the future of the edge, "but it needs to be ZEON class, "it needs to be enterprised as manageability,", and so it won't be five inches by eight inches when we're done, but, it will use some of that IP in the stackable nature, that will allow you, then I can put that stackable unit on the back of a television monitor for a smart display, I could put it back on a kiosk, or a vending machine, or, and all of the sudden, now I can get really different customer experience at the edge, and then I can parse data, maybe I don't need that data, to go back to the cloud, maybe I do need some of that, for, you know, machine-learning capabilities, I want to create big data sets back in the cloud, you can create that level of intelligence at the edge, and parse the data, to where you think the appropriate destination for that data is. >> How important is the IoT edge for you guys, and what should customers who are trying to merge cultures of OT, Operational Technology, with IT? 'Cause now you have IP devices. Which, it creates a security potential, but, there's now policy involved, you got to write software apps for it, you got unique use cases, talk about the importance of the IoT edge, for Lenovo, and what customers should be thinking about when they architect. >> So, my starting point is every piece of equipment becomes an IP-enabled device that will generate and collect data, you're going to have to figure out how to use that data, right? I said to our facilities leader, not too long ago, I said, I pointed at the table, at the conference table we were at, "What do you think this is?" And he's like, "Uh, it's table," and I'm like, "Hmm, no, to me, this is a smart table. "It could be IP-connected, and we could figure out, "is it the right value for this particular room," and you could just get into these crazy things, some will make sense, some won't make sense, but basically, I think every company is looking at how do they make their products and services smart by wrapping them with IT-enabled services. So that creates a new edge. We used to think of endpoints as PCs and phones, now there are cars, and you know, any form of transportation vehicle, they're windmills, they're semi-conductor equipment, you name it. And, that is sort of the new, that's where we are trying to attack, from the IoT perspective, what we're trying to help customers understand is, it's that data collection use case analysis that will enable them. One of my favorite examples is Ford has a prototype product, it's not a car, it's a baby crib. Now, why, right? So, through autonomous driving, they collect a bunch of data, everybody knows that when new parents have a cranky baby in the middle of the night, what do you do, you put 'em in the car, you take 'em for a ride, right? So this baby crib mimics the motion of a car, mimics the sound of an engine, and mimics the streetlights. There's no more taking your baby for a ride in the middle of the night, you put 'em in the bed, yeah, we've all done it! And this is why these endpoint devices collecting data to figure out these new products and services, and I just think, whether they ever bring that to market or not is not the point-- >> It's new experiences. >> It's a brilliant idea, and gives you a really good illustration of how creating these smart-enabled endpoints will allow you to generate new business opportunities. >> That's been a real theme here at the show, getting beyond the technology, right? Transformation is kind of a buzz word, but, I loved that they didn't put a huge amount of tech on stage, they really did talk to the people here, attendees, about, "Look, you've got to step up, "you've got to have new ideas, "you've got to affect the business." How are you, as you talk with both of your customers and inside Lenovo, addressing those kind of transformation and business ad sorts of deals? >> Yeah, look, I said today, and I really believe this, there's a new mandate for IT. The table stakes of keeping the business running, of course we have to keep the business running and running well, right? But really, every IT leader should be thinking about how do they redefine the customer experience for their organization, how they drive extreme productivity, through AI and blockchain and stuff, companies today are extraordinarily inefficient. We all live in a company, and we can tell you it's inefficient, right? But, you now have the ability to affordably drive out that inefficiency through this level of extreme productivity, and then everybody needs to be thinking about the future of the company, what are you in the business of, and how do you wrap those with new products and services, whether it's adjacent markets that you're going to create, or it's enhancements of your existing product, so you can reach new customers, new markets, and that's a far more interesting role for IT, but you can't give up the ship either, right? You cannot let operational performance decline while you're operating on the new mandate, which is why new operating models for IT, and the hyper-converged infrastructures, and in-- >> Containers have been a great help there too-- >> Containers, right, we just have to fundamentally re-architect, so that it's easy to actually drive change, flawless change, into the enterprise, and, the volume of change for our future is twice as great as what we've experienced in the past, and if you accept that as a premise, you'll rethink how you've done your architecture, and how you promote code into production, and how you manage that code going forward. >> We always love having you on theCUBE, 'cause you always do predictions, so I want to go back and get some predictions from you. What's your predictions next year, what do you see happening, you know, by the way, you have been right in a lot of your predictions, so, we have the tapes, we can go back and look at the videos. (laughs) Ah, I guess you were right on that one! What's your predictions this year, I mean obviously you've seen a lot going on, we are talking about, here on theCUBE, seeing what's going on with Kubernetes, change to OpenShift, that a new internet infrastructure's being recast, with compatibility modes, with containers, and Kubernetes for orchestration, cloud scale, you can come up with IoTs, a new infrastructure, and upgrade, is coming. So there's a lot of things happening. So what's your prediction, what's going to happen over the next year? >> Yeah, so I actually believe this is the first year that we have human capacity in IT organizations to reinvent the enterprise structure, which comes led with an enterprise architecture discussion. We've been moving more cloud to the cloud SaaS applications, you know, infrastructure as a service, and that is now absorbed enough into that you can stand back and look at it, so I do believe that, I call it data centers go micro, that the era of data center consolidation is over, that we will be more data centers, they just will be micro-data centers, because they will reflect the edge of every company, and those endpoint aggregation that you need to do to figure out what your data analysis is going to be. I also think that the operational simplicity that operating models are going to be redefined, as more and more private clouds get deployed, the structure of an IT organization has typically looked like this, you have four basic functions, you have IT engineering, IT operations, application development, and applications maintenance. That's typically the structure. I think you're going to see a collapsing of that. There actually is no reason for four independent functions, you need to organize by line of business, and the business outcome you're trying to drive, and, workers are going to need to be more versatile, in terms of being able to span, you're going to abstract a lot from the infrastructure, right, so you need to be able to manage at a higher level, therefore you can't organize in that discreet manner, and I think you'll start to see that come life-- >> John: Like horizontally scalable people. >> Sounds like horizontally scalable people, yeah. >> You've been a CIO at Intel, you have a lot of varieties of roles sittin' on some boards, you're now in an executive role at Lenovo, you're managing products, your responsibilities are building, shipping and business performance as well. How has your role changed? You've been there for about what, a year and a 1/2 or so? >> Yep, just about a year. >> Just about a year, what's the energy like, what are you bringing to the teams, what's your vision, what's your to do list within Lenovo to take it to the next level? >> Yeah, so when I started with Lenovo because I considered Lenovo the underdog, in the data center industry, which was going through phenomenal change, right? And so, the underdog has the best opportunity to capture hearts and minds and share when the industry's going through change, and so that's what attracted me. And it's been true. We organized, about this time last year, by customer segment, to serve the unique needs of our customers in terms of hyper-scaling customers, high performance compute and enterprise, both at the software-defined and traditional layer. And, in that one year, we've won six out of the ten top hyper-scalers in the world, from zero to six in a year, we consider that to be great, and we learn so much from their, they're doing a lot of customization, and they're two, three, four years ahead of what the general enterprise will consume, and so we're able to take that then and pull it back into our private cloud deployment strategy, into our enterprise management, software management, and strategy, because we see what they're doing, and use that as a virtual cycle of life, and we've got a lot of momentum in that area. And our employees are just excited about how much progress we've made in a year. And I would say if you pulled ten of 'em, nine out of ten would've said they wouldn't have believed we could make so much progress in one year. And that's a good feeling to have. Now, there's more work to do (laughs). >> Yeah, you have product leadership, you've got some great products, it's now just focus and getting on the right wave, right? I mean, 'cause the industry is changing! >> Kim: The industry is changing-- >> So you can move the needle big time. >> Yeah, and we've chosen from a software perspective, we've chosen a deep partnership model, with Red Hat as one of the partners, and so, if I look forward, and I would say, "Look, "we're going to have to go deeper and partner more broadly "across the ISV sphere to continue to bring "these tightly integrated appliances "in simple cloud deployment models to the market," and that's what you'll see us do next. >> Well it's exciting for you, and congratulation on that, and they're lucky to have you, and we know from when you were at Intel, you've seen the playbook, you know? (laughs) A lot of change going on, so great to see you, congratulations, we sure did love covering Lenovo, a lot of great action, thanks for your support, and thanks for coming on, sharing your insights here on theCUBE again, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> Kim Stevenson here outside theCUBE for Red Hat Summit 2018, live in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier with John Troyer, we'll be back with more, after this short break. (bright electronic music) (soothing music) >> Oftentimes the communities already know about a facility that's a problematic because, they smell it, they see it, but, again, they don't have the evidence to basically prove that whatever's happening with their health is related to that facility. (bright music) If you have a low-cost instrument that's easy to use, then all of the sudden, science becomes something that everyday people can do. (bright music) (somber electronic music) >> Hi I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, and co-host of theCUBE. I've been in the tech business since I was 19, first programming on minicomputers in a large enterprise, and then worked at IBM and Hewlett Packard, a total of nine years in the enterprise, various jobs from programming, training, consulting, and ultimately, as an executive salesperson, and then started my first company in 1997. And moved to Silicon Valley in 1999, I've been here ever since. I've always loved technology, and I loved covering, you know, emerging technology. I was trained as a software developer, and loved business. And I loved the impact of software, and technology, to business. To me, creating technology that starts a company and creates value and jobs is probably one of the most rewarding things I've every been involved in. And, I bring that energy to theCUBE, because theCUBE is where all the ideas are, and where the experts are, where the people are, and I think what's most exciting about theCUBE is that we get to talk to people who are making things happen. Entrepreneurs, CEO of companies, venture capitalists, people who are really on a day-in and day-out basis, building great companies. And the technology business has just not a lot of real time, live TV coverage, and theCUBE is a nonlinear TV operation, we do everything that the TV guys on cable don't do. We do longer interviews, we ask tougher questions, we ask sometimes some light questions, we talk about the person, and what they feel about. It's not prompted, and scripted, it's a conversation, it's authentic. And for shows that have theCUBE coverage, it makes the show buzz, it creates excitement, and more importantly, it creates great content, and great digital assets, that can be shared instantaneously through the world. Over 31 million people have viewed theCUBE, and that is the result of great content, great conversations, and I'm so proud to be part of theCUBE, we're a great team. Hi, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching theCUBE. (soothing music) >> Man: One of the community's goals.

>> Voiceover: Live (digital music) from New York City, it's The Cube covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are here with Kim Stevenson. She is the senior vice president and general manager of data center infrastructure here at Lenovo. Thank you so much for joining us, Kim. >> Thanks! I always enjoy my time on The Cube, so thanks for having me. >> So you've had a long and esteemed career in technology. Former CIO of Intel. Why did you come to Lenovo? What was it about Lenovo that drew you? >> Yeah, so I was very specifically looking for, to be in the data center space, because I believe our whole data center industry is changing. Right, and the incumbents actually don't possess very much value in this rapid pace of change. And I wanted to be a part of that. I've always loved big change agendas, so I was looking for that. Lenovo was clearly the underdog at the time I was making my decision. I like the underdog, I want, you know, I sort of-- it's about making impact and making progress, and being able to see that impact, and so that fit. And then I had, you know, good experiences with the management team, and I wanted to be able to leverage that, and in fact, you know, it's been a seamless transition in because I knew the management team and I understood some of the dynamics that we'd be facing together, and the challenges that we wanted to take on together. So it's been great, and I do think today's product launch is a culmination of, you know, we're not going to be the underdog for very much longer. >> Kim, I want to help you out and kind of help us unpack that changing dynamic of the data center. You had a very interesting viewpoint, coming from Intel. You know, Intel chips, we know they're going everywhere. What do you see as the role of the data center? Some people are like, oh, public cloud, and the hyperscales, and Lenovo has a, you know, a strong position playing across the board, so what do you see as data center? What does that mean to you and what does that mean to your customers? >> Yeah, so look, I think all businesses today are using technology to deliver their competitive advantage. It's the fundamental thing that's driving transformation in companies. So but if you look what's happened in enterprise tech for the last couple years, we've been consumed as IT practitioners, moving our workload to the cloud. Because there's rich functionality there, there's good economics, it's made complete sense. But that's only half the journey. And when you look at the other half, the second half of this movie, is really about why that enterprise data center becomes so much more important tomorrow than it is today. And it's because of the workloads, the differentiating workloads of your company. So when I was the CIO at Intel, our differentiating workloads were engineering and manufacturing. We got paid to engineer great products. We got paid to make them. And every industry has those kind of workloads. And then with the emergence of artificial intelligence and IOT, those workloads are going to explode, and they are going to reside in your enterprise data center. And so, but you think about what that needs in terms of network, in terms of memory, IO capability, those are much different platforms than what you think of as a legacy data center. And I simply want to be a part of making that come to life. >> Okay, and so you would include, some people would call that the edge requirement, edge computing, which, you know, sometimes the little bit of difference is, it's not my centralized data center, even if it does live out in the customer's environment. >> Some of it is edge, right? Clearly, the growth in the edge will be phenomenal. And some of that will be real-time processing that happens at the edge, and others of it will be coming back to the data center for other types of processing, right? It could be for pattern analysis over a longer time horizon. It could be for developing of new services to deploy it at a later date. But I think both of those things are going to, what do they call it, Jevons paradox, right? The more you have, the more you use, right? And that's what I think's going to happen with the value of data, being able to capture it and store it and analyze it in a very, very cost-effective manner. >> You were talking about how companies get paid to make great products, and how with the introduction or the evolution of AI and machine learning, how those workloads are going to explode, and it's not going to be enough any more to just make great products. Are companies ready for these changes? >> You know, there's a spectrum. I would say some yes, some no. I think in some cases, the rapid pace of technology scares the crap out of boards of directors and CEOs that don't come from our space. But, in the end, I do think that's going to be the winners and losers will be decided by who can deploy the most advanced technology in the fastest amount of time. And I think there's a whole generation of people that that scares. They didn't grow up like us, in the middle of it. There's a whole generation of people like me, that you know, it excites us, and it makes us want to do more. So but yeah, I think companies, especially those outside of tech, they have a longer journey than tech companies do. >> Rebecca: A learning curve. Yeah, learning curve is steeper. >> I want to talk a little about your experience at Lenovo so far. Before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about just the greater numbers of women in senior leadership positions at Lenovo, and how that changes the dynamic and the approach to teamwork. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about what you've experienced? >> Yeah, so it's really been a pleasant surprise, because Lenovo's a very diverse company, and that diversity plays out. So in our president's staff, right, which I'm a member of, you know, half of the staff are women. And that may not sound unusual, except for it's very unusual in tech, >> Rebecca: In technology! and it's very unusual for me, as a woman, to have the opportunity to work with other women. And so, but, it's an interesting thing, because we're focused on driving more customer-centricity as a company, and particularly in data center group, and so what you see with this natural collaboration is that we're all focused on the same problem, and we're willing to leverage the strengths of one another, so there's no siloed thinking, there's no I have to be the smartest person in the room thinking, that often exists in tech companies. And I largely attribute that to the diversity of the staff. And the other thing is, it's sort of a sidetrack, but, the number of African Americans in our organization are greater than I've ever seen in any tech company. And so I've been asking some of the African American women, like, why is that, help me understand that, let's-- and they're brilliant, they're really brilliant. And so I just never subscribe to you can't find any women for these jobs, or you can't find any, you know, diverse candidates for these jobs. You just have to look in the right places, and so it's been really, really fabulous at Lenovo to work with really talented women, and learn from them, and hopefully I'm helping them learn something too, right? >> And eye-opening that it can happen, even in technology. At a time when we're hearing about the dearth of woman leaders, and the sort of bro culture in Silicon Valley, in particular. >> Yep, yep, so it's, you know, I mean I do think it takes a management team that has an open mindset to solve problems in different ways, and you know, if our core different is better, we're willing to do it differently, and look, we have a different management team and style that, you know, is much more focused on our customers. So it's been good. >> Kim, as a former CIO, I'm curious what your viewpoint is of the role of the CIO today. We talked about, you know, just the rapid pace of change that's happening in data center, a cloud needs to fit into the equation, you know, what do you see as the primary role of the CIO, and you know, how that's different today than it was, say, five years ago. >> Yeah, so, look, I think today's, the very, very best CIOs, people the top of our profession, are outstanding change agents. They're transformational leaders, they speak for the company, they don't speak for IT. They are integral in the strategic direction setting of the company, and they bring sort of a new thinking to that. Now, that said, they also have to run the operations extremely well. You do not get to sit at the table at the board meetings, or the CEO's staff, if you can't run the place really well. Because it's so pivotal that operational execution is really, really outstanding when your whole business is built on this. But the differentiators are really the ones around leadership, and speaking for the business, and strategic direction setting, and really trying to understand the capacity of change that the company can go through, and how do you keep expanding that capacity for change. >> Lenovo is number one in customer satisfaction on a slew of different rankings, and as you said, this is where you are focused, on pleasing the customer, satisfying the customer, anticipating the customer's needs before the customer even knows he has those needs. When you're number one, you can't move up. So how do you keep driving toward remaining in that top position? >> Yeah, so you know, one of the things that we're trying to do is change the expectation of the customers have of their hardware vendors, right? So obviously, customers always expect great products. It needs to be reliable, it needs to have good performance, it needs to cost the right price point. Those are always the standard. But we're trying to take it a little bit further and say, look, your expectation should be, we need to be easy to do business with, right, from the time I think about writing an RFQ, to maybe evaluate some hardware, to the time that I sunset that piece of equipment. Everything in-between, right, it needs to be easy to acquire, it needs to be easy to run, easy to manage, it needs to be easy to sunset. I want to future-proof that investment by making things upgradeable, and having, you know, instead of, I was talking to one customer today who said, hey, look, if I could have a 10 year life cycle, I can use bond money to fund my growth. If I don't, I can't. I have to use expense money, and therefore, I can do far less. And I said, well, we future-proofed this system, set of products, and here's how you can do that, right? You upgrade the memory at this cycle. You upgrade the processors at this cycle. Use the same rack, same chassis, for the next 10 years, and you get three generations of technology out of a single rack. And he's like, that's a brilliant! I mean, that's the kind of thing we're trying to help customers think through. It's more than, I always say, it's the tech and the team that get leadership, and that's what we want, to be a part of the team that drives leadership. >> Kim, your team has an interesting blend of people with long history in especially the x86 server market, and new people. Kirk and yourself, both, you know, relatively new to the position, how are you tracking, what KPIs are you measuring, to say that Lenovo's succeeding, becoming a larger, more strategic partner for customers in the data center. >> Yeah, so we're coming off, and it's no surprise, we're coming off a bad year, right? And so, we have really three dimensions that we are driving improvements in. One is sales execution. So all the classic KPIs and you know, sales productivity types of measures, and we've made the changes to get a dedicated sales force, hired very specific specialists, so that's one dimension. The second is product performance and portfolio gaps. So how well, you know, do we make, you know, our benchmarks? So we've got these 30 world record benchmarks, right? In the next generation, how well are we going to do against those? HPC benchmarks, right? So we're really external benchmarking, and it really is, like we measure ourselves externally, so we can get good view of the competition. And then we look at where our portfolio gaps are, and what do we have to do to close those portfolio gaps through focused engineering? And the third is then customer engagement and support, which is really where the satisfaction measure comes from, but we're not-- satisfaction is a rear-view mirror look at the world. We're using advanced analytics and AI to predict customer engagement drop, right? Why would that customer no longer be engaging with us? Customer field failures, and we're tracking every incident that happens out there, whether it's something we need to act on, or the customer needs to act on, so those become our important KPIs, to build this lifelong customer within a trusted relationship. >> The theme of this event is transform, and Lenovo has undergone an enormous transformation in the past few years, and now you're just starting, and sort of on the brink of this new transformation. I asked Cameron about this earlier, but just, if you could talk a little bit about where you want to be five years from now, in Lenovo, and sort of what you've accomplished in the next five years. What do you want to see? >> So I guarantee you, five years from now, I'll still be saying, we need to change, we need to grow! Because I think it's a big journey. But I believe what you'll see in the next five years is you're going to see this enormous growth in these new workloads. And you're going to have to have data center capability that effectively is seamless. So we call that hybrid cloud today, or we call it converged infrastructure, or we call it, you know, hyper converged. But the reality is, you know, IT organizations will have morphed their skill sets to be, instead of being siloed servers, network, and storage, you'll have people that span those technology skill sets, and therefore our products need to be fully integrated, right, and almost so self-healing in their process that you don't need consoles. The idea of a console, the monitor things that I know, we have one, right? You have to have it today. I don't think you need it in the future, because the machine is so self-healing, why do I need someone looking at a console? >> Rebecca: I love that concept of a self-healing machine, one that can fix itself. >> Yeah, and we've got some Lenovo research being done today on how you do that. And I know it can be done, because if you look at the equipment, individual pieces of equipment, all have now call home capability, or some intelligent care capability, but they're siloed by vendors, or type of product. So you could integrate that into a machine learning application, and use that to act, where I don't need any human interference with that. Because I've got a knowledge management database, I have all those events that have happened in the past, so you can really, truly bring self-healing, self-diagnosing, self-healing, to life, and I think that's where we'll be in five years. It doesn't take very long to get that type of capability, given that we have the foundation already. >> So Kim, now that you're on the other side of the table from your relationship with Intel, speak a little bit about Lenovo as a partner. I think about Intel, Microsoft, you know, companies that are very strategic to Lenovo, but also with your key competitors. What differentiates Lenovo as a partner? >> Yeah, so you know, one, we don't compete with our partners, right? And so it sort of depends on what kind of partners, but some of our competitors end up, you know, through acquisition, through growth, through intention, they end up competing with their partners. We're very, very clear. We don't compete with our partners. We're here to make our partners successful. And so we have deep industry partnerships with like the Intels of the world, and the Microsofts of the world, because we're so complementary. And we're after the same types of things, and so, that's really worked to our advantage. But I would even go down to, you know, our channel partners, the value added resellers and distributors, they're critically important to us, and we've made changes this year to insure that they have rich incentives to work with Lenovo. And so it really spans, you know, sort of the supply side to the delivery side, that we have a holistic view of how strategic and important our partners are to us, and that shared sense of win-win. We really want a win-win relationship with all of our partners. >> A great note to end on. Thanks so much for joining us, >> Thanks for having me. it's always a pleasure having you on the show. >> Yep, thanks for having me again, I really appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Lenovo Transform just after this. (digital music)

>> Male voiceover: Live from San Jose California, it's the Cube, covering Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Western Digital World Headquarters It's the Almaden Campus in San Jose. If you know anything about the tech world, you know there's a lot of innovation that's been happening on this campus for years and years and years. Big announcement today called Innovating to Fuel the Next Generation of Big Data. Lot of exciting announcements and here to join us to tell us all about it is Brendan Collins. He's the Vice President of Product Marketing Devices for Western Digital. Brendan, great to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Absolutely so, really exciting announcement. You know, I've talked to Kim Stevenson at Intel, we had an interview talking about Moore's law. And one thing she really reinforced is that Moore's law is really more of an attitude than it is specifically physics, and whether you want to argue the physics is one thing, but the attitude for innovation, to continue to deliver a lot more for less, just continues, continues, and continues, and you guys announced a huge step in that direction today. >> Yeah, we have a challenge that storage is growing at a rate of about 40 percent per year. And budgets from the data centers are not growing, right? So the challenge is for us to develop new technologies that allow us to stay on the technology curve, and cut costs and do that efficiently. >> Then this is a big one, so let's jump in. So actually it was years ago I was actually at the event when you guys introduced the Helium drives, and that was a big deal there, and you've continued to kind of move that innovation but then you can see a plateau. And the density of this data, so you guys had to come up with something new. >> Yeah, what we've seen is that our PMR technology that we use currently is slowly running out of steam, right? So in order to come down the cost curve, we needed to boost areal density. And luckily we were able to come up with a new breakthrough in MAMR technology that will allow us to do that for the next decade. >> It's interesting in the talk, you talked about you guys could see this kind of coming and you actually put a lot of bets on the table, you didn't just bet on MAMR, you bet on HAMR, and you continued along a number of multiple tracks, and you've been at this for a while. What was kind of the innovation that finally gave you a breakthrough moment that got us to where we are today? >> Well, there were multiple technologies that we could have invested in, and we decided to continue on the two major ones which were HAMR and MAMR but we made a decision to invest in a process called, a head fabrication process called damascene that allowed us to extend the life of PMR for the last five to six years, and it's been in all the products we've been shipping since 2013. >> And you talked the areal density, so that's basically the amount of information we can put on the square inch of surface area And you've really, you attacked it on two vectors. One is how many tracks, just think of a record, how many tracks can you get on an album, in terms of the number of lines, and then how much density then you can have on each of those tracks. >> That's right, that's right. And you're now seeing major improvements on both of those factors. >> Well if you look at, we've had three enabling technologies in our products for the past three to four years, right. One is helium, one is micro actuation, and the other is the damascene process. Damascene and micro actuation actually push track density which enables higher capacity. But the newer technology that we're talking about, MAMR, addresses both factors. So we push the track density even tighter together, But we also boost the linear density at the same time, and we do that without adding cost. >> Right. The other thing you talked about, and I think it's a really important piece, right it's not only the technology breakthrough, but it's also how does that fit within the existing ecosystem of your customers, and obviously big giant data centers and big giant cloud providers, we actually have a show going on at a big cloud show right now, and this technology was innovative in that you've got a breakthrough on density, but not so crazy that you introduced a whole bunch of new factors into the ecosystem that would then have to be incorporated into all these systems, because you guys not only make your own systems, but you make the media that feeds a whole host of ecosystems, and that was a pretty important piece. >> If you look at some previous technologies we've introduced whether it be even 4K sectors in the industry, or shingled magnetic reporting, both of those require whole side modifications. Any time you have whole side modifications, it generally slows down the adoption, right? With HAMR, one of the challenges that we had was because of the concerns with thermals on the media, we needed a process called wear leveling, and that required whole software changes. In contrast, when we go to MAMR, everything is seamless, everything is transparent, and it's great. >> Right. I thought it was much simpler than that. I thought just heat is bad, HAMR is heat, and MAMR is microwave, and you know, heat and efficiency and data centers and all those, kind of again, system-level concerns; heat's never a good thing in electronics. >> Well, and in the case of MAMR versus HAMR, there's like an order of magnitude difference in the temperature on the disk, which is the key concern. >> And then of course as you mentioned in the key note, this is real, you've got sample units going on, correct me if I'm wrong, as early as next year >> That's right. >> you're hoping you'd be in scale production in 2020. Where some of these other competing technologies, there's really still no forecasted ship date on the horizon. >> Yeah, you can generate samples, you can build lower quantities of these HAMR drives, but you still have that big concern out there in front of you, how do I address the reliability, how do I address the complexity of all these new materials, and then if I got all of that to work, how do I do it commercially because of the cost additives. >> Right; so I just want to get your perspective before we let you go, you're busy, there's a high demand for your time, as you kind of think back and look at these increasing demands for storage, this increasing demand for computers, and I think one of the data points given is, you know, the data required for humans and machines and IOT is growing way way way way faster than business focused data which has been the driver of a lot of this stuff, if you just kind of sit back and take a look, you know, what are some of your thoughts because I'm sure not that long ago you could have never imagined that there would be the demand for the types of capacities that we're talking about now and we both know that when we sit down five years from now, ten years ago, you know, ten years from now, we're going to look back at today and think, you know, that was zero. >> Yeah, way back in the day there were just PCs and servers and there was traditional IT with rate, today with autonomous cars and IOT and AI and machine learning, it's just going to continue, so that exponential growth that you saw, there's no sign of that slowing down, which is good news for us. >> Yeah, good job security for you for sure. >> You bet! >> Alright Brendan, well, again, thanks for taking a few minutes to sit down and congratulations on the great event and the launch of these new products. >> Thank you, thank you. >> He's Brendan Collins, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching the Cube from the Western Digital Headquarters in San Jose California. Thanks for watching.

>> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in downtown San Francisco at the Mission Bay Convention Center at Node Summit 2017. We've been coming to Node Summit off and on for a number of years. And it's pretty amazing, the growth of this application for development. It really seems to take off. There's about 800 or 900 people here. It's kind of the limits of the facility here at Mission Bay. But we're really excited to be here. And it's not surprising to have me see Intel is here in full force. Our first guest is Monica Ene-Pietrosanu. And she is the Director of Software Engineering for Intel, welcome. >> Thank you, hello, and thank you very much for inviting me. It's definitely exciting to be here. Node is this dynamic community that grows in one year, like others can. So it's always exciting to be part one of these events. And present about the work we are doing for Node. >> So you're on a panel later on Taking Benchmarking to the Next Level. So what is that all about? >> That is part of the work we are doing for Node. And I want to mention here the word stewardship. Intel is a long time contributor in the open source communities. And has assumed a performance leadership in many of these communities. We are doing the same for Node. We are driving, we are trying to be a steward for the performance in OJS. And what this means, is we are watching to make sure that every check in that happens, doesn't impact performance. We are also optimizing Nodes, so it give the best of the hardware, Node runs best on the newest hardware that we have. And also, we are developing, right now new measures, new benchmarks which better reflect the reality of the data center use cases. The way your Node is getting used in the Cloud. The way Node is getting used in the data center. There are very few ways to measure that today. And with this fast development of the ecosystem, my team has also taken this role of working with the industry partners and coming up with realistic measures for the performance. >> Right, so these new benchmarks that you're defining around the capabilities of Node. Or are you using old benchmarks? Or how are you kind of addressing that challenge? >> We started by running what was available. And most of the benchmarks were quite, let's say, isolated. They were focused on single Node, one operation, not realistic in terms of what the measurements were being done for the data center. Especially, in the data center everything is evolving. So nothing is just running with one single computer. Everything is impacted by network latencies. We have a significant number of servers out there. We have multiple software components interacting. So it's way more complex. And then you have containers coming into the picture. And everything makes it harder and harder to evaluate from the performance perspective. And I think Node is doing a pretty good job from the performance perspective. But who's watching that it stays the same? I think performance is one of those things that you value when you don't have it, right? Otherwise you just take it as granted, like it's there. So, my team at Intel is focused on top tier scripting languages. We are part of this larger software organization called Software and Services Group. And we are, right now, optimizing and writing the performance for Python, No-gs, PHP HHVM, and for some of the top tier languages used in the data centers. So Node is actually our interesting story in terms of evolution. Because we've seen, also, an extraordinary growth. We've seen, it's probably the one who's doubled for the past three years. The community has doubled. Everything has doubled for Node, right? Even, the number of commits, it depends on which statuses you look-- >> They're all up and to the right, very steep. >> Yeah, so then it's a very fast progress which we need to keep pace with. And one thing that is important for us is to make sure that we expose the best of our hardware to the software. With Node that is taking an interesting approach. Because Node is one of, what we called CPU front end bounce. It's having a large footprint. It's one of the largest footprint applications that we've seen. And for this we want to make sure that the newest CPUs we bring to market are able to handle it. >> I was just going to say, they have Trevor Livingston on it from HomeAway. Kicked off things today. We're talking about the growth. He said a year ago, they had one Node JS project. And this is a big site that competes with, like, Air B&B. That's now owned by Expedia. Now they say, he said, they had, "15 projects in production. "22 almost in production, and 75 other internal projects." In one year, from one. So that shows pretty amazing growth and the power of the application. And from Intel's point of view, you guys are all in on cloud. You're all in on data centers. You've all seen all the adds. So you guys are really, aggressively taking on the optimization, for the unique challenges and special environment that is Cloud. Which is computing everywhere, computing nowhere. But at the end of the day, it's got to sit on somebody's servers. And there's got to be a CPU in the background. So you look at all these different languages. Why do you think Node has gone so crazy? >> I think there are several reasons. And my background is a C++ developer, coming and security. So coming into the Node space, one thing amazed me. Like, only 2% of the code is yours, when you write an application. So that is like-- >> Jeff: 2%? >> So where is the other 98% coming from? Or it's already pre developed. It's an ecosystem, you just pull in those libraries. So that's what brings, in addition to the security risks you have. It brings a fantastic time to market. So it enables you as the developer to launch an application in a matter of days, instead of months or a year. So time to market is an unbeatable proposition. And I think that's what drives this space. When you need to launch new applications faster and faster, and upgrade. For us, that's also an interesting challenge. Because we have, our super road maps are not days, right? Are years? So what we want to make sure is that we feed back into the CPU road map the developments we are seeing into this space. I have on my team, I have several principal engineers who are working with the CPU architects to make sure that we are continuously providing this information back. One thing I wanted to mention is, as you probably know, since you've been talking to other Intel people, we've been launching recently, the latest generation server, Skylake. And on this latest generation Nodes. So all the Node workloads we've been optimizing and measuring. So one point five x performance improvement, from the prior generation. So this is a fantastic boost. And this doesn't happen only from hardware. It happens from a combination of hardware and software. And we are continuing to work now with the CPU architects to make sure that the future generation also keeps space with the developments. >> It's interesting, kind of the three horsemen of computing, if you will, right? There's compute, there's store, and there's IO. And now we're working, and it's interesting that Ryan Dahl, it's funny, they brought up Ryan Dahl. We interviewed him back at the Node JS, I think back in 2011? Still one of our most popular segments on theCUBE. We do thousands of interviews a year. He's still one of the most popular. But to really rethink the IO problem, in this asynchronous form, seems to be just another real breakthrough that opens up all types of capacity in compute and store. When you don't have to sit and wait. So that must be another thing that you guys have addressed from coming from the hardware and the software perspective? >> You are right on spot, because I think Node, comparing to other scripting languages brings more into the picture, the whole platform. So it's not only a CPU. It's also a networking. It's also related to storage. Also, it makes the entire platform to shine if it's optimized to the right capability. And we've been investing a lot into this. We have all our work is made available is open source. All our contributions are up-streamed back into the mainstream. We also started an effort to work with the industry in developing these new workloads. So last year at Node Interactive, we launched one new workload, benchmark, for Node. Which we called Node DC. With his first use case, which is an employee information system, simulating what a large data center distributed application will be doing. This year, now at Node Summit, we will be presenting the updated version of that, one point zero, this time. It was version zero point nine, last time. Where we added support for containers. We included several capabilities to be able to run, in a configural manner, in as many configurations as needed. And we are also contributing this back. We submitted it to the Node Foundation. So it becomes an official benchmark for the Node Foundation. Which means, every night, after the build system runs, this will be run as part of the regressions. To make sure that the performance doesn't degrade. So that's part of our work. And that's also continuing an effort we started with what we call the languages performance portal. If you go to languagesperformance.intel.com we have an entire lab behind that portal, in which every night we build this top tier scripting languages. Including Python, including Node, including PHP, and we run performance regressions on the latest Intel architecture. So we are contributing the results back into the open source community, to make sure that the community is aware if any regression happens. And we have a team of engineers who jumps on those regression center root causes and analyzes it. So to figure it out. >> So Monica, but we're almost out of time. But before I let you go, we talked before we got started, I love Kim Stevenson, I've interviewed her a bunch of times. And one of the conversations that we had was about Moore's Law. And that Moore's Law's really an attitude. And it's kind of a way to do things more than hitting the physical limitations on chips, which I think is a silly conversation. You're in a constantly, the role of constantly optimizing. And making things better, faster, cheaper. As you sit back and look at, kind of, what you've done to date, and looking forward, do you see any slowdown in this ability to continue to tweak, optimize, tweak, optimize? And just get more and more performance out of some of these new technologies? >> I wouldn't see slow down. At least from where I sit on the software side. I'm seeing only acceleration. So, the hardware brings a 30%, 40% improvement. We add, on top of that, the software optimizations. Which bring 10%, 20% improvements as well. So that continuously is going on. And I am not seeing it improving. I'm seeing it becoming more, there is a need for customization. So that's where when we design the workloads, we need to make them customizable. Because there are different use cases across the data center customers. So they are used differently. And we want to make sure that we reflect the reality. That's how they're in the world. And that's how our customers, our partners can also leverage them, to measure something that's meaningful for them. So in terms of speed, now, we want to make sure that we fully utilize our CPU. And we grow to more and more cores and increase frequency. We also grow to more capabilities. And our focus is also to make the entire platform to shine. And when we talk about platform we talk about networking. We talk about non volatile memory. We talk about storage as well as CPU. >> So Gordon's safe. You're safe, Gordon Moore. Your law's still solid. Monica, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and good luck on your panel later this afternoon. >> Thank you very much for having me here. It was pleasure. >> Absolutely, all right, Jeff Frick checking in from Node Summit 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New York City, it's the Cube. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. >> We are wrapping up a day of coverage, the Cube's coverage, of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host, Rebecca Kinight, along with Stu Miniman. We have been here, we've interviewed all the great guests, heard a lot of great content, we were there at the keynote. Stu, what have we learned? Yeah, so Rebecca, they talk a lot about, think differently, and we're transforming, and we know that there's so much change happening in the industry. On the one hand, I step back and I say, okay, it's a new generation of Intel Chipset. That's great. Said great a few times already. They've got some people that have been with the company a long time. YY, the CEO's been there for many years, steady at the helm. But there's a lot of new leaders in the group. Kirk Skaugen, who we've now interviewed a couple times, Kim Stevenson, who we've known, a great Cube alum, talked about why she joined a company like Lenovo. Said, they're an underdog, and she feels that they have a great position without that legacy baggage. You know, legacy is one of those terms that gets thrown around. One of our guests today said, you know, oh, in five years from now, we'll be calling software defined legacy because, I was at a conference, they said legacy is what you installed yesterday. (laughs) >> Good point, yeah. >> So, you know, that being said, Lenovo understands, you know, fanatical devotion to that, you know, customer-centricity, is the term they put out there a few times. They want to be reliable, they want to be trusted, and they've got metrics and stats to prove that they are meeting what they're doing. They're not just, you know. John Farrier texted me, he said, "There's meat on the bone at this event, Stu." Absolutely. So, interesting to look at, kind of where they are, where they're going forward. The server industry as a whole is a bit challenged. >> Mm-hmm. >> Storage has been going through radical transformation. Networking is driving more to software defined. And all of that means that there's opportunity for new players to rise through the ranks. And Lenovo feels that they're got the pieces to put together both with themselves, and with their channel and technology partners to be able to drive forward. >> So, one of the things that we're hearing a lot about is that they are number one in customer satisfaction. Because they are so reliable, and because they have great service. In terms of what they were hearing from their customers, we heard this a lot, is that the customers want simple, they are overwhelmed sometimes by too much choice. They want nothing too complicated. And they want things future-proofed. I mean, is that possible? >> Yeah, it's really tough. I did an article a few years ago looking at Amazon. And people would say, oh the hyperscale companies, they use commodity off the shelf hardware. I mean, Intel chips everywhere, what's the difference? Well, I wrote, Amazon actually hyper-optimizes. They have to build for one data center; it's their own. So if they built an application, it's 10,000 or 50,000 servers that they can build for that exact environment. Now, Lenovo leads with data centers around the globe. So, where can they simplify and standardize, and where do they need to fit around the world? So, it's great that they can have a common form factor for a power supply, but you know, we've got different power usage in various places around the world. But they do need to be, customers want help to be a little bit more opinionated, and to simplify what they're doing. I talked to a CIO a couple of years ago, and he said, we were really good at, you know, give us a big chunk of money and 18 months and we could build a temple to our application. Today I need to be faster. I need to be able to build, be more modular, and a lot of that means that I need to have architectures that are more software driven. I still need redundancy, and availability in the hardware, but I'm not going to build, you know, that monolithic infrastructure for a specific application. I just need something that's more flexible. And Lenovo understands that, and they've taken the assets that they had internally, added the pieces that they've gotten from IBM, and are driving these pieces forward, and with a lot of partners, as we've said. Interesting stuff coming from Microsoft. Azure Stack was one of my favorite interviews, talking about that mixture of I need standardization but, I also need some flexibility >> Right. >> in what I'm doing. >> Do you think that the product launches that we heard a lot about today, at the keynote, and also in our interviews today. Do you think that they will, how much do they move the needle forward is what I want to ask? >> Yeah, great question because Kim Stevenson told us, I mean, the last year, if you look revenue and units, Lenovo didn't do great. So, they've got the pieces together, the new generation. They've talked to their customer base. I think they understand what they're going to do when they hyperscale, what they're going to do in the enterprise market, and what they're doing partnering on converged, hyper converged, offering to put those together. Some of these things are really easy for us to track. We come back a year from now and we'll say, okay, the quarterly trackers done by someone like Piers in the analyst industry, you know, the numbers don't lie. You know, customers will vote with their wallets, and we will be able to say whether or not they move the needle. It's great to say, number one in customer support, but if, you know, your competition is growing, and you're shrinking, there's only so far that'll go. >> Well, that's just what I was going to ask you. I mean, is it enough? And what do you predict? I mean, can you look into your crystal ball a little bit, and say, where you think we will be one year, five years from now. Will Lenovo be the underdog? >> Yeah, so Lenovo's in a really interesting place because they do have that global footprint. They, doing, when we talk to Kirk, it's where are they in the hyperscale? It's companies like Baidu and Tencent?. Massive, massive growth. They can ride that wave. When the sky like architecture is available, you know, pretty soon from Intel, they know that they're going to get an influx of business to be able to drive that. They're also getting into some of the west coast hyperscales as they've said. The enterprise is a little bit slower to uptick on that adoption, so, you know, I'm sure Lenovo will be able to give us by segment, how they're doing, and how they're growing. They should be reaching the point that we should see the ship be turning around. We saw this story when Lenovo had purchased the PC business from IBM over a decade ago. And, you know, they sunk for a while before they eventually started to rise, and now they're number one in the world. So, they're trying to repeat history, which is challenging to do, even if they know the playbook. Lenovo, if you look at the margins that they run on, they talk about how they can live on slim margins, they understand that consumer side of the business, they've got a lot of good pieces. And, competing against the ones ahead of them in market share, primarily US based companies, and they're fighting it out. You were at Dell in Sea World. Dell and HP, they are fighting it out, it's going to be a death match. You're going to see them just trying to beat the heck out of each other. Reminds me of, can Lenovo be the Abe Lincoln on the side, saying that, you know, I might not have been the first choice, but at the end I could end up a winner because everybody else kind of beats themselves apart. >> And then all of its partners is a team of rivals. We can do this. We can... >> There you go. We started this morning talking Hamilton, and now we're going in >> We're learning (mumbles) >> New York City used to be our capital here, so, we're bringing it full circle. >> Exactly. So, let's talk also about what we've been hearing from Lenovo employees and executives about the culture here, and we hear time and time again, how it's very flat, and how decisions are made, it's collaborative, there's a lot of teamwork, there's a lot of listening that goes on, not only to colleagues but also to customers. Do you buy it? I mean, what do you think? >> Yeah, so right. So one of the things, you know, I've spent a lot of time on the converged and hyper converged infrastructure solutions. And, one of the things you can spot really easily is if the server and the storage teams aren't working together. That CI solution didn't do well. >> It shows. >> Number of companies that didn't do there. Lenovo, primarily they have some IP, but a lot of what they're driving is really through partnerships. So, at the center of it, it's the server team. Storage is coming to look more and more like, you know, x86 servers, and they're running on top of that. Networking is tied closer to the server. So, they actually don't have, you know, this big structure that they have to overcome, unlike some of their competitors. They have, you know, a sizable team, with a good position in the market share. So, I do buy a lot of it. I've been in analyst meetings with Lenovo for the last couple of years. Their messages are all in sync. It's not, oh wait, I heard one group, and I heard this group, and you know, which way is the future? So, they are making some progress. Of course, I'm really interested to see who they might pick up from an M and A standpoint. There's been rumors for the last couple of years as to some moves they'd make. Their competition has, you know, not been sitting still. We've seen, you know, Dell obviously made a lot of big acquisitions, including the really big EMC piece. HP has bought another number of companies. Cisco actually, their server business, which is the UCS, really seems to have plateaued out. So, they had been the driver of change in the storage, in the server industry for the last, gosh, you know, over five years. So, there's that opportunity for the next horse to try to take the lead. Once again, Lenovo feels they're there. I think they have, you know, they've got the resources, they have a reason to be on the track, and to drive that forward. Whether or not they can execute on, remains to be seen. And, you know, they've got, they're looked at their channel, they've looked at their sales team, and they know what they need to do now they can go do it. >> And they've made the changes. Exactly. >> Yeah, so cultural wise, I mean something you study real closely, you had a lot of businesses. Rebecca, what did you hear today? What did you like? What did you want to hear more about? >> Well, I was really fascinated by what Kim Stevenson was saying, talking about the greater numbers of women in senior leadership roles. And also, the greater numbers of people of color. And how important that is in terms of how Lenovo goes about making its decisions, thinking about the customer, empathizing with the customer, and really understanding where to go from there. And then also, then how it comes back in terms of making decisions to go to market with which products. So, that was really fascinating and I think that she's right. I mean, particularly at a time where all you see are the headlines about this machismo culture that is so pervasive in Silicon Valley and in the technology industry. And so to see, you know, YY on one hand, and Travis Kalanick on another, and you just can see these very different models and, so, I'm hoping Lenovo is the one that really prevails in the end here because this is, I think, the future, the future of work, the future of the workforce. And so, I would like to see this model of leadership and of teamwork prevail. >> Yeah, it's a different type of event here. It's nice. It's very intimate. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> You know, Lenovo obviously knows how to do some cool things. The layout here, it's a beautiful facility here >> It is. Yes. >> In New York City. The keynote had some, you know, funny yet, you know, good videos. >> Yeah. That was (mumbles). >> You know, sometimes they fall a little flat, when you go to some of those keynotes. >> Yeah. >> But, you know, Lenovo needs to continue to build their brand, outside of the consumer space. >> Right, right. >> And be known more in the enterprise, and you know, they have a chance to ride some of those waves. >> Yeah, yeah. Well this has been a great show. It's always so much fun to co-host with you on The Cube. I love it. >> All right. >> It's really fun. Great crew. >> Rebecca, thank you so much, and, yeah, actually Kirk Skaugen's going to be back on The Cube next week. I will be with Dave Vellante at the Nutanix .NEXT event in Washington, DC. We have done so many events with the Cube. Of course, as it says on the sign behind us, theCUBE.net, where all the videos are. I'm sure will be record-breaking for us yet again, as to how many shows, how many interviews we do. >> Exciting stuff. >> Rebecca, it's a pleasure to be with you again, and thanks so much for joining with me, you know, the quick train ride down from Boston. >> Yes, exactly. >> Yeah. >> Well, thank you so much, Stu. That wraps it up for us at the Cube. This has been the Lenovo Transform Conference. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for tuning in. (funky music)

>> Announcer: Live from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome to The Cube's coverage of the Lenovo Transform event. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. He is the senior analyst at Wikibon. Thanks so much, Stu, it's great to always be working with you here. >> It's great to be with you here, Rebecca, in New York City. What a time it is in New York City. >> Rebecca: How lucky we are to be alive right now. >> (chuckles) All right, enough Hamilton humor. Yeah, Y.Y., the CEO of Lenovo, got up on stage, talked about how there's no better transformation story than New York City, from a humble trading company, city, over 200 years ago to the center of innovation and just global commerce that it is today. >> So I want to ask you about Y.Y.'s keynote address. He was talking about how this was really an inflection point for Lenovo. He said this is the time where we celebrate what we've done, our past, and think about the impact we've had on society, and on business. And then also really look at the future, and what we aspire to, where Lenovo wants to go. I mean, where do you see Lenovo in terms of all your coverage of this company? >> Yeah, so we know that we're at an interesting time in really what's happening in IT today. One of my favorite lines that Y.Y. had is he said, you look back a hundred years, he said heck, look back 18 months, and you probably couldn't predict where we would be today 18 months ago. And that's true, the pace of change is just off the charts. On the one hand, they're talking about how ThinkPad is now 25 years old, and the server, the x86 line is also-- >> Also 25 years old. >> 25 years ago. >> Rebecca: We are grown up. >> But, you know, I've been in a lot of events this year where you talk whether it's 10, 25, or 100 years, and they say we know we're entering a new era where everything's going to change. Lenovo feels they are a good mashup of their tradition, but they're different and they're new, and one of the people in the keynote this morning said that they're a startup. Now, I wouldn't call them a startup with 43 billion in revenue, and 52,000 employees globally? >> A big startup. >> Um, no. You know, culturally, I think, Rebecca, you'd agree with me, a company of that size, I don't care if you started yesterday, because you all got moved in, you're not a startup. There's certain structure and certain things involved that make up startups and that innovation, you can't move a 52,000-person company on a dime, and say ope, hey, we're just going to go pivot into this. But, they are looking to take advantage of really the whole wave of AI, how do they harness the intelligence, is what they talked about. And what they said is they don't have some of the legacy. So what that means is that while they have a server business that has been around for many years, they've only had it for two years. They don't have the storage, they don't have some of the baggage that we've been watching the industry is, storage is trying to transfer. >> They're unencumbered. Particularly Kirk Skaugen, who we're going to have on the program later today, made the point about the lack of legacy and how that makes it easier not only to innovate, but also to sell. >> Yeah, absolutely. We've been watching that transformation about how software is eating the world, and Lenovo very much wants to focus on those software solutions. What one of the two brand names that they put out today are the ThinkAgile brand. And ThinkAgile is really focused on those software-defined solutions, highlighted by, they've got the OEM of Nutanix solutions and they're also partnering with Microsoft, where we're going to have Azure Stack coming out later this year. And Lenovo of course being one of the top server manufacturers, close partnership with Microsoft is going to drive that forward for really delivering on the promise of hybrid cloud solutions. >> So, yeah, I want to hear what you think about these product announcements. This is the largest product launch in the data portfolio in Lenovo history. Is it a game changer? >> So, ThinkSystems is the other big brand that they have, and it's server, storage and network. So, they have Intel up on stage, and a matter of fact both Kirk and Kim Stevenson both came from Intel, so we know Intel's place in the market. We understand how important they are, and with the Skylake chipset coming out later this year, it's important. Anytime Intel comes out with the next generation, it's important. The caution I have is this is, I think, the fourth or fifth show this year that theCUBE's done where Intel's up on stage talking about their next generation chipset. I was at the Google Cloud event in February, you were at the Dell EMC show in Los Vegas, we had the team at the HPE Discover, and all of them, arm-in-arm with Intel, talking about how this next generation is going to be transformative, and of course leveraging the data, being ready for all of those edge solutions, devices, and really be able to take that infrastructure and tie it to lots of different devices. But it's really that wave that Intel is, that rising tide that rises all boats, because revenue for servers actually in the first quarter this year were down a little bit because really big companies, especially the hyper-scales, are waiting for this next generation chipset. >> So in talking about how Intel is this great partner to all of these companies, what do you think sets Lenovo apart? Where does it compete, what's it's, what's unique about it? >> Yeah, so Kirk in the keynote this morning laid out a couple of places that they want to really tie their brand to. Their goal is to be the most trusted provider in the data center today, and trust is really important. Security, absolutely, it's at the board level, it's one of the top things that everyone discusses there. And when they talk about trust, it starts with up time. So, if you start with we're all using some of the same base pieces, there shouldn't be much difference between them at that point, but Lenovo has some data points to show that they had the least amount of unplanned downtime of any of their competitors. Going out at saying compare them to Dell, and HPE, and they were far and away in the lead. >> And that is huge, particularly as you were saying, the pace of business change and innovation is so fast. >> And the second piece, customer support. So we hear lots of lip service to things like customer support. Lenovo, from a cultural standpoint, they push it through the entire product line. And really, you also hear some of the leverage between the PC, laptop, and even tablet market, and even the device all the way through the servers. So talked about how when they bring in the sheet metals and the screws. You turn one way, and you go to the consumer side, you turn the other way in the factory, and it goes to the enterprise and the server division. And we know that there's leverage that can be made out of that; the economies of scale are good. And we've seen a lot of splitting of consumer and enterprise, HP cut those in two, there were rumors for years that Dell was going to sell off their PC division. Lenovo feels that they have the strength to do both of them. And as we start seeing edge solutions and mobile and all these other devices planned, Lenovo can build an end-to-end story that few companies still can. >> I want to keep, talk more about this end-to-end, because this is another thing that many executives played up in the keynote. I mean, how important is that in terms of how it competes? >> So, there are some pieces that are easy, and you say okay, from a brand standpoint, if I have the new Moto Z and I have a laptop that I like, you build that brand trust, you have a similar user interface. We've seen what Apple and Google can do pushing out across all those devices. But the second one is really if we start talking about data. If I want to have insight in con activity, Y.Y. said in his keynote, this fourth revolution is really going to be focused on the user and therefore you want to be where the data is, where the users are, where the devices are. And Lenovo has a lot of pieces that touch to those end devices. >> We're going to have a number of executives on the program too, also a customer too. One of the things that Y.Y. was talking about is harnessing AI to not only understand where your customers are today but also understand, anticipate their needs, where they want to go tomorrow. Is this something that you view as a strength of Lenovo? >> So, we're still pretty early in the AI. I feel like many of the times here, you heard Big Data and AI both being thrown out there. We know that there's so much data being created, especially with the peripheral proliferation of all of the end devices that are there. So how do we gather that data, turn that into insight, and we're starting to see where that goes. Lenovo still, primarily, is an infrastructure player, so it's devices, it's boxes, you want to hear more about the software that helps drive that, and a lot of that is through partnerships. So I walked around the area here around me. There are many partners here that are helping to be able to transfer that data and create more insight out of them. So, you know, we'll see. It's a lot of that is positioning where they want to be and where they know the new goal lines are, but I want to see some of the proof, I want to talk to customers that are using this and getting advantage from it. >> So much of Lenovo's strategy has really been about partnering and forging these alliances to augment its offerings. And Kirk had said he was going to foreshadow a bit of possible mergers and acquisitions, possible partnerships. What do you see in store for Lenovo in terms of how it moves forward in this hyper-converged world? >> Yeah, so in the software-defined storage space, Lenovo has a lot of partnerships. So whether it's Nexenta, the resale the solution, Nutanix is an OEM solution. Last year they had announced a deeper integration with a storage partner that was bought by one of their biggest competitors. So HPE has been acquisitive as of late. They've bought both SimpliVity and Nimble, both of which were good Lenovo partners. So, the question is, yeah, it's not surprising to hear Kirk say that they are going to be acquisitive. It's great to see him up on stage. I'm sure a question I'm going to have for him is what do you look for? I don't expect him to come out and say yes, this is the company I buy and I'm going to spend 10 billion dollars to go buy a company. But where are they going to fit and where are they going to partner in there? Just behind me here you've got VMware, Red Hat, Nutanix, Micron, all storage-based solutions that Lenovo can work with. Lenovo wants to be one of those platforms for infrastructure and partner with companies that help round out that stack. And therefore buying software solutions that help augment that software-defined infrastructure that Lenovo does would make a lot of sense. >> So you talked about some of your burning questions you have for Kirk, but what else do you want our viewers to come away with after a day of coverage about the Lenovo Transform event? >> Yeah, so one of the other things that Lenovo was highlighting is what they're doing in the HPC or supercomputer market. Because there's a supercomputing show going on in Europe right now, and Lenovo says that they now have 92 of the top 500 are running Lenovo, they're the fastest growth, but what I'd like to hear from him and I want to hear more of, is it's not just oh, we've got the speeds and feeds and this is great, but we're helping scientists do breakthroughs, we're helping the medical industry help out, find new cures for diseases. We usually hear about CERN and what they're doing with advancing science, so those are the kinds of things that connect the technology to the greater good. Y.Y. talked about it, Kirk talked about it, the greater good, because infrastructure at the end of the day, is only there for the applications that the business runs. And of course those applications are there to drive value to the business and hopefully for the greater world. >> Well, and that is true, and that is something that we've heard at a number of technology conferences is using technology, and these transformative new products to make huge advancements in society, and to solve big problems. I mean, how serious is the technology industry, I mean, is this just sort of a side note that you hear at conferences, do you think this really is a raison d'etre of tech right now? >> Yeah, so Rebecca, you and I were at the Red Hat Summit, and it felt ingrained in their culture. There were some companies, you hear, you talk about it, and like, oh great, you give employees time to go work on charitable events or what are you giving to schools, and helping to make things possible? So I'd love to hear from Lenovo, really, as John Furrier would say, the meat on the bone for some of these solutions. I think it is more than lip service, but how deeply ingrained is it? We'd love to hear. The technology industry in general seems to be understanding that their mission should be broader than just selling licenses or selling boxes. As a, I'm a sci-fi fan, and most science fiction is about how we can take technology and make a better future. I have friends of mine that say, if you're a technologist that means you're optimistic about what technology can do for you for the future. An area that you and I like to talk about is what will automation do to the future of jobs? So that needs to be part of the equation, 'cause it's not just oh hey, we've got this cool new data center, and I could just lock it and nobody needs to go into it. Well, what are those people doing, and what does that improve for the business, and improve the world? >> Right, and how will people work side-by-side with these technologies, how will their jobs be improved by the technology taking over some of the perhaps more monotonous tasks, things like that? >> Stu: Absolutely. >> Great. Thanks so much, Stu. I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll be back with more from Lenovo Transform just after this. (upbeat electronic music)