live from New York City it's the cube covering Lenovo transform 2.0 brought to you by Lenovo cubes live coverage of vote transform here in New York City I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host stu minimun so Stu this is the second ever Lenovo transform event and yet it's the third time the cube has been at a Lenovo explain to me what's going on here first first of all I mean Rebecca set the stage here we're at basketball city in New York City right on the water it feels like you know we just hit intermission time everybody got let out after after the keynotes of a good energy yes absolutely yes two years ago we were actually at a Lenovo show and the Enterprise Group is a small piece of it so ashton kutcher was there showing off the cool new note moto foam that has like the snap-on things that now they have like a 5g upgradable version of that so there is still the consumer group I saw some really cool gaming headsets that I might know myself but our focus today really talked about the enterprise the data center group is the ones that bring us in and we're gonna have a bunch of their guests on but you know Lenovo obviously company been around for a long time even though I know some people like wait who's Lenovo and they like wait look at the laptop their company gave them oh that's all I know is it every day right absolutely and they drive a lot of the things behind the scenes just cuz that's the IT business you know I still most people I talk to they're like what do you do I'm like it's computer stuff you know you don't understand so the big news of the day obviously is the net up Lenovo partnership to global powerhouse is coming together I want to unpack that with you but but first of all let's just talk about where Lenovo is at this moment in time this is a company that is really turning the corner and and we're starting to see a lot of positive growth explain tell our viewers where we are get our computers up to speed so so absolutely really good point we're gonna get to that that NetApp which is the big news of the day but to set the stage if you think over a decade ago when Lenovo acquired the PC division out of IBM ThinkPad brand people knew everything like that couple of years they went down and then they grew it become the number one PC manufacturer worldwide well they picked up the server division last year we were talking about 25 years of these x86 servers in the history and everything like that well history seems to be repeating yourself lenovo hopes it all repeats itself because they had about two years of well revenue to crime a little bit where do they focus and now they're starting to see growth you know some good growth and you know I think if it's you know year-over-year that the fastest growing you know vendor in the space you know large global presence so a lot of excitement there on all of the pieces from Lenovo hyper scale I'd love to talk about we're gonna have some segments here you know the storage piece as those solutions go together things like hyper-converged were there their large growth with new panics so a lot of things happening Lenovo and starting to see the fruits of the big Motorola Mobility and x86 server acquisitions really starting to hit on all cylinders ok so now so we and we are going to talk about all of those things later on the show I've got a lot of great guests coming but but but Lenovo NetApp so we're having Kurtz Kagan and Brett Anderson of net upcoming on the show right up after this what do you make of the deal and is it is it going to be the game changer that these two executives are predicting so when you look at Lenovo and say ok you know they didn't form you know a server group when they they bought the server division it's a datacenter group and if you have the data center let's not forget they actually have some nice networking pieces which what's the old the BNT pieces but when they talked about really their global scale you know the whole data center piece and mobility go together you've got to have storage and lenovo has a bunch of storage pieces they have a lot of partnerships we mentioned lenovo companies like pivot three scale computing are helping them but you know you bring that up and up is the largest independent storage company today now last numbers i saw friends at IDC we're putting out the numbers that you know net up is number two overall Dell and its various pieces of course Dell EMC from the EMC acquisition is number one but you know net up is there a broad portfolio getting in there with the all flash or a markets and this will be joint development ten products and two families but net offers very strong position in the all flashier a market and if you look at what storage is today there's really servers inside and this is servers there so this is not just wrapping these together you know and go to market but you know they are going to do joint development they're gonna work on innovation together they've got a joint venture in China because while Lenovo is global it is their positioning in China that will help them I remember if I saw right just you know they announced it today they start shipping tomorrow like overnight they will be the number three player in China and they have you know goal to drive them to be a force number one there and that's the story you hit with Lenovo they've got growth they've got a good usually at least top three position in many pieces of the market and through partnerships to requisitions that you know they are they are helping to themselves to broaden their portfolio move up the stack on some of these and deliver these solutions to help as they Kirk said it you know they're helping solve some of humanity's biggest challenges we're gonna talk about like supercomputers and the like that do some of those really cool things well I want to get back to what you chose to the strategy of the company in terms of the relationships because that really has been lenovo's their operating model is is are these collaborations these partnerships and they have them with with the big companies that everyone sort of the Amazon the Google the Microsoft and then they also have them with a lot of small smaller players is that in this fast-moving fast changing IT environment is that smart yeah absolutely they have to no single vendor can do it all usually we had a you know a decade or so where it was like well let's vertically integrate and put it all together then people thought well maybe it's just gonna be commoditized I mean come on Intel's the big sponsor here you know arm and arm of course that's probably you know the number one partner that lenovo has everybody's partnering with Intel everybody's parking with Nvidia VMware and Microsoft are the same you and I are going to be at Microsoft ignite in two weeks we're gonna be talking to a Lenovo executive they're one of the four biggest sponsors at that show working on as your staff working on the solutions I was at VMworld a couple of weeks ago Lenovo at a big booth they're talking about first that they have with VMware visa and moving in that market so of course Dell has a very strong relationship to VMware but Lenovo partners across a lot of these environments and to speak to how do you differentiate the story I really like is there's you know this is a multi-faceted market so yes there's the enterprise there's traditional markets that Lenovo from server early well there's new changing markets like Pike hyper-converged but as I mentioned like the hyper scale their strategy there is what they call odium Plus which means they do some customization but it massive scale these are tens or hundreds thousand plus servers that they will build for a vendor in a specific environment and it's not just off-the-shelf Intel that they do for that and there are some players in the server market that have just left not specifically HPE pretty sure that they're not touching that market it is relatively low margin it is very hard to get there you need that global scale so lenovo differentiating how they compete against the you know Dell Dell AMC and HP ease of the world as well as the ODMs out there kind of a generic brands so that they're making good progress and the partnerships absolutely are going to help them get there I'm glad we not only have a couple of partners we have you know one of the supercomputer customers on to really talk about some of those cool use cases you mentioned this idea of how Lenovo competes and the the theme that we keep hearing from all of the Lenovo executives is this relentless focus on the customer and really trying to comport itself as this brand that can be trusted that is ethical that is responsible is is that enough is that enough to just to just be to win your heart customers hearts and minds or do you need to be a little more so so so look it if there's one thing that you want to stick and start on focusing on the customer is a great place you're not gonna lose customers because they love you and you support them that's great when you talk about trust the storage world that's what we buy buy on trust and risk is what the storage and networking people buy so that's a great thing but it's not enough and I'm excited Rebekah we've got a whole bunch of interviews be able to dig in got the net up one kicking off and then some of the other pieces to really help us answer that question as to right start with the customer and everything leads from there so they're gonna be a great show thank you so much always a pleasure co-hosting with you alright excited for 6:00 with us at the cube we will have more from Lenovo transform here in New York City in just a few minutes