>> Live from New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Lenovo Transform 2.0 brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Lenovo Transform here in New York City. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Melissa Massa. She is the Executive Director of Hyperscale Sales. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. It's quite exciting. >> It is, it is very exciting. You're a cube newbie. >> I'm a cube newbie, yes. >> So this is very exciting. I'm sure it's the first of many visits. So Melissa we're at this real inflection point in technology and in AI as AI is ushering in this new wave with increasing use of big data and analytics and machine learning. All this means hyperscale is increasingly important. Can you just set the stage for our viewers a little bit about where we are in this-- >> Absolutely, yeah the transformation is really taking place in this industry that we know and love. And it's really amazing at how fast rapid the change is coming so if you look at in the past traditional one U two U type compute were the standard requirements right and today it's much more complex. It's becoming a much faster paced and you look at some of the big guys out there right from the top ten space. They're really helping to evolve AI and machine learning much faster as it's part of the cloud now and it's centric from the cloud space. So it's making things whether it's for personal use, for play, for business or for good humanity type areas. It's really helping involve and change the space altogether. >> One of the themes we've talked about in our kickoff there is Lenovo has a global presence, but it's also through a lot of partnerships. So Intel, Nvidia of course has to be very important in the AI space, you know, people like Microsoft and VMware. That's very much you know, some of those last ones especially look like Microsoft and VMware very much on the enterprise side. The cloud, the hyperscale, you mentioned the top 10 providers. What are the pieces, what are they looking for? What's the expertise that Lenovo brings that helps you fight in this very competitive real tight margin and very demanding ever-changing marketplace? >> You know this marketplace well? You sum it up very well, but in this in this marketplace, when you look at what the big guys are doing right and then you talk about partnerships, in our space, we don't come in and we don't have predisposition in terms of what we're going to. It's really through understanding what they're trying to do with technology and the direction they're going and it's interesting because at Lenovo we have several hundred engineers now dedicated just in our hyperscale organization, but we have 2000 engineers across the globe. So this really allows us to tap into this expertise in our organization, everything from even HPC aspects to multi socket boxes to different types of platforms, you look at ARM, you can look at AMD, look at Intel. So we don't really try to be one provider. We try to be the provider for our customers, and what their needs and where their requirements are going. >> So where have you seen the most success and we're looking forward do you see the growth coming from? >> Yeah we've started out a little bit different in this space. I think a lot of companies take a while getting their name out and getting traction, trying to grow up in what I'll call more that tier two that tier three space. Lenovo really has come into the tier one space. We're very fortunate in that aspect that we kind of are doing more of a top-down trajectory, so we've been very successful. I think you've heard Kirk talk about and you'll hear us continue to talk about the partnerships we have today with ten of the largest, truth be known, I've got pilots going on with the others. I think in a very short period of time we'll be talking about what we're doing across all of the top ten that is really unique to Lenovo, but again I think one of the reasons there's been success there is there's an availability of an engineer to engineer relationship we bring to the table that is really unique and allows our customers as they're going through this evolution with this change in the cloud space, they're realizing that there's not always the expertise they need in house. They've got to go outside and external and look for help in certain areas. One of the areas is we have an eight socket box and it's a great box with an incredibly high memory footprint and there's not a reference architecture on that box in the marketplace. Lenovo really helped develop it. So that's been a great platform for us to be able to have conversations with clients around for SAP hosting, HANA hosting and whatnot. >> Can you talk a little bit about this kind of the scale and investment Lenovo needs to have to be successful in this space? For those of us that track the hyperscales it's like you know there's tens of billions of dollars a year that they're investing in people, plant, and infrastructure. Kirk mentioned in the keynote, what was it? 42 soccer field size manufacturing facility. Is that only for hyperscale? Is it used for some of the other businesses? Help us unpack that a little yeah. >> So that's great, great question. To be in this business, you have to be incredibly committed into this business right, and I can say from YY on down through our entire leadership organization, there is a passion around this space from a hyperscale compute perspective in ensuring our success. In order to do that it really comes with making those right investments, so we can take care of these customers both near-term and long-term. This is not a short-term thing. This is an incredibly long-term plan for us and I will tell you the growth numbers they've given me over the course of the next years so that we have to make these types of investments right, so not only do we leverage our own manufacturing plants, but fortunately for Lenovo, we own. So it really helps minimize margin stacking but I've got great manufacturing facilities around the world and also now as you heard today, and the 42 football fields, we have started our own motherboard lines in our Hefei China Factory. So we'll be producing over 40,000 boards there a year with the two lines we have and then we're going to continue to grow well beyond that. >> So you are a tech veteran. You've been, at this is not your first rodeo here at Lenovo. How would you describe, I mean talking about YY's vision and the commitment he has made to hyperscale, what do you think it is that differentiates Lenovo in this very crowded and competitive tech world? >> I came from a couple of different places before Lenovo. So I had seen the OEM, I had seen the ODM aspect. And I was nervous when we launched this out of Lenovo as to how well is the market going to receive it. It's a crowded place and then you've started to see some of the other players that have been there, have faded off right. So what's really interesting about Lenovo when people ask us about what is your strategy, it's really we call it our ODM plus model and what does that mean? Well it means I'm taking the best parts of an OEM from a size, the global perspective of the markets I can get into for my clients are incredible and for an export of record, being able to get them into markets that are very challenging for others, I have a global services organization. So if you do need me to happen to come into your data center and help with other things, we have that capability too. And then also, but because I own my own manufacturing and I don't outsource anything, I keep relatively low costs to do business with. I can compete with more of that traditional ODM size and now you take the full vertical integration we have and you bring that to the table with being able to we manufacture all of our own motherboards, all the way up through our systems, it's a pretty powerful story, and I think from what we've seen the clients have really resonated with this story. They like what they're seeing from the benefits. >> Yeah it's so much we can learn, maybe you talk so much about scale, I think first of all the customer base that you talk about, 5000 servers or more is kind of the entry level for that, and just the speed that they're changing. A question we get all the time is how do people keep up with this? Give us a little bit of insight as to what you're hearing from your customers in the hyperscale market? How are they keeping to innovate, keeping to grow and how can everybody deal with kind of the pace of change today? >> It's unbelievable, I mean you look around it's immersive data. It's the network you got all this data now and you've got to get it through a pipe right and so there's all these different aspects coming. I've always told our customers look if there are areas that I can't help you with in, I'm going to tell you. I'm going to be more what's right up the middle for you guys, so we really focus on where are you going, where are you evolving, where do you need help from, how can we help to get you? I don't know if Kirk or anybody at the team has talked about it, but really breaking news for you guys because I was going to announce it in pitch today is that we are actually going to build our own white box networking products, and we're going to leave them open source from an OS perspective for our customers too, because we feel this is going to be a very key area for them. We've got the in-house talent. We've actually moved a number of engineers on our networking team directly into our hyperscale organization to get this started. >> Okay is this announcement which, congratulations by the way, is this, are you hearing that demand from the hyperscalers? Some of the hyperscalers have-- >> Absolutely. >> Kind of dipped their toe in there. I know you've been at the OCP events where we see some of the big players like Microsoft and Google. How do they fit, how does that compete against Cisco, so yeah how much of that is kind of a requirement to the customers? >> It is a requirement. I think if you're going to be all-in with these customers because we happen to have a great investment in the networking space already. Also you see Lenovo I think we're a company that we don't come with 50 years of habits right? We come as a fresh company. I never hear inside the company oh we tried that 10 years ago, and we don't want to do it again. We come with a fresh perspective and approach to building our business. We've got the networking organization inside of our company. Why not proliferate it in the next generation and why does that matter? Open matters right? Everything look at what's coming today. Open BMC, open OS. I have major customers coming into Raleigh and sitting down and talking to us about where we going from a security perspective, and how we're going to bring open security standards into this market? >> The other thing when I think about you know, YY mentioned it. Cloud network and device kind of things like IOT and the global device because everybody, AI and IOT everybody's going there. How does that play in your space? >> It just continues, the data just continues to double in massive size and scale, and there are new technologies out. People are learning to use things like the FPGA is a lot smarter and you look at like what they're able to do today from that technology and deliver one server that can take the compute power of four now. So all of that is helping to evolve this rapid pace and where we're going. >> Finally what we'll be talking about next year? I mean perhaps inked deals with the remaining four players that you are in pilot programs with. What other things are most exciting to you? >> Yeah so I think in what you're going to find is I'm launching a team that's going to go after the tier II and tier III market. And we're going to really start to invest in this space. We're going to really start to proliferate. Paul and I, you saw up on the screen. We have 33 custom boards in design today. We have a factory that we need to fill right, so we're going to continue to really push the envelope on everything we're going to be developing from a custom perspective. I think you're going to see it evolve with quite a number of products, maybe even more so beyond just your traditional server approach. We're there to help clients in other areas where they also need to manufacture maybe a part or what could be a commodity for them. And they need special attention in that particular space. We're going to continue to work with them, but I would say the biggest thing. When I'm sitting here next year is going to be the sheer size of where this hyperscale team is going and the revenue and the growth that's bringing in to Lenovo overall. >> Great well thank you so much for coming into theCUBE Melissa. >> It was nice talking to you. >> I appreciate it. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE live at Lenovo Transform in just a little bit. (upbeat music)