>> 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.