>> Hey welcome back to everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio for a CUBE conversation. The crazy conference schedule is just about ready to break over our heads, but we still have a little time to do CUBE conversations before we hit the road. But one show we're doing this summer that we've never done before is Kubecon Cloud Native Con, I got to get all the words. It used to be Cloud Native, now Kubecon's up front. But we're going to go to the European show first time ever. It's May 2nd through 4th at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. We're really excited to go 'cause obviously a ton of activity around containers and Kubecon and Kubernetes, and we're excited to have a little preview of the show with two folks. We've got Wendy Cartee, she is the Senior Director Cloud Native Applications Marketing for VMWare. Welcome. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. >> And also giving us a little preview on her keynote, maybe we can get something out of her, I don't know, Aparna Sinha, she is a Group Product Manager for Kubernetes and Google's Kubernete Engine at Google, long title. Just see the Kubernete shirt, that's all we need to see. Welcome. >> Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Absolutely. So for the folks that have not been to Kubecon before, let's go through some of the basics. How big is it? Who can they expect to be there? Do you have the fancy letter for them to give to their boss to get out of work for a week? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Give us the basics. >> This is going to be our biggest event in Europe yet. So we're expecting actually four thousand plus people. We expect that it'll be sold out. So, folks should register early. And who should go? Actually tends to be a mix of developers who want to contribute to the project as well as users. I think in Austin, which was our last conference, there was about a 50/50 mix of folks that were using Kubernetes. So it's a really great place to meet others that are using the software. >> Are there a couple of new themes this year? Or is just just kind of generic training and moving the platform along? Or are there some big announcements that people can expect? >> Yeah, I expect some big announcements. And I expect that there'll be a couple of themes around security, around Serverless, that's a major area, and around developer experience, and of course machine learning. So those are some of the things that are top of mind for the community. >> And probably Service Mesh will be another round of hot topics this year as well. >> Which one? >> Service Mesh. >> Jeff: What is that? >> It's a project that is a part of CNCF around Envoy. And it's essentially the notion of having a stack of services that provide everything from connectivity to API access for microservices. >> I ask because we had an old customer of Service Mesh saying they got bought by some services company... >> Yeah, this is, I think the term is an old term, so obviously when you start using Kubernetes it's really around breaking down your applications and having microservices. You get a proliferation of microservices. Service Mesh essentially enables you to manage those, so set up security and communication between those services and then manage them at scale, so that's really what a Service Mesh is. And Envoy is at the heart of that. And then there's a project called Istio. There will definitely be, and there was a lot of discussion around that at Kubecon in Austin. And they'll be some training before the conference this time. There are several co-located events. There'll be some training beforehand. So for folks that want to learn, they're new to Kubernetes, they're new to the concept of Service Mesh, I would recommend coming a day early or two days early, 30th and 1st, there's a number of different workshops. >> It's pretty amazing just the growth and the momentum of containers and Serverless, and obviously Docker kind of came out of nowhere a couple three or four years ago. And then Kubernetes really kind of seemed to jump on the scene in terms of at least me paying attention, probably a couple two, three years ago. And it's phenomenal. And even only just to check it out, Google's putting on all these little development workshops. This one was at Santa Clara Convention Center probably a month ago that I went down. And the place was packed, packed. And it was, get out your laptop, get out your notes, and let's start going through and developing applications and really learning. I mean, why does this momentum continue to grow so strongly? >> From what we see, we have enterprises that are in the journey of digital, you're kind of going on the digital transformation. >> Jeff: Right. >> And to drive that faster business model they need technologies like Cloud Native to help them with faster development, to help them with driving new innovations in their application, and I think that that's what we see in the Kubernetes community. I think we see developers and contributors coming to conferences like Kubecon, especially to really learn from each other and find out what are some of the latest innovations in this space and how they can bring that back into their companies to drive faster development, and at the end of it, essentially driving better services, better experience for their end users as well. >> And it's really been interesting watching the VMWare story particularly, because you know people were a little confused when the merger happened with Dell and EMC and how was that going to affect (mumbles) and VMWare, and yet, the ecosystem is super vibrant. We do VMworld every single year. It's one of our biggest shows. The thing is packed with a really excited ecosystem, obviously you guys made big moves with Amazon last year. You're making moves with Google and Kubernetes, and it was funny. People were concerned a couple years. It's almost this rebirth of what's going on at VMworld and this adoption of really (mumbles) technology as well as open source technologies. Has the culture changed inside? Is this something that you guys figured you have to do or was it always there under the covers and maybe we just weren't paying enough attention? >> Yeah, I think it was always there. I think we are very close to the transformation and the journey that our customers are on. And obviously the customers themselves have a full stack solution deployed in their environment today. Many of them are using vSphere or vSan or NSX, vRealize Portfolio to build their business, and they're looking at how to transform and add containers as another layer on top of their software defined data center, to essentially breathe some of these newer technologies into their environment as well. >> Yeah, and Aparna, Google's been sharing open source stuff for a while. Even back to early Hadoop, Hadoop days. So, as big and powerful as a company that it is and as much as scale is such an important piece of that competitive advantage, it's wild that you guys are opening things up and really embracing an open source developer kind of ethos to acknowledge. As smart as you are, as big as you are, as much power as you have, you don't have all the smartest people inside the four walls of Google. Well, Google has always contributed to open source. I think we have a very long and rich history of sharing software and, you know, really doing joint development. So Android is an open source, Chrome, Chromium is open source. TensorFlow is open source. And Kubernetes really is, I think, different in that sense in that there is a thriving community around it and Google's been very, very active, and I've been very active personally, in developing that community and engaging in the project. And I think that goes back to what you were saying about the meetups. There are several meetups all around, so it's not just in one location. I think globally. And I think the reason it's so diverse and so many people are involved is because it does lead to, you know, Kubernetes enables a benefit that is meaningful in enterprises, large and small, where you can start rolling out applications multiple times a day. And it just gives developers that productivity. It's very accessible. And over the years, especially as the project has matured, it has become, it's like my daughter or my son can go and they can use it. It's really easy to use. So it's not hard to pick up either. >> And it's also interesting because we do a lot of shows, as you know, theCUBE goes to a ton of shows, and everybody wants the attention of developer if they haven't had (mumbles) everybody's got a developer track a developer this, a developer that. Everybody wants to get to developers. It's very competitive. As a developer you have a lot of options of where you want to spend your time. But really, especially Google, kind of comes at it from, and always has, development first. Right? It's kind of developer first. So I'm curious, you talked about the community that's going to be gathered in Denmark when you've got contributors as well as users and contributors all kind of blended together. Not really forced together, but coming together around this universal gravity that is Kubernetes. What is that enable that you don't get if you're traditionally either a developer show or kind of a user show? >> Yes, I think that's really important and one of the beautiful things about open source, is that you get what you see. And you can actually change it and own it and it's not some other entity that owns it. So we'll have many companies presenting, so Bookings.com, Spotify, New York Times, Ebay, Lyft. These are all companies that are using Kubernetes and also contributing to Kubernetes. And so it's a nice virtual cycle. And what you get from that is you're in touch, you're in constant touch with your users. So a lot of them actually use Google Kubernetes Engine, and I know what they're looking for. And so we can then shape the project and shape the product accordingly. >> Then the other question I always think is interesting when you're working with open source projects and contributors, right? A lot of times it's a big part of whom they are, especially if they're a good contributor. You know, it's part of their identity, it's part of the way they connect with their community, but they got to get work done for the company, too. So in terms of kind of managing in the development world with contributing people, people contributing to open source projects as well as you got to get our work done that we're working on, too. How do you manage that? How is kind of best practices for having a vibrant open source contributing staff that's also being very productive in getting their day job done? >> I think engineers love to learn from other engineers and developers, and I think that community is the reason why they come. And it's not only our conferences when everybody gets together at a conference like Kubecon, but there's a tremendous amount of activity day to day offline over conference calls like Zoom and, you know I'm on some of the calls that Aparna is on and its amazing. You have people from all over the world, developers from everywhere, who will meet on a weekly basis, and they'll Slack each other. And I think that that sense of community, that sharing of information and really learning some of the best practices and learning what others have done is why people come, and it's great to have a conference like Kubecon where people can finally come together and meet in person and just kind of enjoy each other's presence and communicate face to face, and really connect in person. We're very excited about Kubecon and kind of being part of that energy, that enthusiasm that is in the community. >> It's interesting, the Slack, the kind of cross-enterprise Slack phenomenon, which I hadn't really been exposed to until a couple of projects we got involved with, and I got invited into these other companies' Slack, which I didn't really know that that was a thing to open up that wall in between the two companies and enable a very similar type of interaction and engagement that I have with my peers inside the walls as I do now with my peers outside the walls. So that's a pretty interesting twist in enabling these tools to build community outside of your own company. >> Yes, it is, and Slack is a great tool for that. But even aside from the tooling, I think that the pace of software innovation is very, very fast these days. And if you stay within the walls of your company you miss out on so much innovation that is available, and I totally agree with Wendy. Contributors and developers in general, they like to know what's next. And they like to contribute to what's next. And you said you went to some of the meetups, so you can sort of see that you're actually benefiting from that, from both contributing as well as from meeting with and absorbing what others are doing. You're directly benefiting your company, you're directly benefiting in your own job because you're innovating. >> So before we let you go, any particular session or something is happening at the show in Denmark that either you're super excited about or maybe is a little bit kind of flying underneath the radar that people should be aware of that maybe they didn't think to go to that type of session. >> Well I think there are a variety of excellent sessions at the Kubecon that's coming up. There are user topics. Arpana talked about some of the companies that will be there to share their experience. I've seen talks about communities and contributors and how they can contribute and build the community. I think there are SIG updates that I think would be very informative. And I also think that there are a lot of announcements that will be made at the event as well. I think that's exciting for everybody to see the new innovations that's coming out that impact the community, the users, and in general the ecosystem as well. >> Aparna? >> Yeah, yeah, so if I were to lay it out, I mean definitely folks should register early 'cause it's going to sell out. There were a thousand plus submissions and a 125 talks have been accepted. There are 31 Google talks. There's all manner of content. I would suggest users go a little bit early if they want to get the hands-on training in the workshops. And then as Wendy mentioned, I think on May 2nd there's a contributor summit, which is actually, that's the thing that's flying under the radar. It's a free event, and if you want to learn how to contribute to Kubernetes, that's where a lot of the training will be. And the SIGs, the special interest groups, in the community, each of them will be giving an introduction to what they do. So it's a really good event to meet maintainers, meet contributors, become one yourself. And then in terms of the agenda, I think I mentioned the topics. I'm giving a keynote. I think I'm giving the opening keynote there. It'll be about developer experience, because that's a big deal that we're working on in Kubernetes, and I think there's many new innovations in improving the developer experience with Kubernetes. I'll also be giving an overall project update. And then some of the other keynotes, there's a keynote on KubeFlow, which is a machine learning framework on top of Kubernetes. And then there's a series of talks on security and how to run securely in containers. >> All right, well I think we're almost ready. We got to register, we got to study up, and make a couple contributions before we're headin' over there, right? >> Absolutely. >> All right, Wendy, Aparna, thanks for taking a few minutes and look forward to seeing you across the pond in a month or so. It's May 2nd through 4th in Denmark at the Bella Center, Copenhagen, Denmark. Thanks again for stopping by. >> Wendy: Thank you. >> Aparna: Thank you. >> All right, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto, we'll see you next time. Thanks for watchin'.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering AWS re:Invent, 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. We are live here on The Cube continuing our coverage of re:Invent. The AWS, the big tent. As we were just talking about with our guest, Justin Moore and John Walls here. Your hosts here on The Cube and we're joined by Kiran Bhageshpur, who's the CEO of Igneous Systems and Kiran, thanks for being with us here on the Cube. Good to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Now we were talking about, you know, this is the big tent now. Didn't used to be that way, right? >> Nope, nope. >> It wasn't that long ago this was, I wouldn't say a specialty show, but you said this has certainly taken on a very different vibe, a very different feel. I mean, explain that a little bit before we get into Igneous and what you're doing here. >> Absolutely. I was first here in 2012, I believe it was the first year they had AWS at re:Invent and it was a very different feel, much smaller, maybe about 6,000 or so people. Mostly engineers, hardcore engineers who were discovering this new cool set of toys, if you will, or tools that was quite revolutionary and niche at that time. Fast forward now. It's much more of a mainstream show. It's much more corporate IT, lots and lots of large enterprises are present out here. There still is a lot of developers, but it's more the devops, more people who are operationalizing this rather than building on it for the very first time. So big change from early stage to very mainstream right now. >> And Justin, you made a comment. I mean, to the extent of a jacket, I've got a suit and tie, a jacket. We've all been to shows where maybe the wardrobe was maybe a little different, but this is illustrative of, again, of the maturation of the marketplace and expansion of the marketplace. >> Yeah, you go to some of the developer conferences and you see a lot more people with spiked purple hair and then utilikilts. I've yet to see a single utilikilt here at the show so it does feel, unlike at previous years where there's been, again, a lot more engineers and people are still here in hoodies and casual clothes, but there are a lot more suits. There's clearly a lot more money here and it's become a little more corporate. It'd be interesting to see how it transitions over the next couple of years whether Amazon or AWS is able to maintain that kind of developer vibe as all of these other companies come in and start to see actually, this is a pretty robust and mature ecosystem now. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And obviously, the expansion reflects that. You're here exhibiting for the first time. >> Yes we are. >> Your booth back at K37 if you're here at the show. Kudos to Igneous. Let's talk a little bit about what you do and why are you here? Who are you trying to talk to this weekend and why does this week matter? >> That's great. So what we do, Igneous is an early stage company. We have launched our company a year ago. We have a bunch of customers right now sort of growing very nicely at this stage and what we do is enable businesses, enterprises with lots and lots of file data on premises as well as in the public cloud to better manage and have a handle on this. So our customers tend to be businesses with sort of literally billions of files, hundreds of petabyte or dozens of petabytes spread across a lot of systems traditional, legacy that hook, attach to a system on premises and what they are seeing in their growth is they're going from one data center to multiple data centers within their own infrastructure and now to multiple clouds and as this core asset, data continues to grow. They look to folks like us to help manage that better. So the very first thing we do is we enable them to back up and protect all this data on premises into public clouds like AWS so we literally have scalable solutions which go into their data center, talk to all of their filers as they're called, interrogate all of that data, and create a copy of that into AWS S30 glacier. >> Yeah. There's a lot of companies who are struggling with the idea. Two things really. One is being able to manage data everywhere because data has gravity as people like to say, but also this multi-cloud idea and being able to manage my data in multiple physical locations. Some of it will be on my own site. Some of it will be in Collo. Some of it will be in one or as you say multiple clouds. That really hybrid IT way of things. What are you seeing as the driver behind that need to have this data in multiple locations? >> Yeah, that's a great question. For the things that we see is, look, things have remained on premises. It's not gone away and things continue to grow on premises and Amazon recognizes that. That's why you see starting last year into this year a lot more push into hybrid clouds, if you will. You saw that with the big partnership with Vmware and so on. So that's continuing to grow, but in the same time, they're having new applications being born in the cloud or leveraging the cloud. So one thing which is very common for a lot of our customers is they have infrastructure on premises which is already paid for and continues to grow, but they want to leverage the public clouds, AWS, for its elasticity and its agility to be able to burst into it and use it as they see fit. Now to do that, you require agility of applications and data between on premises and the public clouds and say AWS. So that's kind of where, you know, we come in to go help them in that and the other thing we're also seeing is customers are not in a single cloud. Even if they started in one place, they're starting to exist in multiple different locations. Good example will be in, you know, most of our customers tell us that, say, a Google cloud has the advantage for things like AI and machine learning whereas Amazon has the more mature infrastructure. So they might quite have a lot of infrastructure and data on premises as well as on Amazon, but they might be running a bunch of new applications which are leveraging the machine-learning APIs and Google Cloud. But then how do you get the data from on premises Amazon cloud into Google Cloud, use it but not leave it around and triple pay for it all around so that's really the management challenge. >> Yeah so you mentioned a particular use case there that happened to use Google. So AI and machine learning is something and I'm hearing that in talking to customers myself that they like to use different cloud for different reasons. So what are some of the workloads that you're seeing from customers who are needing to put their data not just on site, but they say, you know what, I want to burst into the cloud, I want to use some of that elasticity that cloud is so great at. What are some of the workloads that you're seeing them use your product for? >> Yeah, I'll give you a great example. Let's take the word of the movie world, right? So lots of it is all digital right now. The data is created and you're gonna go create heavily CGI or computer generated effects using lots and lots of computer cores. What you come to is at the end of the movie, there's a crunch time where they need way more compute than they have available within their data centers. In fact, in the past, there used to be a vibrant side business where little boutique companies would rent you servers and they would literally carve that into your data center for six weeks and take it away again so now that's gone and you'd rather use the public cloud, you use Amazon and EC2 instances for that workload. That's a good example which everybody can relate to. Hey, it's crunch time, movie's coming up for release. I have a lot more work to do, but that pattern exists in pretty much every industry whether it's drug discovery or electronic design. Everywhere, there is a need to grow burst beyond what you have available and that kind of drives the adoption for workflows which already exist on premise to also adopt a cloud. >> Yeah. >> You got it. >> What manageability. I mean, talking about multi-cloud. >> Kiran: Yeah. >> And obviously as you parcel out your assets, you decide what data's gonna reside in what environment managing all that and then managing the cost of all that. I mean how do you keep up corale on that and also help your clients get a handle on where their data's going, 'cause yeah. I don't know, right? >> So that's what we exist to do which is help customers manage this data asset that they have across multiple locations no matter where it lives. The first thing we do in our journey with our customer is just back that stuff up which is all on premises into the cloud so it gets a copy of the dat into the public cloud. Now that enables workflows like being able to use the cloud for disaster recovery or use the clouds for burst computing very well. But it's just beyond that. It's also how do you get the data, where it lives, which could be on premise, on a T01 filer to where it ends to be. Perhaps the public cloud for a back-up deal or a burst-use case or perhaps into a separate cloud for using machine learning and when you do this, how do you ensure you have one copy, one protected copy of the data, not three or four every place? In fact, if you look at the world today on premises, already customers will tell us they have hundreds of systems that it's not infrequent that hey, they have infrastructure say in Santa Clara as well as Israel and it's a same copy which exists in both places because they have no way of globally looking at this in one single way. >> That's kind of what we do is hey, what are your data assets, where do they live, how do we ensure you have one copy of it or n copies as you desire but not a proliferation of that dataset, three how do we get the data from where it lives to where it's needed in a programatic, systematic way that your end user can sort of you know, help themselves too rather than requiring an IT trouble ticket and somebody going through a manual process. So those are sort of good sets of early things we are helping customers out with. The other thing that goes into here and this is where the cloud comes in again is we had targeted customers who are looking at literally billions, tens of billions of files, hundreds of petabytes, tens of petabytes to 100 of petabytes of data spread across many locations and many hundreds of systems. How do you get your hand, your head around that? It's beyond human scale and it's only possible with software and sort of machine learning if you want to use the buzzword and that's the sort of next place where you come in and provide a human comprehensible structure for the sort of data which continues to grow and it's important because this is core assets for businesses today. >> Yeah we were discussing this earlier, both of us, actually. It's that idea of automation because humans don't scale. >> Yeah. >> So when you have these billions of files as you're talking about, that's just not trackable for humans to deal with. So what are some of the automation and autonomous systems capabilities that Igneous has? >> So the first thing we do is go ahead and ensure your automatically and at scale, being able to discover all of that data, right? So think of, you know, if you look in the consumer world, really what the web is goes and crawls every website and indexes all of the data. Well we do that except within the enterprise for the unstructured file data, which happens to live on a net app filer or a Dell cluster or maybe it's living in AWS inside S3 where we go crawl all over that, index, all of that and give you a view into that. That's the first level, simple way of doing that. But then the next level beyond that is if you can give a level of structure on that because it's not useful to just find it. You wanna know what you have or where you have it, how it's changing, who is accessing it, what applications are accessing your data? What applications are modifying your data? Today, that is an extremely manual process within businesses. >> Yeah. In order to make sense of that, again, you're trying to appeal to developers. What APIs and sort of programmatic aspect do you have for that rather than having to employ 1,900 humans who would all have to sit there and drive around with, going through interfaces? >> So since our customers tend to be sort of more on the business side of IT today who are trying to go understand about this data, the interfaces we provide them is clearly the higher level abstraction of what the data looks like of how they want to interact with that, but everything you do in the modern world is API enabled and the vision is clearly to go expose all of this through API such that customers, developers within their organization can go consume it. >> So before we let you go, I want to talk about your presence here, the decision to exhibit. It's not a light one, I know that. At the end of the day, when you walk out of here on Thursday, what do you want to accomplish and I guess from the, in terms of the kinds of audience that you're hoping to be exposed to, who would that be? >> So the customers, the prospects we talk to are typically businesses, enterprises with lots and lots of unstructured data so people in the media world, in the design world, any form of design that is electronic and automated to. You know, geospatial imagining. All of these folks and they are all present here this year. This is the show to be, you know. In the past, it used to be Microsoft PDC, it was RealWorld, it was Oracle World. Today it is AWS re:Invent and they're all here and for us, it's success if we walk out of this being exposed to a whole bunch of people. We as a smaller organization could not have had immediate access to without coming to this show and that's what I think we get out of here. >> Well, good luck on the next three days. It sounds like you're off to a great start in the right place at the right time. >> Yes, indeed. >> And we wish you all the best down the road. >> Thank you. >> Kiran thank you for being here. >> Thank you very much. >> Live on the Cube, you're watching us here at re:Invent where it's AWS's big show here in Las Vegas back with more live coverage in just a moment. (energetic music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. This is Lenovo Transform. Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappin. (upbeat instrumental) >> Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Here we go. I was out the back having a chat. A bit faster than I expected. How are you all doing this morning? (crowd cheers) >> Good? How fantastic is it to be in New York City? (crowd applauds) Excellent. So my name's Rod Lappin. I'm with the Data Center Group, obviously. I do basically anything that touches customers from our sales people, our pre-sales engineers, our architects, et cetera, all the way through to our channel partner sales engagement globally. So that's my job, but enough of that, okay? So the weather this morning, absolutely fantastic. Not a cloud in the sky, perfect. A little bit different to how it was yesterday, right? I want to thank all of you because I know a lot of you had a lot of commuting issues getting into New York yesterday with all the storms. We have a lot of people from international and domestic travel caught up in obviously the network, which blows my mind, actually, but we have a lot of people here from Europe, obviously, a lot of analysts and media people here as well as customers who were caught up in circling around the airport apparently for hours. So a big round of applause for our team from Europe. (audience applauds) Thank you for coming. We have some people who commuted a very short distance. For example, our own server general manager, Cameron (mumbles), he's out the back there. Cameron, how long did it take you to get from Raleigh to New York? An hour-and-a-half flight? >> Cameron: 17 hours. >> 17 hours, ladies and gentleman. That's a fantastic distance. I think that's amazing. But I know a lot of us, obviously, in the United States have come a long way with the storms, obviously very tough, but I'm going to call out one individual. Shaneil from Spotless. Where are you Shaneil, you're here somewhere? There he is from Australia. Shaneil how long did it take you to come in from Australia? 25 hour, ladies and gentleman. A big round of applause. That's a pretty big effort. Shaneil actually I want you to stand up, if you don't mind. I've got a seat here right next to my CEO. You've gone the longest distance. How about a big round of applause for Shaneil. We'll put him in my seat, next to YY. Honestly, Shaneil, you're doing me a favor. Okay ladies and gentlemen, we've got a big day today. Obviously, my seat now taken there, fantastic. Obviously New York City, the absolute pinnacle of globalization. I first came to New York in 1996, which was before a lot of people in the room were born, unfortunately for me these days. Was completely in awe. I obviously went to a Yankees game, had no clue what was going on, didn't understand anything to do with baseball. Then I went and saw Patrick Ewing. Some of you would remember Patrick Ewing. Saw the Knicks play basketball. Had no idea what was going on. Obviously, from Australia, and somewhat slightly height challenged, basketball was not my thing but loved it. I really left that game... That was the first game of basketball I'd ever seen. Left that game realizing that effectively the guy throws the ball up at the beginning, someone taps it, that team gets it, they run it, they put it in the basket, then the other team gets it, they put it in the basket, the other team gets it, and that's basically the entire game. So I haven't really progressed from that sort of learning or understanding of basketball since then, but for me, personally, being here in New York, and obviously presenting with all of you guys today, it's really humbling from obviously some of you would have picked my accent, I'm also from Australia. From the north shore of Sydney. To be here is just a fantastic, fantastic event. So welcome ladies and gentlemen to Transform, part of our tech world series globally in our event series and our event season here at Lenovo. So once again, big round of applause. Thank you for coming (audience applauds). Today, basically, is the culmination of what I would classify as a very large journey. Many of you have been with us on that. Customers, partners, media, analysts obviously. We've got quite a lot of our industry analysts in the room. I know Matt Eastwood yesterday was on a train because he sent a Tweet out saying there's 170 people on the WIFI network. He was obviously a bit concerned he was going to get-- Pat Moorhead, he got in at 3:30 this morning, obviously from traveling here as well with some of the challenges with the transportation, so we've got a lot of people in the room that have been giving us advice over the last two years. I think all of our employees are joining us live. All of our partners and customers through the stream. As well as everybody in this packed-out room. We're very very excited about what we're going to be talking to you all today. I want to have a special thanks obviously to our R&D team in Raleigh and around the world. They've also been very very focused on what they've delivered for us today, and it's really important for them to also see the culmination of this great event. And like I mentioned, this is really the feedback. It's not just a Lenovo launch. This is a launch based on the feedback from our partners, our customers, our employees, the analysts. We've been talking to all of you about what we want to be when we grow up from a Data Center Group, and I think you're going to hear some really exciting stuff from some of the speakers today and in the demo and breakout sessions that we have after the event. These last two years, we've really transformed the organization, and that's one of the reasons why that theme is part of our Tech World Series today. We're very very confident in our future, obviously, and where the company's going. It's really important for all of you to understand today and take every single snippet that YY, Kirk, and Christian talk about today in the main session, and then our presenters in the demo sections on what Lenovo's actually doing for its future and how we're positioning the company, obviously, for that future and how the transformation, the digital transformation, is going ahead globally. So, all right, we are now going to step into our Transform event. And I've got a quick agenda statement for you. The very first thing is we're going to hear from YY, our chairman and CEO. He's going to discuss artificial intelligence, the evolution of our society and how Lenovo is clearly positioning itself in the industry. Then, obviously, you're going to hear from Kirk Skaugen, our president of the Data Center Group, our new boss. He's going to talk about how long he's been with the company and the transformation, once again, we're making, very specifically to the Data Center Group and how much of a difference we're making to society and some of our investments. Christian Teismann, our SVP and general manager of our client business is going to talk about the 25 years of ThinkPad. This year is the 25-year anniversary of our ThinkPad product. Easily the most successful brand in our client branch or client branch globally of any vendor. Most successful brand we've had launched, and this afternoon breakout sessions, obviously, with our keynotes, fantastic sessions. Make sure you actually attend all of those after this main arena here. Now, once again, listen, ask questions, and make sure you're giving us feedback. One of the things about Lenovo that we say all the time... There is no room for arrogance in our company. Every single person in this room is a customer, partner, analyst, or an employee. We love your feedback. It's only through your feedback that we continue to improve. And it's really important that through all of the sessions where the Q&As happen, breakouts afterwards, you're giving us feedback on what you want to see from us as an organization as we go forward. All right, so what were you doing 25 years ago? I spoke about ThinkPad being 25 years old, but let me ask you this. I bet you any money that no one here knew that our x86 business is also 25 years old. So, this year, we have both our ThinkPad and our x86 anniversaries for 25 years. Let me tell you. What were you guys doing 25 years ago? There's me, 25 years ago. It's a bit scary, isn't it? It's very svelte and athletic and a lot lighter than I am today. It makes me feel a little bit conscious. And you can see the black and white shot. It shows you that even if you're really really short and you come from the wrong side of the tracks to make some extra cash, you can still do some modeling as long as no one else is in the photo to give anyone any perspective, so very important. I think I might have got one photo shoot out of that, I don't know. I had to do it, I needed the money. Let me show you another couple of photos. Very interesting, how's this guy? How cool does he look? Very svelte and athletic. I think there's no doubt. He looks much much cooler than I do. Okay, so ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it gives me great honor to obviously introduce our very very first guest to the stage. Ladies and gentlemen, our chairman and CEO, Yuanqing Yang. or as we like to call him, YY. A big round of applause, thank you. (upbeat techno instrumental) >> Good morning everyone. Thank you, Rod, for your introduction. Actually, I didn't think I was younger than you (mumbles). I can't think of another city more fitting to host the Transform event than New York. A city that has transformed from a humble trading post 400 years ago to one of the most vibrant cities in the world today. It is a perfect symbol of transformation of our world. The rapid and the deep transformations that have propelled us from the steam engine to the Internet era in just 200 years. Looking back at 200 years ago, there was only a few companies that operated on a global scale. The total value of the world's economy was around $188 billion U.S. dollars. Today, it is only $180 for each person on earth. Today, there are thousands of independent global companies that compete to sell everything, from corn and crude oil to servers and software. They drive a robust global economy was over $75 trillion or $1,000 per person. Think about it. The global economy has multiplied almost 450 times in just two centuries. What is even more remarkable is that the economy has almost doubled every 15 years since 1950. These are significant transformation for businesses and for the world and our tiny slice of pie. This transformation is the result of the greatest advancement in technology in human history. Not one but three industrial revolutions have happened over the last 200 years. Even though those revolutions created remarkable change, they were just the beginning. Today, we are standing at the beginning of the fourth revolution. This revolution will transform how we work (mumbles) in ways that no one could imagine in the 18th century or even just 18 months ago. You are the people who will lead this revolution. Along with Lenovo, we will redefine IT. IT is no longer just information technology. It's intelligent technology, intelligent transformation. A transformation that is driven by big data called computing and artificial intelligence. Even the transition from PC Internet to mobile Internet is a big leap. Today, we are facing yet another big leap from the mobile Internet to the Smart Internet or intelligent Internet. In this Smart Internet era, Cloud enables devices, such as PCs, Smart phones, Smart speakers, Smart TVs. (mumbles) to provide the content and the services. But the evolution does not stop them. Ultimately, almost everything around us will become Smart, with building computing, storage, and networking capabilities. That's what we call the device plus Cloud transformation. These Smart devices, incorporated with various sensors, will continuously sense our environment and send data about our world to the Cloud. (mumbles) the process of this ever-increasing big data and to support the delivery of Cloud content and services, the data center infrastructure is also transforming to be more agile, flexible, and intelligent. That's what we call the infrastructure plus Cloud transformation. But most importantly, it is the human wisdom, the people learning algorithm vigorously improved by engineers that enables artificial intelligence to learn from big data and make everything around us smarter. With big data collected from Smart devices, computing power of the new infrastructure under the trend artificial intelligence, we can understand the world around us more accurately and make smarter decisions. We can make life better, work easier, and society safer and healthy. Think about what is already possible as we start this transformation. Smart Assistants can help you place orders online with a voice command. Driverless cars can run on the same road as traditional cars. (mumbles) can help troubleshoot customers problems, and the virtual doctors already diagnose basic symptoms. This list goes on and on. Like every revolution before it, intelligent transformation, will fundamentally change the nature of business. Understanding and preparing for that will be the key for the growth and the success of your business. The first industrial revolution made it possible to maximize production. Water and steam power let us go from making things by hand to making them by machine. This transformed how fast things could be produced. It drove the quantity of merchandise made and led to massive increase in trade. With this revolution, business scale expanded, and the number of customers exploded. Fifty years later, the second industrial revolution made it necessary to organize a business like the modern enterprise, electric power, and the telegraph communication made business faster and more complex, challenging businesses to become more efficient and meeting entirely new customer demands. In our own lifetimes, we have witnessed the third industrial revolution, which made it possible to digitize the enterprise. The development of computers and the Internet accelerated business beyond human speed. Now, global businesses have to deal with customers at the end of a cable, not always a handshake. While we are still dealing with the effects of a digitizing business, the fourth revolution is already here. In just the past two or three years, the growth of data and advancement in visual intelligence has been astonishing. The computing power can now process the massive amount of data about your customers, suppliers, partners, competitors, and give you insights you simply could not imagine before. Artificial intelligence can not only tell you what your customers want today but also anticipate what they will need tomorrow. This is not just about making better business decisions or creating better customer relationships. It's about making the world a better place. Ultimately, can we build a new world without diseases, war, and poverty? The power of big data and artificial intelligence may be the revolutionary technology to make that possible. Revolutions don't happen on their own. Every industrial revolution has its leaders, its visionaries, and its heroes. The master transformers of their age. The first industrial revolution was led by mechanics who designed and built power systems, machines, and factories. The heroes of the second industrial revolution were the business managers who designed and built modern organizations. The heroes of the third revolution were the engineers who designed and built the circuits and the source code that digitized our world. The master transformers of the next revolution are actually you. You are the designers and the builders of the networks and the systems. You will bring the benefits of intelligence to every corner of your enterprise and make intelligence the central asset of your business. At Lenovo, data intelligence is embedded into everything we do. How we understand our customer's true needs and develop more desirable products. How we profile our customers and market to them precisely. How we use internal and external data to balance our supply and the demand. And how we train virtual agents to provide more effective sales services. So the decisions you make today about your IT investment will determine the quality of the decisions your enterprise will make tomorrow. So I challenge each of you to seize this opportunity to become a master transformer, to join Lenovo as we work together at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution, as leaders of the intelligent transformation. (triumphant instrumental) Today, we are launching the largest portfolio in our data center history at Lenovo. We are fully committed to the (mumbles) transformation. Thank you. (audience applauds) >> Thanks YY. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Fantastic, so how about a big round of applause for YY. (audience applauds) Obviously a great speech on the transformation that we at Lenovo are taking as well as obviously wanting to journey with our partners and customers obviously on that same journey. What I heard from him was obviously artificial intelligence, how we're leveraging that integrally as well as externally and for our customers, and the investments we're making in the transformation around IoT machine learning, obviously big data, et cetera, and obviously the Data Center Group, which is one of the key things we've got to be talking about today. So we're on the cusp of that fourth revolution, as YY just mentioned, and Lenovo is definitely leading the way and investing in those parts of the industry and our portfolio to ensure we're complimenting all of our customers and partners on what they want to be, obviously, as part of this new transformation we're seeing globally. Obviously now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado once again, to tell us more about what's going on today, our announcements, obviously, that all of you will be reading about and seeing in the breakout and the demo sessions with our segment general managers this afternoon is our president of the data center, Mr. Kirk Skaugen. (upbeat instrumental) >> Good morning, and let me add my welcome to Transform. I just crossed my six months here at Lenovo after over 24 years at Intel Corporation, and I can tell you, we've been really busy over the last six months, and I'm more excited and enthusiastic than ever and hope to share some of that with you today. Today's event is called "Transform", and today we're announcing major new transformations in Lenovo, in the data center, but more importantly, we're celebrating the business results that these platforms are going to have on society and with international supercomputing going on in parallel in Frankfurt, some of the amazing scientific discoveries that are going to happen on some of these platforms. Lenovo has gone through some significant transformations in the last two years, since we acquired the IBM x86 business, and that's really positioning us for this next phase of growth, and we'll talk more about that later. Today, we're announcing the largest end-to-end data center portfolio in Lenovo's history, as you heard from YY, and we're really taking the best of the x86 heritage from our IBM acquisition of the x86 server business and combining that with the cost economics that we've delivered from kind of our China heritage. As we've talked to some of the analysts in the room, it's really that best of the east and best of the west is combining together in this announcement today. We're going to be announcing two new brands, building on our position as the number one x86 server vendor in both customer satisfaction and in reliability, and we're also celebrating, next month in July, a very significant milestone, which will we'll be shipping our 20 millionth x86 server into the industry. For us, it's an amazing time, and it's an inflection point to kind of look back, pause, but also share the next phase of Lenovo and the exciting vision for the future. We're also making some declarations on our vision for the future today. Again, international supercomputing's going on, and, as it turns out, we're the fastest growing supercomputer company on earth. We'll talk about that. Our goal today that we're announcing is that we plan in the next several years to become number one in supercomputing, and we're going to put the investments behind that. We're also committing to our customers that we're going to disrupt the status quo and accelerate the pace of innovation, not just in our legacy server solutions, but also in Software-Defined because what we've heard from you is that that lack of legacy, we don't have a huge router business or a huge sand business to protect. It's that lack of legacy that's enabling us to invest and get ahead of the curb on this next transition to Software-Defined. So you're going to see us doing that through building our internal IP, through some significant joint ventures, and also through some merges and acquisitions over the next several quarters. Altogether, we're driving to be the most trusted data center provider in the industry between us and our customers and our suppliers. So a quick summary of what we're going to dive into today, both in my keynote as well as in the breakout sessions. We're in this transformation to the next phase of Lenovo's data center growth. We're closing out our previous transformation. We actually, believe it or not, in the last six months or so, have renegotiated 18,000 contracts in 160 countries. We built out an entire end-to-end organization from development and architecture all the way through sales and support. This next transformation, I think, is really going to excite Lenovo shareholders. We're building the largest data center portfolio in our history. I think when IBM would be up here a couple years ago, we might have two or three servers to announce in time to market with the next Intel platform. Today, we're announcing 14 new servers, seven new storage systems, an expanded set of networking portfolios based on our legacy with Blade Network Technologies and other companies we've acquired. Two new brands that we'll talk about for both data center infrastructure and Software-Defined, a new set of premium premiere services as well as a set of engineered solutions that are going to help our customers get to market faster. We're going to be celebrating our 20 millionth x86 server, and as Rod said, 25 years in x86 server compute, and Christian will be up here talking about 25 years of ThinkPad as well. And then a new end-to-end segmentation model because all of these strategies without execution are kind of meaningless. I hope to give you some confidence in the transformation that Lenovo has gone through as well. So, having observed Lenovo from one of its largest partners, Intel, for more than a couple decades, I thought I'd just start with why we have confidence on the foundation that we're building off of as we move from a PC company into a data center provider in a much more significant way. So Lenovo today is a company of $43 billion in sales. Absolutely astonishing, it puts us at about Fortune 202 as a company, with 52,000 employees around the world. We're supporting and have service personnel, almost a little over 10,000 service personnel that service our servers and data center technologies in over 160 countries that provide onsite service and support. We have seven data center research centers. One of the reasons I came from Intel to Lenovo was that I saw that Lenovo became number one in PCs, not through cost cutting but through innovation. It was Lenovo that was partnering on the next-generation Ultrabooks and two-in-ones and tablets in the modem mods that you saw, but fundamentally, our path to number one in data center is going to be built on innovation. Lastly, we're one of the last companies that's actually building not only our own motherboards at our own motherboard factories, but also with five global data center manufacturing facilities. Today, we build about four devices a second, but we also build over 100 servers per hour, and the cost economics we get, and I just visited our Shenzhen factory, of having everything from screws to microprocessors come up through the elevator on the first floor, go left to build PCs and ThinkPads and go right to build server technology, means we have some of the world's most cost effective solutions so we can compete in things like hyperscale computing. So it's with that that I think we're excited about the foundation that we can build off of on the Data Center Group. Today, as we stated, this event is about transformation, and today, I want to talk about three things we're going to transform. Number one is the customer experience. Number two is the data center and our customer base with Software-Defined infrastructure, and then the third is talk about how we plan to execute flawlessly with a new transformation that we've had internally at Lenovo. So let's dive into it. On customer experience, really, what does it mean to transform customer experience? Industry pundits say that if you're not constantly innovating, you can fall behind. Certainly the technology industry that we're in is transforming at record speed. 42% of business leaders or CIOs say that digital first is their top priority, but less than 50% actually admit that they have a strategy to get there. So people are looking for a partner to keep pace with that innovation and change, and that's really what we're driving to at Lenovo. So today we're announcing a set of plans to take another step function in customer experience, and building off of our number one position. Just recently, Gartner shows Lenovo as the number 24 supply chains of companies over $12 billion. We're up there with Amazon, Coca-Cola, and we've now completely re-architected our supply chain in the Data Center Group from end to end. Today, we can deliver 90% of our SKUs, order to ship in less than seven days. The artificial intelligence that YY mentioned is optimizing our performance even further. In services, as we talked about, we're now in 160 countries, supporting on-site support, 50 different call centers around the world for local language support, and we're today announcing a whole set of new premiere support services that I'll get into in a second. But we're building on what's already better than 90% customer satisfaction in this space. And then in development, for all the engineers out there, we started foundationally for this new set of products, talking about being number one in reliability and the lowest downtime of any x86 server vendor on the planet, and these systems today are architected to basically extend that leadership position. So let me tell you the realities of reliability. This is ITIC, it's a reliability report. 750 CIOs and IT managers from more than 20 countries, so North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, Africa. This isn't anything that's paid for with sponsorship dollars. Lenovo has been number one for four years running on x86 reliability. This is the amount of downtime, four hours or more, in mission-critical environments from the leading x86 providers. You can see relative to our top two competitors that are ahead of us, HP and Dell, you can see from ITIC why we are building foundationally off of this, and why it's foundational to how we're developing these new platforms. In customer satisfaction, we are also rated number one in x86 server customer satisfaction. This year, we're now incentivizing every single Lenovo employee on customer satisfaction and customer experience. It's been a huge mandate from myself and most importantly YY as our CEO. So you may say well what is the basis of this number one in customer satisfaction, and it's not just being number one in one category, it's actually being number one in 21 of the 22 categories that TBR talks about. So whether it's performance, support systems, online product information, parts and availability replacement, Lenovo is number one in 21 of the 22 categories and number one for six consecutive studies going back to Q1 of 2015. So this, again, as we talk about the new product introductions, it's something that we absolutely want to build on, and we're humbled by it, and we want to continue to do better. So let's start now on the new products and talk about how we're going to transform the data center. So today, we are announcing two new product offerings. Think Agile and ThinkSystem. If you think about the 25 years of ThinkPad that Christian's going to talk about, Lenovo has a continuous learning culture. We're fearless innovators, we're risk takers, we continuously learn, but, most importantly, I think we're humble and we have some humility. That when we fail, we can fail fast, we learn, and we improve. That's really what drove ThinkPad to number one. It took about eight years from the acquisition of IBM's x86 PC business before Lenovo became number one, but it was that innovation, that listening and learning, and then improving. As you look at the 25 years of ThinkPad, there were some amazing successes, but there were also some amazing failures along the way, but each and every time we learned and made things better. So this year, as Rod said, we're not just celebrating 25 years of ThinkPad, but we're celebrating 25 years of x86 server development since the original IBM PC servers in 1992. It's a significant day for Lenovo. Today, we're excited to announce two new brands. ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. It's an important new announcement that we started almost three years ago when we acquired the x86 server business. Why don't we run a video, and we'll show you a little bit about ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. >> Narrator: The status quo is comfortable. It gets you by, but if you think that's good enough for your data center, think again. If adoption is becoming more complicated when it should be simpler, think again. If others are selling you technology that's best for them, not for you, think again. It's time for answers that win today and tomorrow. Agile, innovative, different. Because different is better. Different embraces change and makes adoption simple. Different designs itself around you. Using 25 years of innovation and design and R&D. Different transforms, it gives you ThinkSystem. World-record performance, most reliable, easy to integrate, scales faster. Different empowers you with ThinkAgile. It redefines the experience, giving you the speed of Cloud and the control of on-premise IT. Responding faster to what your business really needs. Different defines the future. Introducing Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. (exciting and slightly aggressive digital instrumental) >> All right, good stuff, huh? (audience applauds) So it's built off of this 25-year history of us being in the x86 server business, the commitment we established three years ago after acquiring the x86 server business to be and have the most reliable, the most agile, and the most highest-performing data center solutions on the planet. So today we're announcing two brands. ThinkSystem is for the traditional data center infrastructure, and ThinkAgile is our brand for Software-Defined infrastructure. Again, the teams challenge themselves from the start, how do we build off this rich heritage, expanding our position as number one in customer satisfaction, reliability, and one of the world's best supply chains. So let's start and look at the next set of solutions. We have always prided ourself that little things don't mean a lot. Little things mean everything. So today, as we said on the legacy solutions, we have over 30 world-record performance benchmarks on Intel architecture, and more than actually 150 since we started tracking this back in 2001. So it's the little pieces of innovation. It's the fine tuning that we do with our partners like an Intel or a Microsoft, an SAP, VMware, and Nutanix that's enabling us to get these world-record performance benchmarks, and with this next generation of solutions we think we'll continue to certainly do that. So today we're announcing the most comprehensive portfolio ever in our data center history. There's 14 servers, seven storage devices, and five network switches. We're also announcing, which is super important to our customer base, a set of new premiere service options. That's giving you fast access directly to a level two support person. No automated response system involved. You get to pick up the phone and directly talk to a level two support person that's going to have end-to-end ownership of the customer experience for ThinkSystem. With ThinkAgile, that's going to be completely bundled with every ThinkAgile you purchase. In addition, we're having white glove service on site that will actually unbox the product for you and get it up and running. It's an entirely new set of solutions for hybrid Cloud, for big data analytics and database applications around these engineered solutions. These are like 40- to 50-page guides where we fine-tuned the most important applications around virtual desktop infrastructure and those kinds of applications, working side by side with all of our ISP partners. So significantly expanding, not just the hardware but the software solutions that, obviously, you, as our customers, are running. So if you look at ThinkSystem innovation, again, it was designed for the ultimate in flexibility, performance, and reliability. It's a single now-unified brand that combines what used to be the Lenovo Think server and the IBM System x products now into a single brand that spans server, storage, and networking. We're basically future-proofing it for the next-generation data center. It's a significantly simplified portfolio. One of the big pieces that we've heard is that the complexity of our competitors has really been overwhelming to customers. We're building a more flexible, more agile solution set that requires less work, less qualification, and more future proofing. There's a bunch of things in this that you'll see in the demos. Faster time-to-service in terms of the modularity of the systems. 12% faster service equating to almost $50 thousand per hour of reduced downtime. Some new high-density options where we have four nodes and a 2U, twice the density to improve and reduce outbacks and mission-critical workloads. And then in high-performance computing and supercomputing, we're going to spend some time on that here shortly. We're announcing new water-cooled solutions. We have some of the most premiere water-cooled solutions in the world, with more than 25 patents pending now, just in the water-cooled solutions for supercomputing. The performance that we think we're going to see out of these systems is significant. We're building off of that legacy that we have today on the existing Intel solutions. Today, we believe we have more than 50% of SAP HANA installations in the world. In fact, SAP just went public that they're running their internal SAP HANA on Lenovo hardware now. We're seeing a 59% increase in performance on SAP HANA generation on generation. We're seeing 31% lower total cost to ownership. We believe this will continue our position of having the highest level of five-nines in the x86 server industry. And all of these servers will start being available later this summer when the Intel announcements come out. We're also announcing the largest storage portfolio in our history, significantly larger than anything we've done in the past. These are all available today, including some new value class storage offerings. Our network portfolio is expanding now significantly. It was a big surprise when I came to Lenovo, seeing the hundreds of engineers we had from the acquisition of Blade Network Technologies and others with our teams in Romania, Santa Clara, really building out both the embedded portfolio but also the top racks, which is around 10 gig, 25 gig, and 100 gig. Significantly better economics, but all the performance you'd expect from the largest networking companies in the world. Those are also available today. ThinkAgile and Software-Defined, I think the one thing that has kind of overwhelmed me since coming in to Lenovo is we are being embraced by our customers because of our lack of legacy. We're not trying to sell you one more legacy SAN at 65% margins. ThinkAgile really was founded, kind of born free from the shackles of legacy thinking and legacy infrastructure. This is just the beginning of what's going to be an amazing new brand in the transformation to Software-Defined. So, for Lenovo, we're going to invest in our own internal organic IP. I'll foreshadow: There's some significant joint ventures and some mergers and acquisitions that are going to be coming in this space. And so this will be the foundation for our Software-Defined networking and storage, for IoT, and ultimately for the 5G build-out as well. This is all built for data centers of tomorrow that require fluid resources, tightly integrated software and hardware in kind of an appliance, selling at the rack level, and so we'll show you how that is going to take place here in a second. ThinkAgile, we have a few different offerings. One is around hyperconverged storage, Hybrid Cloud, and also Software-Defined storage. So we're really trying to redefine the customer experience. There's two different solutions we're having today. It's a Microsoft Azure solution and a Nutanix solution. These are going to be available both in the appliance space as well as in a full rack solution. We're really simplifying and trying to transform the entire customer experience from how you order it. We've got new capacity planning tools that used to take literally days for us to get the capacity planning done. It's now going down to literally minutes. We've got new order, delivery, deployment, administration service, something we're calling ThinkAgile Advantage, which is the white glove unboxing of the actual solutions on prem. So the whole thing when you hear about it in the breakout sessions about transforming the entire customer experience with both an HX solution and an SX solution. So again, available at the rack level for both Nutanix and for Microsoft Solutions available in just a few months. Many of you in the audience since the Microsoft Airlift event in Seattle have started using these things, and the feedback to date has been fantastic. We appreciate the early customer adoption that we've seen from people in the audience here. So next I want to bring up one of our most important partners, and certainly if you look at all of these solutions, they're based on the next-generation Intel Xeon scalable processor that's going to be announcing very very soon. I want to bring on stage Rupal Shah, who's the corporate vice president and general manager of Global Data Center Sales with Intel, so Rupal, please join me. (upbeat instrumental) So certainly I have long roots at Intel, but why don't you talk about, from Intel's perspective, why Lenovo is an important partner for Lenovo. >> Great, well first of all, thank you very much. I've had the distinct pleasure of not only working with Kirk for many many years, but also working with Lenovo for many years, so it's great to be here. Lenovo is not only a fantastic supplier and leader in the industry for Intel-based servers but also a very active partner in the Intel ecosystem. In the Intel ecosystem, specifically, in our partner programs and in our builder programs around Cloud, around the network, and around storage, I personally have had a long history in working with Lenovo, and I've seen personally that PC transformation that you talked about, Kirk, and I believe, and I know that Intel believes in Lenovo's ability to not only succeed in the data center but to actually lead in the data center. And so today, the ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile announcement is just so incredibly important. It's such a great testament to our two companies working together, and the innovation that we're able to bring to the market, and all of it based on the Intel Xeon scalable processor. >> Excellent, so tell me a little bit about why we've been collaborating, tell me a little bit about why you're excited about ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile, specifically. >> Well, there are a lot of reasons that I'm excited about the innovation, but let me talk about a few. First, both of our companies really stand behind the fact that it's increasingly a hybrid world. Our two companies offer a range of solutions now to customers to be able to address their different workload needs. ThinkSystem really brings the best, right? It brings incredible performance, flexibility in data center deployment, and industry-leading reliability that you've talked about. And, as always, Xeon has a history of being built for the data center specifically. The Intel Xeon scalable processor is really re-architected from the ground up in order to enhance compute, network, and storage data flows so that we can deliver workload optimized performance for both a wide range of traditional workloads and traditional needs but also some emerging new needs in areas like artificial intelligence. Second is when it comes to the next generation of Cloud infrastructure, the new Lenovo ThinkAgile line offers a truly integrated offering to address data center pain points, and so not only are you able to get these pretested solutions, but these pretested solutions are going to get deployed in your infrastructure faster, and they're going to be deployed in a way that's going to meet your specific needs. This is something that is new for both of us, and it's an incredible innovation in the marketplace. I think that it's a great addition to what is already a fantastic portfolio for Lenovo. >> Excellent. >> Finally, there's high-performance computing. In high-performance computing. First of all, congratulations. It's a big week, I think, for both of us. Fantastic work that we've been doing together in high-performance computing and actually bringing the best of the best to our customers, and you're going to hear a whole lot more about that. We obviously have a number of joint innovation centers together between Intel and Lenovo. Tell us about some of the key innovations that you guys are excited about. >> Well, Intel and Lenovo, we do have joint innovation labs around the world, and we have a long and strong history of very tight collaboration. This has brought a big wave of innovation to the marketplace in areas like software-defined infrastructure. Yet another area is working closely on a joint vision that I think our two companies have in artificial intelligence. Intel is very committed to the world of AI, and we're committed in making the investments required in technology development, in training, and also in R&D to be able to deliver end-to-end solutions. So with Intel's comprehensive technology portfolio and Lenovo's development and innovation expertise, it's a great combination in this space. I've already talked a little bit about HPC and so has Kirk, and we're going to hear a little bit more to come, but we're really building the fastest compute solutions for customers that are solving big problems. Finally, we often talk about processors from Intel, but it's not just about the processors. It's way beyond that. It's about engaging at the solution level for our customers, and I'm so excited about the work that we've done together with Lenovo to bring to market products like Intel Omni-Path Architecture, which is really the fabric for high-performance data centers. We've got a great showing this week with Intel Omni-Path Architecture, and I'm so grateful for all the work that we've done to be able to bring true solutions to the marketplace. I am really looking forward to our future collaboration with Lenovo as we have in the past. I want to thank you again for inviting me here today, and congratulations on a fantastic launch. >> Thank you, Rupal, very much, for the long partnership. >> Thank you. (audience applauds) >> Okay, well now let's transition and talk a little bit about how Lenovo is transforming. The first thing we've done when I came on board about six months ago is we've transformed to a truly end-to-end organization. We're looking at the market segments I think as our customers define them, and we've organized into having vice presidents and senior vice presidents in charge of each of these major groups, thinking really end to end, from architecture all the way to end of life and customer support. So the first is hyperscale infrastructure. It's about 20% on the market by 2020. We've hired a new vice president there to run that business. Given we can make money in high-volume desktop PCs, it's really the manufacturing prowess, deep engineering collaboration that's enabling us to sell into Baidu, and to Alibaba, Tencent, as well as the largest Cloud vendors on the West Coast here in the United States. We believe we can make money here by having basically a deep deep engineering engagement with our key customers and building on the PC volume economics that we have within Lenovo. On software-defined infrastructure, again, it's that lack of legacy that I think is propelling us into this space. We're not encumbered by trying to sell one more legacy SAN or router, and that's really what's exciting us here, as we transform from a hardware to a software-based company. On HPC and AI, as we said, we'll talk about this in a second. We're the fastest-growing supercomputing company on earth. We have aspirations to be the largest supercomputing company on earth, with China and the U.S. vying for number one in that position, it puts us in a good position there. We're going to bridge that into artificial intelligence in our upcoming Shanghai Tech World. The entire day is around AI. In fact, YY has committed $1.2 billion to artificial intelligence over the next few years of R&D to help us bridge that. And then on data center infrastructure, is really about moving to a solutions based infrastructure like our position with SAP HANA, where we've gone deep with engineers on site at SAP, SAP running their own infrastructure on Lenovo and building that out beyond just SAP to other solutions in the marketplace. Overall, significantly expanding our services portfolio to maintain our number one customer satisfaction rating. So given ISC, or International Supercomputing, this week in Frankfurt, and a lot of my team are actually over there, I wanted to just show you the transformation we've had at Lenovo for delivering some of the technology to solve some of the most challenging humanitarian problems on earth. Today, we are the fastest-growing supercomputer company on the planet in terms of number of systems on the Top 500 list. We've gone from zero to 92 positions in just a few short years, but IDC also positions Lenovo as the fast-growing supercomputer and HPC company overall at about 17% year on year growth overall, including all of the broad channel, the regional universities and this kind of thing, so this is an exciting place for us. I'm excited today that Sergi has come all the way from Spain to be with us today. It's an exciting time because this week we announce the fastest next-generation Intel supercomputer on the planet at Barcelona Supercomputer. Before I bring Sergi on stage, let's run a video and I'll show you why we're excited about the capabilities of these next-generation supercomputers. Run the video please. >> Narrator: Different creates one of the most powerful supercomputers for the Barcelona Supercomputer Center. A high-performance, high-capacity design to help shape tomorrow's world. Different designs what's best for you, with 25 years of end-to-end expertise delivering large-scale solutions. It integrates easily with technology from industry partners, through deep collaboration with the client to manufacture, test, configure, and install at global scale. Different achieves the impossible. The first of a new series. A more energy-efficient supercomputer yet 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. With over 3,400 Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, each performing over two trillion calculations per second, giving us 11.1 petaflop capacity. Different powers MareNostrum, a supercomputer that will help us better understand cancer, help discover disease-fighting therapies, predict the impact of climate change. MareNostrom 4.0 promises to uncover answers that will help solve humanities greatest challenges. (audience applauds) >> So please help me in welcoming operations director of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, Sergi Girona. So welcome, and again, congratulations. It's been a big week for both of us. But I think for a long time, if you haven't been to Barcelona, this has been called the world's most beautiful computer because it's in one of the most gorgeous chapels in the world as you can see here. Congratulations, we now are number 13 on the Top500 list and the fastest next-generation Intel computer. >> Thank you very much, and congratulations to you as well. >> So maybe we can just talk a little bit about what you've done over the last few months with us. >> Sure, thank you very much. It is a pleasure for me being invited here to present to you what we've been doing with Lenovo so far and what we are planning to do in the next future. I'm representing here Barcelona Supercomputing Center. I am presenting high-performance computing services to science and industry. How we see these science services has changed the paradigm of science. We are coming from observation. We are coming from observation on the telescopes and the microscopes and the building of infrastructures, but this is not affordable anymore. This is very expensive, so it's not possible, so we need to move to simulations. So we need to understand what's happening in our environment. We need to predict behaviors only going through simulation. So, at BSC, we are devoted to provide services to industry, to science, but also we are doing our own research because we want to understand. At the same time, we are helping and developing the new engineers of the future on the IT, on HPC. So we are having four departments based on different topics. The main and big one is wiling to understand how we are doing the next supercomputers from the programming level to the performance to the EIA, so all these things, but we are having also interest on what about the climate change, what's the air quality that we are having in our cities. What is the precision medicine we need to have. How we can see that the different drugs are better for different individuals, for different humans, and of course we have an energy department, taking care of understanding what's the better optimization for a cold, how we can save energy running simulations on different topics. But, of course, the topic of today is not my research, but it's the systems we are building in Barcelona. So this is what we have been building in Barcelona so far. From left to right, you have the preparation of the facility because this is 160 square meters with 1.4 megabytes, so that means we need new piping, we need new electricity, at the same time in the center we have to install the core services of the system, so the management practices, and then on the right-hand side you have installation of the networking, the Omni-Path by Intel. Because all of the new racks have to be fully integrated and they need to come into operation rapidly. So we start deployment of the system May 15, and we've now been ending and coming in production July first. All the systems, all the (mumbles) systems from Lenovo are coming before being open and available. What we've been installing here in Barcelona is general purpose systems for our general workload of the system with 3,456 nodes. Everyone of those having 48 cores, 96 gigabytes main memory for a total capacity of about 400 terabytes memory. The objective of this is that we want to, all the system, all the processors, to work together for a single execution for running altogether, so this is an example of the platinum processors from Intel having 24 cores each. Of course, for doing this together with all the cores in the same application, we need a high-speed network, so this is Omni-Path, and of course all these cables are connecting all the nodes. Noncontention, working together, cooperating. Of course, this is a bunch of cables. They need to be properly aligned in switches. So here you have the complete presentation. Of course, this is general purpose, but we wanted to invest with our partners. We want to understand what the supercomputers we wanted to install in 2020, (mumbles) Exascale. We want to find out, we are installing as well systems with different capacities with KNH, with power, with ARM processors. We want to leverage our obligations for the future. We want to make sure that in 2020 we are ready to move our users rapidly to the new technologies. Of course, this is in total, giving us a total capacity of 13.7 petaflops that it's 12 times the capacity of the former MareNostrum four years ago. We need to provide the services to our scientists because they are helping to solve problems for humanity. That's the place we are going to go. Last is inviting you to come to Barcelona to see our place and our chapel. Thank you very much (audience applauds). >> Thank you. So now you can all go home to your spouses and significant others and say you have a formal invitation to Barcelona, Spain. So last, I want to talk about what we've done to transform Lenovo. I think we all know the history is nice but without execution, none of this is going to be possible going forward, so we have been very very busy over the last six months to a year of transforming Lenovo's data center organization. First, we moved to a dedicated end-to-end sales and marketing organization. In the past, we had people that were shared between PC and data center, now thousands of sales people around the world are 100% dedicated end to end to our data center clients. We've moved to a fully integrated and dedicated supply chain and procurement organization. A fully dedicated quality organization, 100% dedicated to expanding our data center success. We've moved to a customer-centric segment, again, bringing in significant new leaders from outside the company to look end to end at each of these segments, supercomputing being very very different than small business, being very very different than taking care of, for example, a large retailer or bank. So around hyperscale, software-defined infrastructure, HPC, AI, and supercomputing and data center solutions-led infrastructure. We've built out a whole new set of global channel programs. Last year, or a year passed, we have five different channel programs around the world. We've now got one simplified channel program for dealer registration. I think our channel is very very energized to go out to market with Lenovo technology across the board, and a whole new set of system integrator relationships. You're going to hear from one of them in Christian's discussion, but a whole new set of partnerships to build solutions together with our system integrative partners. And, again, as I mentioned, a brand new leadership team. So look forward to talking about the details of this. There's been a significant amount of transformation internal to Lenovo that's led to the success of this new product introduction today. So in conclusion, I want to talk about the news of the day. We are transforming Lenovo to the next phase of our data center growth. Again, in over 160 countries, closing on that first phase of transformation and moving forward with some unique declarations. We're launching the largest portfolio in our history, not just in servers but in storage and networking, as everything becomes kind of a software personality on top of x86 Compute. We think we're very well positioned with our scale on PCs as well as data center. Two new brands for both data center infrastructure and Software-Defined, without the legacy shackles of our competitors, enabling us to move very very quickly into Software-Defined, and, again, foreshadowing some joint ventures in M&A that are going to be coming up that will further accelerate ourselves there. New premiere support offerings, enabling you to get direct access to level two engineers and white glove unboxing services, which are going to be bundled along with ThinkAgile. And then celebrating the milestone of 25 years in x86 server compute, not just ThinkPads that you'll hear about shortly, but also our 20 million server shipping next month. So we're celebrating that legacy and looking forward to the next phase. And then making sure we have the execution engine to maintain our position and grow it, being number one in customer satisfaction and number one in quality. So, with that, thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you in the breakouts today and talking with many of you, and I'll bring Rod back up to transition us to the next section. Thank you. (audience applauds) >> All right, Kirk, thank you, sir. All right, ladies and gentlemen, what did you think of that? How about a big round of applause for ThinkAgile, ThinkSystems new brands? (audience applauds) And, obviously, with that comes a big round of applause, for Kirk Skaugen, my boss, so we've got to give him a big round of applause, please. I need to stay employed, it's very important. All right, now you just heard from Kirk about some of the new systems, the brands. How about we have a quick look at the video, which shows us the brand new DCG images. >> Narrator: Legacy thinking is dead, stuck in the past, selling the same old stuff, over and over. So then why does it seem like a data center, you know, that thing powering all our little devices and more or less everything interaction today is still stuck in legacy thinking because it's rigid, inflexible, slow, but that's not us. We don't do legacy. We do different. Because different is fearless. Different reduces Cloud deployment from days to hours. Different creates agile technology that others follow. Different is fluid. It uses water-cooling technology to save energy. It co-innovates with some of the best minds in the industry today. Different is better, smarter. Maybe that's why different already holds so many world-record benchmarks in everything. From virtualization to database and application performance or why it's number one in reliability and customer satisfaction. Legacy sells you what they want. Different builds the data center you need without locking you in. Introducing the Data Center Group at Lenovo. Different... Is better. >> All right, ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause, once again (mumbles) DCG, fantastic. And I'm sure all of you would agree, and Kirk mentioned it a couple of times there. No legacy means a real consultative approach to our customers, and that's something that we really feel is differentiated for ourselves. We are effectively now one of the largest startups in the DCG space, and we are very much ready to disrupt. Now, here in New York City, obviously, the heart of the fashion industry, and much like fashion, as I mentioned earlier, we're different, we're disruptive, we're agile, smarter, and faster. I'd like to say that about myself, but, unfortunately, I can't. But those of you who have observed, you may have noticed that I, too, have transformed. I don't know if anyone saw that. I've transformed from the pinstripe blue, white shirt, red tie look of the, shall we say, our predecessors who owned the x86 business to now a very Lenovo look. No tie and consequently a little bit more chic New York sort of fashion look, shall I say. Nothing more than that. So anyway, a bit of a transformation. It takes a lot to get to this look, by the way. It's a lot of effort. Our next speaker, Christian Teismann, is going to talk a lot about the core business of Lenovo, which really has been, as we've mentioned today, our ThinkPad, 25-year anniversary this year. It's going to be a great celebration inside Lenovo, and as we get through the year and we get closer and closer to the day, you'll see a lot more social and digital work that engages our customers, partners, analysts, et cetera, when we get close to that birthday. Customers just generally are a lot tougher on computers. We know they are. Whether you hang onto it between meetings from the corner of the Notebook, and that's why we have magnesium chassis inside the box or whether you're just dropping it or hypothetically doing anything else like that. We do a lot of robust testing on these products, and that's why it's the number one branded Notebook in the world. So Christian talks a lot about this, but I thought instead of having him talk, I might just do a little impromptu jump back stage and I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about. So follow me for a second. I'm going to jaunt this way. I know a lot of you would have seen, obviously, the front of house here, what we call the front of house. Lots of videos, et cetera, but I don't think many of you would have seen the back of house here, so I'm going to jump through the back here. Hang on one second. You'll see us when we get here. Okay, let's see what's going on back stage right now. You can see one of the team here in the back stage is obviously working on their keyboard. Fantastic, let me tell you, this is one of the key value props of this product, obviously still working, lots of coffee all over it, spill-proof keyboard, one of the key value propositions and why this is the number one laptop brand in the world. Congratulations there, well done for that. Obviously, we test these things. Height, distances, Mil-SPEC approved, once again, fantastic product, pick that up, lovely. Absolutely resistant to any height or drops, once again, in line with our Mil-SPEC. This is Charles, our producer and director back stage for the absolute event. You can see, once again, sand, coincidentally, in Manhattan, who would have thought a snow storm was occurring here, but you can throw sand. We test these things for all of the elements. I've obviously been pretty keen on our development solutions, having lived in Japan for 12 years. We had this originally designed in 1992 by (mumbles), he's still our chief development officer still today, fantastic, congratulations, a sand-enhanced notebook, he'd love that. All right, let's get back out front and on with the show. Watch the coffee. All right, how was that? Not too bad (laughs). It wasn't very impromptu at all, was it? Not at all a set up (giggles). How many people have events and have a bag of sand sitting on the floor right next to a Notebook? I don't know. All right, now it's time, obviously, to introduce our next speaker, ladies and gentlemen, and I hope I didn't steal his thunder, obviously, in my conversations just now that you saw back stage. He's one of my best friends in Lenovo and easily is a great representative of our legendary PC products and solutions that we're putting together for all of our customers right now, and having been an ex-Pat with Lenovo in New York really calls this his second home and is continually fighting with me over the fact that he believes New York has better sushi than Tokyo, let's welcome please, Christian Teismann, our SVP, Commercial Business Segment, and PC Smart Office. Christian Teismann, come on up mate. (audience applauds) >> So Rod thank you very much for this wonderful introduction. I'm not sure how much there is to add to what you have seen already back stage, but I think there is a 25-year of history I will touch a little bit on, but also a very big transformation. But first of all, welcome to New York. As Rod said, it's my second home, but it's also a very important place for the ThinkPad, and I will come back to this later. The ThinkPad is thee industry standard of business computing. It's an industry icon. We are celebrating 25 years this year like no other PC brand has done before. But this story today is not looking back only. It's a story looking forward about the future of PC, and we see a transformation from PCs to personalized computing. I am privileged to lead the commercial PC and Smart device business for Lenovo, but much more important beyond product, I also am responsible for customer experience. And this is what really matters on an ongoing basis. But allow me to stay a little bit longer with our iconic ThinkPad and history of the last 25 years. ThinkPad has always stand for two things, and it always will be. Highest quality in the industry and technology innovation leadership that matters. That matters for you and that matters for your end users. So, now let me step back a little bit in time. As Rod was showing you, as only Rod can do, reliability is a very important part of ThinkPad story. ThinkPads have been used everywhere and done everything. They have survived fires and extreme weather, and they keep surviving your end users. For 25 years, they have been built for real business. ThinkPad also has a legacy of first innovation. There are so many firsts over the last 25 years, we could spend an hour talking about them. But I just want to cover a couple of the most important milestones. First of all, the ThinkPad 1992 has been developed and invented in Japan on the base design of a Bento box. It was designed by the famous industrial designer, Richard Sapper. Did you also know that the ThinkPad was the first commercial Notebook flying into space? In '93, we traveled with the space shuttle the first time. For two decades, ThinkPads were on every single mission. Did you know that the ThinkPad Butterfly, the iconic ThinkPad that opens the keyboard to its size, is the first and only computer showcased in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, right here in New York City? Ten years later, in 2005, IBM passed the torch to Lenovo, and the story got even better. Over the last 12 years, we sold over 100 million ThinkPads, four times the amount IBM sold in the same time. Many customers were concerned at that time, but since then, the ThinkPad has remained the best business Notebook in the industry, with even better quality, but most important, we kept innovating. In 2012, we unveiled the X1 Carbon. It was the thinnest, lightest, and still most robust business PC in the world. Using advanced composited materials like a Formula One car, for super strengths, X1 Carbon has become our ThinkPad flagship since then. We've added an X1 Carbon Yoga, a 360-degree convertible. An X1 Carbon tablet, a detachable, and many new products to come in the future. Over the last few years, many new firsts have been focused on providing the best end-user experience. The first dual-screen mobile workstation. The first Windows business tablet, and the first business PC with OLED screen technology. History is important, but a massive transformation is on the way. Future success requires us to think beyond the box. Think beyond hardware, think beyond notebooks and desktops, and to think about the future of personalized computing. Now, why is this happening? Well, because the business world is rapidly changing. Looking back on history that YY gave, and the acceleration of innovation and how it changes our everyday life in business and in personal is driving a massive change also to our industry. Most important because you are changing faster than ever before. Human capital is your most important asset. In today's generation, they want to have freedom of choice. They want to have a product that is tailored to their specific needs, every single day, every single minute, when they use it. But also IT is changing. The Cloud, constant connectivity, 5G will change everything. Artificial intelligence is adding things to the capability of an infrastructure that we just are starting to imagine. Let me talk about the workforce first because it's the most important part of what drives this. The millennials will comprise more than half of the world's workforce in 2020, three years from now. Already, one out of three millennials is prioritizing mobile work environment over salary, and for nearly 60% of all new hires in the United States, technology is a very important factor for their job search in terms of the way they work and the way they are empowered. This new generation of new employees has grown up with PCs, with Smart phones, with tablets, with touch, for their personal use and for their occupation use. They want freedom. Second, the workplace is transforming. The video you see here in the background. This is our North America headquarters in Raleigh, where we have a brand new Smart workspace. We have transformed this to attract the new generation of workers. It has fewer traditional workspaces, much more meaning and collaborative spaces, and Lenovo, like many companies, is seeing workspaces getting smaller. An average workspace per employee has decreased by 30% over the last five years. Employees are increasingly mobile, but, if they come to the office, they want to collaborate with their colleagues. The way we collaborate and communicate is changing. Investment in new collaboration technology is exploding. The market of collaboration technology is exceeding the market of personal computing today. It will grow in the future. Conference rooms are being re-imagined from a ratio of 50 employees to one large conference room. Today, we are moving into scenarios of four employees to one conference room, and these are huddle rooms, pioneer spaces. Technology is everywhere. Video, mega-screens, audio, electronic whiteboards. Adaptive technologies are popping up and change the way we work. As YY said earlier, the pace of the revolution is astonishing. So personalized computing will transform the PC we all know. There's a couple of key factors that we are integrating in our next generations of PC as we go forward. The most important trends that we see. First of all, choose your own device. We talked about this new generation of workforce. Employees who are used to choosing their own device. We have to respond and offer devices that are tailored to each end user's needs without adding complexity to how we operate them. PC is a service. Corporations increasingly are looking for on-demand computing in data center as well as in personal computing. Customers want flexibility. A tailored management solution and a services portfolio that completes the lifecycle of the device. Agile IT, even more important, corporations want to run an infrastructure that is agile, instant respond to their end-customer needs, that is self provisioning, self diagnostic, and remote software repair. Artificial intelligence. Think about artificial intelligence for you personally as your personal assistant. A personal assistant which does understand you, your schedule, your travel, your next task, an extension of yourself. We believe the PC will be the center of this mobile device universe. Mobile device synergy. Each of you have two devices or more with you. They need to work together across different operating systems, across different platforms. We believe Lenovo is uniquely positioned as the only company who has a Smart phone business, a PC business, and an infrastructure business to really seamlessly integrate all of these devices for simplicity and for efficiency. Augmented reality. We believe augmented reality will drive significantly productivity improvements in commercial business. The core will be to understand industry-specific solutions. New processes, new business challenges, to improve things like customer service and sales. Security will remain the foundation for personalized computing. Without security, without trust in the device integrity, this will not happen. One of the most important trends, I believe, is that the PC will transform, is always connected, and always on, like a Smart phone. Regardless if it's open, if it's closed, if you carry it, or if you work with it, it always is capable to respond to you and to work with you. 5G is becoming a reality, and the data capacity that will be out there is by far exceeding today's traffic imagination. Finally, Smart Office, delivering flexible and collaborative work environments regardless on where the worker sits, fully integrated and leverages all the technologies we just talked before. These are the main challenges you and all of your CIO and CTO colleagues have to face today. A changing workforce and a new set of technologies that are transforming PC into personalized computing. Let me give you a real example of a challenge. DXC was just formed by merging CSE company and HP's Enterprise services for the largest independent services company in the world. DXC is now a 25 billion IT services leader with more than 170,000 employees. The most important capital. 6,000 clients and eight million managed devices. I'd like to welcome their CIO, who has one of the most challenging workforce transformation in front of him. Erich Windmuller, please give him a round of applause. (audience applauds). >> Thank you Christian. >> Thank you. >> It's my pleasure to be here, thank you. >> So first of all, let me congratulation you to this very special time. By forming a new multi-billion-dollar enterprise, this new venture. I think it has been so far fantastically received by analysts, by the press, by customers, and we are delighted to be one of your strategic partners, and clearly we are collaborating around workforce transformation between our two companies. But let me ask you a couple of more personal questions. So by bringing these two companies together with nearly 200,00 employees, what are the first actions you are taking to make this a success, and what are your biggest challenges? >> Well, first, again, let me thank you for inviting me and for DXC Technology to be a part of this very very special event with Lenovo, so thank you. As many of you might expect, it's been a bit of a challenge over the past several months. My goal was really very simple. It was to make sure that we brought two companies together, and they could operate as one. We need to make sure that could continue to support our clients. We certainly need to make sure we could continue to sell, our sellers could sell. That we could pay our employees, that we could hire people, we could do all the basic foundational things that you might expect a company would want to do, but we really focused on three simple areas. I called it the three Cs. Connectivity, communicate, and collaborate. So we wanted to make sure that we connected our legacy data centers so we could transfer information and communicate back and forth. We certainly wanted to be sure that our employees could communicate via WIFI, whatever locations they may or may not go to. We certainly wanted to, when we talk about communicate, we need to be sure that everyone of our employees could send and receive email as a DXC employee. And that we had a single-enterprise directory and people could communicate, gain access to calendars across each of the two legacy companies, and then collaborate was also key. And so we wanted to be sure, again, that people could communicate across each other, that our legacy employees on either side could get access to many of their legacy systems, and, again, we could collaborate together as a single corporation, so it was challenging, but very very, great opportunity for all of us. And, certainly, you might expect cyber and security was a very very important topic. My chairman challenged me that we had to be at least as good as we were before from a cyber perspective, and when you bring two large companies together like that there's clearly an opportunity in this disruptive world so we wanted to be sure that we had a very very strong cyber security posture, of which Lenovo has been very very helpful in our achieving that. >> Thank you, Erich. So what does DXC consider as their critical solutions and technology for workplace transformation, both internally as well as out on the market? >> So workplace transformation, and, again, I've heard a lot of the same kinds of words that I would espouse... It's all about making our employees productive. It's giving the right tools to do their jobs. I, personally, have been focused, and you know this because Lenovo has been a very very big part of this, in working with our, we call it our My Style Workplace, it's an offering team in developing a solution and driving as much functionality as possible down to the workstation. We want to be able, for me, to avoid and eliminate other ancillary costs, audio video costs, telecommunication cost. The platform that we have, the digitized workstation that Lenovo has provided us, has just got a tremendous amount of capability. We want to streamline those solutions, as well, on top of the modern server. The modern platform, as we call it, internally. I'd like to congratulate Kirk and your team that you guys have successfully... Your hardware has been certified on our modern platform, which is a significant accomplishment between our two companies and our partnership. It was really really foundational. Lenovo is a big part of our digital workstation transformation, and you'll continue to be, so it's very very important, and I want you to know that your tools and your products have done a significant job in helping us bring two large corporations together as one. >> Thank you, Erich. Last question, what is your view on device as a service and hardware utility model? >> This is the easy question, right? So who in the room doesn't like PC or device as a service? This is a tremendous opportunity, I think, for all of us. Our corporation, like many of you in the room, we're all driven by the concept of buying devices in an Opex versus a Capex type of a world and be able to pay as you go. I think this is something that all of us would like to procure, product services and products, if you will, personal products, in this type of a mode, so I am very very eager to work with Lenovo to be sure that we bring forth a very dynamic and constructive device as a service approach. So very eager to do that with Lenovo and bring that forward for DXC Technology. >> Erich, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to work with you, today and going forward on all sides. I think with your new company and our lineup, I think we have great things to come. Thank you very much. >> My pleasure, great pleasure, thank you very much. >> So, what's next for Lenovo PC? We already have the most comprehensive commercial portfolio in the industry. We have put the end user in the core of our portfolio to finish and going forward. Ultra mobile users, like consultants, analysts, sales and service. Heavy compute users like engineers and designers. Industry users, increasingly more understanding. Industry-specific use cases like education, healthcare, or banking. So, there are a few exciting things we have to announce today. Obviously, we don't have that broad of an announcement like our colleagues from the data center side, but there is one thing that I have that actually... Thank you Rod... Looks like a Bento box, but it's not a ThinkPad. It's a first of it's kind. It's the world's smallest professional workstation. It has the power of a tower in the Bento box. It has the newest Intel core architecture, and it's designed for a wide range of heavy duty workload. Innovation continues, not only in the ThinkPad but also in the desktops and workstations. Second, you hear much about Smart Office and workspace transformation today. I'm excited to announce that we have made a strategic decision to expand our Think portfolio into Smart Office, and we will soon have solutions on the table in conference rooms, working with strategic partners like Intel and like Microsoft. We are focused on a set of devices and a software architecture that, as an IoT architecture, unifies the management of Smart Office. We want to move fast, so our target is that we will have our first product already later this year. More to come. And finally, what gets me most excited is the upcoming 25 anniversary in October. Actually, if you go to Japan, there are many ThinkPad lovers. Actually beyond lovers, enthusiasts, who are collectors. We've been consistently asked in blogs and forums about a special anniversary edition, so let me offer you a first glimpse what we will announce in October, of something we are bring to market later this year. For the anniversary, we will introduce a limited edition product. This will include throwback features from ThinkPad's history as well as the best and most powerful features of the ThinkPad today. But we are not just making incremental adjustments to the Think product line. We are rethinking ThinkPad of the future. Well, here is what I would call a concept card. Maybe a ThinkPad without a hinge. Maybe one you can fold. What do you think? (audience applauds) but this is more than just design or look and feel. It's a new set of advanced materials and new screen technologies. It's how you can speak to it or write on it or how it speaks to you. Always connected, always on, and can communicate on multiple inputs and outputs. It will anticipate your next meeting, your next travel, your next task. And when you put it all together, it's just another part of the story, which we call personalized computing. Thank you very much. (audience applauds) Thank you, sir. >> Good on ya, mate. All right, ladies and gentlemen. We are now at the conclusion of the day, for this session anyway. I'm going to talk a little bit more about our breakouts and our demo rooms next door. But how about the power with no tower, from Christian, huh? Big round of applause. (audience applauds) And what about the concept card, the ThinkPad? Pretty good, huh? I love that as well. I tell you, it was almost like Leonardo DiCaprio was up on stage at one stage. He put that big ThinkPad concept up, and everyone's phones went straight up and took a photo, the whole audience, so let's be very selective on how we distribute that. I'm sure it's already on Twitter. I'll check it out in a second. So once again, ThinkPad brand is a core part of the organization, and together both DCG and PCSD, what we call PCSD, which is our client side of the business and Smart device side of the business, are obviously very very linked in transforming Lenovo for the future. We want to also transform the industry, obviously, and transform the way that all of us do business. Lenovo, if you look at basically a summary of the day, we are highly committed to being a top three data center provider. That is really important for us. We are the largest and fastest growing supercomputing company in the world, and Kirk actually mentioned earlier on, committed to being number one by 2020. So Madhu who is in Frankfurt at the International Supercomputing Convention, if you're watching, congratulations, your targets have gone up. There's no doubt he's going to have a lot of work to do. We're obviously very very committed to disrupting the data center. That's obviously really important for us. As we mentioned, with both the brands, the ThinkSystem, and our ThinkAgile brands now, highly focused on disrupting and ensuring that we do things differently because different is better. Thank you to our customers, our partners, media, analysts, and of course, once again, all of our employees who have been on this journey with us over the last two years that's really culminating today in the launch of all of our new products and our profile and our portfolio. It's really thanks to all of you that once again on your feedback we've been able to get to this day. And now really our journey truly begins in ensuring we are disrupting and enduring that we are bringing more value to our customers without that legacy that Kirk mentioned earlier on is really an advantage for us as we really are that large startup from a company perspective. It's an exciting time to be part of Lenovo. It's an exciting time to be associated with Lenovo, and I hope very much all of you feel that way. So a big round of applause for today, thank you very much. (audience applauds) I need to remind all of you. I don't think I'm going to have too much trouble getting you out there, because I was just looking at Christian on the streaming solutions out in the room out the back there, and there's quite a nice bit of lunch out there as well for those of you who are hungry, so at least there's some good food out there, but I think in reality all of you should be getting up into the demo sessions with our segment general managers because that's really where the rubber hits the road. You've heard from YY, you've heard from Kirk, and you've heard from Christian. All of our general managers and our specialists in our product sets are going to be out there to obviously demonstrate our technology. As we said at the very beginning of this session, this is Transform, obviously the fashion change, hopefully you remember that. Transform, we've all gone through the transformation. It's part of our season of events globally, and our next event obviously is going to be in Tech World in Shanghai on the 20th of July. I hope very much for those of you who are going to attend have a great safe travel over there. We look forward to seeing you. Hope you've had a good morning, and get into the sessions next door so you get to understand the technology. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (upbeat innovative instrumental)

welcome back to pre owned alive Jeff Rick here with the cube as you know we go out to the signals we we go out to the offense we extract the signal from the noise or date to hear percona live Santa Clara Convention Center the heart of Silicon Valley John had to step away so I'll be going solo on this and we're excited to to invite to the cube Lane Campbell CEO and co-founder of Blackbird welcome to the cube thank you very much so Blackbird is a new name I saw on my notes what was what was it called before well we are a merger of two companies Palomino DB has been a longtime sponsor and contributor at at Kona for about seven years it has focused on MySQL database operations and consulting dr dev was an operation shop with a DevOps focus okay and we've decided to merge together take everything up the stack build a company that could operate everything with a heavy database focus awesome so when did you complete the merger probably thirty years from now but technically we did in January first okay very good congratulations never never that fun to to complete all the other processes behind a merger absolutely good deal so we caught you I guess in between two keynotes here mmm-hmm at the show mhm so when he tell us a little bit about what you're covering earlier and what are you gonna cover in the not-too-distant future as soon as you get to your slides after we finish the interview absolutely I'm doing a melange of Amazon Web Services talks this time so I just finished scaling MySQL and Amazon Web Services or I talked about both options of Amazon's RDS and ec2 opportunities and the next session is a deep dive into RDS so the relational database service okay great so we were just at at Amazon summit last week in San Francisco we're at Amazon reinvent last year will be at Amazon some in New York City in a couple of months I think July and then of course back at reinvent in October so clearly Amazon has changed in the world that cloud service has been completely transformative and the enterprise disruptive everyone's running to to catch the Andy Jesse and the team at the show just released it just you know it's like an avalanche of feature improvements feature improvements as the breadth of services gets wider and then the depth of the services gets deeper and then I think they announced their forty third consecutive price decrease yes at the show so there's just relentless innovation both in terms of the feature set as well as the as the as the pricing pressure so how did you get involved on working on the Amazon side and what are you seeing in the marketplace with some of your customers and how is it transforming absolutely we started with Amazon when clients were going to it and it was obviously something we need to support particularly we've always been a very bespoke cost company we do make sure to support our customers but like Amazon we can't do everything so Amazon will start with a core and then they'll evolve based on customer need they'll start digging out new features new functionality and so we did the same thing and as more customers used Amazon we moved to Amazon as more customers use RDS we started using RDS and yeah at this point I would say about 75% of our customers are in some sort of cloud whether it is Amazon Google compute Rackspace cloud and even some folks who are building their own private clouds as well and realistically the own that's the way it's gonna go in a few years everything if every piece of infrastructure will be abstracted and this isn't a really exciting time to be part of the move towards that as we evolve our own maturity matrix for customers to show them where they stand on the DevOps maturity Bay matrix being in a virtualized environment where one can evolve very agile configuration management and infrastructure as code is crucial and so we have that's what we at this point we're helping a lot of our customers get to that point we're helping a lot of our customers not need operation staff and managing everything ourselves which is much easier in a virtual cloud environment and also letting people know when it's not the right choice for them so so on the Amazon side right they have the service of yours your value-add then is helping customers is it a configuration piece is it how they set it up is it what apps are they using I mean where where's your value-add sit on top of the Amazon infrastructure then they're purchasing directly from Amazon so Amazon themselves are utility that's all they want to be and they're not interested in running systems that sit on their environment and so we will help customers from a strategic view deciding which which in which a virtualized environment whether it's Amazon or something else is the right choice we will help them choose which of their architectural components should use an Amazon service versus their own service that they would run anywhere and once we do that we help people migrate to Amazon and we can run it the whole thing okay so you help them run it absolutely yes then are you guys playing an OpenStack as well we do have a few customers in OpenStack it's growing a combat side little earlier but yes absolutely so talk a little bit about when when customers are talking about making the move to the cloud and they want to use Amazon or they want to use a service like that what are some of the strategic gates you walked in through and making a decision as to whit you know what should be where what workloads should be in a public cloud what workload should be maybe on their own or behind the firewall or you know where a hybrid is more appropriate absolutely and I will say that up until recently we have predominantly worked with startups who are about in their mid level of maturity so not as much enterprise clients who might have much more hybridized environment realistically a lot of the folks that come in don't have large operations staff they don't and the staff that they do have want to be working on features right what we call development velocity and so we look for customers who recognize that and item a at this point I don't think a virtualized environment is optional anymore and more often than not unless they are an enterprise or unless they have a large commitment to an existing data center going with something like open stock doesn't make a lot of sense but that being said we do make sure with anyone that we are bringing in that we set everything up with a mitigated risk so that it is easy to get them out even though we've never had an issue with any specific provider for risk purposes it makes a lot of sense to use multiple clouds or to use an on-premise and other hybrid so then so that their startups or most of the applications that you're getting involved with their new applications that they're building as part of their startup a game or whatever one if you can give any examples so we're very much in their retail vertical and the gaming vertical we do have a few others in healthcare and you know sometimes I tease sometimes infrastructure but predominantly and most of the verticals we work with are either retail or gaming and in those environments we will either be brought in for a system that has grown past often that's already either already in Amazon but it was not architected for scale okay and we will come in and help them get to that next level okay more often than not we do have of course some green fields we're doing a large large infrastructure change right now for a new acquisition for Shutterfly okay and in that environment we're going right to RDS and using that okay so one of the one of the potential knocks on a cloud environment or infrastructures of service is is is there a point in time where the cost of rent suddenly becomes more than it would be the cost to buy we're often for speed of implementation getting started clearly renting a service is the easier and lower friction do you find that with your customers or as Amazon able to keep up in terms of pricing reductions where they can stay where they tend to stay kind of Amazon pure as opposed to hitting you know kind of this breaking point where maybe we really should put in our own infrastructure and it's getting really expensive to continue to kind of rent the service absolutely in RDS there was a there was a point where people were getting priced out of RDS which is more expensive than the instances underneath and at that point we had a lot of customers coming to us asking to move the new PI think they dropped most of their prices and RDS by 40% last week so it's amazing right so it gets a lot better some of the larger systems can be very significant but at this point you can get a managed database server that is fully redundant for about six thousand dollars a year and it's pretty impressive what we will find is we'll help customers manage cost one of the things people forget is you have a whole new component of infrastructure management in how do you whether it's using reserved instances spot instances auto scaling up and auto scaling down removing snapshots there's so many opportunities to manage costs that people forget about and we make sure that that happens as well so that people don't get runaway kraut runaway bills so to really find really fine-tune their their their instance at AWS or kind of cost optimize based on because there's a lot of choices right there's a lot of there's a lot of variables in an Amazon in a lot of Amazon purchase yes and there are absolutely tons of ways to save money it's essentially just another facet of automation becomes the cost management part of it and that's one of the most amazing things of Amazon is particularly for a customer that can leverage elasticity whether it's because of peak seasons retail during Christmas education during semesters any customer that can rely on the Dyna Missa tee of an Amazon can scale up can scale down can shift out and really pay when they need to pay or not pay when they don't okay so you've been doing this for a while from kind of a longer-term perspective right there's a lot of new entrants into the public cloud space really you know Google compute and you know Cisco just announced a billion-dollar initiative I think last week for their new public cloud you got HP cloud but sure there's a lot of clouds out there mmm but clearly it appears that anglin's got a giant lead I think Andy said it was their eighth year of the AWS summit what's your kind of perspective as a kind of a service provider looking at the market and trying to deliver value to your customers as to Amazon's position relative to everybody else kind of jumping in the game so at this point we predominantly work with either Amazon Google compute or Rackspace and that is where we focused we don't do a significant amount of Windows so we haven't really played too much with Azure at this point we are predominantly working with what our customers already have if it is completely Greenfield which it's pretty rare they'll bring in a service provider that early we would tend to focus on a combination of those two and that of course will depend on the strategy and the goal we don't want to over build something before they actually have the revenue and the business model supporting what they need there's a lot of options out there like anything it's a matter of managing risk and as a I am a CEO but I was a database administrator by trade and managing risk is core so I will not go to a new database release in its first year and I will not go to a new cloud and probably its first three to four years unless there's something extraordinarily compelling feature that just makes you be willing to accept a huge amount of risk right okay so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about we're here at Percona live shows growing I think he said it's his tenth year of the show why is this important event what's the what's the feeling you're getting here at the show from the community so I started coming to these back when they was in our Riley show when it was the O'Reilly of MySQL conference versus percona who took it over open source is a huge deal and it still is extraordinarily relevant I believe very firmly that open source technology and the access to code the access to tech and to software and the access to open source education is what's going to help us get into the next level of the technological workforce at this point I'm not sure you probably know the numbers since I know you do this more than me but even in Silicon Valley there are 300,000 Latino families who don't have access to computers and internet so any any come any organization like percona liven like MySQL that is based on open source needs to be supported because that is going to be what helps a child in Kenya solve cancer figure out cancer and get us to the next level so that's why I come out here yeah we support closed source databases too but wherever possible we're going to come support an open source product so let's shift gears again cuz I know you're passionate about diversity in tech and you've talked about some of the digital divide you know with with families and people having access to the to the tools and then of course the education and and and the focus on stem we're big fans of women in tech and diversity in tech all of us have we don't have a lot of women hosts but we all have a lot of daughters yeah we're pretty passionate about it and growing up here in the heart of the valley clearly girls need to learn how to code mom so can you talk about some of the things that you get involved with to support that effort in terms of diversity in tech absolutely one one amazing incident actually is at percona live last year they did not have a code of conduct and we had a bit of an issue and some there was a some conversations had and this year we're gonna live now has a code of conduct which helps women come out and feel like there's a clearly written statement that they will not be harassed they will not be intimidated that they are welcome and that is a huge step in and of itself and it was really an issue last year in the year 20 2013 there always is there always is it's amazing when you actually start looking at women speaking out about harassment and you know even abuse at conferences how it quickly devolves into them being attacked stalked harassed it's pretty radical so I was very happy that rakonin took that on and got that in place I was on the content committee for this conference and I was in the beginning there were only about five five proposals out of 400 from women and they were really very nice about helping me extend it and get out there and get more women presenting at the conference here which is great I'm speaking at a bright role hosted data-driven Women events in about a month and wherever I can getting out there at the ghats he just invited me to code his craft to talk about that at their meetups as well good that's he's an amazing organization for bringing women into tap good it seems to be getting more exposure so just a shot out four we've got a great women in tech playlist of women in tech that have been on the cube if you go to Silicon angle dot TV look under playlist women in tech I think we just looked before we came on there we have 97 women of all roles responsibilities seniority size of companies who've been on the cube and you'll be joining that list shortly X so we're big fans and and it's it's it is amazing in 2014 that this is still an issue but we do see more and more at these conferences that there's often you know kind of a women in tech launch track or special networking event or or thanks to really encourage two women to be not only involved but really kind of take a leadership position we saw that back with at EMC world last year with Sheryl Sandberg as well so that's that's great so what's kind of next you've been doing this a long time you've been involving this community a while what's kind of the next big hill to take in terms of the micing community well right now for us it's DevOps and I don't know if you're familiar with it but near this culture of bringing the development operations teams together as we have more infrastructure as code as we get to a point where you cannot compete if you cannot continually push code out push change out that's where we reached and with every customer we're working on we're pushing development velocity getting them to have you know the ability to push code out as fat as rapidly as they won and as safely as they want we just announced today an open-source toolkit for continuous delivery for databases that is starting with MySQL and we feel like that's going to be the next step big data of course is there we are in the middle of ramping up a cassandra team which is a very good addition in the data ecosystem to a relational system like like MySQL and the demand for it is insane so we're very excited to have just brought on our second full time experience because Andre DBA and a building that out as well so in the clients right there's a lot of huge trends right now there's there's kind of mobile first right it was to recently get the mobile first as a driver there's the DevOps culture and and agile software development you know just get stuff out in this this continual pace of improvements and bug fixes and rolling and then and then finally the data first mm-hmm which is kind of the newer trend within your clients of those three things what's really the the primary driver if you had to pick one of the three I will answer that in a way that doesn't answer your question but that happens often excellent right now I believe it's DevOps in a few years and no one will know what that is anymore it will be ubiquitous it is an opportunity right now and then it's going to be data at this point you know we're in the cloud environment and it is the next revolution this virtualized environment infrastructure as a utility just like the electrical and industrial revolutions but data really is a big data and you know how does how to get the data in right now we're in the basics how do you get all of that data in there how do you keep it available how do you manage these huge forms of data but soon it will be about the machine learning and the continued evolution of pulling insights from it and that's what we're gonna be seeing awesome Elaine thanks for coming on the cube Thank You V been here with Len Campbell the CEO and co-founder of Blackbird we're at percona live 2014 Santa Clara California you're watching the cube we go out to the events extract the signal from the noise get the smartest people that we can find in the room bring them on the cube ask them the questions you'd like to ask them so thanks for staying with us we'll be back after this short break with our next guest