(upbeat electronic music) >> Voiceover: Live from New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman, who is a senior analyst at Wikibon. We are joined today by Julian Box. He is the founder and CEO of Calligo, and Shekhar Mishra, who is the director of product management here at Lenovo. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> So Julian, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about Calligo and your business challenges. >> Calligo is six years old now. We're a cloud service provider, but we do things slightly differently. We were set up with data privacy at its core, which is a little bit of a paradox for cloud, of course, because you shouldn't really care where the data is, but I believed people would care where the data was, and what laws were applicable, and who could look at the data, and so forth. Fast forward to today, and we've had Edward Snowden, and now we've got the EU GDPR, which, some people would say, is a lot tougher now because of Edward Snowden's stuff that he actually showed was going on. Interestingly, a lot of that stuff, was really focused very much on the U.S. and not really about outside the U.S. We focus very much around any organization that touches EU citizens. We have a privacy play around that. We do it just slightly differently than a standard cloud service provider. >> I do want to get into that new EU regulation you were talking about, but can you tell us a little bit about why you chose Lenovo? >> There's a lot of history there. Right back in the day, I was true blue in the '80s, coding away in the midrange, and I've always had that link with IBM. Then, through the acquisition that Lenovo did, we flowed into Lenovo, and it's been actually very, very good. Some people questioned whether that was a good move, but I saw what they'd done with the ThinkPad, and the Think Range, and the PC, and I was pretty confident it was going to carry on. We've been very happy with what we've had so far. >> Shekhar, want to bring you into the discussion. You've been talking a lot about infrastructure, things like server, storage, and networking. Bring us into how cloud fits into the Lenovo portfolio with the announcements that we've been talking about today. >> Definitely. If you really look at, not the how, but why people are moving towards having cloud structure, people like as he was talking earlier, that service provider, they're looking really for the agility and simplicity that a lot of the public cloud brings, but then, as he was talking, that a lot of the regulatory issues, SLA, security concerns really prohibit them to actually put everything on a public cloud, right? They want those benefits, but they want that at their own terms, right? The best people who can provide that is one who are able to embrace openness, play with the ecosystem, like partners, like Microsoft, Nutanix, and VMware, and also provide a very solid infrastructure, to run those things, right? We, as a company, Lenovo DCG, can offer that. Those are the key values, but also going beyond that, if you think about, cloud is really simple, but once you get it deployed and working, that is a big "if" there, right? What we have done as a strategy is to simplify this, to increase the kind of value for our customers. We promote this as a pre-integrated solution, which is really a turnkey with the simple support so customers are not running around for support or having to deploy it on their own terms, things like that. >> I would actually say, the idea of cloud is simple. Once you really get into it, it's not so simple. I've been at the Amazon re:Invent show for many years. They're adding 1,000 new features every year. That's not simple. Julian, six years? I mean, that's like multiple lifetimes since you started your company. The whole service provider marketplace has changed a lot. Can you talk about what's been changing in your business? You're involved with the Microsoft Azure Stack. How do you look at the public cloud, and that hybrid layer, and envision your role going forward? >> Yeah, it has changed a lot. If someone had asked me that we would be doing a Microsoft stack cloud-based system a few years ago, I wouldn't have thought we would be, but because of the way people perceive data now, and where it is, and where it's held, there's more and more of a demand that, "I want my data, and I want it executed "in the location, the jurisdiction that I live in." Microsoft, and Amazon, and all the other places, they can't be in every single country in the world, clearly. The scale is not there. Even for them, it's not. The Azure Stack is a way, I think, that Microsoft's going to attempt to deal with some of those challenges around actually where data is processed. That gives us an opportunity because we have a lot of clients that won't put their data into the Azure cloud because of where the Azure cloud actually is right now, but when we put it into the jurisdictions we're in, we've got a lot of people wanting to use it. The sooner we get it, the better, really. >> You look at it more from a actual, physical location more than kind of control or governance? >> No, that all goes part and parcel, but the starting point is jurisdictional position in the data. With the EU, you're either in the EU, or you're not in the EU, clearly. With the GDPR law, it's switching. It's switching to become who that person actually is. At the moment, it's all around where the data is. With the GDPR, it's more focused on the individual. The individual doesn't have to live in the EU anymore, but it's still protected by these same laws. People do care, very much so, where the data is actually going to be. Businesses don't want to be caught out either, and they have the challenges of actually processing the data, or controlling the data, as it's known. As a service provider, one of the biggest changes for us, is that we're now liable for some of the processes of what actually happens to that data. Before, it was just the client that was using it. Now, it's proportionally between the two of us. We have a role as a processor, and they have a role as a control of that data. Therefore, again, it comes down to, how do we minimize the risks? How do we ensure that we are meeting the obligations that we have under these new laws? It becomes easier if you're actually doing it in a jurisdiction that has the appropriate laws, or is physically in the EU. There's a thing called a adequacy rating that the EU give to a certain set of countries. You can apply for it. Anybody can apply for it, but only about a dozen or so countries around the world actually have it. What this gives them is the ability to be seen as being in the EU, even though you're not in the EU, from a data protection perspective. >> Companies are really fundamentally rethinking how they approach data privacy. Shekhar, how are you partnering with other companies and helping them work through this? I mean, your example with Calligo, and other companies, too, that are affected? >> That is one of the biggest challenge, if you would think about this. Not only have the companies have to think about, yes, I have to go to a cloud and have a cloud strategy, but the whole deployment model, the mindset of the companies themselves are also shifting, and they need to shift. A very simple example I'll give you, for instance. We have a very prominent educational institute. They're budget right now was allocated to build three more buildings, for instance, to accommodate the influx of new students coming in. They're now talking to us, respect to Azure Stack, that, "Should I move some of that budget "to build up an Azure Stack versus building a new building?" No one thought two years back that IT will be actually competing with the construction. It's very weird to think of that way. One of the key reasons, when you ask them, is, look, Amazon is there, but I cannot just go there. I need that flexibility, but I need it on my own terms, and that this makes sense for me. We are partnering with people like Microsoft to create those. We are doing innovations on a platform itself from the compute all the way to the networking, so as you asked earlier, we own, enter, and stack, whether it is compute, storage, or networking, we have our own IP around it, so we can really create that security across the platform. We are not trying to create an island for customers where you have to work towards the propriety solution because that's totally against the whole cloud model then. That's why we partner with Microsoft. We are partners with VMware, we are partners with Nutanix, and then other networking players also, but that helps our clients to get the best of the breed solution, the software, on a best of breed infrastructure. >> Where do you see data privacy right now? I mean, famously, Europeans and Americans look at data privacy very differently, just individually, consumers, also businesses. Edward Snowden, is he a hero, is he a villain? I mean, there's so many questions, and we're still really a society wrestling with all of this. How does Lenovo approach this? You talked about the mindset. >> From a piracy perspective, you see that, we have a very strict policy around the security and, what do you call, the real vicinity of the infrastructure itself. We do unique things inside our infrastructure itself. We control our infrastructure lineup, the manufacturing and everything. We have certain features enabled which are default, like IPv6 for instance, right? It won't let us ever go in a mode where it can be compromised in any way. We bring that into our software stack all the way from the comware. Those kind of things are helping us drive and maintain that piracy issue. >> Julian, Lenovo, of course, has a long history partnering with both Intel and with Microsoft. When I look at the first generation of Azure Stack, there's not a lot of feature differentiation. Microsoft says, "This is the configuration "you're going to offer, lock it in." So why Lenovo, in your mind? Because there's another three companies, two of which have more market share and other positions. What led you down the path of Lenovo? >> For me, it was very much the history that Lenovo and the Lenovo team that they inherited from IBM have got. They led the way when virtualization first came out. I remember when the 440 was released back in 2001, 2002, something like that, people didn't understand why it was being built. It was because they were ahead of the game. They could see that virtualization was coming. I think Lenovo has the edge from a capabilities perspective. The XClarity tool, I think it's the best management tool that's out there right now. And reliability. I've been using their technology for a very long time now, in all it's forms, and you can see why they're number one, because they genuinely hardly ever ... Literally, I can hardly think, in the last six years, we've probably replaced a couple of spinning disks. That's about it. It really is that reliable, actually. >> Julian, want to get your input. You've been looking at the Azure Stack here. Azure Pack's existed for a while. We've been talking about Azure Stack for a couple of years. This'll be a 1.0 release. What does it mean for your business and your customers? Are there things that you're looking at beyond the 1.0 that will expand it even further? >> Yeah, clearly, on the first version, it's not going to have every single feature that you want it to have, but it will have a lot of the things that our clients are calling for right now. I'm speaking to them right now, and they're prepared to wait for the extra features to come along. Right now, they can't get any of it, so we're giving them a big chunk of it, and they will take the extra features as they come along. As to the point you mentioned a little bit earlier about, it is what we're given, that's true, but people want it to be exactly the same as the big one. We don't care that it's not exactly the same. That said, it will be deployed alongside our standard infrastructure and server offering, which we call CloudCore, and again, it's all Lenovo equipment, not just the Azure Stack. We're 100% Flash. We guarantee any workload. We do things very, very slightly differently in a lot of cases, and you combine these two technologies because clearly, the Azure Stack does stuff that CloudCore doesn't, and CloudCore can do stuff that Azure doesn't do, so we actually think we can give a combination there that you wouldn't typically be able to get. Of course, they're right next to each other running at super high speeds, and not different clouds going across much slower high latency links. Lots and lots of positive stuff. >> Shekhar, from your standpoint in product development, what excites you the most about Azure Stack, and what your customers expect today, and what you see in the future from Lenovo? >> You asked a question that, that it's fixed, and is that a constraint? Actually, my view, I feel that, other than minor tweaks, customers actually don't want a lot of variations because that actually simplifies an environment, right? Today, there's a lot of overhead and management. What my group is really focused on is not about so much on what infrastructure layer. It's more about what the end to end solution is, and not just from a point product, but how the customer is consuming in the entire life cycle of it. All the way from when they start thinking about Azure Stack, for instance, how do you make sure that what kind of data is right on Azure and what is not? How do you make sure that, how much of Azure do they really need? How do they make sure that it's going to audit and ship promptly? And then they can deploy it. By the way, once you deploy it, how am I going to maintain it, right? Our onsite professional go and train them. Then, once you have it deployed, how do I do ongoing management? I'm going to have issues. Who is going to help me? Because this is now built with multiple things. We think of all those entrance consumption, and that's what the whole motivation around ThinkAjile is, to make all of that simplified for our clients, all the way from deployment, to support, to management, and things like that. >> Great point on the consistency because, if you ask any customer, "What version of Azure are you running?" they'll laugh at you 'cause Microsoft takes care of that, and you would want the customer environment to be similar. >> For us, the fact that they're actually going to come and commission it for us is one less thing I have to organize, I have to resource. Literally, the rack turns up, they do the commission, and give us two cables to plug into our core switches, and away we go. The time to delivery is far quicker for us. As we want to roll these out quite quickly around the globe, with everything else that we are up to at the moment, that's another massive plus for us. We actually like the fact that it's coming in this set form, and these guys are going to look after it for us at that lower level, and we're operating, run it with our clients, and that, again, is huge benefit for us. >> Julian, Shekhar, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. >> [Julian And Shekhar] Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Lenovo Transform after this. (upbeat electronic music)