(upbeat music) >> Man: From San Francisco it's theCUBE covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020 (upbeat music) brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Francisco. It is absolutely beautiful outside. Sun is going down, we're here for a really special event, It's the Accenture Tech Vision, kind of unveiling of the five things that we should be paying attention to as we look to 2020 the year that we're going to know everything with the benefit of hindsight. So it's pretty exciting, it's pretty exciting time. And we have a new guest, Mike Redding, he's the managing director of Accenture Ventures telling us where the Accenture Ventures plays in all this stuff, so Mike, well, welcome. >> Well, thanks for having me, I'm really excited to be here. It's a big day here at Accenture with the launch of the 2020 tech vision. You know, and one of the key trends is about innovation DNA, which is really saying, how does an organization connect to the external ecosystems to systematically and scalably and sustainably innovate? And that's part of the role of Accenture Ventures. >> Well, it's an interesting play, right? Because unfortunately Clayton Christensen just passed away, my favorite business writer ever. And the whole innovator's dilemma is that smart people working at big companies making sound business decisions based on revenue and their customers will always miss this continuous change. So really you need some other things to help motivate that. And that's really piece that you guys play. >> Right, exactly cause what, you know, we're a bridge builder between those highly successful large enterprises, which are big, they're slow and they're risk adverse, and the startups, which are small, fast and nothing but risk. And so for us, the role of Accenture and Accenture ventures as being part of that innovation DNA is to say, let's make a bridge, let's figure out how the elephant can dance. And as a result, not get caught up in those disruptions, but in fact leverage them to propel those big enterprises forward. >> Right, now you guys invest in all types of areas, Ais, looking through the portfolio, security, big data, I love this Industry X Dot O, what is Industry X Dot O? >> Well, so, you know, a lot of places talk about industry 4.0 but we're like, why put it, you know, X dot O, is make it a variable? five point O, six point O, which makes it evergreen. Which says, every industry on the planet is going through a transformation, you know, powered by AI, powered by all those areas you mentioned. And as a result, we want to make sure that whatever the future of any industry is, Accenture is part of it and we're bringing in the startups and of course the big technology players that are going to be the fundamental players making that transformation possible. >> Right, there's so much synergy, right? Because for the little guys, right? They've got all the juice behind the innovation and the really smart people and they're kind of breaking things and moving fast, but the challenges there are scale and a sales force and marketing and reach and distribution and all these things that are not too hard for the big guys. >> Right, and so that's why it's a marriage made heaven, right? Again, if you can bring, I always like to say the analogy of you've got the aircraft carrier and then you have all the battleships and the PT boats circling around it, that's a battle group. And so that's what we really see as the opportunity is to bring what each strength, the strength of that disruption and passion and energy and capital to marry to market scale and data and customer base, right? Put those things together, unstoppable force? >> How do the enterprises, you know, kind of view it, do they, obviously they see the value, you wouldn't be doing what you're doing, but is that something that's attracted to them? Is it too disruptive to them? How do they try to work these little startups? Cause (laughs) the other thing, right? Is always vendor viability when you're a little startup doing business with a big company and they can kill you with meetings and there's all kinds of, you know, kind of interesting things that can happen to screw that up. >> Well you're right on and so that's part of where, you know, Accenture comes in as that broker, that bridge maker, because we help each other find how to match up, how not to crush the little guy with infinite meetings, you know, in an enterprise, you know, six months is quick, in a startup, that's a funding cycle, right? And so we've got to find a way to meet each other in the middle and as a result, get the strength of each, but pointed in the same direction and really, you know, become really good dance partners. And that's what we really think any organization, cause they know they need to do it, they know they want to do it, they just don't know how. And that's the gap we help fill. >> And then how do you find your investments? Are you partnering with other venture firms? How are you kind of out prospecting for new opportunities? >> Well, so for us, since we're a corporate strategic, we're really focused on the future of our client's business, the future of the marketplace. And so for us, it's a network game. It's, you know, it's everything from what the corporate venture units at our clients are up to where they're seeing strategic bets. Of course, we're the VC, you know, of Sand Hill Road, of Tel Aviv, of Shenzhen and Shanghai, you know, Bangalore, you know, there's so many great venture capital communities. We love the syndicate, we love friends because we, you know, a financial VC will bring their discipline and we'll bring Accenture's discipline and that's a combo pack that one plus one is three. >> Right, so I want to get your take, you've been in this for a while -- >> Oh, yeah. and one of the themes that we hear over and over, right, is the acceleration of accelerating pace of technology innovation, right? And this exponential curve and people have a hard time with exponential curves, we like linear curves. But it's getting steeper and steeper and steeper. So you know, from your kind of cap bird seed, as you've watched the evolution, do you see, you know, kind of, is this the only way for the enterprises to keep ahead of these things? Is it just an augment? Is it more important than it used to be? How has the landscape kind of changing as this acceleration just keeps going and going and going? >> Well, I think that the era of build it all yourself vertically integrate it So, you know, start to finish, soup to nuts yourself, you can't do it, right? If you're a large incumbent and, but also if you think about this way, and I would talk to audience especially, you know, business audience and say, "Who's got enough budget?" Nobody, there's no such thing as enough budget, the government doesn't have enough budget, right? Nobody does, but if you partner, you can leverage other people's money, their investment cycles, and as a result, for every dollar you have, you can get multiple dollars of leverage. And as a result, no matter how fast it's going, because of the Public Clouds, because of the big software players, you can get so much further. So even though things are moving faster, what you can leverage to adapt to that change is more powerful than ever before. So the good news is the rate of change is fast, but you're not starting from dead stop. You're jumping on a moving train and going where it's going and putting your own business spin on it. >> Right, the other piece is kind of the disruptive speeds. It's funny you mentioned Amazon just, you know, watch a lot of great interviews with Bezos. One of them, he talks about AWS having, you know, a seven-year uninterrupted headstart because no one down the road in Redwood shores or Philadelphia or Waldorf was really paying attention to the little bookseller up in Seattle as a competitor for enterprise infrastructure. So you know that which is going to get you is often not the competitors that you're benchmarking against. It's not the same people that you've been competing with but can completely come out of left field. >> Well, and so that again, is why we really believe passionately that with this future, the next few years, those enterprises that have an innovation DNA that get out of their foxhole and don't just look at your bank, don't just look at FinTech, look at all tech and thanks to this thing called the internet. It's really possible, and language translation, even if you don't speak Chinese, you can get a sense of what's happening in China, where you can call a friend like Accenture and we can hook you up. And regardless of the fact is you can now, if you cast that wide net, if you challenge yourself to get out of that Foxhole and look around, well then suddenly you can't be surprised. You can see it coming and you can then use your superpowers, which is incumbency, scale, balance sheet, customer base, you know, loyalty, all those things that you brand, all the things that make you strong, you can now append that disruption to it and basically, not get disrupted. So I think that's, that's the formula for going forward. >> Yeah, well, I love the one plus one makes three formula cause it really is kind of a match made in heaven really bringing together two sets of strengths that the other person or the other party doesn't really have. So you guys been at it for awhile and continued success. >> Well, thank you very much. All right. Well, Mike, thanks for taking a minute. He's Mike, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. With the Accenture Tech Vision launch 2020. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services Intel and their ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent here at the Venetian in Las Vegas I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host Dave Volante Rebecca we work together this week and I'm excited for our next guest he is an esteemed cube alum Harish Venkat vice president global sales enablement and marketing at Veritas technologies welcome back to the Q thank you very much thank you see you Gary good to see you David so you've been to this is not your first rodeo you know many AWS reinvents what are you hearing what what are you hearing on the ground from your customers what trends are you seeing what most excites you yeah first of all that's great to be part of reinvent you know love the buzz here it's very electrifying and we're very happy about our partnership with AWS and we're very happy about the sponsorship for reinvent as well if there are any skeptics out there who's still thinking cloud is still a fashion statement they really need to reassess their statement because proud is in full effect for both computer and storage the other trend that I'm seeing is globalization is in full effect ideas are flowing swiftly and freely through the borders and then when you think about technology technology is very exciting the global GDP is what about 79 trillion IT spend about four trillion but it's interesting to see the four trillion sort of fueling the growth for the 79 trillion I also think AI machine learning deep learning all of this is going to reshape not only the software industry but I think it's going to reshape the way we live our lives and the last thing I'll say is data hands down as the new currency for enterprise right exactly we keep hearing this data is the new oil data is the it is the currency it's even more valuable I got our take on this okay so I can take a quarter oil and/or a gallon oil I can put it in my house or I can put it in my car I can't do both with that same resource data it doesn't follow the laws of scarcity I can use that same data from multiple use cases so by premises it's more valuable than oil what do you think I think the versatility of data is not the same as oil oil has very limited purpose and I think it's important and we are all dependent on it but data is so meaningful the amount of insights you can get it provides you a competitive edge in the industry it is unbeatable so yeah oil not say mono reefs I've had the pleasure of doing a couple of Veritas solution days yes I did Veritas vision last year you guys have broken that up into multiple cities this year I did New York and Chicago just at ease with the last 30 to 45 days yeah had some great conversations with customers some Veritas execs the conversation was obviously heavy kool-aid injection of Veritas technology your roadmap your vision really really detailed stuff obviously a cloud was a piece of that the conversations here I'm sure a much more cloud oriented now can you talk about the discussions that you're having the focus that you have on cloud generally in AWS specifically yeah sure look I mean data is growing year over year and and customers are still trying to figure out how to manage the data how am I going to work out the economics of this by leveraging cloud and this is not an easy equation to solve by no means and this is where Veritas and cloud service providers like AWS are really taking the market leadership role and then figuring out how do we leverage the entire data landscape if you will so before you even think of cloud the first thing you want to know is where does my data reside and what type of data do I have so Veritas is able to provide that visibility of data classification of data we provide immense amount of deduplication ratio which helps with the economics of this ratio this equation so I think we provide an end to solution from visibility classification deduplication even helping new application and data to the cloud and the partnership with AWS is really enabling customers to solve that conundrum that you're talking so I want to double click on this you know so as a as a as a person who understands backup and recovery deeply as a working for a company that's that's their business and of course you're extending beyond backup and I understand that but you know snapshots replication that's not backup in recovery so when I see something like outpost outpost is this on Prem infrastructure appliance that AWS is bringing as part of its hybrid strategy I want to know how is that gonna be protected now of course they'll talk about the way in which they protect it but a company like yours has a different philosophy your recovery is everything the whole data management approach how do you guys think about data management and data protection you know beyond snapshots or beyond just replication can you explain that yeah so I think the best way to explain that would be to talk about a customer use case great and while several customers come to mind I want to talk about see IMC I think it's a perfect embodiment of all the business use cases that we've been discussing so far ok see IMC is China International Marine container and they've been in business since 1980 you know employ about 51,000 based out of Shenzhen in in in China and they started their digital transformation in 2017 and what they're trying to do is really achieve three things one move all of their business application to the cloud starting with their strategic ERP in this case it was s AP and s AP Hana and the other thing is because they've been around since 1980s a lot of their processes are outdated it's very manual and they had a lot of dependency on tape as part of their backup and recovery so they want to modernize but they want to modernize that piece of it and then the last thing is they wanted a state-of-the-art disaster recovery which is also required by the local compliance laws in China where it doesn't matter where your business application is running they needed a copy of data on Prem so they evaluated all the different vendors market and clearly they chose Veritas as well as AWS to solve that business problem why why did they choose you guys yeah so you know obviously Veritas is number one in data protection 15 years in a row we got more than 50 thousand customers 96 percent of Fortune 100 trust their data with us but more importantly I think it's the partnership with AWS that really helped solve this problem and let me tell you how they did it I think that's important so the first thing they did is they launched an instance of net backup in AWS you know gone are the days where you're completely dependent on purpose-built appliance people are switching over to virtual appliance and they were able to do that by the partnership with Veritas and AWS so an instance in AWS leveraging s3 for the immediate server two days after the data they moved on s3 data over to s3 ia and eventually to glacier you know obviously Andy Jessee has been talking quite a bit in terms of increased throughput from s3 to glacier which is going to help this cause and then when you when you think about how customers are dealing with the transition to the cloud not everyone's ever going to move there all of their application to the cloud it's going to be a journey with time but what that creates in a customer environment is you got critical data in the cloud critical data on prem and they're looking at one data protection solution for both on prem and cloud and this is where Veritas net back really comes and that backup really comes in well I want to ask a little bit about that journey because as you said they don't have everything in the cloud so how has Veritas and any available AWS this sort of three-way partnership how are you how does that work I mean our user hand-holding them are you is it a co-creative process can you can you riff on that a little bit yeah sure so you know just like any of their lines we start off with the technical alliance we want to make sure that whatever use case that we're going to the market and all of those use cases are really coming from customers we understand customer challenges we work with different companies and cloud service providers in this case AWS to make sure that the solution that we take to the market is complete there's absolutely no hiccups we got professional services to help them to mitigate the risk factors and to considerations that most customers are thinking about one is costs another one is performance and thanks to net backup a IR or auto image replicator you know we are able to take a 2/3 of the network bandwidth out so you can achieve all of that performance with one third the network we got incredible deduplication ratio the storage cost as a result as 50 times less than what you would get and so back to the to consideration factor performance and cost we're able to do that in collaboration with AWS so I wonder we could talk about multi cloud or poly cloud as we sometimes call it so you can infer from listening to AWS that it really is better off having a one cloud strategy but as we know oh you say you talk to customers there's no one customer cloud strategy the customers are made up of there's like the government there's multiple constituencies in the company and shadow IT and so there's multi clouds you don't care whether it's one cloud a moment about you're there to protect it but I'm interested in what years you're seeing so what are you seeing and how are you because we we know it's not more than it's more than just one it's not just on Prem in one cloud how are you approaching that problem talk about customers and what their kind of roadmap looks like in their strategic plans and where you fit yeah so back to your point I don't think we'll ever see just one cloud the dependency on just one cloud is not happening we're seeing multiple clouds we're seeing hybrid clouds obviously you know Azure stack is coming up with their own version and so is AWS and in a customer's environment you are seeing that now there's also talks about are we going to see cloud to cloud movement cloud to cloud disaster recovery I am not seeing that at all I think the economics of cloud to cloud move over our failover is just too expensive so I think we're still seeing physical to cloud cloud back to physical and then one physical to another cloud I don't see a whole lot of cloud movement so where Veritas really comes in as our ability to provide that disaster recovery both from physical to physical protect your data in the same assured way on Prem as well as the cloud allowing you to leverage the cloud as a disaster recovery mechanism in fact I was having breakfast with Bell media this morning and they have two sides in Canada that they're using disaster recovery and they're wanting to leverage cloud and he's super excited about net backup eight one two cloud catalyst you know ability to leverage cloud as the disaster recovery and with our VRP was just Veritas resiliency platform to achieve that so a culmination of all of that hopefully answers their question absolutely and I think that's right on you had referenced earlier in your commentary Harish that you see some major changes coming for the software industry and we were we were talking to Jerry Chen the other day from Greylock in a really sharp former VMware now he's you know VC so he sees a lot of stuff and he put forth the premise that everything's changing in software development as a software company I wonder if you could you could comment that Amazon is essentially giving all these this tooling to create new software apps but as a software player how do you guys look at that how are you modernizing you know your platform and what do you see is the outcome yeah so you know it's interesting you talked about VSD in New York obviously and I spoke about it and when I talked about two things over there which was really ease of use and simplicity and and that's really where the customers are gravitating we have to make sure that any platform in the software industry has the 3.click to value mantra built in you can't be having the green screens anymore so Veritas has taken the same approach we're really looking at ease of use and simplicity and three clicks to value so that's a big trend you know I talked about AI and machine learning and deep learning you know gone are the days where everyone is reacting to something now it's all predictive analytics how do I garner more information so we're building AI and machine learning into our platform where if there's an outage we're going to tell you beforehand some of the reasons before or beforehand into some of the reasons behind it and that way you can address it and not be a subject to a reactive catastrophe so I think those are two big things that I'm seeing in the software-defined storage and the second thing is just an overall ecosystem right so it's not just about standalone value but how do you collaborate with the rest of the software providers to build a bigger and better solutions as an example our relationship with AWS is speaking very highly of that we're solving bigger and better problems as a result of this we just announced our alliance with pure storage with their data hub architecture we're able to do you know data protection with IOT s which is again another trend in the marketplace where we can share protect and collaborate with pure data as well well let's talk with the edge in terms of data protection for the edge how'd how does the edge IOT how does that affect customers data protection strategies and what's Veritas is angle there yeah so you know I mentioned this in in Microsoft ignite because Satya had mentioned this in his keynote saying that the edge computing there's a lot of proliferation around that and it's not just a compute fact because a lot of data has been generated in that too so how do you make sense of all of that data how do you which ones do you protect which ones do discard so Veritas has that solution which allows you to sift through all of that data figure out which one's important classify that and then help you provide data protection for the edge computing I'm thinking about yesterday's keynote with Andy Jesse a dizzying number of announcements of new products and services new innovations and it's and this is really de rigueur at an AWS reinvent is this is this pace sustainable I mean this this constant innovation I mean is that sustainable what are you you know it's interesting you asked me that question because it's the same concept of is Moore's lot going to be sustainable right so far we're seeing that it is and as a result you're seeing all these madness around innovation you know driverless cars and you know journey to the another planet in a I and and ml and full effect and all of this is going to reshape our future so far I'm not seeing any signs of slowing down as long as Moore's law is going to keep up with its multiplier effect I think we'll see better better lifestyle and more and more innovation just the amount of patents that we're seeing with new startups it's just off the charts so I'm a big proponent of innovation and I think this will this will continue going on well I think if I could comment I think Moore's Law in many ways was was one-dimensional I mean you had the doubling of you know performance every 18 months whatever it is now you have this multi-dimensional innovation combination Moore's Law fine but you've got data you've got machine intelligence applied to that data and you've got the cloud at scale so this you have this combinatorial effect that has multiplicative effects on innovation so that our argument is the curve is actually bending you know into a nonlinear and it's mind-boggling there's big pace of innovation you certainly see that here from from Amazon it seems to be accelerating and it's it's underscored by the number of announcements that this company is making others trying to keep pace them forcing their customers to keep pace it's him it actually feels like it's it's speeding up not decelerating without a doubt and I think it depends on the type of company you're talking about if you're a startup company you know and have any of the legacy things that you're talking about you're spending all of your IT spent on innovation you look at a classy IT spend equation 85% of it just to keep the lights on and less than 10% on innovation I think that is mind-boggling to me and that's why some of these new startups are constantly challenging you know fortune 500 companies whose lifespan used to be 65 years but now at 16 years and it's constantly getting down because of this effect as well and I think that's a great point if if you're stuck in that 85% technical debt world and you don't allocate enough for innovation yeah it's it's going to be problematic and so what we see is customers looking at it as a portfolio we got run the business we have grow the business we have transformed the business we're going to deliberately allocate cash to each of those and hopefully bet on the right things yeah not a doubt I mean look at the at the end of it as a result of all these different phenomenons that we're talking about it is good for consumers because they're looking at more and more options better technology and those sort of fierce competition is always good for everyone as consumers as well as enterprise great well Harish thank you so much for coming on the cables my pleasure I'm Rebekah night for DES Volante we will have more of the cubes the live coverage of AWS re-invent coming up in just a little bit [Music]

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico It's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (latin music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound I'm John Furrier, your host, here covering all the action in Puerto Rico as the global society and industry come together. Our next guest is Marhall Taplits he's the Chief Strategy Officer and Co Founder of Nynja.biz, check out their site, Nynja.biz. Marshall, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you. >> So tell about what you guys do. You guys are doing some disruptive stuff, tell us about what you guys do, then it will jam into a conversation. >> Sure, so are you familiar with WeChat in China, for example? >> Yeah. >> Okay great. So I've personally been living in China 15 years, so we've watched kind of the birth of the Chinese internet, which as we know, is a little different than the regular internet. >> A lot of mobile users. >> A lot of mobile users, 800 million China mobile subscribers alone. WeChat, basically, is a platform that started off as just a messenger but basically what it's done is it's integrated into every facet of Chinese society. To give you an example, you go to a restaurant, you scan the QR code, the menu comes up, you pick the food, you pay for the food, it comes, you walk out. Everything like that is in China. Everything like that is in Wuzhen China. So what we've done is we've kind of taken this concept, and we're working on a global version of it, that's cryptocurrency based, and we are working specifically with Chinese companies in order to help them go global as part of the China One Belt One Road program and working with companies like Alibaba, what have you, in order to help Chinese companies go overseas and take what they've built in China but operate globally with cryptocurrency. >> Are you guys in China? Cause it's been hard for companies to start companies in China. So you're living in China or you're working in China? >> Yeah so because we live in Shenzhen, right next to it is Hong Kong. Hong Kong is where our company is based. Hong Kong, as you know, previous British colony, the legal system, and the financial system-- >> And you domicile in Hong Kong, that's where you're based? >> Me personally in Shenzhen, but the company is in Hong Kong. So we also have a Wyoming corporation in the US. >> That's where all the action is. >> That's right >> That's where WeChat is >> That's right >> Alibaba's got Alipay and then there's more business to business with their app. So I get that WeChat's been highly successful. In fact we have a huge following on WeChat, Sou Kanai, Niki Bond, free content. But that brings up the question of Chinese kind of showing the way with mobile expansion, so their users are heavily mobile savy. >> Marshall: That's right. >> This is pretty obvious when you think about it, but in America and around the world, that's going to translate to the new user experience. So in your opinion, how would you describe the expectations that users have? Because you're living on the front end of the wave of what mobile's doing, I mean there's a lot of gamification going on, some if it's kind of creepy, but what is your view of the expectations that users have and what's different about what's currently available in the webstac, and the 20 year old e-commerce stacks, that are out there? >> Sure, I think the most important thing is reducing friction, all right. You don't want to be using platforms where you can not do it wherever you are whenever you are, you don't want to have to go through payment processes, you don't want to have to re-authenticate yourself across whatever platforms you use. And interestingly, when I first went to China, it was all about copying what was in the west over to there, but actually it's kind of the opposite now, right, so we basically want to take this concept of the frictionless digital life, and make it a global opportunity. And especially with BlockChain and cryptocurrency you have that really as an opportunity, because if you look at all the apps that are out there, and the platforms that are out there, the only ones that have gone past a billion users, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever are the free ones. But as soon as you layer in payment, it becomes very locked. And as big as WeChat is, and as big as LINE is, but ultimately it's locked into the Rem and B system or Reo in Korea, what have you, so the cryptocurrency is really the first opportunity that the world's had to create platforms that can get up to a billion, two billion, three billion users that are able to pay. And we just think that's a once in a lifetime opportunity and we want to be part of it. >> So I got to ask you about the impact that cloud computing has had on this, obviously we've seen cloud computing destroy the data center model, allow people to get time to value faster, mobile on top, big data analytics using data, all this stuff's awesome stuff. So the question is, is that, that's kind of a horizontally disruptive view, so these stacks that are built old way where I got to own the stack end to end, yeah there's some standardization on the lower end of the stack. But now you're thinking about more of a horizontal, I got jurisdictions, I got regions, I got countries, I got sovereignty, all these things are in the melting pot of the cryptocurrency BlockChain, de-centralized applications, are major impacts to all those things. How do you see that playing out because, that's kind of what developers worry about, oh shit will this work on that chain? I got Neo I got this I got that, so the plumbing is totally a moving train right now. >> Marshall: That's right. >> But the business models are pretty obvious. So there's like a business ops thing going on. What Dev opts did for Cloud, you got this new abstraction thing going on with this world. What's your view on that, do you agree? Or what's your take? >> Yeah well you pretty much nailed it. I mean basically what's happening is over the last 10 or 15 years people have finally accepted that having your own server is kind of silly, you know, and most people now will just spin up whatever they need in terms of resources on TheCloud. But over the last couple years, you're really going more toward Edge Cloud, where the way the clouds work, is that basically it's pushing to get the least amount of latency and store the data as close to the user as possible. And then there's also regulatory in some countries now in terms of, if your users are from this country, you have to legally store the data in this area. So this is all kind of evolving. And if you look at the BlockChain technology, I think it's the payment version of that. So for example, everyone's always concerned about getting in and out of Fiat Currency, and how am I going to get back to dollars, and this and that, but I think what's going to wind up happening, is this is going to get pushed towards the edges and there will be opportunities and ways with exchanges and what have you to get in and out. But more importantly, it's going to be like, just other currencies, so for example, I live in China but I come to the US a few times a year, I also travel to Europe, I have some dollars, I have some Euros, I have some Rem and B, when I leave China, I don't immediately sell all of my Rem and B, I just keep it because at some point I'm going to need it. And I think what's going to happen in the cryptocurrency space is, especially on the larger BlockChains, like Ethereum and Neo and what have you, is people are just going to get used to keeping some of it and they're going to stop worrying about what the exact exchange rate is and how am I going to get in and out, and this and that, and they're just going to start treating it as part of their currency stack that they keep. >> Yeah as long as there's some level of stability. It's just like, I remember when I was growing up, there was no Euro, every country had their own currency. You had the French Franc, the Swiss Francs, the Deutsche Mark, Lira, etc, etc. But you're seeing that the viability of the money aspect, cause at the end of the day there's two things that we've identified in analysis, and I was talking about it last night, talked about it this morning on theCUBE, is the killer apps for BlockChain cryptocurrency, these sorts of apps is two things, money and marketplaces. >> Marshall: That's right. >> Everything else is just kind of circling around those two. >> Well there's more but certainly that's the main part of it >> Money, moving around. So the UK just announced with coin based, the Financial Conduct Authority, reading the news yesterday, has essentially said we're going to allow for the fast payment system to convert to Fiat. This is a government, the UK is a nation. This is the beginning, to your point, that if they don't get up to speed, the edge of the network will democratize them and kind of circle the wagons, if you will, so it's already happening. >> Yeah and I think what governments are starting to realize is hey guys this is just a technology and not only do you don't really have jurisdiction to control it, but also that you don't even have the technical means. So Wyoming is a good example of regulation coming into play, that just kind of accepts the presence that this now exists, right. And they're not going to try to make it something and fit it into the old way. So, and in terms of the stability of these coins, I think it is important because people want stability, but in other ways, if you don't look at the exchange rate, it's actually way more stable than the current system, and I'll give an example. In the last month or two, the prices of cryptocurrency have dropped almost 40%. Now if the stock markets and the global affects markets drop 40%, you'd have blood in the streets. But the crypto market is asset based instead of debt based and because it's so structurally sound it's able to handle these wild swings without actually collapsing the system, so in may ways, it's way more stable, and then as the market gaps and the buy in of these currencies get bigger and bigger, of course it's going to be more stable over time. >> Well I mean its stable from a fail standpoint, but a lot of emotional instability. People losing money for the first time. >> But that's just because they're-- >> That's a lot of speculation, right? >> There's a lot of speculating and then if they're down they feel like they lost but, that's life. >> People that are into the game, like you, were long on this. So what would you explain to someone, cause I have two, a lot of friends that have two schools of thought, that's a total scam, don't associate with that, to oh my god, that's the next biggest wave, lets get our surfboards out there and lets get on this, there's a multiple set coming in, it's the biggest thing we've seen, and everything in between. How do you explain it to people for the first time? >> It's just your traditional curve, there's early adopters and what have you, and if you were one of the guys buying up domaine names in the early 90s, you know some people would say I can't believe you're spending $100,000 buying up domaine names, but some of them now are worth, you know, tens of millions of dollars. But again, this is the speculatory piece of it. And there's no shortage of opportunities for speculation and I encourage everybody to speculate a little bit because what it does is it gets you a taste of the technology. And usually, when you have some money on the line, you pay more attention, so if speculation is what gets people interested, and it gets them watching it and understanding the technology and using it, then I'm all for it, but people shouldn't be speculating with money they don't have. Anything could happen in the short term. Nobody knows what's going to happen with any specific currency. But in terms of the technology itself, this is a revolution way bigger than the internet itself. This is where you're getting, not only, communications like the internet, but financing governance and all as one. Programmable money, programmable contracts, that wipes out finance, it wipes out legal, it whites out governance in many ways. So this is a huge evolution in human society, and we've termed this Open Unity actually. And so we believe that society has to reach a state of open unity in order to go into the singularity as we would envision it wanting to be, as something that's under our control. >> Yeah and I think one of the things, first of all that's a great statement, well said. I'll just kind of put some reality on that, connect the dots, is that if you look at the trajectory of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services was laughed at years ago. S3 came out, compute storage building, basic building blocks and a slew more services. What Cloud did for software developers, and what they've disrupted from a business standpoint, dev ops, it's proven. What open source has done, even going back to the old red-hat days and linux, is that now a tier one global citizen in software, you look at those two trends, you can connect that dots to what you just said. And what made Cloud great was they made application developers have access to programmable infrastructure. >> Marshall: Exactly. >> You're talking about a whole nother level of software programmability, money, marketplace, society, >> Yeah you hit it on the head. >> We're there right? >> That's exactly right, so when a programmer wants to start a business, instead of going to create an LLC, and getting their EIN Tax ID or whatever, and when they want to go into Europe, and dealing with that and then trying to open a bank account, which is almost impossible, internationally now, instead of that, you just have your SDKs and your APIs or whatever and you've got access to money, program adding, you can take money, you can move money around, globally, frictionless, permissionless, with governancy, smart contracts-- >> They might not not need an SDK dashboard, its a console, click, click, click, smart contracts, governance, turn key. >> And one of the things we're working on with Nynja in particular, is this kind of on-demand marketplace and putting together a de-centralized teams for work. And this is all driven by smart contracts. So one of the issues with the economy is the huge booms and busts that people have in the economy. And if you look at the root cause of that, my personal opinion, is that it's because of payment terms. So for example, if I do work for you, and then there's an invoice, but it's not due for 30 days, now your business may be structurally sound, but the truth is your cashflow is all over the place. With BlockChain technology, we can actually do real time payments. You could be paid minute by minute, hour by hour. Real time, program, contract. So we're going to create very flat even money flows through the entire economy globally, and we're going to just completely remove these booms and busts that are really nothing more than just cashflow issues that are compounded and compounded at a global level. >> I mean I lived through the dot com bubble, I was actually part of it on the front end, on the euphoria side, as well as on the crash. Part of the whole search paradigm, google right there. Key words, all that stuff happening, growth, massive growth. So I saw that, the scammers in there, or the bubble people, that's what we called them. But the reality is, everything happened. It was pet foods online, you could get shopping delivered to your house. So again, to your point, it's a little euphoric right now, but what's different is, is you have now, community data. See what I see happening is, it's not a major bubble crash, because self government, self governing, self governance, is a community dynamic. So I think there's going to be a lot of self healing, inside the networks themselves. You're already seeing it here, a lot of people, bad act is being identified, investors flight to quality, looking at quality deals. Interesting times, your thoughts? >> Well I mean you know, we've been through many evolutions of society, we've had surf-dom, we've had monarchies, we've had representative democracies, we have all these things, and I just think the next evolution is decentralized governance. And we don't even know what that means yet, because it's just starting, but I think we can all, if we can close our eyes and really think about it. I think it's pretty obvious what the issues are with our current system and not just the US, but globally, and I think we have an opportunity here to build in organic program governance. And what's really special about BoxChain technology is if I program it to do X, it's going to do X. So we don't need to, I don't need to know who you are to trust you. I don't need to worry about where we're going to sue each other, or we're going to have arbitration if things go wrong. We're just going to make an agreement, and we're going to program it that way, and that's it. And now the next phase is, I could build on top of that trusting that that's just going to happen. So you can create these chains of trust, and that can happen anywhere in the world. So I think this is a whole nother-- >> Sounds like a bunch of web services. >> Well in many ways, in terms of the architecture, sure you could absolutely think of it like that. >> The reusability, the leverage is amazing. All right, so I want to just end the segment Marshall, take a minute to end the segment, to talk about what you're working on, Nynja coin, Nynja, N-Y-N-J-A .biz, you guys have a product, you got a BlockChain enabled platform, you got a coin, take a minute to explain what you're working on. >> Basically we want to provide the tools and services to help people live in this new reality. So in order to basically function in the world that we're entering into, we're going to need tools that far surpass what's currently available in terms of the messengers, the web sites, all these things. We need to be operating at a level that takes communication completely frictionless, payment completely frictionless, and governance completely frictionless. And we have to put this all together, and that's what we're doing with Nynja. We're staring with a global communicator, which is basically, if you want to take WeChat, telegram, whatever, but we have about 50 additional features that really take communications to the next level. And then on top of it, creating the baseline with cryptocurrency payment, and also smart contract wizards and helping people kind of get these teams going and get paid and organize their financial life in a de-centralized way. So we're just basically going to be the next generation of these messenger type platforms with BlockChain integrated. And what you're going to see is that over the next couple years you're going to get to the first companies that are achieving not just a billion or two billion or three billion users, but paying users, and we're going to be one of the probably three to five platforms that are offering tools at the global level like this. >> And have you got an IC already or not? >> We've just started our private ICO about two weeks ago. We're getting tremendous support in Asia. Quite frankly, the US is not seeing it as much-- >> Is it a utility token or security? >> Utility Token, and I think it's really telling, interesting, coming here. It's the first time I've been doing the presenting. We spoke yesterday at the d10e and we also spoke at d10e in Korea a week or two ago, and the response is incredible. And I think the reason is because-- >> The Asian market gets it. >> Well they're already living in this world within their own confines in terms of the messenger with their payment and governance built in, so when I tell them that we're going to do this globally with crypto, immediately they get it. I'm having trouble here, especially in these five minute pitches which is ridiculous, it's like a chop shop, I don't know how to communicate the idea within this short time frame, so, what I'm looking for while we're here this week is just to find people who really want to take an hour or two or even people like yourself who want to do interviews and just kind of really talk to people and really explain-- >> Well platform is complex, a lot of pieces to it. It's a system, but the value you offer is essentially offering developers, who are building products, for tools that you've built so they can scale faster. That sounds like your value. >> That's right and although I can't say specifically, we're also working on a deal that's going to get us started with about 15 million active users on day one, so that's very exciting and we're really really excited about that. >> And the coins will be utility of measures, what? >> Sorry? >> Well your utility coins going to be measuring what, what's the main token economics that drives the-- >> For the ICO economics? >> Your Nynja Coin. >> So basically we're releasing 5 billion tokens, 45% of them will be sold. There's five cents a token, so the hard cap, by definition is about 112 million, actually we're planning to do the public sale in April, but we may cancel it or postpone it just because the private sale is going really well, but we'll see how that goes. But in terms of once it's live, this will basically be the utility token of the entire eco-system, so anybody, not just within our Nynja App or platform, but even people, I don't know if you know XMPP federation, like back in the day-- >> Yeah you know about real messaging >> If you could think of us as the next version of XMPP federation, but using cryptocurrency in order to avoid bad actors by making it very expensive to do bad things, and very cheap to do good things and globally. >> So it's like Twitter you can create a bot instantly, but if there's coins involved, you'd have to spend to get it. >> That's right and also people could spin up nodes that are basically their own Twitters and decide if those Twitters of their own, their Nynja boxes of their own, are either just internally, or you could specify specifically context or group of context-- >> We agree, that's a great way to get bad actors out because it costs them money. And it's de-centralized, there's no single spot. >> That's right, if email came out today, when cryptocurrency existed, there would be no spam. Because it would be expensive as hell to send more than a few a second, but it would still be free and for everybody generally, and you wouldn't even have spam. So we think we can do that for messaging globally. >> Great. Marshall, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, check out Nynja. Marshall Taplits is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Nynja.biz, check them out online. Check out the website, it's in Asia, bringing that culture of mobile and fast moving, real time apps, to the rest of the developers. This is theCUBE coverage in Puerto Rico for BlockChain Unbound exclusive two days of coverage. We'll be right back with more, after this short break, thanks for watching.

(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)