>> Live, from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2.0. Brought to you by, Lenovo. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Lenovo Transform, here in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We have two guests here on this segment, We have Kirk Skaugen, he is the president of Lenovo Data Center Group, and Brad Anderson, the Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Mobility for NetApp. Thanks for coming on the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> So the big news of the day, the NetApp Lenovo partnership, explain to our viewers exactly what this means. These are two global powerhouses joining forces. >> Yeah sure, so I think Lenovo has had an amazing year. Last year in our Transform 1.0 we announced the largest server portfolio in our history. And this year we announced the largest data center, data management storage portfolio in our history. With a partnership with NetApp, so we're creating a multi-billion dollar global alliance, a multi-year alliance and it has a place in a joint venture in China as well as we'll be distributing NetApp products in over 160 countries in the world. >> So tell us about the background to this partnership. How did it come about? >> Well, you know, for NetApp we were looking for expanding our reach, and there was two markets that were kind of underserved in. One being kind of the commercial SMB SME channel, and Lenovo has a high-velocity channel there, a strong position. So Lenovo made complete sense in that space as well as in China, where we have a strong brand but we're underserved there as well, so who is better in China than Lenovo? So for us this is all about global market and then the fact that they're a server vendor is just icing on the cake, because the other two server vendors in the marketplace are also our competitors. And then, Lenovo is so much more compatible and complementary to our entire business. >> Kirk, maybe you could spend a little more, because when you look at storage today, storage is really built on servers. You know, NetApp is, you know, at it's heart a software company, even back in the day NetApp was never, some of the other storage companies spent a lot of time and money on the hardware pieces. And of course had reliable, good, trustable hardware, but maybe explain how much, kind of, I.P. goes into this partnership. >> Yeah, sure. So I think today we have about 15 percent coverage of the overall storage market within Lenovo. We've grown our flash array business over 100 percent over the last four quarters. IDC had us at 30% quarter to quarter growth. So we've done well, but we've only cover 15% of the market. After this announcement, and shipping now today, we'll cover over 90% of the market in more than 160 countries. So we're using our global supply chain which is ranked number five in the world by Garner. Manufacturing in Europe, in China, in Mexico et cetera. Really expand this out through our channel partnership program. And in China we're taking a very unique approach to this joint venture. This isn't about taking global products and just trying to force fit them into China. China has unique software solutions, unique hyper scale requirements. So we're pooling our R and D there. Lenovo will be a 51% owner, NetApp a 49% owner. Brad's going to be on the board and there we're going to be delivering products in China for China. >> Yeah, is it, you've got a lot of experience with that. You talk about coming in the future there's an NFV software and hardware solution in China, so Lenovo has some experience doing this kind of engagement, you know. >> Yeah, I think we have a more than 50% growth now, year on year in China. We retooled a lot of the operations that we had there. We have a really nice, broad portfolio now since we launched Think System and Think Agile so it's a nice place to grow on. But today we talked about the joint venture with NetApp and also the fact that over the next year we'll be building out a telecom NFV company after having China Mobile and China Telecom with us as at Mobile World Congress. As well as new edge gateway and edge server solutions. >> Brad, I know cloud is in your title for what you are doing, when I hear NetApp talking, I see NetApp at all the cloud shows we go to. It's a very different world than when I think about NetApp ten years or twenty years ago as like, you know, the Nas Filer company. So bring us up to speed of kind of the NetApp today the momentum and what this brings. >> Yeah, I mean we are going through our own transformation where we were principally a storage company and now we want to be a data company, and increasingly to be a data company you got to be a cloud company. And so, we continue to develop what we think are the, you know, the best storage products in the world, but they are all cloud connected. 'Cause we want data to be able to flow from prim to cloud and customers be able to, you know. That's what really kind of fuels these digital enterprises is that data is the new oil. And so in doing that we have kind of expanded NetApp's charter significantly to being the data authority in hybrid cloud. Hybrid being both the private and the public. And so part of my business is really focused on providing products and solutions so customers can have the same experience in building their own private clouds that they enjoy in the public. And then on the public side we have partnerships with all the hyper scalers to put NetApp's in there so they can deliver native cloud data services. And so, this is a very different company where we're getting more and more cloudy every day. (Rebecca laughs). And that's part of our transformation intentionally. >> So, the transformation, it's the theme of this conference and you were up on the main stage talking about Lenovo's turning this corner and really accelerating its growth, and also talking about the transformation from within the company. Changing the look of the leadership team in particular. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about that strategy. >> Sure, so we acquired the IBM system X business in late 2014 and we did some things really well and we did some things that we've learned from. So we spent, you know, basically the last 18 months transforming the whole company. New channel programs, new system integrator partnerships, new training certifying over 11,000 people in the world now. Tripling the number of our solution recipes. And we have transformed The management team as well. We have replaced about 19 executives because we wanted the right balance of external and internal perspectives from our competitors as well as from ex-Lenovo and ex-IBM employees. So we feel like we have a very customer-centric organization now and, again, Gardner now is saying we are growing 49% year on year in units, IDC said we are growing 87% year on year in revenues. So I think customers are responding to the new product line. Over the last year the Think System brand truly meant the highest customer performance, the highest reliability, the highest customer satisfaction. And as a result it does take a while to transform. And I think that over the last 12 months you've seen that and we're exponentially growing now as a company. >> And you see it in your results. I mean, they are outstanding. >> So Brad, bring us inside the products a little bit. So we've got, it's the Think System DE and DM. Of course the storage industry very much, they need to trust it, they need to understand it. Gives little to understand, I believe DE maybe has something to do with the >> The E series >> The E series there and tell us the DM series, what's underneath there and how do people understand what's different and what's the same. >> Yeah, I mean the. We're taking platforms across our E series, our FAS and our all flash arrays. So the DE corresponds to the E series. The DM will have our FAS products as well as our all flash array products in there. So that's kind of the mapping. We're putting initially I think, ten products in there. We have the capacity to expand and I'm sure we're going to learn a lot because these are serving markets that NetApp doesn't typically serve. So I think not only is this going to give Lenovo the tools to compete, it's going to give us a lot of information to even build better products, better solutions for both NetApp and our Lenovo customers. So we're super excited about that. The second thing is, it's OnTab, it's the same core software, and all the value and performance testing and validation you get with NetApp. That all goes into the Lenovo branded products as well. And we have made it one of our hallmarks is our data fabric. All of the data services that are on top of this that you can move data and manage data between platforms, that is really important for the NetApp customer. All those values extend to the Lenovo customer. So if they also have NetApp in their environment, or vice-versa, they can share or move data between both those platforms. So that's, nowhere else in the industry is that possible across vendors let alone within. >> So how does it work when you are in the product development process. Two companies, both relentlessly focused on customers. This is part of your culture, part of your DNA. So how do you work together in terms of innovating and collaborating. >> Well, I think the first thing is you just look at the core business: our server business and NetApp branded storage, or Lenovo branded storage based on NetApp's portfolio. We're going to have a better together solution. So the first thing we're looking at is a set of solution recipes so that when you use NetApp and Lenovo together, you're going to get a better experience as a customer base. So that's why I am excited today. We've launched three times as many engineered solutions as we did a year ago. And trained these 11,000 people because we have a very solution oriented sales force and a very complementary channel. From a development perspective, we're going to be building X Clarity management into our portfolio. So the same systems management software that is mission critical for Lenovo server products will now manage the big system DE and DM products. So it's a very familiar management interface for customers, there's an engineering effort gone with that. And then on service and support, we're going to use over 10,000 people around the world that Lenovo has to go service and support these products. So we can deliver a premium customer experience. Whether you're buying the server or the storage. And back to the customer base: we're going to, especially in China, have deep engineering collaborations. Where we're walking into those customer bases and asking what's unique about the China market. >> And, and. It really helps that the two companies are very complementary. So NetApp has deep storage expertise, Lenovo has tremendous compute expertise. So they are very complementary and as customers want more and more complete solutions, we are learning, our engineers are learning from each other and it doesn't hurt the fact that we have a large engineering. We NetApp, have a large engineering population in the research triangle where Kirk's people are at. >> That's right. We're probably one kilometer away from each other in research triangle park. >> Geography matters, location location location. >> No, and our two support organizations are next door as well. So I think that proximity will only contribute to the collaboration. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Alright, so the storage industry actually has a relatively good track record of some deep, long partnerships. NetApp has had a number of them over the years. Tell us, what does success look like if we look back three years from now, what's this partnership. >> Well, what we said publicly is we plan to have a multi-billion dollar, multi-year alliance. So that's going to be fantastic as we grow in over 160 countries. We're going to use Lenovo's extensive supply chain network. So you know as one of the largest kind of procurers of componentry and things around the world, we get to leverage this global factory network to build even more value into that situation. And in China specifically, we've set a goal of being a top three storage player. So we both have probably single digit share in China but together with this collaboration we are setting sights quite high to be in the top three over the next several years. >> I think that's exactly right and I think those are all achievable goals. But right now, we want to get out the gate fast. I mean this is a partnership with two companies with a lot of momentum and I see this as a huge opportunity for both our companies to kind of amplify that momentum near term. And so while there's a lot of excitement on the future, I think success is going to look like, you know, some very exciting results that Kirk can share at Transform 3.0 next year. >> That's right. And for our customer base, we have already gone into production. Taking orders, as of today and tons of engineering, tons of manufacturing development. So we'll have a whole host of seed units and early access units. Our customers can get their hands on this stuff right away and start testing it in their environment. >> As you said, it is an audacious vision. You announced an audacious vision last year, you did another one again this year. So when you think about what you want to be talking about next year. You said what success looks like. What are some other things that you're working on? You said, this is a process, Lenovo has turned the corner and it's got a lot of momentum. But what else are you, what else do you have on tap that you're... >> Well, if we tell all of you that, (Rebecca laughs) we won't have this here next year. >> Yeah >> But I think today is about entry and midrange. About expanding Lenovo's breadth from 15 to 90% of the market and being very aggressive against our top competitors that have a combined server storage portfolio. And I think as I've gone around the world, I've been in Latin America, in India, our channel partners are incredibly excited about this. So I think while other customers might be taking business more direct, we've traditionally been very channel-centric. So, I've seen a lot of pull for choice in the market and I think that's what we're going to deliver to our channel partners. But we will have a lot more in store, that I can promise you. This is phase one of a multi-phase, multi-year plan. >> I think there's a lot of things, there's a lot of possibilities on the product development side and how we can do better products, but I think a lot of success is going to look, it's going to come in our global market. Already, Kirk, since I've been here, I've had a channel partner come up and said "Hey, this makes me rethink my channel partners all over again", because now that channel partner who's a Lenovo has the full breadth of the storage portfolio. So I think this is going to be really good for both of us. Particularly when, you know, Lenovo and NetApp are both very channel friendly partners and companies and I think this I going to be a catalyst to have more people on our side than ever before. >> Kirk, just last thing, just give you the opportunity to talk about some of the other breadth and choice and other things that Lenovo has going on. We're going to talk to some of your team about, you know, hyper converge and hyper scale and other hyper things, but yeah. (Rebecca laughs) >> Well I think the good news about our growth now is that we're doing it across multiple segments in the industry. There isn't just one part of the market that growing. So last year we set an audacious goal of being the largest supercomputer company in the world by 2020. We've now crossed that actually this year. So we are the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers now are there. And we're expanding that into a lot of AI offerings as well with our four artificial intelligence centers, from China, Germany, Taipei, Beijing. All having customers bring their AI workloads into a controlled environment with our partners where there's intel and video or the FGBA vendors. So super-computing is alive and well and we continue to innovate with our warm-water cooling technology that's going to be here on display. We think we're building one of the largest supercomputers in Europe right now using that technology. So not just helping solve global warming but being more energy-efficient while we are computing on that as well. In hyper scale we've grown to about delivering six of the top ten hyper scalers products. And we're doing that through, basically starting with a white sheet of paper with our customers and building more than thirty customized products. In the motherboard, in the system, in putting it through our entire supply chain. Versus just, in the past maybe two years ago, maybe just leveraging ODM products, so. Significant growth in hyper scale where we're bringing on new billion dollar customers on a regular basis now. And then in flash arrays, our traditional business, we were over 100% growth year on year. So we're building off of momentum. We had great products but only covering 15% of the market, now much larger. Last but not least, we did announce since Transform, new divisions in embedded and IoT as well as in telecommunications NFVF software. We think each of those can be billion dollar groups within Lenovo, so that's probably a lot of what we would be talking about next year is announcements and innovations we've had. Would be Transform 3.0 probably. (Rebecca laughs) >> Well, we're already looking forward to the next Transform. >> 3.0 will be CUBEd so we look forward to that. >> Stu, very nice. Very nice. Excellent. Well thank you so much Brad and Kirk for being on the show, I really appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Lenovo Transform and theCUBE's live coverage, just after this. (intense electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Washington, DC. It's the Cube covering .NEXT Conference. (upbeat music) Brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back at Nutanix .NEXT, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of our wall-to-wall coverage of .NEXT Conf. Kirk Skaugen is here, he's the president of the Lenovo Data Center Infrastructure Group. Sudheesh Nair is the president of Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. I'm Dave Vellante, this is Stu Miniman. We're part of the nerd herd here at the conference. So Kirk, let's start with you. We've been talking to Nutanix all week. You guys got the great booth, we've been looking at your booth all week. Transform, last week you guys had a big conference. Lenovo, obviously undergoing major transformations, as are your customers and your partners. Give us the update, how's it going? >> Well, it was a big event for us. We've been working for about two and a half years since the acquisition, the IBM X-Series team. So we launched basically our biggest data center portfolio in history, about 14 new servers, seven new storage boxes, five new network machines, and, probably more importantly to our relationship, we announced two big new brands. So Think System is kind of for the traditional infrastructure and then Think Agile, and our appliances with Nutanix for hyper-converge infrastructure. >> You guys have been talking to analysts and your community about what I call choice. You know, you've got a lot of different choices of partners, of even now processor types, hyper-visors, etc. So talk about how that's important to your partnership strategy, generally and specifically unpack some of the Lenovo specifics. >> I think it is important to have a point of view, when you're talking to customers nowadays. The problem is: is the point of view about your own company's thought process, Wall Street expectations or the point of view's doing by what is right for the customer. Take it for example, an SSD, a commodity SSD from Samsung or Toshiba. If you take that SSD and put it inside a Solar and try to sell it, you probably will get X dollars for it. That same SSD, if you put it inside a high-end SAN, you can probably take like 10X more that, right? Where do you you are-- >> Those were the days. (laughing) >> The thing is where do you think you will be going first? What will you be trying to sell first? The thing I like about Lenovo is that they're made to be efficient. That it is going to be a software defined world. But hardware does matter, the library matters, support matters and along with Lenovo, we are able to go to customers and completely re-transform, you know sort of change their architecture without being caged by any sort of Wall Street expectation that goes counter to what is right for customers. >> Kirk, I know there are many milestones you talked about at Lenovo Transform. I think if I remember it, one of them was the 20 millionth x86 server is going to be shipping sometime in the next couple weeks. >> That's right. >> To think Agile line to kind of look at software defined, how does Nutanix fit into that? You've been OEM-ing them since before you went into this branding so tell us how that came together to the new line. >> So I think we're celebrating this year 25 years an x86 servers and so you're right, we are looking at a software defined world and what I constantly hear is that Lenovo is getting pulled in because we don't have a legacy infrastructure of a big SAN business or a big router business, so we're kind of unencumbered by that but we're shipping our 20 millionth x86 server in July, next month. But with Nutanix, what we're basically doing is we're tightly integrating our management software with their prism software, we're looking at integrating some of the network topology work now with innovation because rather than kind of a legacy network that people are used to now, well we moved to a hyper-converge infrastructure, some of those pain points move onto networking but we've been innovating together now for almost two years and I think we're crossing almost 300 customer deployments now, almost 200% growth since we've started. At least Lenovo's goal is we're going to be Nutanix's largest growing OEM partner this year. >> So talk more about that innovation strategy because, you know, the general consensus is well, it's x86, they're all the same. How do you guys differentiate from an innovation standpoint? >> Well, what we talked about at Transform is our legacy now is we're number one in customer satisfaction in Lenovo on x86 systems in actually 21-22 categories. And that's a third party survey that's done across like 700 customers in 20 countries. Number one in reliability. So we're building off of this infrastructure, off of a really strong customer base. What we're trying to do on Think Agile is completely redefine the customer experience. From the way you configure the system, we can now do configure to order in three weeks. Which we think is about half of what anyone else in the industry can do relative to our competitors. And then we're innovating down the the manageability layer, the networking stack, all of those pieces to really build the best solutions together. >> Sudheesh, there's an interesting two differing things if I look at Lenovo and your partnership. Number one is Kirk says they don't have any legacy, but one of the reasons you're in OEM with them is because they do have history, they've got brand, they've got channel, how do those come together in the partnership? >> So remember, I think before XEI, servers used to be a stateless machine, being they would move the VM's back and forth because the data lives somewhere else in the storage system. So what you expect out of the server, when it comes to reliability and serviceability are very different. What we did with XEI when we came on for the first time, we took the liable storage piece, sharded into small segments and move them inside the servers. All of a sudden, the library of the server has become exponentially more important. Affordability, serviceability, how you do things like form guard management, all those things become important now because your entire core banking application is running inside a bunch of servers, there is no SAN sitting behind protecting all of this. One of the reasons why Lenovo's ex-clarity project is one of the first apps on our app store is because we want to make sure that customers have a fully integrated souped enough experience of not just managing the product but also experiencing the day one and day two. Upgrades, replacements, failure replacement, all of those things. So between our relationship with Lenovo's hardware and engineering, plus the support, we are able to deliver a one plus one equals three experience for our customers. >> So Sudheesh, I heard almost 300 customers you're at. Could you give us a little bit of kind of either verticals or geography that you're being successful? >> What we've seen with Lenovo that is a little different from the rest of the business that we do is that majority of the business is coming from large customers and second, I would say financial sectors were the biggest initial moment it seem to be. And the repeat business is following the same pattern that the customers who buy are coming back and buying again. In fact, one of the largest financial institutions in the country, New York, bought last quarter a decent size, a seven figure plus deal, and they'll probably come back and buy again this quarter. So that pick-up is happening really fast and customers are happy with the overall experience. And it's also about the courting process, the shipping process that he talked about, these are all simple things but these are extremely important in the customer buying experience. >> I think from our perspective, we operate in over 160 countries, a lot of people don't realize we have over 10,000 support specialists that call with more than a 90% customer sat rating. So when we're bringing in Think Agile, what we're bundling now with Think Agile and the Nutanix appliances is premiere customer support so you don't even go to an automated system, you go directly to a local language speaking person on the phone immediately and you get one vendor to support you across your server, your storage, your networking in the whole configuration. That has gotten customers like for us, Jiffy Lube, Holloway, Beam Suntory who's the third largest premium spirits vendor in the world, one of the largest Japanese auto-manufacturers, I mean, I think it's been across all verticals that we've seen success together. >> I was in Asia last week, two weeks ago, and the business there is tremendously picking up speed. It goes through the story, you know, they have local language support, local marketing, local channel enablement, those things matter significantly. Lenovo's very strong in all those areas. >> We live in a world that's data driven. Data is the new oil. You've got to montage your data. You guys have big volumes, you have a lot of data. In relation to partnerships, in this day and age, what role does the data play? Is there an integration of data, is there a way to get more value, how are you getting more value out of the data that you share with your customers? >> I started maybe working China as well in one of the areas, this is an extremely important question, don't think of this as a hardware and infrastructure software play, this is about what customers want. In one area, for example, SAP. One of the largest SAP's partner is Lenovo and by partnering with Lenovo, we are now able to deliver, in fact, there is a specific product CD's that we've built for Lenovo HANA customers called Bridge to HANA where we deliver certified HANA platform on Lenovo along with the Nutanix software as a prediction and testing and wiring IB's next to that. By lapping the Lenovo SAP expertise, the hardware expertise, and the Nutanix's infrastructure expertise, the customers can have a single one-stop shop for analytics, ERT, and everything. Those kind of experiences are what customers are looking for. >> I think one of the reasons people are coming to Lenovo is we're not trying to compete with them necessarily far up the stack like we would think some of our competitors are doing. But if you look at SAP, we're excited because we've had a relationship in software defined with SAP since probably eight years ago. We were actually blazing the trail, I think, with them on software defined and we got rid of the legacy SAN out of that solution probably in 2010, started eliminating some of the costs associated with that. And now we're proud that SAP runs Lenovo, and Lenovo runs SAP. We're starting to pull some big customers together like V-Grass which is one of the largest, fastest growing clothing manufacturers in China, but we're not trying to like hoard the data and use the data, or compete with our customers on data. >> Alright, guys, we're out of time. But just to sort of last questions relates to the future. Where do you guys want to take this? A couple years down the road, where are we going to see this partnership, what's your shared vision? >> You saw today, we moved from that hyper-converge to a multi-cloud world. A multi-cloud world where we are redefining what hybrid cloud really means. There's a lot of work to be done to bring applications, infrastructure, and uses togethers. And partners like Lenovo is how we are going to get there. >> Yeah, absolutely, I think this is just the beginning. We're looking to a transposable world, hyper-convergence is one path along the way. We've been participating in public cloud and now the world is moving into hybrid cloud. We've got great partnerships I think we'll see strong growth with both companies for the next few years. >> Can't do it alone. Kirk and Sudheesh, thanks very much for coming to the Cube, I really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much. >> You're welcome. Keep right there, buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from Nutanix .NEXT, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New York City. It's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Kamran Amini. He is the General Manager, Server and Storage Business Unit, here at Lenovo. Thanks so much. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I should say. (Kamran laughs) >> Thank you. >> So today we've heard a lot about the largest product portfolio data storage product portfolio launch in Lenovo history. >> Kamran: Umhmm. Can you put this in perspective for us, though, in terms of the customer and why is this meaningful for the customer? >> Absolutely, so one of the key things with the entire Think System Portfolio, we started three years ago. A clean sheet and really listening to our clients, listening to our channel partner. What are their challenges with IT? Outside of wanting performance and everything else? How can we simplify their experience, from the buying experience, to life cycle management of the products, simplify part purchases. So a couple of things we did was common building blocks. So, the majority of the Think System Server Portfolio have common power supplies that go across. One of the things customer asked us was you have too many power supplies, right? I'm buying a part, I have to decide which server you have, and what form factor goes in. Now, we have one common across the board. Same thing with management software, we provide one look, and one feel experience for our clients. The whole philosophy of our Think System was start clean, deliver what customers are really valuing around IT and be able to help accelerate and future-proof the technology for them. As they're evolving their workloads and applications, as they're moving to Flash technologies, how do we provide that flexibility? And that's really the foundation of the Think System. >> Yeah, so, Kamran, there was discussion in the keynote this morning, it's about harnessing the intelligence revolution and AI. Can you connect the dots for us as to how that fits into servers, and specifically this launch the new Skylake Chipset? >> Absolutely, so, of course with the new scalable xenon processor, you're getting tremendous increase in performance. And I think when you look at AI and machine learning, there's the aspect that requires acceleration applications, and there's still computing happening on the CPU aspect of the AI machine learning. And you're seeing more the analytics and big data coming into this play. So that's really where we're leveraging the foundational excellence we have with our analytic platforms, and also looking at big data. And bring in with the accelerator's platforms to drive that end to end view around artificial intelligence. And that's where the Think System Portfolio is really shining. It's bringing that end to end view from a client perspective for all their purpose to drive the AI platform environments. >> One of the things we keep hearing about is Lenovo being number one in customer satisfaction, number one in reliability. Can you talk about how you make that happen? How do you ensure that you are as reliable as you come to be known to be? >> Yeah, so one of the things with Lenovo is we listen. If you're not listening to your clients and understand where they're going, what their challenges are, it's hard to be able to adapt. And one of the things you'll see from a reliability perspective, we believe even as you think about the future of software defined, that foundational server is going to be, it has to be reliable. You're getting away from the legacy thinking of redundancy of infrastructure to running everything on a server base. So now that server has to truly deliver five nines. So, we design stuff. A lot of people think x86 is a commodity space. My background is engineering, and I think you can do different styles of engineering. And our engineer team is a great team that thinks about how do we take the Intel processor technology, build a platform around it to be able to have the highest reliability? And, of course, with the highest reliability, it also leads to customers basically having gooder customer engagement, customer satisfaction. So they sort of go hand in hand, right? And that's where we try to continue drive innovation. As you heard from Curt in the main tent, our purpose is not to let go of that, but figure out how we can continuously drive improvement in our reliability. Ideally, I like to have six nines if I can in the server one day. But that's the foundation from an engineering aspect, and innovation that's leading into the actual platforms and offerings for our clients. >> Kamran, can you bring us inside what your customers are asking for? You talked about massive amounts of data, there's so many choices out there, I hear. You look in the AI space, it's like, oh, there's the public cloud with their GPUs and TPUs, versus moving to more distributed architectures internally. What kind of feedback are you getting from your customers, and what are they excited about that they can do this year that they couldn't do next? >> So I think a lot of >> Stu: Last. >> customers will love to have purpose-driven platforms. And I think, if you look at the market today, there's plenty of servers out there by a variety of different vendors. The challenge for customers is some customers are very price performance sensitive. And you know, sometimes they get siloed into I have to buy the expensive thing, even though my application might not require Flash, might not require GPUs. So if you look at the Think System Portfolio, we really focused on the segments of clients. All the way from SMB to large enterprises. And how are they actually using it? What's their purchasing philosophy? And build the platforms that accommodate that segment, plus the capabilities inside those platforms. So you'll see, for example, our mainstream two socket server where it has full capability with GPU, NVMe capabilities, future Intel technology built-in, versus we have our value line really focused around customers that are looking for really SMB environment. Give me that price performance that fits my budget friendly environment. And then you also see places like dense optimized platforms, really driving innovation around our HPC but also being leveraged around hyper-converg platforms and general purpose consolidations. And finally, we do believe that the big data analytics platforms are going to be mainstream one day. They're sitting in your backend of your center running your mission critical but they're becoming more and more relevant today. As you see AI happening. More and more stuff is going to go on those backend system to drive the analytics. And that's where we believe we're positioned very well in the portfolio we're delivering across the 14 servers. >> So what will it take for big data to really become an important part of they way companies do business. There is a deluge of data right now. And we're still trying to figure out how to, what to do with it, how to slice it and dice it. And how to, how to make improvements based on it. What will it take do you think? >> I think you're seeing a lot of ISP that we're doing traditionally. Traditional analytics are bring big data into the analytics. So that's their first movement, that the ISPs are merging those two environments together. The next thing is for people like Lenovo be able to deliver the infrastructure platform that actually can leverage that environment. Big data requires a lot of storage. And you'll see in our next gen analytics system, we almost quadruple the amount of storage you have in that platform because we know more and more is going to go from a storage perspective, and analytic and memory database environment. So it's really looking how the ISPs are looking in this challenge and building the right platform that actually leverage those those ISP solutions. >> Kamran, I loved how you were talking about some of the applications because when I talk to customers, it's that spectrum of application they have that they're struggling. Everything from building new microservices-based architecture to I've got my ERP solution, sitting back there. How do you help customers with that portfolio to modernize their infrastructure, optimize what they're doing and stay agile. >> Well, part of that is actually our service organization. It's really sitting and listening to understanding where the customer wants to go. Sometimes I think a lot of companies approach customers by saying here's what I have and try and force feed that offering into the customer environment. We actually are leveraging our professional service and consulting services to get a better idea. What does the customer want to do today but moving into tomorrow. And what platform or solutions will actually benefit the client from server storage or networking or even our engineers solutions that we have at Lenovo. >> When you're thinking about, when you're hearing the customer feedback, and trying to anticipate what the customer needs tomorrow, is there any area that worries you in particular that the customer may be have have a blind spot for? It could be about data storage or it could be about internet of things or cloud computing. What keeps you up at night? >> I think a lot of it is, to be personal, is around cloud. I think cloud initially provides a value prop around, for public cloud economics. But I think what we're seeing is a lot of customers have that philosophy of clouds but I think as they start looking into the actual deployment and how you manage that environment, the economics evolves. So what keeps me awake is, making sure that clients understand our story. Understand what Lenovo can bring into the table both for what their traditional IT needs, but also their next gen IT. Plus have establish for them a private cloud environment and tie into hybrid environment as well. We want to make sure our clients understand and drive the best value. One of things I always tell my clients is, look, if I could sell you one less server, but you're getting more benefit, I'm here to consult you in that way. I want to make sure the result that you see is what we want to achieve. And that's what we're focused on. And to me, that's what keeps me up is making sure our clients understand the journey as they want to go to cloud and what's the right path for them. >> Kamran, it's been about three years since Lenovo acquired the x86 business. Give us, as you look back, what surprised you in those three years. The keynote this morning, Y Y said, we wouldn't be able to think 18 months ago where we are today. So, what's changed the most, what surprised you the most about the journey with x86? >> So I did come from system X as part of the acquisition. And to be very frank, I think one of things that was stated in the keynote today was, the agility that Lenovo acts on. It's okay to make a mistake. As long as you quickly react and fix the mistake. And I think what I've noticed in the three years I've been here Lenovo now is, one, the culture is very flat. Everyone is empowered to make a decision. There's no hierarchical decision making. Of course, there's always the president. There's always the CEO. But people are empowered to make decisions that's beneficial for our clients. And we're seeing a huge focus around customer experience. It's not just a organizationally, it's not just a individual KPIs. It's really looking from end to end of our business. How can we transform our customer experience? To drive a better experience for our customers. And I think that's, with Lenovo being that agile of a company. I had great service years at, 17 years at IBM, very successful. But because of the size of the company and the different structures of the company, a lot of clients didn't feel we could adjust their needs immediately. And I think with Lenovo you're seeing a lot more faster agility. From our supply chain to how customers get quotes. From a product perspective and support. Those are all the things that I see slightly different, and we've been transforming as we've been going. Enhancing those capabilities. And we've learned through our mistakes through the last three years. It hasn't been any mistakes that we haven't came out with. But we constantly learn and try enhance as we go forward. And I'm very excited going into this year. Especially with these announcements that we're going to be driving a lot more enhancements and how our customers see Lenovo as a data center provider. >> A lot have been made about the fact that this is, Thinkpad and x86 25th year anniversary. Which seems amazing, really. >> Mmhmm. >> Now that these products are in their sort of adulthood so to speak, what do you think we should expect in terms performance and in terms of approach. Just because they are now, they've fully worked out the kinks of the youth and their adolescence. >> Yeah so if you look at, for example, in the server business, and the server portfolio Think System, from just gen to gen, literally, this is three years ago, two three years ago. You're going to see customers be able to run 150% more VDI, users. And that drives a better economics, dollar per user. So just from a gen to gen you're seeing tremendous platform improvements. And that's where I think, we're going to see customers. Customer, I think are going to see driving more and faster applications. I think we're going to see huge adoption of Flash within the server technology. And therefore, I think you're going to see where software define and server generation we're delivering come together very nicely. Where we believe that, my personal belief, you're going to see a lot more customers moving away from a traditional storage array to now software defined or all Flash software define environments. Where they're leveraging a commodity server base with huge amount of performance capabilities and software on top to deliver the business value. >> Kamran, where do you think we're going to be, next year but then also 10 years down the road. As you talk about the pace of business, change is incredible aren't they now. Can you predict a little bit into the future? (Kamran laughs) >> About what we're going to, I know it's a tough one. >> Kamran: I wish I could predict. I think you're going to see a lot of different applications coming together. I think you're going to see AI being a key factor to drive and generate a lot of information with machine learning. And being able to take that information and figure out how you drive business agility. I think you're going to see retail driving AI aggressively. I think you're already seeing automotive industry driving machine learning and everything else into their cars. So for us, it's very exciting as an IT provider. Were we see an evolution happening and eventually another revolution happening in IT, I think in the next 10, 15 years. You're going to see I think more dense platforms because you're going to drive more density with the nut form factor. I think you're going to see a lot more powerful systems. And I think you're going to see software becoming more relevant. And I think that the legacy status goal is going to eventually be gone I think. I think legacy, 10 years from now, legacy is going to be considered software defined I believe. >> Great. Bold predictions. (Rebecca laughs) >> Predictions. (Kamran laughs) >> Well, Kamran Amini, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure having you on the show. >> Kamran: Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE at Lenovo Transform just after this. (upbeat music)