>> 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)