 from the Masonic in San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Lenovo Tech World 2016. Brought to you by Lenovo. Now, here are your hosts. Stu Miniman and John Walls. And welcome back, John Walls, here with Stu Miniman. We continue our coverage here in theCUBE of the Lenovo Tech World gathering here in the Masonic Auditorium in beautiful San Francisco. What a wonderful day it's been so far. Pretty exciting day. Hope we've been able to convey that for you. Joining us now is Brian Connors, who is the Vice President of NextGen Infrastructure and Business Development at Lenovo. Brian, thanks for being with us. Glad to be here. You have taken a look at your portfolio. So your converge, hyperconverge, high performance computing, network business unit, strategic alliance. I mean, what do you do with all your free time? Not a lot of free time. That's for sure. Look, what we're doing in Lenovo is really focused on the future. A lot of what I do and our team does around the next generation, really focus on how we can embrace technology and move it to the next generation and help customers and working with our partners to actually accelerate that and disrupt the marketplace. So NextGen IT, your definition of it. NextGen IT is really looking at kind of legacy free. There's a lot of legacy environments out there, but there's a lot of innovative technologies occurring. Take Moore's law. I mean, Moore's law has enabled us to go from discrete computing to virtualization of processing to virtualization of storage and processing to ultimately virtualization of the entire data center. So in the end, really the data center is the computer of tomorrow. So it basically changes everything upside down. So Brian, I see there's two pieces basically of what you're doing. One is there's the technologies that you're using in your technologies, platforms, OEM relationship, and other Nutanix OEM falls under what you do. And then there's the changes happen in the application side and most of the times those two go together. What can you help unpack for us as to how you see that changing world because we know the enterprise changes really slow and the slowest part of change tends to be the applications. Yeah, yeah. So it's very true. I mean, but you look at what's going on in the cloud environment. You look at what's going on in the hyper scale environments where applications born in the cloud applications are becoming more resilient. Their resiliency is not necessarily in the hardware and the platforms. It's in the operating environment and it's in the application development. Sure, look at our relationship with SAP. SAP is mission critical, ERP, in-memory database, analytics. But the HANA Enterprise Cloud is a complete migration to environments and applications that are basically born in the cloud and leveraging cloud technology and large systems to really run enterprise class applications. It's going to take time and there's not everything's going to happen in a public cloud. Enterprise cloud, on-prem and hybrid clouds are very, very important as a consumption and an operational expense, basically, Apex model to really drive utilization. Okay, so why have you guys been so successful with HANA because every infrastructure company out there has a solution for it. So we started HANA, I'd say six or seven years ago, in a kind of a skunkworks project with SAP in Waldorf. We have a development team that sits there with them. They were actually just starting in-memory database. We were in there early. We were in there with our technology at the time I was at IBM. We used a file system, used to be called GPFS, now they call it something else, spectrum scale. But we've embedded that into the environment so you don't have any external sand. So you've got optimized performance, you've got a solution that can scale and we're the leader in SAP HANA appliance and configuration, basically because we're there first and we continue to innovate with SAP over these years to this day. In January, we took that to another level within Lenovo. I really took that relationship to really around the whole go-to-market area. We were just at Sapphire three weeks ago I think it was and we introduced eight terabytes before Intel Nonstra processor support where it was traditionally six terabytes support. We demoed 128 gigabyte dims with Samsung and SAP. So we're in there innovating with them, in their laboratories, physically, in the building involved. So about those kinds of partnerships, because that's not unique, right? Your relationship with SAP. I mean, Red Hat, Juniper, you've got a long list. How does that factor into your philosophical approach to doing business and seeking out those kinds of collaborative efforts? Well, our objective is to be the number one partner in the data center, trusted partner in the data center. And to do that, we have to have trusted relationships with our partners in a very open relationship to do so. So it's neutral. So, you know, the SAPs of the world, the Microsofts of the world, the Juniper's of the world, Nutanix is coming up new in the world. And the Red Hat's of the world are very trusted and very well known in the data center. Our relationship with them is very symbiotic, but we're also not competing with them. We don't compete with them. We don't have a middleware business. We don't have an operating system business. We actually really mold, one in one has to be much greater than two when we come together with these partnerships. But kind of our objective is to be the number one trusted partner in the data center and having trusted mutual relationships with the large trusted partners is very important. So it's a mutual. Yeah, so Brian, you went through that acquisition of the System X. I think a lot of people understood that, you know, moving out of under IBM, moving to Lenovo, there was a lot of opportunity there. What have you seen? Give us kind of the update after 18 months as to those partnerships that you mentioned, you know, middleware, of course, IBM is a strong position. You know, how much of that has come to fruition as you thought and anything that surprised you? I don't know if it was surprising so much, but yeah, it's only been 18 months. It feels like a little longer. But yeah, it was a challenging transition to say the least, especially in the first, say six to nine months. Since then it's becoming much better and customers are starting to adopt and understand who we are. So we're really the same team, same products as we were before. World-class engineering, over 20 some years of engineering capability in the enterprise server market. So that's kind of getting behind us now. Recognition of Lenovo in the data center is something we're going through. Now, what surprised us, I think, is the openness that we have the ability to be as part of Lenovo. Some of the partners before are always been a little timid. We did compete in some areas. Now IBM's a great company. They help and they partner in global business and GTS and other areas with a lot of these partners. But it's a very, very much a co-op competition area. Being legacy-free, being very open as Lenovo, being a hardware platform provider and a solution provider, really started to open up a lot of buys. We have partnerships and capabilities at levels of the companies that we never had imagined. But you also have to look at what's happened in the industry. We're really the open one. Some of our competitors are starting to close things up and starting to get a lot more competitive with some of the partners that we have. I won't go through in detail, but if you start to look at what's happening, we're starting to look pretty shiny as well. And as long as we continue to deliver great products, great solutions, and have our customer base, we'll be successful. And how much of a competitive advantage is that for you, do you think? Or is that your calling card in a way? I mean, kind of a differentiator in the fact that you're maybe moving one way and you feel like some of the market is maybe a large chunk of the market's moving another? We got a couple of competitive advantage. A few competitive advantage. A is our products and our people and our capability. I think that's our number one. Number two, we have a company who wants us to become number one. There's no competing technologies or product. They want us to become number one. Three is we are, we're very strong in emerging markets. China is an example. We're kind of global and local in that respect, right? And so, probably the final one is we ship, I don't know, maybe the latest number, maybe 100 million things a year. So our supply chain capability is bar none, awesome. I mean, we have capability and cost benefit to help our customers. HPC is a business I'm having, I have right now. It was kind of, we were on a limited fringe a lot in my old role, with big systems. We are very strong in big systems again. You'll see us have one of the top 500 capabilities in the ISC show in Frankfurt next week with a partnership with Intel, stronger partnership with Intel. But we're also winning higher education. In North America, we're hardly losing in relations because we have a cost profile that is much lower than we had in the past because we have the capability of an infrastructure that is scale, much bigger scale than we had as a hardware company before. So down the road then, if you could give us vision inside your crystal ball here right now, let's just talk about the big picture and talk about next gen IT and kind of where do you think you're going? Where is it going? And what do you think the next wave might be? So first, this is an evolution without a doubt. As I said, you go back and you look at how VMware came on the scene in what, 2005 maybe, or maybe a little earlier than that. And we had virtualization 10, 15 years earlier in mainframes and things, right? So it's evolved, but it's white, it's white. With the capability we now have in our servers, it's becoming very, I'll call server-centric. Server-centric means compute-centric. We don't have to have specialized hardware to run storage, to run, even networking in the future, we have a lot more virtualization capability. So it's kind of coming home to where we are. And as long as we continue to deliver, Moore's law is tapering off, but the amount of capability in the processor, and now we can really innovate on the software element of this data center operating environment, we're going to start to see the movement of not only consumption, more and more consumption, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and public cloud, but also the data center itself being a lot more elastic as a software-defined data center. I just want to hitch up. I've heard of this a few times, the references to Moore's law, obviously, about computing power and tapering off, you say. I mean, is it possible that technology kind of renders that obsolete at some point because it becomes impossible to continue to develop at that rate, considering how sophisticated the technology is? The development can continue, it's physics right now. It's obviously down to physics and how small those lines can be. One of the large areas of innovation right now for us is going to be in machine learning and deep learning, taking that capability and actually applying it to be more analytical in nature, HPC-like, and also in energy efficiency. If you look at the density that we're getting with some of the servers, it was not too long ago that Intel said that the maximum wattage of the processors will be 80 watts. We're up to 100 and it's 35, 160. It's not going to, with Moore's law kind of slowing down, it's not going to get any lower in power. So we have other innovations that we can go do in the data center to really drive efficiency in the data center and cost of operations, which is basically very, very big. So last question I had for you. You talked about just the massive scale that Lenovo has. From a technology standpoint, though, is there kind of cross-pollination? You've got the core from the System X, great history of innovation over the years, but how does being in Lenovo change, or does it change the engineering and the culture at all? Yeah, well, I came kind of full circle because I was in the PC business for most of my career. I started in kind of the second generation of PC in IBM and Volca. And then it separated, and we saw the difference. We had a little different mindset on it. A mature enterprise mindset. But as we've come back together, looking at IoT, you look at some of the announcements that were made here today and the devices with angle. You just look at about the amount of data and source of information that can come off of that. And what we can learn as we look at machine learning, deep learning, capability in the infrastructure. The infrastructure, you'll hear, infrastructure, we want to be invisible, but it has to be operational. It has to be reliable. It has to be resilient. And with the amount of data being created and the amount of information coming in, we're learning it firsthand. We're going to show it at Supercomputer next week, the 3D. We have a big, large partner in Germany who's one of our biggest water cool supercomputers. And they've done a 3D room, basically a physical room. We're going to show that to customers' capability with one of our 3D goggles there to actually give them a virtual reality of what's happening. It's actually the core mantle of the earth, actually going in and deep diving from a science standpoint. So we're applying it, not just a game and everything else. It's being applied to real visualization and visual analytics. Well, you're bringing it to life. There's no question about that technology, bringing all kinds of... So that's a good example, probably, of what we're doing. Brian, thanks for the time. We appreciate that. Congratulations on a great launch today with a number of fantastic products. I certainly wish you all the best down the road at Lenovo. Very good. Thank you very much. Appreciate being here. The Cube continues here from San Fran, right after this.