 Live from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017, brought to you by Lenovo. We are wrapping up a day of coverage, theCUBE's coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. We have been here, we've interviewed all the great guests, heard a lot of great content, we were there at the keynote. Stu, what have we learned? Yeah, so Rebecca, they talk a lot about, think differently, and we're transforming, and we know that there's so much change happening in the industry. On the one hand, I step back and I say, okay, it's a new generation of Intel chipset. That's great. Said great a few times already. They've got some people that have been with the company a long time. YY, the CEO's been there for many years, steady at the helm. But there's a lot of new leaders in the group. Kirk Scalgan, who we've now interviewed a couple of times. Kim Stevenson, who we've known, great CUBE alum, talked about why she joined a company like Lenovo. Said they're an underdog, and she feels that they have a great position without that legacy baggage. Legacy, it's one of those terms that gets thrown around. One of our guests today said, oh, in five years from now, we'll be calling software-defined legacy, because I was at a conference, they said, legacy's what you installed yesterday. Good point, yeah. So that being said, Lenovo understands, fanatical devotion to that customer centricity is the term they've put out there a few times. They want to be reliable, they want to be trusted, and they've got metrics and stats to prove that they are meeting what they're doing. They're not just, as John Furrier texted me, he said, there's meat on the bone at this event stew. Absolutely. So interesting to look at kind of where they are, where they're going forward. The server industry, as a whole, is a bit challenged. Storage has been going through radical transformation, networking's driving more to software-defined, and all of that means that there's opportunity for new players to rise through the ranks, and Lenovo feels that they've got the pieces to put together, both with themselves, and with their channel and technology partners to be able to drive forward. So one of the things we were hearing a lot about is that they are number one in customer satisfaction, because they are so reliable, and because they have great service. In terms of what they were hearing from their customers, we heard this a lot, is that their customers want simple, they're overwhelmed sometimes by too much choice, they want nothing too complicated, and they want things future-proofed. I mean, is that possible? Yeah, it's really tough. I did an article a few years ago looking at Amazon, and people would say, oh, well, the hyperscale companies, they use commodity off-the-shelf hardware. I mean, Intel chips everywhere, what's the difference? Well, I wrote, Amazon actually hyper-optimizes. They have to build for one data center, it's their own, so if they build an application, it's 10,000 or 50,000 servers that they can build for that exact environment. Now, Lenovo lives in data centers around the globe, so where can they simplify and standardize, and where do they need to fit around the world? It's great that they can have a common form factor for a power supply, but we've got different power usage in various places around the world, but they do need to be, customers want help to be a little bit more opinionated and to simplify what they're doing. I talked to CIO a couple of years ago, and he said, we were really good at, give us a big chunk of money in 18 months, and we could build a temple to our application. Today, I need to be faster. I need to be able to build, be more modular, and a lot of that means that I need to have architectures that are more software-driven. I still need redundancy and availability in the hardware, but I'm not going to build that monolithic infrastructure for a specific application. I need something that's more flexible, and Lenovo understands that, and they've taken the assets that they had internally added the pieces that they've gotten from IBM and are driving these pieces forward. And with a lot of partners, as we said, interesting stuff coming from Microsoft on Azure Stack was one of my favorite interviews talking about that mixture of I need standardization, but I also need some flexibility in what I'm doing. Do you think that the product launches that we heard a lot about today, at the keynote and also in our interviews today, do you think that they will, how much do they need move the needle forward is what I want to ask you? Great question, because as Kim Stevens told us, I mean, the last year, if you look revenue and units, Lenovo didn't do great. So they've got the pieces together, the new generation, they've talked to their customer base, I think they understand what they're going to do in the hyper scale, what they're going to do in the enterprise market and what they're doing, partnering on kind of converge, hyper-converged offering to put those together. Some of these things are really easy for us to track. We come back a year from now and we'll say, okay, the quarterly trackers done by some of my peers in the analyst industry, the numbers don't lie. Customers will vote with their wallet and we will be able to say whether or not they move the needle. It's great to say number one in customer support, but if your competition's growing and you're shrinking, there's only so far that'll go. Well, that's just what I was going to ask you. I mean, is it enough and what do you predict? I mean, can you look into your crystal ball a little bit and say where do you think we will be one year, five years from now? Will Lenovo be the underdog at? Yeah, so Lenovo's in a really interesting place because they do have that global footprint. They are doing, when we talk to Kirk, it's where are they in the hyper-scales? It's companies like Baidu and Tencent, massive, massive growth. They can ride that wave when the Skylake architecture is available pretty soon from Intel. They know that they're going to get an influx of business to be able to drive that. They're also getting into some of the West Coast hyper-scales, as they said. The enterprise is a little bit slower to up-tick on that adoption, so I'm sure Lenovo will be able to give us by-segment how they're doing and how they're growing. They should be reaching the point that we should see the ship be turning around. We saw this story when Lenovo had purchased the PC business from IBM over a decade ago and they sunk for a while before they eventually started to rise and now they're number one in the world. So, they're trying to repeat history, which is challenging to do, even if they know the playbook. Lenovo, if you look at the margins that they run on, they talk about how they can live on slim margins, they understand that consumer side of the business, they've got a lot of good pieces. And competing against the ones ahead of them in market share, primarily US-based companies, and they're fighting it out. You were at Dell EMC World. Dell and HPE, they are fighting it out. It's going to be a death match. You're going to see them just trying to beat the heck out of each other. And reminds me of, can Lenovo be the A-blanket on the side saying that I might not have been the first choice, but at the end I could end up the winner because everybody else kind of beats themselves apart. And then all of its partners as a team of rivals. We can do this. There you go. We started this morning talking Hamilton and now we're going A-blanket. We're learning it. New York City used to be our capital here, so we're bringing it full circle. Exactly. So let's talk also about what we've been hearing from Lenovo employees and executives about the culture here. And we hear time and time again how it's very flat and how decisions are made, it's collaborative. There's a lot of teamwork. There's a lot of listening that goes on not only to colleagues, but also to customers. Do you buy it? I mean, what do you think? What do you make of it? So right, so one of the things, I've spent a lot of time on the converge and hyperconverge infrastructure solutions. And one of the things you could spot really easily is if the server and the storage teams aren't working together, that CI solution didn't do well. Number of companies that didn't do there. Lenovo's primarily they have some IP, but a lot of what they're driving is really through partnerships. So at the center of it, it's the server team. Storage is coming to look more and more like X86 servers and they're running on top of that. Networking is tied closer to the server. So they actually don't have this big structure that they have to overcome. Unlike some of their competitors, they have a sizable team with a good position in the market share. So I do buy a lot of it. I've been in analyst meetings with Lenovo for the last couple of years. Their messages are all in sync. It's not, oh wait, I heard one group and I heard this group and which weighs the future. So they are making some progress. Of course, I'm really interested to see who they might pick up from an M&A standpoint. There's been rumors for the last couple of years as to some moves they make. Their competition has not been sitting still. We've seen Dell obviously made a lot of big acquisitions including the really big EMC piece, HP has bought another number of companies. Cisco, actually their server business, which is the UCS, really seems to have plateaued out. So they had been the driver of change in the server industry for the last, gosh, you know, over five years. So there's that opportunity for the next horse to try to take the lead. And once again, Lenovo feels they're there. I think they have, you know, they've got the resources, they have a reason to be on the track and to drive that forward. Whether or not they can execute on remains to be seen. They've got, you know, they've looked at their channel, they've looked at their sales team and they know what they need to do now they go do it. And they've made the changes, exactly, exactly. So culture-wise, I mean, something you study real closely at a lot of businesses, Rebecca, what did you hear today? What'd you like? What did you want to hear more about? Well, I was really fascinated by what Kim Stevenson was saying, talking about the greater numbers of women in senior leadership roles and also the greater numbers of people of color and how important that is in terms of how Lenovo goes about making its decisions, thinking about the customer, empathizing with the customer and really understanding where to go from there and then also then how it comes back in terms of making decisions to go to market with which products. So that was really fascinating and I think that she's right. I mean, particularly at a time where all you see are the headlines about this machismo culture that is so pervasive in Silicon Valley and in the technology industry. And so to see, you know, YY on one hand and Travis Kalanick on another and you just can see these very different models and so my, I'm hoping Lenovo is the one that really prevails in the end here because this is, I think, the future, the future of work, the future of the workforce. And so I would like to see this model of leadership and of teamwork prevail. Yeah, it's a different type of event here. It's nice. It's very intimate. Lenovo obviously knows how to do some cool things. The layout here, it's a beautiful facility here in New York City. The keynote had some funny yet good videos. Sometimes they fall a little flat when you go to some of those keynotes but Lenovo needs to continue to build their brand outside of the consumer space and be known more in the enterprise and they have a chance to ride some of those waves. This has been a great show. It's always so much fun to co-host with you on theCUBE. I love it. It's really fun. Great crew. Rebecca, thank you so much and yeah, actually Kirk Scalgan's going to be back on theCUBE next week. I will be with Dave Vellante at the Nutanix.next event in Washington, D.C. We have done so many events with theCUBE. Of course, as it says on the sign behind us, thecube.net, where all the videos are, I'm sure it will be record breaking for us yet again as to how many shows, how many interviews we do but Rebecca, it's a pleasure to be with you again and thanks so much for joining with me. The quick train ride down from Austin. Yes, exactly. Well, thank you so much Stu. That wraps it up for us at theCUBE. This has been the Lenovo Transform Conference. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for tuning in.