 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 here with Kim Stevenson. She is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center Infrastructure here at Lenovo. Thank you so much for joining us, Kim. Thanks. I've always enjoyed my time on theCUBE, so thanks for having me. So you've had a long and esteemed career in technology, former CIO of Intel. Why did you come to Lenovo? What was it about Lenovo that drew you? Yeah, so I was very specifically looking for to be in the data center space because I believe our whole data center industry is changing, right? And the incumbents actually don't possess very much value in this rapid pace of change. And I wanted to be a part of that. I've always loved big change agendas. So I was looking for that. Lenovo was clearly the underdog at the time I was making my decision. I like the underdog. I want, you know, I sort of, it's about making impact and making progress and being able to see that impact. And so that fit. And then I had, you know, good experiences with the management team and I wanted to be able to leverage that. And in fact, you know, it's been a seamless transition in because I knew the management team and I understood, you know, some of the dynamics that we'd be facing together and the challenges that we wanted to take on together. So it's been great. And I do think today's product launch is a culmination of, you know, where we're not going to be the underdog for very much longer. Kim, I wanted to help you help us unpack that changing dynamic of the data center. You had a very interesting viewpoint coming from Intel. You know, Intel chips we know, they're going everywhere. Where do you see as the role of the data center? Some people are like, oh, public cloud and the hyperscales and Lenovo has a, you know, a strong position playing across the board. So what do you see as data center? What does that mean to you? And what does that mean to your customer? So look, I think all businesses today are using technology to deliver their competitive advantage. It's the fundamental thing that's driving transformation in the companies. So, but if you look at what's happened in enterprise tech for the last couple of years, we've been consumed as IT practitioners moving our workload to the cloud because there's rich functionality there. There's good economics. It's made complete sense. But that's only half the journey. And when you look at the other half, the second half of this movie is really about why the enterprise data center becomes so much more important tomorrow than it is today. And it's because of the workloads, the differentiating workloads of your company. So when I was the CIO at Intel, our differentiating workloads were engineering and manufacturing. We got paid to engineer great products. We got paid to make them. And every industry has those kind of workloads. And then with the emergence of artificial intelligence and IoT, those workloads are going to explode. And they are going to reside in your enterprise data center. And so, but you think about what that needs in terms of network, in terms of memory, IO capability, those are much different platforms than what you think of as a legacy data center. And I simply want to be a part of making that come to life. Okay, so you would include, some people would call that the edge requirements, edge computing, which sometimes a little bit of difference is it's not my centralized data center, even if it does live out in the customer's environment. Some of it is edge, right? Clearly, the growth in the edge will be phenomenal. And some of that will be real-time processing that happens at the edge. And others of it will be coming back to the data center for other types of processing, right? It could be for, you know, pattern analysis over a longer time horizon. It could be for developing of new services to deploy at a later date. But I think both of those things are going to, it's what do they call it? Jevon's paradox, right? And the more you have, the more you use, right? And that's what I think's going to happen with the value of data, being able to capture it and store it and analyze it in a very, very cost-effective manner. You were talking about how companies get paid to make great products and how with the introduction or the evolution of AI and machine learning, how those workloads are going to explode and it's not going to be enough anymore to just make great products. Are companies ready for these changes? You know, like there's a spectrum. I would say some yes, some no. I think in some cases, the rapid pace of technology scares the crap out of boarders of directors and CEOs that don't come from our space. But in the end, I do think that's going to be the, winners and losers will be decided by who can deploy the most advanced technology in the fastest amount of time. And I think there's a whole generation of people that that scares. And they didn't grow up like us in the middle of it. There's a whole generation of people like me that it excites us and it makes us want to do more. So, but yeah, I think companies, especially those outside of tech, they have a longer journey than tech companies do. And learning curve is steeper. Yeah, learning curve is steeper. I want to talk a little bit about your experience at Lenovo so far. Before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about just the greater numbers of women in senior leadership positions. At Lenovo and how that changes the dynamic and the approach to teamwork. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about what you've experienced? Yeah, so it's really been a pleasant surprise because Lenovo is a very diverse company. And that diversity plays out. So in our president's staff, which I'm a member of, half of the staff are women. And that may not sound unusual, except for it's very unusual in technology. And it's very unusual for me as a woman to have the opportunity to work with other women. And so, but it's been, it's an interesting thing because we're focused on driving more customer centricity as a company and particularly in data center group. And so as what you see with this natural collaboration is that we're all focused on the same problem. And we're willing to leverage the strengths of one another. So there's no siloed thinking. There's no, I have to be the smartest person in the room thinking that often exists in tech companies. And I largely attribute that to the diversity of the staff. And the other thing is sort of sidetracked, but the number of African-Americans in our organization is far greater than I've ever seen in any tech company. And so I've been asking some of the African-American women, like why is that? Help me understand that. And they're brilliant. They're really brilliant. And so I really just never subscribe to you can't find any women for these jobs or you can't find any diverse candidates for these jobs. You just have to look in the right places. And so it's been really, really fabulous at Lenovo to work with really talented women and learn from them. And hopefully I'm helping them learn something too, right? And eye-opening that it can happen even in technology. At a time where we're hearing about the dearth of women leaders and the sort of row culture in Silicon Valley in particular. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, you know, I mean, I do think it takes a management team that has an open mindset that to solve problems in different ways and, you know, core of our core, different is better. We're willing to do it differently. And look, we have a different management team and style that, you know, is much more focused on our customers. So it's been good. Kim, as a former CIO, I'm curious what your viewpoint is of the role of the CIO today. We've talked about, you know, just the rapid pace of change that's happening in the data center. Cloud needs to fit into the equation. You know, what do you see as the primary role of the CIO and, you know, how that's different today than it was, say, five years ago? Yeah, so look, I think today's the very, very best CIOs. People at the top of our profession are outstanding change agents. They're transformational leaders. They speak for the company. They don't speak for IT. They are, you know, integral in the strategic direction setting of the company. And they bring sort of a new thinking to that. Now, that said, they also have to run the operations extremely well. You do not get to sit at the table at the board meetings or in the CEO staff if you can't run the workplace really well because it's so pivotal that operational execution is really, really outstanding when your whole business is built on this. And so, but the differentiators are really the ones around leadership and speaking for the business and strategic direction setting and really trying to understand, you know, the capacity of change that the company can go through and how do you keep expanding that capacity for change? Lenovo is number one in customer satisfaction on a slew of different rankings. And as you said, this is where you are focused on pleasing the customer, satisfying the customer, anticipating the customer's needs before the customer even knows he has those needs. When you're number one, you can't move up. So how do you keep driving toward to remaining in that top position? Yeah, so one of the things that we're trying to do is change the expectation of the customers have of their hardware vendors, right? So obviously customers always expect great products. Shouldn't it be reliable? It needs to have good performance. It needs to cost the right price point. Those are always the standard. But we're trying to take it a little bit further and say, look, your expectations should be, we need to be easy to do business with, right? From the time I think about writing an RFQ to maybe evaluate some hardware to the time that I sunset that piece of equipment. Everything in between, right? It needs to be easy to acquire. It needs to be easy to run, easy to manage. It needs to be easy to sunset. I want to future-proof that investment by making things upgradable and having, you know, instead of I was talking to one customer today who said, hey, look, if I could have a 10-year life cycle, I can use bond money to fund my growth. If I don't, I can't. I have to use expense money and therefore I can do far less. And I said, well, in future-proofed, this thinks that system set of products and here's how you can do that, right? You upgrade the memory at this cycle. You upgrade the processors at this cycle. Use the same rack, same chassis for the next 10 years and you get three generations of technology out of a single rack. And he's like, that's brilliant. I mean, that's the kind of thing we're trying to help customers think through. It's more than, I always say it's the tech and the team that get leadership. And that's what we want to be part of the team that drives leadership. Kim, your team has an interesting blend of people with long history in especially the x86 server market and new people. Kirk and yourself, both, you know, relatively new to the position. How are you tracking? What KPIs are you measuring to say that Lenovo's succeeding becoming a larger, more strategic partner for customers in the data center? Yeah, so we're coming off, and it's no surprise, right? We're coming off a bad year, right? And so we have really three dimensions that we are driving improvements in. One is sales execution. So all the classic KPIs and sales productivity types of measures. And we've made the changes to get a dedicated sales force, hired very specific specialists. So that's one dimension. The second is product performance and portfolio gaps. So how well do we make our benchmarks? So we've got these 30 world record benchmarks, right? How in the next generation, how well are we going to do against those? HPC benchmarks, right? So we're really external benchmarking. And it really is like we measure ourselves externally so we can get good view of the competition. And then we look at where our portfolio gaps are and what do we have to do to close those portfolio gaps through focused engineering. And the third is then customer engagement and support. So which is really where the satisfaction measure comes from, but we're not, satisfaction is a rear view mirror look at the world. We're looking at, we're using advanced analytics and AI to predict customer engagement drop, right? Why would that customer no longer be engaging with us? Customer field failures and we're tracking every incident that happens out there, whether it's something we need to act on or the customer needs to act on. And then so those become our important KPIs to build this lifelong customer within a trusted relationship. The theme of this event is transform. And Lenovo has undergone an enormous transformation in the past few years and now you're just starting and sort of on the brink of this new transformation. I asked, I asked Cameron about this earlier, but just if you could talk a little bit about where you want to be five years from now in Lenovo and sort of what you've accomplished in the next five years, what do you want to see? So I guarantee you five years from now I'll still be saying we need to change, we need to grow because I think it's a big journey. But I believe what you'll see in the next five years is you're going to see this enormous growth in these new workloads. And you're going to have to have data center capability that effectively is seamless. So we call that hybrid cloud today or we call it converged infrastructure, we call it hyper converged. But the reality is IT organizations will have morphed their skill sets to be instead of being siloed servers, network and storage, you'll have people that span those technology skill sets and therefore our products need to be fully integrated and almost so self healing in their process that you don't need consoles. I think the idea of a console to monitor things and I know we have one, right? You have to have it today. I don't think you need it in the future because the machine is so self healing. Why do I need someone looking at a console? I love that concept of a self healing machine. Someone that can fix itself. Yeah, yeah, and we've got some Lenovo research being done today on how you do that. And I know it can be done because if you look at the equipment, individual pieces of equipment all have now call home capability or some intelligent care capability but they're siloed by vendors or by type of product. So you could integrate that into a machine learning application and use that to act where I don't need any human interference with that because I've got a knowledge management database. I have all those events that have happened in the past. So you can really truly bring self healing, self diagnosing, self healing to life. And I think that's where it will be in five years. It doesn't take very long to get that type of capability given we have the foundation already. So Kim, now that you're on the other side of the table from your relationship with Intel, can you speak a little bit about Lenovo as a partner? I think about Intel, Microsoft, you know, companies that are very strategic to Lenovo but also with your key competitors. What differentiates Lenovo as a partner? Yeah, so one, we don't compete with our partners, right? And so it sort of depends on what kind of partners but some of our competitors end up through acquisition, through growth, through intention. They end up competing with their partners. We're very, very clear. We don't compete with our partners. We're here to make our partners successful. And so we have deep industry partnerships with like the Intel's of the world and the Microsoft's of the world because we're so complimentary and we're after the same types of things. And so that's really worked to our advantage but I would even go down to our channel partners and the value added resellers and distributors, they're critically important to us and we've made changes this year to ensure that they have rich incentives to work with Lenovo. And so it really spans sort of the supply side to the delivery side that we have a holistic view of how strategic and important our partners are to us and that shared sense of win-win. We really want a win-win relationship with all of our partners. A great note to end on. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure having you on the show. Yep, thanks for having me again. I really appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Lenovo Transform just after this.