 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 to Lenovo Tech World. John Walls with Stu Miniman. We continue our coverage here at Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco's Lenovo. Rolled out just a whole line of interesting consumer and infrastructure products today. And to help us talk about that is Radhika Krishnan. She rejoices the GM of Converged and Hyperconverged at Lenovo, and Radhika, good to see you once again here on theCUBE. We're glad to be here, John. Again, very exciting times for Lenovo. Lots of new announcements that came out earlier part of this week. What about the stage that we're on, literally, here? We're on the keynote stage right now. Just about an hour and a half, two hours ago, we had the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Home and Garden TV hosts and whatever, releasing some great product. Sorry to start to stop on your job, but we had Intel CEO here, and it was the CTO of Juniper, which is in your space. So it's kind of an interesting mix of both the consumer, cool stuff, and as YY put it so eloquently, the boring infrastructure stuff that we all love and play with. That is correct. So yeah, definitely, as it was clearly demonstrated this morning, the data thinner group within Lenovo just isn't about service. We've got an extensive portfolio in networking who are continuing to grow our assets. There's obviously an organic set of products that we bring to the market, and then there is our partnership with Juniper as well that allows us to complement and bring forward a very comprehensive set of offerings in the networking arena. So, Radhika, for those that don't know the lineage, maybe you can map out for us, the pieces that Lenovo have from, it's not just the System X, I remember the B&T acquisition kind of came over. You know, there's converged piece that you have, so give us the owned OEM'd and partnered map if you would. Absolutely, Stu. So, as you rightly pointed out, Lenovo actually has a very rich heritage in networking that comes about by virtue of the acquisition of blade network technologies a while back. And what we offer organically is top rack switches and network operating systems and applications and protocols that go along with it that are absolutely required by your data center customer that's looking to deploy servers and connect them up, right? So, think of it as the foundational server connectivity product. In addition to that, as you probably are aware, we also have a bladed set of offerings and there are switches that get embedded as part of that. So, that belongs in this portfolio as well. Now, that is in terms of the core set of offerings. The really cool thing that I will point out in the context of our organic portfolio is an announcement that we made earlier this week around the release of a cloud network operating system. So, if you think about what's happening, you know, if you just step back and think about what's happening in the data center as a whole, you know, there is this move towards scale out towards hyperscale. And if you think about what you need in order to enable those hyperscale types of environments with thousands of servers, networking becomes the backbone, right? And so, it's incredibly critical that your server connectivity scales to multiple thousands of objects and that's what we're enabling with this cloud network operating system that we came out with. It is also programmable. So, you know, keeping in mind that, you know, large data center customers, service providers don't want to be orchestrating, you know, networking and servers and other pieces of their infrastructure piecemeal. They want to do it using DevOps. What we have done with our network operating system is provide that programmability as well. Plus, the other interesting feature set and functionality it brings as well as around debugability and so on. So, you know, again, customers want that visibility and as they deploy networking, they want to know what's going on, you know, where the bottlenecks are and so on. And so, one of the things our cloud network operating system enables is that level of transparency internet working. So, that is in terms of our organic portfolio. Okay, so the cloud networking operating system is your target market. Most of the, is it the hyperscales and some large enterprises, combination in between? It is actually a combination of both. So, if you think about it, you know, your average data center customer is moving to that scale out model. I mean, we just talked about converged and hyperconverged. So, the traction, the movement is toward large number of smaller nodes that can, that all need to be connected together and that need to work as a whole. And so, that's where the phenos becomes extremely relevant. Okay, and from a, so that's the software piece from a hardware standpoint. It sits on your hardware. Can it sit on another hardware or what? That is correct. So, as you may be very well aware, you know, with the networking, there is this trend toward defa-gregation, right? And defa-gregation happens at multiple levels, if you will. So, there is defa-gregation of the data plane and the control plane, which is what has given birth to software-defined networking and networking, virtualized networking, overlays and things of that nature. There is also another level of defa-gregation that's playing out in the context of networking and that is the defa-gregation of hardware and software. So, particularly, you know, if you look at telco kinds of verticals or hyperscale customers, you know, their tendency is to optimize the hardware, standalone and then to buy software independent of the hardware. And so, one of the things that we have been doing as moving forward is really delivering what are known as only compliant platforms. So, essentially, what that gives you is the ability to, you know, essentially run any other operating system on top of it. And vice versa, our cloud network operating system can be run on other hardware platforms as well. Okay, so that reminds me of Juniper strategy then, correct? Yes. So, maybe a good transition to talk about the partnership with Juniper and, you know, what was announced this week? Absolutely. So, Juniper is a great compliment to what Lenovo brings in the networking space. As I mentioned earlier, you know, our core portfolio is really focused around top-rack switches. But if you look at what you really need in the classic data center, you know, the three-tier networking architecture, you know, you need aggregation switches, you need core switches. And then as you start going outside the data center, customers are also looking for routers, you know, they're looking for firewalls, load balancers, security products, they're looking for software-defined networking as well. And Juniper, as you're very well aware, has a very rich heritage in that networking arena, in the ability to cater to, you know, that wide swath of customer needs in those areas. And the partnership gives us the ability to walk in the customer environments hand-in-hand and be able to demonstrate to them that we have everything that they need in order to deploy a complete solution. And you're putting that in the practice office. You had an announcement today, I believe, about what Juniper, with product that you're moving forward, or services that you're moving forward with them. And we'll go a little bit more on that. Yes, absolutely. So what we announced today were a couple of things. So we now have the ability to both OEM as well as refill Juniper offerings. In addition to that, what we're also doing is helping customers are providing them blueprints of how they can deploy the combination of Juniper and Lenovo offerings for various use cases. So a couple of the ones that I'll point at, you know, there is a remote office, branch office kind of deployment where you may want to deploy a power over ethernet switch, for instance, in combination with other products from the Lenovo portfolio. So that's one of the instances of we're delivering a solution blueprint that sell us from both sides as well as, you know, system integrators can go sell to customers. Another use case that we're focusing on is virtual private data center. So again, going back to the comment that I made earlier where, you know, you need to have a strong networking backbone in order to deploy this notion of a private cloud. We're partnering with Juniper with, you know, we're using spine switches from Juniper, we're using our access layer, we're pulling in software components from VMware and we've architected a blueprint that allows customers to basically take it and, you know, pretty much off the shelf and buy a bill of materials and deploy it in their environments. Just in general, if you take a big picture here, taking a step back, you've got this almost like inexorable link between data centers and networking, right? I mean, what do you focus on? I mean, how do you characterize that relationship and what do you focus on in terms of making sure that it works? Yes, that's a great question, John. And then again, if you think about, you know, some of the trends that, you know, that have been getting talked about for just convergence, for instance, or hyper-scale deployments, these are all about optimizations across servers and networking, right? Conversion and hyper-conversion are all about, you know, how you put various components within the infrastructure together, such that they work in a much more efficient and a much more optimal fashion. And so that's really where the bulk of the focus has been. So again, if you look at the focus of the business that I manage, it's all around converged and hyper-conversion networking, which are all extremely synergistic to each other. So, Radhika, you know, in partnerships with Juniper and with Nutanix, can you talk about the services piece of that? Because customers are, of course, always looking for that single-throat to joke. Yeah, how does Lenovo look at those partnerships? And that is, that's a great question, too, because that's one of the areas where we believe we can add a lot of value. Lenovo clearly has a global footprint, you know, we have presence in many, many countries across the globe, and we have the ability to provide the level of support and services that enterprise customers can count on. And to your point, having that single-throat to joke, that is huge for a lot of customers. So that is a very distinct advantage that we believe we can bring to the table with these partnerships. We've been asking various guests here just to perhaps look down the road a little bit. And there's always a next step, right? I mean, you can't afford to sit still in your environment. So what is that for you? 12, 18-month timeframe? I mean, what kind of roadmap do you have? Yeah, that's a great question, John. So, you know, I'll go back to some of the trends that are playing out in the industry that we have been heavily monitoring, tracking, as well as investing in. One of the ones that I alluded to earlier is the smooth towards virtual networking, right? Software-defined networks, network fabric virtualization known as NFV, that is catching on like wildfire and telco and hyperscale kind of environments. And so, you know, our teams are actively working on delivering those types of solutions. And then when you start looking at converged and hyper-converged as well, you know, there is, you can almost argue that networking is the next frontier, right? So the storage problem has been solved to some extent. Hyper-converged systems today crunched down, compute and storage together, but networking is still that unknown, relative unknown. And what we believe, where we believe we can really add value is by focusing on that networking piece, by optimizing networking such that it is much more compatible and it works much better with the converged, hyper-converged environments is one of the key areas that we're investing in as well. Well, first, before we say so long, how do you feel about being on the keynote stage? I mean, this was kind of- This is very exciting for us. And my setup, isn't it? This is, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, loving it. This is a very exciting day for Lenovo. As I mentioned earlier, lots of very cool data center announcements that happened earlier this week. We announced some industry-leading benchmarks that you'll hear about from our server leader. We had some pretty cool announcements about our storage partnerships. Clearly, as I mentioned earlier, we've now announced our brand new cloud network operating system, our partnership with Juniper. And then, on the hyper-converged front as well, we just rolled out a series of platforms targeted toward the SMB customers. So this has been an extremely exciting week for us here within DCG at Lenovo. It's a great future ahead of you. We appreciate the time here. You're double-dipped on theCUBE today. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you, it's a pleasure. We'll be back with more from the Lenovo tech world in 2016, get together here in San Francisco in just a bit, right here on theCUBE.