 Live 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. Welcome back to the big stage here at the Masonic Auditorium as theCUBE continues our coverage of Lenovo Tech World in San Francisco on top of picturesque Nob Hill. Beautiful setting here on the keynote stage for just about an hour ago. They rocked the house, they really did with the presentation of a number of products and talking about infrastructure launches and what have you. And with us to talk about that along with Stu Miniman is Madhu Mada, who's the Vice President of Marketing for Server and Storage in the Enterprise Business Group at Lenovo. And thank you for joining us, Madhu. We appreciate the time. Thank you for having me. Yeah, the impression of what you got from what you saw down here, it wasn't kind of like the old Lenovo, was it? Absolutely not, I'll tell you. It had a little pizzazz going. Absolutely not. I'll tell you, where will you see the future of smart devices, connected devices, mobility, gaming, VR, and much, much more all in a span of one and a half hours? I certainly didn't see that. I mean, I have whole new respect for where the market's headed on that side of the house. Clearly a lot of these things require one thing in common that's a data set on the back end and that's where I come in. Yeah, we were still, and I were talking in the open just a few moments ago and had a, having a chuckle about why, why he's talking about. You know, we're going to do five minutes of boring infrastructure and then we're going to move on. To your point, that is, that's not just a common thread, that is an essential foundation for all the consumer use and the enterprise use and so your work really is, I think, highlighted by the kinds of product launches that we saw here today. Absolutely, and I saw a statistic the other day about the future holding 5.5 million connected devices coming online every day. Now, they're not necessarily smartphones, but in this era of internet of things, it's sensors, devices all over the world, but behind all of that requires a data center. The data center is a compilation of server storage, networking, solutions, and services and that's where data center group, which is the group I lead from a server storage and solution standpoint, that's where we come in. There's a hunger out there. A lot of the infrastructure is not built yet. There are data centers today that require traditional equipment and there is the data center and transformation. We address the needs for both. I'm sorry, go ahead. Can you, for those people that don't know the data center group inside Lenovo, how many people, what's the breadth and span of it? Of course, we talked to the keynote about the system X acquisition of over $2.1 billion, so give us the breadth and scope of the data center group. Yeah, so the data center group is a global organization. We have, with the group itself, we have about a little over 2,000 employees, but more importantly, very strong breadth of server storage, networking, solutions and services. And the point here is that we are part of a very large global organization called Lenovo, by which we have the advantage of taking, using the Lenovo scale and economics and that's more important. Having a very strong portfolio is one thing, but being able to deliver that to our customers with the right scale, our customers are global, delivering at the right scale with the right economics is absolutely critical. Great, can you talk a little bit about the announcements that were made today, specifically in kind of the server and storage? So as we bring out more and more products to complement our portfolio, let's start with the first one. You brought up system X, that was part of the IBM acquisition that came across in 2014. Now as part of the entire server line, our flagship line is called the system X 3850 and 3950, and just a quick blurb on that, the 3850 and 3950 flagship line actually drive 55% share in the SAP HANA space. So we have the number one share there and this is the line of servers that drives that. So today the first announcement is the introduction of the next generation of 3850, 3950 with Intel's next generation of processors, the E7 V4, that's one on the server line. Secondly, there's a big market around dense, the dense portfolio of servers out there. We already have the next scale today, which is a 6U12 node. We're introducing a brand new product to expand that portfolio in the dense space with the ST350 and the N400, which is a 2U40, and customers in a single 2U, 2U40 box can actually run forex a number of workloads and there's a whole bunch of other benefits to that. The third is a very exciting space called software defined storage. Many of us come from the storage space, we've seen the growth in storage, however, there's been a small decline this year primarily because of the new models of storage coming up, one of them being software defined storage. So we've jumped into the market very quickly with first up appliance called the 8200N with an extensor, that's for unified file and block. And secondly, object which is growing the fastest of the 27% cagger, we've got an alliance with a partnership with Claudion and that's the 8200C. So very exciting announcements today. Samaru, on stage, Intel CEO got up and while he didn't talk a lot about the server space, I think he put an Oculus Rift on, played a little bit of game like that, how is the partnership with Intel? Where does Lenovo sit? It kind of in the partnerships that Intel has. Well, to have Brian, VK in the room today along with YY speaks volumes right there for the level of partnership that we've got with Intel, we meet with them quarterly, bi-weekly, we have teams working with them all the time, every new announcement, the partner is along with them, the partnership couldn't be stronger as it is today. And they see us as on a growth path, they see us from where we are coming growing, because they see the portfolio and they're a huge partner of ours. And I think he alluded to some of the cloud services, the platforms that Lenovo builds, kind of that scale and density that you talked about before. Right, and they're a huge partner with us as we build out a lot of these new portfolio products, be it for the cloud, be it for Hyperscale, we have a huge Hyperscale business, they're a huge partner of that. As you know, the Hyperscale business is not a business you can walk into alone, having a partner behind us like Intel has been amazing. You know, you're looking at, if you talk about your general approach, about openness, flexibility, versatility, those kinds of things, how does that translate at the end of the day to your customer and the values, the benefits that you're trying to bring them? So you know, one of the three key tenets of our strategy, having a great portfolio, foundational core set of products, services offering solutions is fantastic. But the strategy that underpins that is in three tenets. The first one is being open and flexible. The second one is purpose-driven innovation that matters to our customers. And the third is a transformation of customer experience. Now let's talk about the first one. The key to being open and flexible is to be able to deliver best-of-breed solutions to our customers with the most current technology. And that can only happen by marrying our core foundational products with a set of very exciting innovations being driven by partners around us. And for that to happen, we built a very strong ecosystem of partners. So for our customers, they can be sure that day in and day out, what we would bring to them is the best-of-breed set of solutions. Knowing that we're bringing the best-of-breed ecosystem of partners, we're not tied to organic investments like many of our competition. There isn't a set of technologies that we need to protect within the company that may be our cake today. We're out there with partners, we pick the best-of-breed and we bring that to the customer. How do you help them make that change gradually though? Because it's hard to write huge checks. When you have all this legacy equipment, you're situated with your existing equipment and now you come on with obviously some very dramatically different product. How do people make that migration and then how do you assure them that this is going to work out and you can give them ease of comfort when it comes time to write the check? So that's a great question and it actually is a staged process job. And the way it works is, the way we approach this is, we walk into a customer based on their profile. We have a conversation of where what their journey is to the future. Almost every customer that we know is in some sort of transformation journey. You've heard the cloud a lot today. That is a journey of transformation. We have a lot of conversations with these customers. Show them what we have in store for them as they get on that journey one year forward, two years forward. But we're very mindful of the fact that our portfolio serves their needs today. So the conversation starts from where they are headed on that journey that we want to be part of that journey because of the technologies and offerings we bring to them today. At the same time, we have a foundation set of offerings that they're buying today that they're very excited about. So excited about the journey, excited about how we can be a partner for them on the journey but very mindful of what they're buying today. So Matta, you threw out the term best of breed before. We've seen a number of players out there in the marketplace that have done a lot of integration. Oracle comes to mind with the full red stack. Kula Packer Enterprise has their piece, you know, IBM, you know, between Softlight and Bluemix and everything that they're pulling together, even the applications and the data itself. How does Lenovo view that kind of integration versus some of the partnerships that you're doing? So, as I said, one of the beauties of being open and flexible is we're not tied to organic investments. And here's the reason why. As much as there is a lot of depth to that you can bring with organic investments, the challenge always is the fact that you don't know where the next generation of innovation is going to come from. Right here in the valley, we're surrounded by so much innovation and the worry always is who's going to come up and out innovate from you and what happens to the hundreds of millions of dollars that you just spent on these organic investments, right? So, the natural tendency is to start to protect those investments and for the customer that is not necessarily the right answer because they like the leapfrog effect in many ways and we can bring that to them with the best of the partners that we partner with. So, talk about those new innovations and what's coming. We talked about the storage space, software-defined storage and hyper-converged. The compute layer is still quite important to it. So, you mentioned some of the partnerships you got the OEM of Nutanix and Accenta and Cloudion. You know, what does Lenovo bring special to those partnerships and OEM relationships? So, let's take Nutanix as a quick example or even Juniper. The partnership with Nutanix is primarily software. We work with them very closely on taking their software layer, the hyper-converged infrastructure software. And like I said when I started out the interview here today that we bring a global scale. So, we take our compute platforms with the global scale, the economics that we can bring, a cost structure that most companies out there with our level of scale cannot bring today. The wrapping around of a set of services, design, implementation, consultancy, manage services, we bring all that together. The third pillar of that is a set of solutions and applications that we work with the best application members out there, the ISV ecosystem, to test and provide seamless solutions running on either a Nutanix or on a regular set of servers, storage and networking in a set of engineered solutions that we can deliver to a customer, literally turnkey. So, forward thinking. I mean, I hate to say, let's look down the road when you have such a significant series of announcements here today. But in your vision in that 12 to 18 month roadmap about where you want to take your group and the kinds of maybe partnerships that you'd like to explore, do you have some thoughts that you can share with us in that vein? Sure. So, it's a section that we call beyond the portfolio. So, there is clearly a roadmap across servers, storage, networking and solutions. But we have an entire section that we're focused on which is beyond the portfolio and that's a function of a few things. The top trend in the market out there is the cloud. That's beyond the portfolio. So, we're working very closely with a set of partners to deliver a very simple set of solutions to the customer to make, to ensure that customers have a choice of workload placement. To me, cloud's all about a choice of workload placement. That's what it's about, at the enterprise level. At the device level, it's very different. But we are the data center group and at that level, it's about where you place your workloads. Typically, it's a choice of two. One is on-prem private cloud or a hybrid cloud which where you're moving the workload to a public, your choice of public cloud. So, our view is very simple to provide an entire very simple set of solutions for seamless workload placement that the customer has a choice of. The next piece is, we talked a lot today about smartphones, mobility, connected devices, the fact that this is the era of Internet of Things. All that's going to be about generating tons and tons of data. Now, that data's got to be analyzed and eventually, you need a business result. Now, you enter big data analytics. So, our next generation platforms are going to be providing a set of very simple solutions around big data analytics and analytics working with an ecosystem of partners. We already are the leading analytics platforms with our partner SAP. We intend to expand that with other partners. And the third set is a set of engineered solutions. Now, when we talk workloads, a lot of workloads, a lot of companies out there take workloads and provide a set of seamless solutions out there that they say are workloads. Your workloads run seamlessly on this set of solutions. We see the different way. For us, the idea is to take that workload, engineer a solution underneath it to provide an extra percentage more performance or ROI benefit that some of the others can't provide against that same workload. So, these are the three tenets of where we're headed from a future perspective, knowing that we've got a very strong foundation of core hardware and stuff like that. Well, it's an exciting time for sure. A great kickoff today, but you paint, I think, an interesting path here for the data center group and the rest of your group for the days ahead. So, we wish you all the best on that. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Manu. Thank you. Stu and I'll be back with more from San Francisco right after this, here on theCUBE.