 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 Lenovo Tech World. Here in San Francisco, we're in the Masonic auditorium, John Walls, along with Stu Miniman. And we're wrapping up here from San Fran with the chance to look back at all that we've heard today, Stu. You know, the WhizBang stuff, I find, you know, pretty interesting, right? We've seen new devices, we saw the new tablet, the FabPro too, and what have you. And there are a lot of bells and whistles, a lot of fun stuff, right? Virtual reality, augmented reality. But underneath all of that, right, it's all data, it all needs the underpinning, it all needs foundation and infrastructure, and I think that's the interesting play here, is that Lenovo sees that and obviously is trying to prepare for that future. Yeah, absolutely. So first, right, you know, talking event like this, Masonic is beautiful, John, you know, really cool demos, you know, the music's been pumping, keeping us hoppin' here, and we're on the keynote stage. I mean, it's kind of nice, right? I feel like, you know, you go to the Super Bowl, they're a sports center, we've been called the ESPN attack, so, you know, John and Dave, you know, we're missing you here in San Francisco. We're on the field. But, you know, yeah, we're on the field. We're on the field. Here in San Francisco. So, you know, first of all, you know, Lenovo, I mean, you know, leading brand in PCs. And, you know, YY, the CEO said, you know, we're, you know, personal computing, you know, is really becoming obsolete. It's connected computing. You know, and I look at it and said, you know, right, if they don't move beyond, you know, the PC business, the PC business is going to move beyond them. We understand where those are going. So, you know, big pushes into mobile, and you know, we'll talk a lot about the enterprise. I actually, I traded notes with a cousin of mine. My cousin Brandon Minaman really understands, you know, the mobility space. He and one of his brothers created a website called Pocket Now. Really understands the consumer space. He was actually watching the keynote, and he saw the Moto Z. And he said, you know, the Android space has been kind of dull the last couple of years. They got some cool things. That connected piece, the developer angle, you know, he says thumbs up, you know, something he wants to look in. I mean, heck, they brought in Ashton Kutcher, to, you know, kind of show this. I don't know if he's invested in it, but, you know, he said he'll judge the million dollar developer thing that he's going. But the reason that ties this all together is all those devices and the smart devices, you know, PCs with virtual reality and augmented reality, the internet of things. At the end of the day, there's the cloud and infrastructure, you know, that are going to back those up. So that's where, as you know, we've said a number of times, the boring infrastructure stuff sits behind there. And on theCUBE today, we had the people from Lenovo say, from the server side, their job is to make sure that it just becomes indivisible. You know, this is the foundational layer that sits behind everything. You know, we always said in the storage world, it's like, you don't think about the fact that, you know, when you go to the ATM, that, you know, hey, can I lose some of that data? Oh wait, you know, sorry, that paycheck went in. Oops, sorry, no money. So, you know, we understand that, you know, that the nitty-gritty stuff that happens in information technology behind the scenes, most people don't pay attention to it, but it is critical to how our modern society works. And we heard, you know, we were talking with several people on the server side and they said, wait a minute, you know, we've actually been around a long time. This is part of the IBM acquisition, you know, the SystemX back in 2014. And so we're not newbies to this at all. It's just we've reconfigured, we've reorganized. But you go to the storage side and we heard Stuart McCrae readily admit, we are new to this. This is a new game to us, but they see that as an opportunity of a lifetime, he called it. So it's interesting that they have obviously cited what they think is a big upside, a big opportunity, and they're trying to seize it now in the storage side. Yeah, so first of all, right on the server side, of course, IBM's got a great legacy there. You know, they really were the first in the blade server market. They brought, you know, Linux, you know, to a large parts of data center when their servers brought, you know, small form factors, a lot of innovation that IBM's driven in their times, but the X86 business was not getting the attention that it needed when it was inside of IBM. IBM still has the power systems. They still have the Z systems. So, you know, spinning it off was helpful for IBM so that they could focus on what they need. And it's going to, you know, Lenovo hopes to reinvigorate the X86 group. We heard that there were some, you know, some challenges anytime you make an acquisition and Lenovo made two big acquisitions, the Motorola piece and the system XP. So both of those big acquisitions, a lot of people, there were some people that left the organization, there were people some cut, figuring out the strategy that it fits, but they think they've got that where they want to go and they think they can win back market share and be aggressive, both in the traditional enterprise space as well as the hyperscale place, because Lenovo has global reach, global support, and they can push much lower margins than IBM can in the hardware space. And where that fits for the storage side is what we talked about with Stewart and Radhika and some of the others, is if you look at the hardware that makes up storage today, it's X86 servers. So, you know, underneath it used to be custom monolithic hardware that you build. And today, you know, it's mostly Intel based architectures, and they did that. When EMC switched their main product line, the Symetrix, you know, over to an Intel based architecture, you know, it went pretty smoothly for them. So, if you look at Lenovo and you say, okay, they have what they want to be one of the top leaders in X86, should they be a storage player? Well, if you're a server vendor and storage is coming back to the server either to build storage arrays like scale out filers or for hyperconverge where you've got both compute and storage together, well, you're either going to be a supplier to storage companies or, you know, hey, that you should have that mix of partnering and what you do internally. So, it makes perfect sense for Lenovo to be there. Stewart says it's the once in a lifetime. He said, well, you know, it's usually every 15 to 20 years you get a big opportunity with some of these, you know, seismic shifts, but absolutely Lenovo has the right to be at the table and that we are in the early parts of their journey to see how they can compete both against the big guys as well as, you know, some of the incumbents and partnering with the likes of, you know, Cloudian, Nixenta and Nutanix who is the leader in hyperconverge today. That's right, I want to hitch up on the partnership thing too because we've heard that a lot, right? That if they don't have the expertise they're going to lie to themselves with those who do. And we see that on the networking side with Juniper, you know, Radhika Christen was telling us about that. So, that seems to me to be smart play, the right play because they're augmenting their offerings now with the expertise of those who have really been acutely focused on it. Yeah, it's interesting, there's, you know, there's been the vertical integration of a lot of companies. If you look at an Oracle, you look at an IBM, how much of the stack can they own? But when you talk about the breadth of these solutions, if you're doing IoT, you're going to be partnering with somebody just because just all of those devices and the edges, nobody's going to own all of the pieces. So, you know, Lenovo is starting out, they've, you know, put their places to where they have some of their early partnerships, ones that fit well with kind of the architectures that they have, and they'll grow that out. On the networking side, you know, Juniper's a good partner to work with. They both are interested in kind of that disaggregation of hardware and software. Networking is one that we're still, I mean Cisco's still dominant in that marketplace, but you know, we believe that there are places where, you know, customers will start to make changes and move to more of these distributed architectures and make some of those decisions separately for hardware and software. So, interesting opportunities there. Remains to be seen, I mean, who knows, you know, two years down the road, five years down the road, how much is Lenovo partnering? Today they say they, you know, don't compete with any of those partners well as you grow out a portfolio. Eventually you reach a point where you compete. Dell used to say- I'll say naturally there's friction, right? At some point. So, you know, I remember back, you know, if you went to Dell, you know, 10 plus years ago, it was, they partnered for storage. They partnered with networking well. They made acquisitions. They made a big acquisition, you know, with EMC more recently, which will be wrapping up soon. And so, you know, now they have, you know, their partnerships and what they do internally. So, it's always that maturation of the solution and, you know, especially for storage, partnering out is a great way to start and get you into these markets. They're changing fast. I mean, that's what we've seen is, you know, storage as a whole moves real slow, but boy, there are some micro changes that are happening and, you know, getting, you know, new architectures ramping up to a billion dollars in a couple of years, you know, happens faster than, you know, I've seen in my career. And it seems Lenovo has the commitment to get there, too. I found that interesting. Always a pleasure to work with you. Good seeing you out here. Your final thoughts, I mean, before we head off, just about in terms of their landscape. We've talked from, again, from many of the folks inside the company, very optimistic, upbeat, positive and assured, I think, of the path they're on. You feel good about it? Yeah, no, I was impressed by what I saw here and it's interesting. You know, there's a large server manufacturer that's having a conference, you know, in another city that theCUBE's broadcasting today. They just shed their consumer division. Lenovo believes that, you know, it is the breadth of the portfolio and, you know, very different portfolio than that other company that they have. So how they work together, how they'll put those solutions together, I think Lenovo has an understanding of where they want to take it. There's some tough competition out there and things are changing fast. So it's always exciting to watch this on theCUBE. I'm excited. We've got, you know, so many shows coming up here. We talked about Nutanix next. I'll be back here. Hey, you're a busy guy. Thanks San Francisco for the Red Hat Show. You know, summer will be gone quick. We'll be back for VMworld this year in Las Vegas. So yeah, John, thank you for coming out for this one. A lot of fun. I want to say big thanks to our team. I mean, you know, this one was one, you know, getting here on the keynote stage is a some unique characteristics. We're also broadcasting from the Fairmont. So I want to just, yeah, we have big thanks to Pat, Greg, Chuck, Brendan, Alex. You got them all. Team effort, you know, everybody back in the home office that have been blogging in the cube gems and everything else, you know, team effort here. Really appreciate everybody watching here. You can always hit us up on the Twitters and you know, see SiliconANGLE TV for what's going on. We had a one hour turnaround here. And if we didn't need time lapse to show you, because they were flying around in fast motion the whole time, but did a cracker jack job of getting things set up, we do appreciate that. Stu, been a pleasure. And we thank all of you as well for joining us here on theCUBE. For Stu Minimum, I'm John Wall, so long from Lenovo Tech World here in San Francisco on theCUBE.