 Live from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2.0, brought to you by Lenovo. Live coverage of Lenovo Transform here in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. So Stu, this is the second ever Lenovo Transform event. And yet it's the third time theCUBE has been at a Lenovo, explain to me what's going on here. First of all, I mean, Rebecca, set the stage here. We're at Basketball City in New York City. Yes, that's true, you're right. Here's 36, yes. Right on the water, it feels like, you know, we just hit intermission time. Everybody got let out after the keynote, so it's a good energy here at the show. But thank you, yeah, 1,000 people here. I think it's like double what we had last year in New York City. Yes, absolutely, yes. Two years ago, we were actually at a Lenovo show, and the Enterprise Group was a small piece of it. So, Ashton Kutcher was there, showing off the cool new Moto phone that has like the snap on things, that now they have like a 5G-upgradable version of that. So, there is still the Consumer Group. I saw some really cool gaming headsets that I might know my son would really be liking. But our focus today, really talk about the Enterprise. The Data Center Group is the one that bring us in, and we're going to have a bunch of their guests on. But, you know, Lenovo, obviously, company been around for a long time, even though I know some people are like, wait, who's Lenovo? And they're like, wait, look at the laptop their company gave them. Oh, that's a Lenovo thing. I use it every day, right. Absolutely, and they drive a lot of the things behind this, just because that's the IT business. You know, I still, most people I talk to, they're like, what do you do? I'm like, yeah, it's computer stuff. You know, you don't understand. So, the big news of the day, obviously, is the NetApp Lenovo partnership, two global powerhouses coming together. I want to unpack that with you. But first of all, let's just talk about where Lenovo is at this moment in time. This is a company that is really turning the corner, and we're starting to see a lot of positive growth. Tell our viewers where we are. Get our viewers up to speed. Yeah, so absolutely really good point. We're going to get to that NetApp, which is the big news of the day. But to set the stage, if you think over a decade ago, when Lenovo acquired the PC division out of IBM, ThinkPad brand, people knew everything like that, couple of years they went down, and then they grew it and become the number one PC manufacturer worldwide. Well, they picked up the server division. Last year, we were talking about 25 years of these x86 servers and the history and everything like that. Well, history seems to be repeating itself. Lenovo hopes it all repeats itself because they had about two years of, well, revenue declined a little bit. Where do they focus? And now they're starting to see growth, so some good growth. And I think if it's year over year that the fastest growing vendor in the space, large global presence, so a lot of excitement there on all of the pieces from Lenovo. Hyperscale, I'd love to talk about. We're going to have some segments here. You know, the storage piece as those solutions go together. Things like hyperconverge with their large growth with the mechanics. So a lot of things happening in Lenovo and starting to see the fruits of the big Motorola mobility and x86 server acquisitions really starting to hit on all cylinders. Okay, so now, so we are going to talk about all of those things later on the show. We've got a lot of great guests coming, but Lenovo NetApp. So we're having Kurt Scalgan and Brad Anderson of NetApp coming on the show right up after this. What do you make of the deal? And is it going to be the game changer that these two executives are predicting? So when you look at Lenovo and say, okay, they didn't form a server group when they bought the server division, it's a data center group. And if you have the data center, let's not forget, they actually have some nice networking pieces, which was the old, the BNT pieces, but when they talked about really their global scale, you know, the whole data center piece and mobility go together, you've got to have storage. And Lenovo has a bunch of storage pieces. They have a lot of partnerships. We mentioned Lenovo, companies like Pivot 3, scale computing are helping them. But you know, you bring NetApp. NetApp is the largest independent storage company today. Now, last numbers I saw are friends at IDC. We're putting out the numbers that, you know, NetApp is number two overall. Dell in its various pieces, of course Dell EMC from the EMC exhibition is number one. But you know, NetApp is there, a broad portfolio, getting in there with the all flash array markets. And this will be joint development, 10 products in two families, but NetApp has a very strong position in the all flash array market. And if you look at what storage is today, there's really servers inside. And this is servers there. So this is not just wrapping these together, you know, and go to market, but you know, they are going to do joint development, they're going to work on innovation together. They've got a joint venture in China because while Lenovo is global, it is their positioning in China that will help them. I remember if I saw right, just, you know, they announced it today, they start shipping tomorrow, like overnight they will be the number three player in China and they have, you know, a goal to drive them to be of course number one there. And that's the story here with Lenovo. They've got growth, they've got a good, usually, at least top three position in many pieces of the market and through partnerships, through acquisitions, you know, they are helping to themselves to broaden their portfolio, move up the stack on some of these and deliver these solutions to help as Kirk said it, you know, they're helping solve some of humanity's biggest challenges. We're going to talk about like supercomputers and the like that do some of those really cool things. Well, I want to get back to the strategy of the company in terms of the relationships because that really has been Lenovo's, their operating model is, are these collaborations, these partnerships and they have them with the big companies that everyone's heard of, the Amazon, the Google, the Microsoft and then they also have them with a lot of small, smaller players. Is that in this fast moving, fast changing IT environment, is that smart? Yeah, absolutely, they have to. No single vendor can do it all. Usually we had a decade or so where it was like, well, let's vertically integrate and put it all together. Then people thought, well, maybe it's just going to all be commoditized. I mean, come on, Intel's the big sponsor here. You know, arm in arm, of course, that's probably the number one partner that Lenovo has. Everybody's partnering with Intel. Everybody's partnering with Nvidia. VMware and Microsoft are the same. You and I are going to be at Microsoft at night in two weeks. We're going to be talking to a Lenovo executive. They're one of the four biggest sponsors at the show working on Azure Stack, working on the solutions. I was at VMworld a couple of weeks ago. Lenovo had a big booth there. Talking about first that they have with VMware vSAM and moving in that market. So of course Dell has a very strong relationship with VMware but Lenovo partners across a lot of these environments and to speak to, how do you differentiate? The story I really like is this is a multifaceted market. So yes, there's the enterprise. There's traditional markets that Lenovo can serve really well. There's new changing markets like Hyperconverge. But as I mentioned, like the Hyperscale, their strategy there is what they call Odeon Plus which means they do some customization but at massive scale. These are 10s or 100,000 plus servers that they will build for a vendor in a specific environment and it's not just off the shelf Intel that they do for that. And there are some players in the server market that have just left that. Specifically HPE, I'm pretty sure that they're not touching that market. It is relatively low margin. It is very hard to get there. You need that global scale. So Lenovo differentiating how they compete against the Dell, Dell EMC and HPEs of the world, as well as the ODMs out there, kind of a generic brand. So they're making good progress and the partnerships absolutely are going to help them get there. I'm glad we not only have a couple of partners, we have one of the super computer customers on to really talk about some of those cool use cases. You mentioned this idea of how Lenovo competes and the theme that we keep hearing from all of the Lenovo executives is this relentless focus on the customer and really trying to comport itself as this brand that can be trusted that is ethical, that is responsible. Is that enough? Is that enough to just be to win your customer's hearts and minds or do you need to be a little more? So look, if there's one thing that you want to stick and start on, focusing on the customer is a great place. Absolutely, if you're not going to lose customers because they love you and you support them, that's great. When you talk about trust, the storage world, that's what we buy, buy on trust and risk is what the storage and networking people buy on. So that's a great thing, but it's not enough. And I'm excited, Rebecca, we've got a whole bunch of interviews to be able to dig in, got the net up one kicking off and then some of the other pieces to really help us answer that question as to, right, start with the customer and everything leads from there. So, great stuff. Well, it's going to be a great show. Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure co-hosting with you. So stick with us at theCUBE. We will have more from Lenovo Transform here in New York City in just a few minutes.