 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. There's over 5,000 customers, partners, NetAppians, analysts, press here. theCUBE is here as well. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Back for our second year of covering, we're joined by two guests, one an alumni and one a new guest to theCUBE, Henri Richard, EVP of World Wide Field and Customer Operations from NetApp. Welcome. Good morning. Morning, and Cameron, I'm EVP and GM of Data Center Infrastructure from Lenovo. Welcome back. Glad to be here. So guys, Lenovo, NetApp, just about a month ago announced some exciting news. Henri, let's start with you. Kind of give our viewers who may not be that familiar with the news announcement, what this new technology partnership is all about. Well, it's a multifaceted partnership. I think it's important to understand that for us, there is a component that has to do with a worldwide engagement of Lenovo around storage solutions that will be infused with NetApp technology. There's a second element, which is the opportunity for us to pull our go-to-market organization in certain countries and get to critical mass to cover the needs of customers. And then the last part, the one that's probably the most talked about is a joint venture in China, where we will combine our forces to serve the needs of the very fast-growing Chinese market. All right, Henri, I was at the Lenovo event where this was announced. I want you to give us a little bit about the field engagement, because it really does seem a place where NetApp and Lenovo, there's good synergies there, but there's not a ton of overlap, maybe explain a little bit from the field engagement. That is really one of the reasons we were excited, I think on both sides, to do this agreement. We feel that Lenovo is a fantastic server company that's demonstrated incredible momentum in the last 12 months. We have ourselves, modestly, a pretty nice momentum in the storage business, and though coming together, I think we can be stronger in serving the needs of customers that have both compute and storage needs. When we did the analysis of our market coverage, it so happens that there's a lot of places where we're strong and Lenovo can benefit from that, and other places where they're strong and we can benefit from it. So you're correct in stating that there was not that much overlap. And then lastly, we've put in place a process where our go-to-market organizations are going to combine their strength and help each other in some of the accounts where both a strong compute story and a strong storage needs to be integrated to serve the needs of the customer. Let's talk a little bit more guys about the impetus from the customers. The keynote this morning, as I was mentioning with jam packed, and we heard a lot Stu about the customer experience and how NetApp is an enabler of customers to harness their data, to become data-driven. Cameron, from your perspective, what was some of the customer input that really sort of brought this partnership in this multifaceted partnership together? I think as we see customers looking at their applications, not only current applications, emerging applications, data is becoming very critical. And be able to accelerate data and the availability of data is going to be key for them, right? As you heard earlier this morning, data's gold, right? It's the next oil as we think about it. So we looked at our customers and as they're transforming, moving toward machine learning and AI, big data analytics, and it's driving massive amount of data that you have to be able to accelerate and be able to give results back. The partnership was the best of the breed here. Looking at a leader partner around all flash and growing massively with their data management solutions and us leveraging our server technology and the capability we're bringing as a data center group, bringing the most of best breeds to deliver an end solution for customers is really what we focused on. And it's all being driven really by data, really where we see acceleration happening on the workload aspect of it. Yeah, I was listening to the keynote this morning. It talked about how customers today, it's a hybrid multicloud world, is what NetApp position. And what I actually like is both NetApp and Lenovo are really aware and work with really the hyperscalers out there. There's a bunch of years that we kind of, there was this fighting from certain vendors out there that was like, don't go that, that's not the future. We know what we're telling. Maybe talk a little bit about how that plays into philosophy, how you deal with customers and how that leads to the co-engineered solutions that you'll work with together. Well, I think that both companies have a history of being good partners in the industry, right? Let's start there. Secondly, you're right that some vendors in what we would call traditional IT are still fighting the reality of the hybrid multicloud. And I think that's a path to death. Lenovo doesn't have that position. We certainly don't have that position. And we believe that combining our strength when we're serving the customer to help them go to the public cloud, to help them leverage both great compute capabilities on-prem and the extraordinary innovation that happens in the cloud is the right way to serve the customers. No, absolutely. I think customers are looking to be more agile, right? As their business evolves and they're seeing competitive nature in their line of business, agility is becoming more and more important. Everybody also has to fit within a budget. So the hybrid cloud story is really the path. And today, again, Lenovo is serving six of the top 10 hyperscalers today from technology. And we believe the hybrid cloud story for on-prem is the path to the future where customers need to adopt and deploy, to be more agile and reactive to their markets. You tell, sorry, George Currian talked about in his keynote this morning, excuse me, that we seem to kind of initially address, NetApp has a massive install base, a lot of enterprises that were not born in the digital age. So he kind of talked about something that reminded me what you said, Henri, is if customers don't adapt, transform rapidly at scale, they're out of business. So NetApp itself has undergone a very significant transformation. I'd love to understand from both of your perspectives, Henri, we'll start with you. How does the NetApp Lenovo multi-faceted partnership deliver differentiators? Presumably, Lenovo has a lot of choices to do a partnership with a cloud and storage data management company. What are some of those unique things from NetApp's view? So one of the salient point that George made this morning is that for legacy companies, they have to understand that the fact that they already have data is a huge asset that they need to leverage, right? That's using that data is how they're not going to become disrupted by the new company. Startups have agility, but they don't have the data. So jumping on that opportunity was certainly something we did at NetApp, and we have an application called ActiveIQ that actually takes a massive data lake of information we get from our systems and is helping our customer make better usage of our technology. So just an example of our digital transformation. To the point of the relationship with Lenovo, the nice thing about our data fabric strategy is that it is not related to NetApp hardware. It's really all-encompassing. It's there to serve the needs of the customer to be able to leverage the value of their data. And so it makes it very easy to partner with us because really we're not parochial about how we go about leveraging the technology. Yeah, I think what we see is that this digital transformation is driving many new use cases. IoT is becoming a big thing, putting edge to the cloud. So data and understanding data and what you could do with data is going to become more relevant across all lines of business. And that's where we're really focused on. And our transformation as Lenovo, it's all around how do we address that shift that's happening in the market where customers are moving away from data being just there to actually leveraging data and be able to create an outcome out of that data. It's going to be effective. All right, so this was announced about a month ago. Give us a little insight. How's the rollout been going? What's the reaction been from customers, channel partners and the like? So I think channel partners, analysts and press have been very positive, right? I think as we talked about being frictionless, it's been there, right? I think people see that what we said is actually out there. We're seeing good success in parts of the geography worldwide already for the products they've been shipping as of 9.14. We have our DE series shipping shortly in early November that we're going to continue to see acceleration of that in our channel partners and our end customers. So we're very excited. I think as we saw, you know, prior to announced when we were growing triple digits in all flash as Lenovo, I think with the expanded TAM going from 15% to addressing above 90% on market with the storage portfolio, we're excited here. We're anxious to keep going. Yeah, I'll go a little further. I would tell you that I think many channel partners felt hostage to some of the other choices in the industry. And you know, the overwhelming feedback to the announcement of this relationship is thank God, I now have an alternative that is powerful with great focus on the compute side, great momentum on the storage side, bringing together best of great portfolio. And now I've got choice that I didn't have before. So I think there's a very high level of expectation, excitement, and I expect the momentum with channel partners and distributors to be very high. Let's unpack that joint go to market GTM strategy a little bit more. Let's talk about it first from the NetApp side. How are you going to market with them? You mentioned through partners, the selling motion, how do customers engage? How about understand that? So NetApp is really coming from a very high touch sales model. You know, the beauty of our partnership with Lenovo is they have a velocity model. So for the part of the markets that are really about having velocity, I think it's a perfect marriage. The second thing is they have a much larger worldwide presence than we do. I mean, they've got physical location in many countries where we're not present. So that's expanding the footprint of potential, you know, close in service to NetApp customers. And then lastly, you know, the world is evolving very quickly, it's all about the apps. And I am excited about the fact that my go to market team rubbing shoulders with the Lenovo team is going to get more intelligent about compute, which is important for us to understand the real needs of the customers. And Cameron, from your view? I mean, I think Lenovo serves over 160 countries. As you know, Andri said, we have a very expanded. We serve customers all the way from SMB, all the way to very large enterprise, the cloud service providers and MSPs. I think the momentum we have based on the product announcement is really provides that alternative solution to the HPE and 3PAR and Dell EMC, right? As Andri stated, I think a lot of our channel partners, our distis, our value added resellers are looking for an alternative route of a solution between the two leading platform solutions providers here. And I think we're seeing that momentum, right? I think as of 9, 13 when we made the announcement to transform, we're seeing the excitement and the pull coming from the field and driving it. And of course we of course have a direct sales model, right? Having the high touch with the end customer, selling the value prop of the storage solution and the entire portfolio we could bring in and the partnership value that brings them with NetApp here. All right, so what should we expect to see from this partnership in the near future? Well, I think, you know, expansion of the product portfolio, particularly in the case of the China JV, one of the mission of that JV will be to design products specifically for the Chinese market, which we'll know very big and growing extremely fast. So that's one aspect that is yet to be seen. And then the second thing is as we collaborate on solving real customer problems, I expect to see a higher level of innovation as we understand both sides of the equation and how we can bring our technologies together to solve real customer problems. So last question for both of you. You both talked about this joint partnership gives both NetApp and Lenovo and your respective install bases choice. What is the one differentiator? Why would a customer choose to go this route versus as you mentioned, Dell EMC, HPE? So I think you look at where NetApp has had leadership performance in all flash and on tap's amazing software, data management software solution. And look at Lenovo, we've been the fastest growing server provided in the world. We see where we're leading in HPC environments and really driving software defined. So I think customers are looking for how do I take the best of breed of things and bring it together and making sure when you bring it together, it is working together. So part of having the relationship of leveraging the NetApp technology as a Lenovo storage portfolio also provides that ability that says it's a proven technology, the server technologies and the storage are proven. So it doesn't matter if a customer wants to leverage a NetApp technology with a Lenovo server, it is a proven solution for them and they could depend on the value it's going to deliver. From my standpoint, you've got two credible long-term solid people in the industry partnering to get best of breed solutions with an eye towards being leaning into the cloud. And I think that in today's IT business with a new wave of IT, if you don't embrace the cloud, the cloud will kill you. And so I think that's our unique differentiation is that we have two companies that can serve our customer on-prem needs but have a very comprehensive private cloud, public cloud and on-prem strategy. And I think that nobody else can claim that differentiation. Henry Cameron, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting and sharing a little bit more about this exciting partnership. We look forward to hearing news next year. It's been a pleasure. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are live from NetApp Insight 2018. We'll be back after a short break.