 Live from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. theCUBE's coverage of the Lenovo Transform event. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. He is the senior analyst at Wikibon. Thanks so much, Stu. It's great to always be working with you here. It's great to be with you here, Rebecca, in New York City. What a time it is in New York City. We are lucky we are to be alive right now. All right, another Hamilton humor. Yeah, YY, the CEO of Lenovo, got up on stage, talked about how there's no better transformation story than New York City from a humble trading company city over 200 years ago to the center of innovation and just global commerce that it is today. So I want to ask you about YY's keynote address. He was talking about how this is really an inflection point for Lenovo. He said, this is a time where we celebrate what we've done, our past, and think about the impact we've had on society and on business. And then also really look at the future and what we aspire to, where Lenovo wants to go. Where do you see Lenovo in terms of all of your coverage of these companies? Yeah, so we know that we're at an interesting time in really what's happening in IT today. One of my favorite lines that YY had is he said, you look back 100 years, he said, heck, look back 18 months, and you probably couldn't predict where we would be today 18 months ago. And that's true, the pace of change is just off the charts. On the one hand, they're talking about how ThinkPad is now 25 years old and the server, the x86 server line is also 25 years ago, but I've been at a lot of events this year where you talk whether it's 10, 25, or 100 years and they say we know we're entering a new era where everything's going to change. Lenovo feels that they are a good, really mash-up of their tradition, but they're different and they're new. And one of the people in the keynote this morning said that they're a startup. Now, I wouldn't call them a startup with 43 billion in revenue and 52,000 employees globally. A big startup. No, culturally, I think you and Rebecca, you'd agree with me, a company of that size, I don't care if you started yesterday because you all got moved in, you're not a startup, there's certain structure and certain things involved that make up startups and that innovation, you can't move a 52,000-person company on a dime and say, oh, hey, we're just going to go pivot into this. But they are looking to take advantage of really that the whole wave of AI, how do they harness the intelligence is what they talked about. And what they said is they don't have some of the legacy. So what that means is that while they have a server business that has been around for many years, they've only had it for two years, they don't have the storage, they don't have some of the baggage that we've been watching the industry is, storage is trying to transform. Particularly Kirk Scalgan, who we're going to have on the program later today, made that point about the lack of legacy and how that makes it easier not only to innovate, but also to sell. Yeah, absolutely. We've been watching that transformation about how software is eating the world and Lenovo very much wants to focus on those software solutions. What one of the two brand names that they put out today are the Think Agile brand and Think Agile is really focused on those software-defined solutions highlighted by, they've got the OEM of Nutanix solutions and they're also partnering with Microsoft where we're going to have Azure Stack coming out later this year. Lenovo of course being one of the top server manufacturers close partnership with Microsoft and going to drive that forward for the really delivering on the promise of hybrid cloud solutions. So yeah, I want to hear what you think about these product announcements. This is the largest product launch in the data portfolio in Lenovo history. Is it a game changer? So Think Systems is the other big brand that they have and it's server storage and network. So they have Intel up on stage and as a matter of fact both Kirk and Kim Stevenson both came from Intel. So we know Intel's place in the market. We understand how important they are and with the Skylake chipset coming out later this year, it's important anytime Intel comes out with the next generation, it's important. The caution I have is this is, I think the fourth or fifth show this year that theCUBE's done where Intel's up on stage talking about their next generation chipset. I was at the Google Cloud event in February. You were at the Dell EMC show in Las Vegas. We had the team at the HPE Discover and all of them arm and arm with Intel talking about how this next generation is going to be transformative and of course, leveraging the data, being ready for all of those edge solutions, devices, and really be able to take that infrastructure and tie it to lots of different devices. But it's really that wave that Intel is the rising tide that rises all boats because revenue for servers actually in the first quarter this year we're down a little bit because really big companies especially the hyper scales are waiting for this next generation chipset. So in talking about how Intel is this great partner to all of these companies, what do you think sets Lenovo apart? I mean, where does it compete? What's unique about it? So Kirk in the keynote this morning laid out a couple of places that they want to really tie their brand to. Their goal is to be the most trusted provider in the data center today and trust is really important. Security, absolutely, it's at the board level. It's one of the top things that everyone discusses there. And when they talk about trust, it starts with uptime. So if you start with, we're all using some of the same base pieces. There shouldn't be much difference between them at that point but Lenovo had some data points to show that they had the least amount of unplanned downtime of any of their competitors going out and saying compare them to Dell and HPE and they were far and away in the lead. And that is huge particularly as you were saying the pace of business change and innovation is so fast. And the second piece customer support. So we hear lots of lip service to things like customer support. Lenovo from a cultural standpoint, they push it through the entire product line and really you get to hear also the leverage between the PC laptop and even tablet market and even the device all the way through the servers. So talked about how when they bring in the sheet metals and the screws, you turn one way and you go to the consumer side, you turn the other way in the factory and it goes to the enterprise and the server division. And we know that there's leverage that can be made out of that. The economies of scale are good and we've seen a lot of splitting of consumer and enterprise HP cut those into the rumors for years that Dell was going to sell off their PC division. Lenovo feels that they have the strength to do both of them. And as we start seeing edge solutions and mobile and all these other devices playing, Lenovo can build an end to end story that few companies still can. Talk more about this end to end because this is another thing that many executives played up in the keynote. I mean how important is that in terms of how it competes? So there are some pieces that are easy and you say okay, well from a brand standpoint, if I have the new Moto Z and I have a laptop that I like, you build that brand trust, you have a similar user interface, we've seen what Apple and Google can do pushing out across all of those devices. But the second one is really if we start talking about data, if I want to have insight and connectivity, YY said in his keynote this fourth revolution is really going to be focused on the user and therefore you want to be where the data is, where the users are, where the devices are. And Lenovo has a lot of pieces that touch to those end devices. We're going to have a number of executives on the program too, also a customer too. One of the things that YY was talking about is harnessing AI to not only understand where your customers are today but also anticipate their needs, where they want to go tomorrow. Is this something that you view as a strength of Lenovo? So we're still pretty early in the AI. I feel like many of the times here you heard big data and AI both be thrown out there. We know that there's so much data being created, especially with the proliferation of all of the end devices that are there. So how do we gather that data, turn that into insight, and we're starting to see where that goes. Lenovo still primarily is an infrastructure player. So it's devices, it's boxes. You want to hear more about the software that helps drive that. And a lot of that is through partnerships. I walked around the area here around me. There are many partners here that are helping to be able to transfer that data and create more insight out of them. So we'll see. It's a lot of that is positioning where they want to be and where they know that the new goal lines are. But I want to see some of the proof. I want to talk to customers that are using this and getting advantage from it. So much of Lenovo's strategy has really been about partnering and forging these alliances to augment its offerings. And Kirk had said he was going to foreshadow a bit of possible mergers and acquisitions, possible partnerships. What do you see in store for Lenovo in terms of how it moves forward in this hyper-converged world? Yeah, so in the software-defined storage space, Lenovo has a lot of partnerships. So whether it's Nexenta, they resale the solution. Nutanix is an OEM solution. Last year they had announced a deeper integration with a storage partner that was bought by one of their biggest competitors. So HPE has been acquisitive as of late. They bought both SimpliVity and Nimble, both of which were good Lenovo partners. So the question is, yeah, it's not surprising to hear Kirk say that they are going to be acquisitive. It's great to see him up on stage. I'm sure a question I'm going to have for him is what do you look for? I don't expect him to come out and say, yes, this is the company I buy and I'm going to spend $10 billion to go buy a company. But where are they going to fit and where are they going to partner in there? Just behind me here, you've got VMware, Red Hat, Nutanix, Micron, all storage-based solutions that Lenovo can work with. Lenovo wants to be one of those platforms for infrastructure and partner with companies that help round out that stack and therefore find software solutions that help augment that software-defined infrastructure that Lenovo does would make a lot of sense. So you talked about some burning questions you have for Kirk, but what else do you want our viewers to come away with after a day of coverage of the Lenovo Transform event? Yeah, so one of the other things that Lenovo is highlighting is what they're doing in the HPC or supercomputer market because there's a supercomputing show going on in Europe right now and Lenovo says that they now have 92 of the top 500 are running Lenovo, they're the fastest growth, but what I'd like to hear from him and I want to hear more of is it's not just, oh, we've got the speeds and feeds and this is great, but we're helping scientists do breakthroughs. We're helping the medical industry help out, find new cures for diseases. We usually hear about discern and what they're doing with advancing science. So those are the kind of things that connect the technology to the greater good. YY talked about it, Kirk talked about it. The greater good because infrastructure at the end of the day is only there for the applications that the business runs and of course those applications are there to drive value to the business and hopefully for the greater world. Well, and that is true and that is something we've heard at a number of technology conferences is using technology in these transformative new products to make huge advancements in society and to solve big problems. I mean, how serious is the technology industry? I mean, is this just sort of a side note that you hear at conferences or do you think this really is a raison d'etre of tech right now? Yeah, so Rebecca, you and I were at the Red Hat Summit and it felt ingrained in their culture. There were some companies, right? You hear you talk about it and like, oh, great, you give the employees time to go work on charitable events or what are you giving to schools and helping to make things possible? So I'd love to hear from Lenovo, John Furrier who said the meat on the bone for some of these solutions. I think it is more than lip service but how deeply ingrained is it? We'd love to hear the technology industry in general seems to be understanding that their mission should be broader than just selling licenses or selling boxes as a, I'm a sci-fi fan and most science fiction is about how we can take technology and make a better future. I have friends of mine that say if you're a technologist that means you're optimistic about what technology can do for you for the future. An area that you and I like to talk about is what will automation do to the future of jobs? So that needs to be part of the equation because it's not just, oh, hey, we've got this cool new data center and I can just lock it and nobody needs to go into it. Well, what are those people doing and what does that improve for the business and improve for the world? Right, and how will people work side by side with these technologies? How will their jobs be improved by the technology taking over some maybe perhaps some more monotonous tasks and things like that? Absolutely. Great, thanks so much Stu. I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll be back with more from Lenovo Transform just after this.