 Hi, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Bev Crair. She is the vice president data center group product development and quality at Lenovo. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks, Stu. So Lenovo is a longstanding partner of Microsoft. Why don't you just set the scene for our viewers and talk a little bit about the history of the partnership and where you are today. So Lenovo and Microsoft have had a partnership of about 25 years, which is a long time in this industry. And we work really closely together on both innovation, but also making sure that anything that Microsoft is building runs best on Lenovo. And what about, so here at this conference, what are you hearing, what are you seeing in terms of this partnership? We have actually six things that we're really talking about here at the conference, which is a lot if you think about it. But the first is the announcement of our Think Agile MX, right? Which is that integrated WSSD system. It's pre-certified, you just buy it as itself. There's four or five different sizes of it, if you will. The second one is our Azure Stack, but also our Azure Services. So we're now doing both on-prem Azure Stack and Azure Services, which is really about customer choice. Because a lot of data center customers are really struggling with, how do I build a hybrid cloud infrastructure and what do I do with that? The third thing that we're doing, oh my gosh, I'm not going to remember them all. The third thing that we're doing is our SQL Server performance. We continue to be the best in performance for all of our SQL Server efforts. Our two socket systems are best performing, our four socket systems are best performing, and still our eight socket systems are best performing. In addition to that, we have, when we're proud to work with Microsoft on the launch of Windows Server 2019. Again, that's part of that 25-year partnership. It's just something you've got to do. And we're really proud of that. The other thing that we've announced here is what we're calling the buyback program. And a lot of companies have buyback programs where you can actually buyback equipment and you buy back your competitor's equipment in order to build your stuff up. But the one thing that's kind of different about what Lenovo is doing is something I call Zillow for systems. So you actually can go online and put in the systems that you have or the equipment that you have. And we give you an automatic instant quoteback. And nobody else is actually doing that. So it's kind of a Zillow-ish system where you can see what's my stuff really worth. I want to click in a little bit. So I know the partnership for a long time. When I think about PCs, when I think about servers, obviously, Lenovo has the gear, Microsoft has the OS and various pieces that go on there. When I look at solutions like WSSD and Azure Stack, Microsoft has a number of partners. Maybe help us understand what that partnership means, how Lenovo differentiates from some of the other players out there. So that was one of the things I forgot. So one of the things that we've announced today and that we showed today, and actually Jeff Woolsey talked about it in his talk earlier today, is an integration of Microsoft's Windows Admin Center for WSSD and Lenovo's X-Clarity System Management System. So via a single pane of glass from your Windows Admin Center, you can actually not just look at Windows Admin and the Windows infrastructure, but you can actually dig down and really understand what's actually happening with the hardware itself that WSSD is running on. And that's part of that really close partnership and relationship that we have. Can you talk a little bit about the approach to the partnership? Just because we had a Microsoft executive on here earlier today, and he said that our partnerships, we were able to have a collaborative and collegial partnership with our competitors. So it's sort of part of their DNA. How does Lenovo think about the way, when it partners and how it partners with a competitor? Well, but Microsoft isn't actually a competitor of ours, and this is the thing I think that Lenovo as a company really is focusing on offering to our customers this choice, right? We have a co-located lab up in Seattle with Microsoft. We have had for years. We do innovation summits with them. We look at where the technology is going and what is it that we can do together in order to make that more effective for our shared customers and how they deliver in the long run. And so it really is a very strong collaboration. We don't build operating systems. We don't build all of the SQL server. We don't build the Azure stack and the cloud and all the rest of that. So the partnership with Lenovo, Microsoft gets to take advantage of all of our supply chain goodness, all of our services goodness, as well as all the platform stuff that we do as well. If you look, HCI is one of the things that we've been talking a little bit more about here. Obviously it makes sense for Lenovo to partner here, but Lenovo also has a number of other solutions. Maybe how do you look at it? What are you hearing from customers when it comes to that kind of solution and how Microsoft does it? It really is about choice, right? It really is about choice. Customers have different kinds of problems in their environments and they're seeking partners to help them solve those problems in their environments. And those choices are actually really critical for them. So when you're working with somebody like Lenovo, where we also offer VMware, we also offer some of the other solutions that are out there in the market, that you work with a partner like Lenovo where we have all of the services and the infrastructure to back that up, plus the longstanding relationships that we have with our partners, enables us to offer that kind of choice that allows our end customers to solve their customer's problems. And that's really the core piece that we're looking at. Yeah, Microsoft of course, partners with a lot of companies. I heard in some of the technical keynotes, I heard about NetApp get mentioned quite a bit. Of course, Rebecca and I were with your team at Lenovo Transform in New York City recently. Maybe for our viewers that might not have caught that show. Give us the update, what you're hearing people about the big partnership between Lenovo. So we announced a partnership with Network Appliance, NetApp, at our Transform show last week, I guess it must have been. We've been working on it for a while. So just the fact that the announcement happened was really cool. And it's kind of a three-part partnership. The first part is that Lenovo will be branding NetApp's, a couple of the sets of systems that NetApp has. And it allows us to fill out our storage infrastructure. Last year, when we launched our largest portfolio of servers, we launched eight all on a single day, and the rest of the Perli platforms followed from my team in the next quarter. This year with NetApp, we actually launched the largest storage portfolio in the market. And so this partnership actually allows us to do that very, very collaboratively. Then the second part of the relationship is a joint venture that we're starting with NetApp in China. Given the depth of work that Lenovo does in China, it allows NetApp to actually build their market and their infrastructure. And I think some of the customers in China are actually really looking for the kinds of solutions that NetApp has available. And then the third is moving forward to build innovative solutions together. So taking the innovation and the 25 years worth of innovation that my team has done over the years, and all of the work that we do in performance, all the number one on client satisfaction, all the number one on reliability for the fifth year in a row, and bringing that into our NetApp alliance. What are the themes at this conference? And also, frankly, at Lenovo Transform is about company culture and about this idea of the importance of collaboration and creativity and teamwork and inclusivity. Can you describe a little bit for us how you think the Lenovo culture is similar to the Microsoft one that Satya Nadella is a proponent of and also how it's different? How is it similar and how is it different? That's a really interesting question. The thing that I have found about the Lenovo culture that I think surprised me the most one year in is how committed Lenovo is to really understanding how people think and bring that in to how we build effective solutions together. It is by far the most diverse organization that I've worked in, in lots of lots of ways. But if you look at the senior leadership level, right, you would expect it given that the company is actually headquartered in Beijing and in the United States and we're on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, you would expect it to be Chinese, but it's not, right? The leadership team is actually incredibly diverse, way more diverse than I expected. But even on my team and further down in the organization, a lot of our engineers have spent multiple years overseas. They've raised their kids overseas, they've gone to school overseas, and so they have a very inclusive perspective on how do we solve problems? And they also understand that the way in which we solve problems isn't necessarily the best way. So in our conversations with Microsoft and the culture that we create with them together, it becomes very collaborative, because we go back to what's the customer problem we're really trying to solve? How are we actually helping our customers in their intelligent transformation? How do we become their trusted partner? And how do we actually help solve humanity's greatest challenges? And that's a together statement, right? With Microsoft and just kind of peeling back the onion on what are the real problems that we need to get to to solve together? You mentioned how diverse a company Lenovo is and that's actually at a time where the technology industry is not known for its diversity. In fact, it's really known for its bro culture, it's the derse of female leaders. I'm wondering if you could just give me your thoughts on how technology, sort of the state of the affairs today, is it as bad as the newspaper headlines make it out to be and sort of what we need to do to move forward? So I think in part, there's two answers to that. One of them is that the participants in technology are changing. So if you look around the room and you watch who's here, what you're seeing is that there's a whole generation of new people coming in who've always had technology at their fingertips. And so they think differently and assume differently about what that technology is supposed to do for them. And so just age diversity starts to come into play. But also the people that buy our stuff, right? 65 to 75% of commercial electronics are bought by women. That's a stunning figure when you really think about it because it's very different from the people that actually create or have in the past created that technology. So when you start to see who's buying and why they're buying, you actually have to start to understand that they're buying for very different reasons than perhaps you were creating the technology for. So an example of this is the new Hub 500 or the Hub 700. Have you seen this? So it's a link connected system that sits on the table and you push a button and you're automatically connected with everybody that's going to be in your link meeting or everybody that's going to be in your Skype meeting. And we had to do a fair amount of work to really understand how people were going to interact with the system or not interact with the system. And even colors like red and green and the fact that they mean different things in different cultures and how are we going to display those colors, right? But that's where the diversity of participation in solving a problem really comes into play. Great. Well, Bev, it was a pleasure having you on the show. It was really fun talking to you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit.