 Live from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Cameron Amini. He is the general manager, server, and storage business unit here at Lenovo. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. And you're welcome back to theCUBE, I should say. Thank you. So today we've heard a lot about the largest product portfolio, data storage product portfolio launch in Lenovo history. Can you put this in perspective for us though, in terms of the customer, and why this is meaningful for the customer? Absolutely. So one of the key things with the entire ThinkSystem portfolio, we started three years ago at CleanSheet and really listening to our clients, listening to our channel partner. What are their challenges with IT, outside of wanting performance and everything else? How can we simplify their experience from the buying experience to life cycle management of the products, simplify part purchases? So a couple of things we did was common building blocks. So a lot of the majority of the ThinkSystem server portfolio have common power supplies that could grow off. One of the things customer asked us was, you have too many power supplies, right? I'm buying a part, I have to decide which server you have and what form factor goes in. And now we have one comment across the board. Same thing with management software. We provide one look and one feel experience for our clients. The whole philosophy of our ThinkSystem was start clean, deliver what customers are really valuing around IT and be able to help accelerate and sort of future proof the technology for them. As they're evolving their workloads and applications, as they're moving to flash technologies, how do we provide that flexibility? And that's really the foundation of the ThinkSystem. So Cameron, there was discussion in the keynote this morning. It's about harnessing the intelligence revolution and AI. Can you connect the dots for us as to how that fits into servers and specifically this launch, the new Skylake chip set? Absolutely. So of course with the new scalable Xeon processors, you're getting tremendous increase in performance. And I think when you look at AI and machine learning, there's the aspect that requires acceleration applications and there's still computing happening on the CPU aspect of the AI machine learning. And you're seeing more of the analytics and big data coming into this place. So that's really where we're leveraging the foundational excellence we have with our analytic platforms and also looking at big data and bring in with the accelerator's platforms to drive that end to end view around artificial intelligence. And that's where the ThinkSystem portfolio is really shining. It's bringing that end to end view from a client perspective for all the purpose to drive AI platform environments. One of the things we keep hearing about is Lenovo being number one in customer satisfaction, number one in reliability. Can you talk about how you make that happen? How do you ensure that you are as reliable as you've come to be known to be? Yeah, so one of the things with Lenovo is we listen. If you're not listening to your clients and understand where they're going, what their challenges are, it's hard to be able to adapt. And one of the things you'll see from a reliability perspective, we believe even as you think about the future of software defined, that foundational server has to be reliable. You're getting away from the legacy thinking of redundancy of infrastructure to running everything on a server base. So now that server has to truly deliver five nines. So we design stuff. A lot of people think X86 is a commodity space. I'm in my background's engineering and I think you could do different styles of engineering. And our engineering team is a great team that thinks about how do we take the Intel processor technology, build the platform around it to be able to have the highest reliability. And of course with the highest reliability, it also leads to customers basically having good customer engagement, customer satisfaction. So they sort of go hand in hand, right? And that's where we try to continue drive innovation. As you heard from Kirk and the main tent, our purpose is not to let go of that but figure out how we can continuously drive improvement in our reliability. Ideally I'd like to have six nines if I can in the server one day. But that's the foundation from an engineering aspect and innovation that's leading into the actual platforms and offerings for our clients. Kevin, can you bring us inside what your customers are asking for? You talked about massive amounts of data. There's so many choices out there. I mean, I hear, you look in the AI space, it's like, oh, there's the public cloud with their GPUs and TPUs and versus moving to more distributed architectures internally, what kind of feedback are you getting from your customers and what are they excited about that they can do this year that they couldn't do next? So I think a lot of customers will love to have purpose driven kind of platforms. And I think if you look at the market today there's plenty of servers out there by a variety of different vendors. The challenge for customers, some customers are very price performance sensitive. And sometimes they get siloed into I have to buy the expensive thing even though my application might not require flash, might not require GPUs. So if you look at the ThinkSystem portfolio we really focused on the segments of clients all the way from SMB to large enterprises and how are they actually using it? What's their purchasing philosophy and build the platforms to accommodate that segment plus the capabilities inside those platforms? So you'll see, for example, our mainstream two socket server where it has full capability with GPU, NVMe capabilities, future Intel technology built in versus we have our value line really focused around customers that are looking for really SMB environment. Give me that price performance that fits my budget friendly environment. And then you also see places like dense optimized platforms really driving innovation around our HBC but also being leveraged around hyper-converged platforms and general purpose consolidation. And finally, we do believe that the big data analytic platforms are going to be mainstream one day, right? They're sitting in your back end and the data center running your mission critical but they're becoming more and more relevant today. As you see AI happening, more and more stuff is going to go on those back end systems to drive the analytics. And that's where we believe we're positioned very well in the portfolio we're delivering across the 14 servers. So what will it take for big data to really become an important part of the way companies do business? I mean, there's a deluge of data right now and we're still trying to figure out what to do with it, how to slice it and dice it and how to make improvements based on it. What will it take, do you think? I think you're seeing a lot of ISPs that are doing traditionally traditional analytics are bringing big data into the analytics. So that's the first movement that the ISPs are merging those two environments together. The next thing is for people like Lenovo be able to deliver the infrastructure platform that actually can leverage that environment. Big data requires a lot of storage and you'll see our next gen analytics system. We almost quadrupled the amount of storage you have in that platform because we know more and more it's going to go from a storage perspective and an analytic and memory database environment. So it's really looking how the ISPs are looking in this challenge and building the right platform that actually will leverage those ISP solutions. Cameron, I love how you were talking about some of the applications because when I talk to customers it's that spectrum of applications they have that they're struggling everything from. I'm building new microservices based architectures to, I've got my ERP solution sitting back there. How do you help customers with that portfolio to modernize their infrastructure, optimize what they're doing and stay agile? Well, part of that is actually our service organization. It's really sitting and listening to understanding where the customer wants to go. Sometimes I think a lot of companies approach customers by saying here's what I have and try to force feed that offering into the customer environment. We actually are leveraging our professional service and consulting services to get a better idea of what does the customer wants to do today but moving into tomorrow and then what platform or solutions will actually benefit the client from heartworm, server storage or networking or even our engineered solutions that we have as Lenovo. When you're thinking about, when you're hearing the customer feedback and trying to anticipate what the customer needs tomorrow, is there any area that worries you in particular that the customer maybe have a blind spot for and it could be about data storage or it could be about internet of things or cloud computing? What keeps you up at night? I think a lot of it is to be personal is around cloud. I think cloud initially provides a value prop around for public cloud economics. But I think what we're seeing is a lot of customers have that philosophy of cloud but I think as they start looking into the actual deployment and how you manage that environment, the economics evolves. So what keeps me awake is making sure that clients understand our story and understand what Lenovo can bring into the table both for what their traditional IT needs but also their next gen IT plus how we could establish for them a private cloud environment and tie into a hybrid environment as well. We want to make sure our clients understand and drive the best value. One of the things I always tell my clients is look, if I could sell you one less server but you're getting more benefit, I'm here to consult you in that way. I want to make sure the result that you see is what we want to achieve. And that's what we're focused on. And to me, that's what keeps me up is making sure our clients understand the journey as they want to go to cloud and what's the right path for them. Cameron, it's been about three years since Lenovo acquired the X86 business. Give us as you look back, what surprised you in those three years? The keynote this morning, YY said, we wouldn't be able to think 18 months ago where we are today. So what's changed the most? What surprised you the most about the journey with X86? So I did come from System X as part of the acquisition to be very frank, I think one of the things that was stated in the keynote today was the agility that Lenovo acts on. It's okay to make a mistake, as long as you quickly react and fix the mistake. And I think what I've noticed in the three years I've been here with Lenovo now is one, the culture is very flat. Everyone's empowered to make a decision. There's no hierarchical decision-making. Of course, there's always a president, there's always a CEO, but people are empowered to make decisions that's beneficial for our clients. And we're seeing a huge focus around customer experience. It's not just a, organizationally, it's not just individual KPIs. It's really looking from end to end of our business. How can we transform our customer experience to drive a better experience for our customers? And I think that's, but Lenovo being that agile of a company, I had great service years at 17 years at IBM, very successful, but because of the size of the company and the different structures within company, a lot of clients didn't feel we could adjust their needs immediately. And I think with Lenovo, you're seeing a lot more faster agility from our supply chain to how customer gets quotes from a product perspective and support. Those are all the things that I see slightly different and we've been transforming as we've been going, enhancing those capabilities. And we've learned through our mistakes, you know, through the last three years. It hasn't been any mistakes that we haven't came out with, but we constantly learn and try to enhance that as we go forward. And I'm very excited going into this year, especially with these announcements that we're going to be driving a lot more enhancements than how our customers see Lenovo as a data center provider. A lot has been made about the fact that this is ThinkPad and x86 25th year anniversary, which seems amazing really. Now that these products are in their sort of adulthood, so to speak, what do you think we should expect in terms of performance and in terms of approach? Just because they are now, they've really worked out the kinks of the youth and their adolescence. Yeah, so if you look at, for example, in the server business, and at the server portfolio ThinkSystem, from just gen to gen, literally this is three years ago, two, three years ago, you're going to see customers be able to run 150% more VDI users and that drives a better economics dollar per user. So just from a gen to gen, you're seeing tremendous platform improvements and that's where I think we're going to see customers. Customers, I think you're going to see driving more and faster applications. I think we're going to see huge adoption of Flash within the server technology and therefore I think you're going to see where software defined and the server generation we're delivering come together very nicely where we believe that my personal belief is you're going to see a lot more customers moving away from a traditional storage arrays to now software defined or all five software defined environments where they're leveraging a commodity server based with huge amount of performance capabilities and software on top to deliver the business value. Cameron, where do you think we're going to be at the next year but then also 10 years down the road? I mean, as we've talked about the pace of business change is incredible. Okay, now, can you predict a little bit into the future about what we're going to, I know it's a tough one. I wish I could predict. I think you're going to see a lot of different applications coming together. I think you're going to see AI being a key factor to drive and generate a lot of information with machine learning and be able to take that information and figure out how you drive business agility. I think you're going to see retail driving AI aggressively. I think you're already seeing automotive industry driving machine learning and everything else into their cars. So for us it's very exciting as an IT provider where we see an evolution happening and eventually another revolution happening in IT, I think, in the next 10, 15 years. You're going to see, I think, more dense platforms because you're going to drive more density with the not form factor. I think you're going to see a lot more powerful systems and I think you're going to see software becoming more relevant. And I think that the legacy status quo is going to eventually be gone, I think. I think 10 years from now, legacy is considered to be software defined, I believe. Bold predictions. Predictions. Well, camera to Mimi, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for having me, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE at Lenovo Transform just after this.