 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 Radhika Krishnan. She is the VP and GM of Software-Defined Infrastructure at Lenovo. Thanks so much for joining us. You've been on before, so thank you for having us. Welcome back. It's a pleasure to be back on again. Thank you. So I want to start out by talking about something we've been hearing a lot about today, and that is Lenovo's lack of legacy and how that makes it easier for your company to innovate and to sell to customers. Can you talk a little bit about that from your vantage point? Absolutely, Rebecca. So if you look around, there are a lot of legacy vendors that have incumbent businesses that have been built on very customized, very proprietary offerings. I'll point to my own background. I've spent a chunk of my career in storage, a chunk of my career in networking, a chunk of my career in service. And if you look across all of the offerings that come out from these vendors, these are usually high-margin, they're very rich offerings. And so as the industry has moved towards Software-Defined, there is less of a motivation on the part of these vendors to really embrace Software-Defined entirely. Now, Lenovo does not have that baggage, right? We're not looking to protect any legacy businesses. There is no concern around cannibalizing and existing stream of revenue or profits. And so we are truly able to innovate from the ground up. Rebecca, so the Software-Defined really is the intersection of pulling some of those pieces into standard typically x86 components. Can you bring us inside a little bit of Think Agile, the new brand that's announced? Seems maybe you're going to get a new job title, you know, to match that branding, but it feels like it all kind of pulls together to Lenovo's server as a core piece and then adding software on top of it. That is absolutely spot on Stu, you know? I mean, if you think about it, our core expertise is in building highly reliable, high-performing servers, right? And if you think about where Software-Defined is headed, you know, it's all anchored around a server, a core server platform or a platform that can deliver processing capabilities, which were extremely capable. I mean, we've got the industry's best supply chain as you heard, you know, highly reliable platforms, you know, variety of benchmarks and so forth. So we've got the basis, the foundation for being able to innovate with Software-Defined on top of that. All right, can you bring us inside the Think Agile family as it were? There's some partnerships, there's OEM, there's some technology Lenovo has. What fits under this umbrella? What are we up to today and what's coming soon? Absolutely, so the way we think about Think Agile is, we want to deliver to our customers the simplicity, the agility, and the cost economics that they may get in a public cloud in on-prem infrastructure, right? So if you had to net it out, our vision really is to deliver on the benefits and more. And so to that end, the way we have it architected is as a set of, you know, two sets of offerings. So we have appliances, which essentially take capabilities like Software-Defined storage and hyper-converged, blend them with our very capable platforms and deliver it as a turnkey offering. We're also bringing to market rack scale solutions, you know, keeping in mind that there are customers that want to consume the entire infrastructure, you know, end to end in a single turnkey offering for bringing those to market as well. And we're seeing a very strong response for both of those types of flavors. When you're talking about innovation and you're a tech veteran who has spent your career at various companies, large and small in the industry, how does Lenovo approach innovation? Especially because it's a large company, 43 billion in sales, 52,000 employees around the world. How do you stay in the startup mindset or do you? Well, we absolutely do and that's actually one of the, you know, as I mentioned earlier, Rebecca, you know, we don't have the baggage of legacy. And so if you look at how we're really approaching the Software-Defined space, you're exactly right. We're approaching it like an entrepreneur, you know, very much in a startup mode. We're able to innovate from the ground up, which is exactly what we're doing. You know, we're able to step back and look at it holistically from a standpoint of customer problems today, right? So there is no longer a, you know, let's see if we can wedge in this other, you know, multimillion dollar business here because that could then generate it more revenue stream. It's really more around organically thinking through what customer problems are, applying a first principles-based approach and then investing in it. So from that standpoint, it is very exciting to be in an environment where you can truly operate in a startup mode while you have the benefit of, you know, the very large sales teams that you alluded to and the, you know, ability to invest in it as well. What are some of the managerial practices that enable that? I mean, one of the things that Rod was talking about in the very beginning was there's no arrogance at Lenovo and then it really is part of the culture. I mean, can you describe a little bit about how you do get customer feedback and how you do work with customers to solve these problems? Absolutely. So, you know, I think a big part of it is, you know, the ability to live in, right? You know, humility starts with, you know, paying attention to your customers, paying attention to the stakeholders around you. And so, you know, we definitely do a lot of that. The other thing I'll point to as well is, you know, there is a very distinct emphasis around agility, right? You know, it's around the need to move quickly as Stu and I were talking about prior to the session. You know, this industry is going through a massive disruption. You know, there is transformation happening every day as we speak and therefore it is very important to be tuned in to what is going on around you and to be able to deliver on, you know, what customers are truly seeking. So, yeah, I mean, I would say humility is a big aspect of it, it's the agility, it's the hunger, the desire to succeed as well. Radhika, specifically what customers are asking for, I'm curious what you're hearing around hybrid cloud. I look at solutions that you're offering, including you've got the Nutanix solution, you've got the Microsoft Azure Stack coming soon. What are you hearing from customers? What do they look for in a hybrid cloud solution and how are you looking to deliver on that? Yeah, so that's a very interesting question, Stu, because, you know, over the years, you know, many, many vendors in this space have, you know, talked about hybrid cloud, but it's never really come of age for to speak. And I think a large part of it is because, you know, there hasn't been enough of an understanding around how customers truly consume hybrid. And I, as one of the things we've done in partnership with Microsoft is to really profile how customers really want to consume this notion of hybrid, right? I mean, there are environments where, you know, you have a disconnected set of data centers, you know, you have the edge and then you have the central data center and they need to be able to keep those two synchronized and aligned and so on. There are use cases where, you know, you truly want a hybrid nature, you want data fitting at both ends and you want to be able to execute test dev and your cloud environment and a primary workload running into your on-prem data center. And so, Microsoft Azure Stack, in particular, I would point to it as one, you know, hybrid cloud offering that we do have in the marketplace that we're partnering very closely around which truly addresses the problems that customers or the desires that customers have in this space. When you're thinking about your customers, what keeps you up at night? I mean, you just were describing how customers aren't even sure themselves, you know, how hybrid they want to be and how they will use the cloud. What are your biggest concerns when you think about your customers and how they use Lenovo's offerings? Yeah, so, you know, I think at the core of it, you want to enable them to succeed, right? I mean, it's not so much about the IT infrastructure underneath, it's really about enabling them to drive their business as quickly as they can, to drive productivity and so on. So, for us, it's very important that we stay aligned with their business objective and eliminate the worry and concern that they typically have with IT infrastructure under their hood, right? I mean, honestly, if we all in the industry tend to say IT is a means to an end and we truly want to enable that, I mean, we truly want to make this a non-issue for our customers. So that's really what keeps us up at night is ensuring that we have the right framework, the right portfolio, the right set of offerings and more importantly, the right set of services to allow them to do that. Radhika, we all know that IT is typically spending way too much time with some of the basic blocking and tackling. The number I've here, plus 15 years, is 75, some are doing 75, 90% of your budget is spent on kind of keeping the lights on. What's holding us back? How are we actually moving the needle forward with some of these new solutions? I think a lot of it interestingly comes down to software-defined. I mean, if you think about it, software-defined enables a level of agility, simplicity and cost economics as well, that we weren't able to previously get from the more legacy hardware-centric offerings, right? So I think to a large extent it comes down to being able to deliver on the automation, the deep integration across hardware and software, which is really where we at Lenovo think we can add the most value because we've got the platforms as we just talked about and so we're really very keen on innovating on the software layer about it, such that customers can expect to get these highly verticalized offerings that they can then deploy for their workloads and various other business use cases. All right, Radhika, we can't let you get out of here without talking about some of the networking pieces with your background. Kirk talked about it a little bit, but can you give us a little insight what's Lenovo doing with the networking piece, some of the integrations that you're helping to deliver? Yeah, that's an area I feel incredibly proud of. I'll say that, you know, if I've spent the last couple of decades in the IT industry, it's becoming very evident, you know, there's a simplicity that is continuing to grow, right? Even obviously we've come out with hyper-converged, it's solved the storage problem, it's made it a lot simpler to consume. Networking is really the next frontier, right? You know, it's the frontier that hasn't been attacked yet. We're still talking about technologies that are in work that are like four decades old, right? And so this is ripe for a disruption. That's exactly what we're doing. You know, as we go talk to our customers about deploying cloud data centers, scale-out data centers, you know, they're telling us network traffic is flowing east-west and the equipment that they have has been architected for traffic that predominantly flows north-south. So we're really helping simplify that challenge for them. You know, we're giving them, we're coming up with tools and we're announcing a couple of these today. We're coming up with tools that provide much better visibility with telemetry capabilities. We're providing them tools that allow them to apply policies. So even as they deploy different types of workloads, they can specify quality of service and have that carried over to the network traffic as well. So we're incredibly excited about what we're doing here in networking. So where do you see, what's the end for networking in the sense of, as you said, it is an industry that is ripe for disruption. Where do you think we'll be 10 years from now in terms of networking, in terms of visibility? Yeah, that's a very interesting question. I think networking has to evolve to where it is much, much, much more simplified. You don't need to have certifications that you have to gain over, you know, multiple years in order to qualify you to work in the data center and get, because ultimately this is plumbing, right? And as we go to scale out data centers, it's going to be incredibly important that nodes are able to talk to each other and data is fluid and is able to move around very quickly and networking is what enables it. And so the ultimate vision for networking is really making it invisible, right? Make it invisible to the point that you don't have to worry about it. Radhika, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you, it's been my pleasure as well. Appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more of the CUBE's coverage of Lenovo Transform after this.