Kirk Skaugen sits down with hosts Stu Miniman & Rebecca Knight at Lenovo Transform 2017 in New York City, NY #LenovoTransform #theCUBE https://siliconangle.com/2017/06/27/how-will-lenovo-make-hyperconverged-tech-a-reality-for-enterprise-lenovotransform-guestoftheweek/ Just how will Lenovo make hyperconverged tech a reality for the enterprise? Lenovo Group Ltd. is working to make the hyperconverged data center a reality for the enterprise. Clarifying its growth intentions last week during the Lenovo Transform event in New York City, the company unveiled key products and an evolving mentality to drive adoption of its portfolio of server, storage, networking, software and data center services. The company is trying to capture a piece of what Gartner predicts will be a $5-billion integrated systems market in 2019 — a market that includes legacy players like Dell Technologies Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. Building on its x86 server business and the economy of scale that its famed PC business brings, Lenovo is driving the software-defined data center through enriching the customer experience. “If you think about us as a company, we’ve acquired the x86 server business from IBM a few years ago, and we are also building off more than a decade of our China heritage for the ThinkServer business. So that’s combining the two together, driving to our next phase of growth,” said Kirk Skaugen (pictured), executive vice president and president of the data center group at Lenovo. While at the Lenovo Transform event, Skaugen spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and explained how the company is taking an extremely grassroots, customer-centric approach to redefining the data center through simplicity. (* Disclosure below.) This week theCUBE features Kirk Skaugen as our Guest of the Week. Simple thinking Lenovo’s strategy with ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile is to offer a premium brand across not only its server business but to also move into storage and networking as well. The company will use ThinkAgile for hyperconverged storage, as well as to solve some of the challenges associated with networking and moving traffic. ThinkSystem provides server, storage and networking platforms with simplified management, Skaugen explained. Promoting ThinkSystem as a platform engineered to reliably and safely deliver demanding workloads such as real-time analytics, DevOps application services, and software-defined storage services, Lenovo is attempting to improve ease-of-use, accelerate certification time and minimize training. “The whole purpose is transforming the customer experience and starting with the customer first. We’re incredibly proud that we just got ranked number one in customer satisfaction, again, but we’re not stopping there. We’re going to use this [technology] to catapult us ahead,” Skaugen said. Today’s enterprise customers need technology to be simplified, and as the digital transformation continues to add more layers of data and networking demands, the complexity and rapidity of innovation are making it difficult for information technology organizations to keep up, according to Skaugen. Lenovo designed its server storage and networking to be flexible and “future-proofed” by reducing the number of products in the portfolio and building them for scale for the next wave of technology. “Software-defined is going to be a key element as well because people aren’t looking to change out the hardware as much as they are the software part. Everything from our configuration managers to our system hardware management, and with XClarity, the whole design experience, we’re changing to simply the experience for the customer,” Skaugen said, referring to Lenovo’s centralized resource management solution for IT administrators. Lenovo has a few advantages in the marketplace, Skaugen pointed out. One of the primary benefits is the company’s lack of legacy. They don’t have the upkeep and all the associated costs and services, so Skaugen and his team are not encumbered by the past. The data center group also has the advantage of being autonomous and making its own decisions. However, it is the manufacturing capability of Lenovo that affords the group the scale and speed it needs to retain its number one status, Skaugen added. On the PC side, the company builds approximately four devices a second. On the server side, it is about a hundred servers an hour. ... Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the Lenovo Transform event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Lenovo Transform. Neither Lenovo Group Ltd. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)