In IT, there are right ways and wrong ways to partner. Beware the “Barney partnership” — a figurative handshake between companies that doesn’t actually produce anything. For “coopetition” to be productive, it needs to be more than a truce between companies — they need to be actively invested in each others’ success.

Brian Connors, VP of Next-Generation Infrastructures and Business Development at Lenovo Group Ltd., said that the company has high expectations of its partnerships.

“One and one has to be much greater than two when we come together with these partnerships,” he said. He told Stu Miniman (@stu) and John Walls, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about Lenovo’s long-term goals. “Our objective is to be the number one trusted partner in the data center,” he explained.

Achieving more together

Connors tried to elucidate why he sees Lenovo as the best company to partner with. “We’re really the open one,” he claimed, saying that the company is more actively supportive of partners than others. “Some of our competitors are starting to close things up and starting to get a lot more competitive with some of the partners that we have,” he stated.

What does next gen mean?

Connors said that the foundation of next-generation IT is increased virtualization. He said we are approaching “virtualization of the entire data center.” He said the data center is becoming so lightweight and user-friendly that you could say that “the data center is the computer of tomorrow.”

He spoke about what consumers, enterprises and IT teams can expect from next gen. “We’re going to see the movement of not only more and more consumption of private cloud, hybrid cloud and public cloud, but also the data center itself being a lot more elastic as a software-defined data center,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Lenovo Tech World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE