During every conference visitors will always get to see the “bells and whistles,” the eye-catching, breath-stopping displays of things like virtual reality and augmented reality. But underneath it all – no matter how colorful or show-stopping – is data. At this week’s Lenovo World event, it was an exciting time rich with innovations behind the scenes.

Stu Miniman (@stu) and John Walls, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, found themselves on the keynote speaker stage for Lenovo Tech World 2016, feeling much like announcers as they commented on the events and interviewed key players on theCUBE.

Rapid microchanges

Lenovo has been using its global reach and global support to match and even outdo its competitors to become the leading brand of PCs. Of course, everyone wants to know – what next? “Storage as a whole moves slow, but micro changes are happening all the time,” Miniman said. Lenovo knows what it’s aiming for and is moving toward its goal.

What Miniman sees on the horizon is a decline in the popularity of personal computers and instead a rise in connected computing, with a big push to mobile. He argued the importance of the nitty gritty stuff behind the scenes that most people don’t pay attention to but are crucial to basic functions. For instance, without this data supporting the surface applications, when you go to deposit your paycheck it could simply disappear. It’s necessary to recognize the importance of such vital operations and how everything works together, beyond what is visible.

Partnerships

Another main theme of this year’s conference was partnerships. Lenovo is innovating and advancing, all while competing with the larger companies. There has been a lot of vertical integration of other companies, Miniman said.

“If you’re doing IoT, you’re going to be partnering with somebody; no one owns all of the pieces,” he said. They’re also moving to distributed architectures. However, as the hosts pointed out, it remains to be seen how much Lenovo is actually partnering. While the company says partnering is an integral part of its plans, Dell, Inc. said similar things but soon made big acquisitions of other companies.

Only time will tell, but it is certain that partnership is a fundamental component to Lenovo’s current endeavors.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE