With the announcement of ThinkAgile, a new brand for software-defined products, Lenovo Group Ltd. is drawing a line in the sand between its offerings and those of legacy system vendors. Companies who have built their business on selling rich, customized products may now find themselves having to deal with a new competitive enterprise landscape.

“There is less of a motivation on the part of these vendors to really embrace software-defined entirely. Lenovo doesn’t have that baggage,” said Radhika Krishnan (pictured), vice president and general manager of software-defined infrastructure, networking and telco at Lenovo.

Krishnan appeared on the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and answered questions from hosts Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu) during Lenovo Transform in New York, New York. They discussed Lenovo’s announcement of the ThinkAgile brand, the need for more networking innovation and the future of the hybrid cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Leveraging core expertise to deliver turnkey offering

ThinkAgile is branded as a way for Lenovo to capitalize on its expertise in building reliable, high-performing servers, such as the x86, Krishnan explained. Taking hyperconverged appliances along with rack-scale solutions and blending them with Lenovo’s platforms as a turnkey offering, the company wants to deliver on the benefits of its core expertise.

“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-premises infrastructure,” Krishnan said.

One of the issues that Lenovo hopes to address is the thorny problem of networking in the data center. Customers are expressing concerns to Krishnan that the flow of data traffic doesn’t match the architectures they are using. “Networking has to evolve where it is much more simplified,” Krishnan said, pointing out that technicians should not need multiple years of certification to work in a data center.

Included with ThinkAgile’s software-defined technologies will be tools for Microsoft’s Azure Stack. Lenovo is trying to bring some clarity around what customers want in a hybrid cloud. “Many vendors in this space have talked about hybrid cloud, but it has never really come of age,” Krishnan concluded.

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.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE