Lenovo Group Ltd. dipped its toe into the enterprise market in 2014, when it acquired IBM’s x86 server business. Now competing in the enterprise market with heavy hitters like Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Dell Technologies Inc., the company revealed it is now trying to boost its rack space in the data center.

This week at the Lenovo Transform event, held in New York City, the company announced partnerships and products that will aid in its effort.

“We are very clear we don’t compete with our partners; we are here to make our partners successful. We have deep industry partnerships with the Intels of the world and Microsofts of the world because we are so complementary. We have made changes this year to ensure that they have rich incentives to work with Lenovo. We really want a win-win,” said Kim Stevenson (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of data center infrastructure at Lenovo.

Stevenson, who is the former chief operating officer at Intel, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Lenovo Transform event about her new role at Lenovo and her vision of the data center of the future. (* Disclosure below.)

The data center of the future will handle AI and IoT

Businesses today are using digital transformation and technology as a competitive advantage, but moving workloads to the cloud has consumed information technology practitioners, according to Stevenson. Rich functionality and common sense economics are driving these efforts, but it’s only half of the journey, she added.

“The enterprise data center becomes so much more important tomorrow than it is today. And it’s because of the workloads, the differentiating workloads of your company. … With the emergence of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things, those workloads are going to explode. And they are going to reside in your enterprise data center,” Stevenson said.

Citing Jevons paradox — which states that technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for anyone use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand — Stevenson sees phenomenal growth at the edge of IoT. Information will be coming back to the datacenter, however, for other types of processing. The value of data is being able to capture it, store it and analyze it in a very cost-effective manner, Stevenson explained.

Lenovo’s datacenter products had a bad year, Stevenson acknowledged, but she anticipates growth through three areas of improvement: sales execution, product performance and portfolio gaps, and customer engagement and support. Measuring those key performance indicators using advanced analytics and AI to track and predict customer engagement is the next step for Lenovo in building the lifelong customer, Stevenson 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