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.

“We’re taking advantage of that scale and we get that advantage, unlike some of our competitors. What that really means to our customers is we can compete with the best commodity costs and the best manufacturing costs in the industry,” Skaugen said.

Customer satisfaction is personal

Throughout the event, theCUBE spoke with many Lenovo executives, and the sentiment was the same for all: The focus is on the customer. This year, every Lenovo employee has an incentive to improve the customer experience. From the engineers to customer support, a grass-roots level approach is underway, according to Skaugen.

Lenovo is also using innovative technology to improve service and keep customer satisfaction rates at number one across the board: “Our CIO and us in the data center group, we’ve all been collaborating to bring artificial intelligence deeper into everything we do, from our supply chain to our order delivery. … We can predict the supply chain, the right amount of inventory, and shipping it all the way through, and predicting the dock date to our customers incredibly well,” Skaugen explained.

After acquiring the x86 service business in 2014, Lenovo had to integrate information from more than 40 different databases into its systems. As of January 1 of this year, that process was completed. Pulling those big data analytics together and using AI and predictive analytics allows the company to track the aged population of all of the installed base, comprised of over about 2.5 million servers for warranty replacements and hardware replacements, helping to improve service and reliability, Skaugen stated.

By taking advantage of PC economics and bringing them to hyperscale computing, Lenovo is going the low-margin, high-volume business route to pick up market share in the top-tier, tier two, tier three markets, he added.

“We can compete with the best, most cost-effective companies in the world, and still make a little bit of money for Lenovo shareholders,” Skaugen 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