Lenovo Group Ltd. is a seasoned technology provider with decades of experience serving the hardware needs of international customers, but still the company has never subscribed to the “legacy” designation that characterizes so many organizations slow to outgrow their traditional infrastructures and embrace modernization.

By building out through strategic partnerships and preserving a core focus on customer simplicity, Lenovo has maintained agility and precipitated both technological and cultural progress in the market.

“Lenovo and Microsoft have had a partnership of about 25 years, which is a long time in this industry,” said Bev Crair (pictured), vice president of development and quality, Data Center Group at Lenovo Group Ltd. “We work really closely together on innovation, but also making sure anything that Microsoft is building runs best on Lenovo.”

Crair sat down with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. A tech veteran who’s worked within some of the largest organizations in the industry, Crair is overseeing the range of collaborations Lenovo facilitates as the company strives for greater cloud accessibility. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Bev Crair in our Women in Tech feature.

A modern partner portfolio

Lenovo’s long-standing partnership with Microsoft is one deeply rooted in a significant mutual benefit. The agility Lenovo has sustained provides innovation options to the legacy tech giant, and in exchange the company can leverage Microsoft’s trusted infrastructure and wide customer base in expanding service and product offerings toward complete platform support.

In an effort to refresh its portfolio for a rapidly evolving cloud market, Lenovo recently announced a myriad of new and updated services in partnership with Microsoft. Lenovo is now an Azure reselling partner to U.S. clients, which enables them to participate in a hybrid cloud infrastructure, as well as the company’s as-a-service offerings without requiring ownership of Lenovo hardware.

The company is bolstering Microsoft’s Windows Server Software-Defined solution, or WSSD, with the integration of its ThinkAgile MX Certified Nodes for greater scalability in software-defined storage. In preparation for the phase-out of Windows Server 2008, Lenovo and Microsoft are working together on an SQL Server solution.

“In addition to that, we’re proud to work with Microsoft on the launch of Windows Server 2019,” Crair said.

In an effort to incentivize developer hardware upgrades, Lenovo has also instituted a Data Center Competitive Buy Back Program that includes instant equipment value quotes, cash back on return eligible models, free shipping, and sustainable salvage of all hardware. Additionally, Lenovo and Microsoft are collaborating on a solution for outdated, vulnerable data centers with the integration of Microsoft’s Windows Admin Center for its WSSD solution and Lenovo’s XClarity system management system.

“Via a single pane of glass from your Windows Admin Center, you can not just look at Windows Admin in the Window’s infrastructure, but actually understand what’s happening with the hardware itself that WSSD is running on,” Crair said.

Lenovo also announced a new partnership with hybrid cloud data services company NetApp Inc. aimed at building Lenovo a more robust storage offering through the integration of NetApp’s ONTAP operating system, hybrid data fabric, and full management capabilities. The alliance will vastly increase Lenovo’s access to the global storage market, growing their service base from 15 percent to over 90.

“Lenovo will be branding a couple of the sets of systems that NetApp has, and it allows us to fill out our storage infrastructure. With NetApp, we actually launched the largest storage portfolio in the market. This partnership allows us to do that very collaboratively,” Crair said.

Nurturing a culture of collaboration

Those types of collaborations are key to Lenovo’s strategy of remaining flexible and malleable enough to meet the needs of an ever-transforming market. It’s that freedom that gives the company the opportunity to deeply engage in partner innovations in order to make them more effective for shared customers, whether in its Microsoft-shared lab in Seattle or exploring the next generation of cloud with NetApp.

“We don’t build operating systems. We don’t build all of the SQL Server. We don’t build the Azure Stack. The partnership with Lenovo, Microsoft gets to take advantage of all of our supply chain goodness, all of our services goodness, as well as all the platform stuff that we do,” Crair said.

Crair doesn’t see these organizations as competitors, but necessary and complementary contributors to Lenovo’s overall mission of providing complete solutions and custom options for enterprises at all levels of cloud.

“Customers have different kinds of problems in their environments, and they’re seeking partners to help them solve them,” Crair said. “We have the services and infrastructure, plus the long-standing relationships with our partners that allows end customers to solve their customer’s problems.”

To ensure the productive synergy essential to developing those enterprise solutions, Lenovo and Microsoft have worked together on nurturing a culture of collaboration founded in user benefit.

“We go back to the customer problem we’re trying to solve. How are we helping our customers in their intelligent transformation? How do we become their trusted partner? How do we actually help solve humanity’s greatest challenges? That’s a together statement,” Crair said.

Diversity crucial to creating for all

Lenovo’s diversity plays a major role in its successful collaborations and the development of inclusive products, according to Crair. The tech leader has long been a proponent of active diversity efforts in her previous companies like Cisco Systems, Quantum Corporation and Intel, and calls Lenovo “by far the most diverse organization” that she’s worked in.

The team has been crucial to Lenovo’s mission of creating functional products for all its customers around the world. “Even colors like red and green, and the fact that they mean different things in different cultures — how are we going to display those colors? That’s where the diversity of participation in solving a problem really comes into play,” Crair said.

As Lenovo continues working toward its mission of “empowering customers and solving humanity’s challenges,” the company is prioritizing collaboration across the globe to ensure its offerings can serve every customer.

“The thing about Lenovo culture that surprised me the most, one year in, is how committed Lenovo is to really understanding how people think and bringing that in to how we build effective solutions together,” she said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite event. (* Disclosure: Lenovo Group Ltd sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from Cohesity Inc. Lenovo Group Ltd., Cohesity, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE