Lenovo Group Ltd. is darting in all directions, partnering in software-defined enterprise infrastructure, while its mobile phones and laptops are still on sale at the local Best Buy. Is there a method to the Chinese tech giant’s madness?

“We’ve seen a lot of splitting of consumer and enterprise — [Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.] cut those in two; there have been rumors for years that [Dell Technologies] was going to sell off their PC division,” said Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, left), today during the Lenovo Transform event in New York, New York. 

Miniman and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) (pictured, right), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, examined differences and similarities among these hardware legacies entering the digital age. (* Disclosure below.)

Lenovo played to the notion of “end-to-end” at the keynote this morning during the event to explain its sprawling portfolio, Miniman stated. The idea is that if consumers have a Lenovo phone or laptop, their familiarity with the brand’s interface could lure them to wider adoption of Lenovo tech, he added.

“We’ve seen what Apple and Google can do pushing out across all of those devices,” Miniman said.

Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo’s chairman and chief executive officer, claimed the company’s device business gives it an unexpected advantage in big data.

“YY [Yuanqing] said in his keynote this fourth revolution is really going to be focused on the user, and therefore you want to be where the data is, where the users are, where the devices are,” Miniman said.

Like HPE, Lenovo is also investing in high-performance computing; that particular race belongs to whichever company can first churn effective applications out of the huge supercomputers, according to Miniman.

Legacy limitations

As for Lenovo’s claim that despite its long legacy teeth it is now as agile as a startup, Miniman is not quite buying it.

“There’s certain structure and certain things involved that make up startups and that innovation; you can’t move a 52,000-person company on a dime and say, ‘Hey, we’re just going to go pivot into this,'” he said.

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.

Photo: SiliconANGLE