Partnerships and platforms has been the rallying cry for many tech companies recently. In general, the tech world has realized that no one business can do everything alone. The open-source community has proved a crucial meeting ground for partnerships, providing the platforms and common standards companies need to make their products compatible with legacy information technology and each other’s data centers.

Kirk Skaugen (pictured), executive vice president and president of the Data Center Group at Lenovo Group Ltd., knows open source is a key aspect of his company’s long term strategy.

At the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, Skaugen sat down with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, to talk about Lenovo’s open-source commitment, laying out the details of Lenovo’s pipeline and announcing a new open-platform product. (*Disclosure below.)

Setting the open standard

“From our perspective, it’s about optimizing the base hardware for all of these platforms,” Skaugen said referring to Lenovo’s efforts in the open-source community towards fine-tuning systems’ performance. As Lenovo isn’t tied to a legacy hardware business, it is able to use open-source partnerships as a foundation for its enterprise offerings.

To cement this foundation, Lenovo announced a new version of its Open Platform @ Lenovo (OP@L) product during Red Hat Summit. This offering is an open platform with an optimized stack. Lenovo plans to use this technology to advance open architectures that can be customized to suit the needs of cloud service providers.

This fits in with Lenovo’s new direction as it expands from its server roots into networking and storage. The company is running on the idea of working with partners to tune up the performance of systems in these areas. It also considers containers to be the future.

As for its cloud market strategy, Lenovo has chosen four customer-centric pillars: hyperscale, software-defined, supercomputing and the traditional data center. The goal is to not just ship hardware, but provide optimized solutions with fine-tuning of applications.

“The little things don’t mean a lot; the little things mean everything,” Skaugen said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE