Lenovo Group Ltd., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Dell EMC bring to mind the phrase “legacy hardware,” so why does Lenovo keep telling us it’s not legacy?

It seems the answer is in the way the company defines legacy hardware: a server-network-storage combo that is very specifically designed and difficult to change, which Lenovo is moving away from in favor of more flexible, software-defined hperconverged offerings.

“Lenovo feels that they’ve got the pieces to put together both with themselves and with their channel and technology partners to better drive forward,” said Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Miniman and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) (pictured, left), his co-host at Lenovo Transform in New York, New York, discussed whether Lenovo is better positioned for hybrid cloud than competitors HPE and Dell EMC.

While Lenovo still sells servers (including the highly rated x86 line it acquired from IBM in 2014), its portfolio is significantly less weighed down with hardware than Dell EMC’s or HPE’s, the company has said.

“They actually don’t have this big structure that they have to overcome,” Miniman said. It can therefore partner to build modern solutions more easily — and it would be wise to, considering the state of the server industry.

“In the last year, if you look at revenue in [server] units, Lenovo didn’t do great,” Miniman said.

Reverse engineering cloud?

Perhaps this is why Lenovo is attempting to turn its server business into something simpler, across-the-board-compatible and cloud-ready. Is it such a stretch? Even Amazon Web Services Inc. runs on servers. Can Lenovo and its channel partners combine to allow an enterprise to build its own private AWS?

“Amazon actually hyper-optimizes — they have to build for one data center — it’s their own,” Miniman said, explaining that the company can build thousands of custom servers.

“Lenovo needs to live in data centers around the globe. So where can they simplify and standardize, and where do they need to fit around the world?” asked Miniman, noting the diverse data center needs in different regions.

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