Lenovo Group Ltd.’s transition from a successful consumer products company to a major player in enterprise computing has been clouded in the past by more questions than answers. But the company made significant progress today in clarifying its enterprise strategy, while going to great lengths to emphasize where it expects to find competitive advantage.

“We’re sort of celebrating today this transformation to the next phase of our growth,” said Kirk Skaugen (pictured), Lenovo’s executive vice president and president of the Data Center Group at Lenovo.

Skaugen stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and answered questions from hosts Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu) during Lenovo Transform in New York, New York. They discussed Lenovo’s announcements at the conference, how the company will leverage its strengths in enterprise computing and potential new joint ventures. (*Disclosure below.)

The company announced two new brands as part of its largest end-to-end data center offerings: ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. Lenovo’s ThinkSystem will include servers, storage and networking systems, while ThinkAgile covers a new software-defined solutions portfolio.

Plans to continue tight relationship with Intel

The use of Intel chipsets in Lenovo x86 servers provides a competitive advantage that will be fully leveraged, according to Skaugen. He attributed a 59 percent performance improvement on the SAP HANA platform to Intel’s processors. Lenovo also highlighted the introduction this week in Barcelona, Spain, of the world’s largest supercomputer that uses Intel’s technology.

“We have a really tight innovation relationship with them,” Skaugen said.

The Lenovo executive also hinted that the company was making inroads into the U.S. hyperscale data center market. The company already sells to Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba in China. “There are multiple hyperscale customers in the top 10, many of whom are based in the U.S., that we are already shipping into significantly more units this year than last year,” Skaugen explained.

Asked about future plans for acquisitions and joint venture deals, Skaugen would only say that Lenovo would be looking “at joint ventures in the areas of software-defined networking and software-defined storage.”

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