Lenovo: Data Centers, Infrastructure, and Cloud Computing (#244)

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• published: 27 Jul 2017
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Data centers are the heart of today's data- and cloud computing world. On this episode, we explore data center infrastructure and innovation with a true industry leader who is also a female former CIO. Kim Stevenson is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center Infrastructure at Lenovo. Previously she was the Chief Information Officer at Intel. Michael Krigsman is an industry analyst and host of CXOTALK. For more information, see https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/modern-data-centers From the transcript: Michael Krigsman: (04:46) Kim, when you say that data centers are at an inflection point, can you elaborate on that? Kim Stevenson: (04:51) One is, there’s obviously the cloud, right? And whether you own data centers now, or you choose to run your workload in a public cloud. And if you follow the news in this space, over the last five years, most industry analysts and pundits… I remember reading news articles that said, “Who would want to own a data center? Why would you want to do that? Move everything to the cloud?” And there are indeed a set of workloads that, I think are what I call “classic enterprise workloads,” HR, ERP, CRM, that should be run in the cloud because they are a design once used, many. So, every company needs a customer relationship management. Every company needs HR. So, somebody can design that and many people can use it. And that is the type of workload that should be run from a public cloud so that you get the most innovation possible, there. (05:53) The other type of workload that every business has is a workload that's unique to your company. And, the unique to your company workload is where you create value. When I was at Intel, I would tell you those workloads were engineering and manufacturing because we designed semiconductors and then we manufactured them. And those were the foundational principles of how we got paid, and every company has that. (06:19) So, the shift is you're splitting your workloads. You're sending certain workloads to the cloud and then you've got to run certain workloads on your premise versus thinking everything goes to the cloud. Now, the big underpinning of when you run it on your own premises, and in your own data center, whether you're renting it or owning it is not really the point. What you have to do is to deliver the service in a cloud model because fundamentally, cloud gives you both speed and scale. And the original reason why people needed to go to the public cloud is that they have underutilized assets. I think I'd say 2012-13, in that range, data centers ran at, on average, about 20-25% utilization. No other asset in your business would you buy enough of that asset to only use 25% of it. (07:22) And so, the reason that was happening is that those discreet pieces weren't well integrated. So, you had servers, you had storage, you had network and they were all discreet pieces. And today, the part of the architectural shift that you’re seeing is a great level of integration. So, it used to be data center providers like us would expect our customers to integrate those pieces. And today, we largely deliver those pieces in an integrated fashion. And that takes a great responsibility off of the customer that allows them to take their investment dollars and drive value into those workloads that you ultimately get paid for by your customers. So, those are the sort of things, I believe are foundational behind the shift that we’re seeing. (08:36) Over the last five to seven years, what you’ve seen is more and more technology is purchased outside of the IT organization. And people used to think that was bad. […] We called it “shadow IT,” or “rogue IT,” and we came up with labels that were negative. But the reality is the reason those things happen, the reason a sales team buys licenses of Salesforce is to get some form of efficiency. The reason a marketing team buys a digital marketing platform or a finance team buys an investor relations platform is to make their business of what they do more and more efficient and effective. So, it’s not just an IT organization statement, right? It really is a business statement. I would tell you that today, data centers are the engine of business, right? Whether it’s workloads to acquire new customers and grow the company, or workloads that drive efficiency into the operations of the company. (09:43) But, you can’t run a business today without a great data center operation and, you know, with the same level of asset utilization or reliability that you would expect of any other of your business functions.