The Lenovo Group, Ltd. believes the current business model for storage solutions is broken, with vendors playing a game with customers where if they don’t re-up they get hammered on maintenance costs. This leads to customers feeling like they’re held hostage to their current storage provider and makes the market ripe for disruption.

In fact, according to Dave Lincoln, GM of the Storage Business Unit at the Lenovo Group, he had a prospective customer literally tell him that they had a “small version of Stockholm syndrome.”

First-time theCUBE interviewee Lincoln, and his colleague Stuart McRae, director of product planning for Storage and Networking at Lenovo, sit down at OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

The ‘bad boy’ of software-defined storage

The world’s largest personal computer vendor by unit sales in 2015, Lenovo is entering the software-defined storage market.

“It’s ripe to be disrupted, not just from product but business model,” said Lincoln. Lenovo is out to prove they are not a one-trick pony but can be an end-to-end solution provider. “Existing incumbents are offering more than what the market actually requires,” said Lincoln. And Lenovo is looking to bring value back to the market.

“Any customer that cares about TCO [total cost of ownership], choice, customer service simplicity – we’re targeting them,” Lincoln added.

McRae pointed out that as a newcomer, Lenovo has no legacy to protect, allowing it the freedom to be very disruptive. He promised that two years from now, people will know Lenovo as “the bad boy of the data center for storage” because it came in and “did stuff counter to what everyone else was doing.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit — Austin. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE