The Six Five team discusses Lenovo opening a security center in Israel.

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Transcript:

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so first off, let me get a little bit of background on this. Lenovo, because it’s a company based out of China, gets more scrutiny than other US-based and western European-based companies on security. It was interesting, I mistakenly thought that when the company came in it would lose pretty much all its public and energy and government contracts for PCs and servers. But to Lenovo’s credit, what they did is for nearly a decade they underwent some of the highest scrutiny that any company can provide US and Western European authorities. They went through, I would say, a 5X more stringent security process.

Now, what I have recently learned that people at Lenovo aren’t trumpeting is these annual, I’ll call them, security rectal exams no longer have to happen. Again, hats off to the company. One of the reasons that they’re in this very good position, and we’re going to talk about their earnings a little bit later, is because they do invest hardcore into security. The company just established an innovation center in Israel at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and I think this is a pretty big deal at the next step in what they’re doing.

There is something about Israel and security companies, I mean, literally they’re all over like kudzu. It makes sense if you look at, first off, you have on all sides they are surrounded by people who want to kill them. And even in the West Coast is the med, and I guess that would be on all four sides. What that does, it creates an environment where being really good at cybersecurity is an important thing, not just for commerce, but the security of their family. So I’ve always been just incredibly impressed at the companies that come out there. The other thing is they know how to keep secrets where you see some regions leaking like sieves. I attribute that a lot to the required military service. I think it’s four years for every man and woman to go into. But net net, the center is really focused on the next generation, which is about this zero trust security architecture that we’ve talked about a lot and also the below the operating system security. I do believe, having talked to the principals all the way up to the CEO level at Lenovo, is that it does believe in security by design. I’m not saying that other companies don’t, I just want to reinforce that I believe that Lenovo does. I think this is a good next step in its evolution of its security capabilities, and I think they did it in an incredible country that is noted for cutting-edge security innovation.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, I think you hit most of this one, Pat. I think that what I would add that’s maybe worth noting or just double clicking on is Lenovo having its ties traded on the Hang Seng, Chinese company, has a very big and robust operation in the US, but obviously that has always made it more susceptible to scrutiny. The company putting extra dollars in investment to both publicly market and then of course build zero trust architectures and build security hard end into their products and then be transparent with these Western European and US and Middle East, like Israel, to show that they’re operating in good faith. There’s a significant demarcation between a Lenovo and a Huawei for instance, where there’s been a lot of-

Patrick Moorhead: Dear God.

Daniel Newman: What’s that?

Patrick Moorhead: No, you said Huawei, and I’m like, “Man, they totally screwed it up.”

Daniel Newman: Yeah, they absolutely did. That’s what I’m saying though, is sometimes companies from similar regions will get grouped together. Lenovo’s putting in extra cycles to make sure that that doesn’t happen. So good move, good strategy. It’s going to be important with their long-term growth that they continue to be able to get more and more into these larger government, Fed-ramp opportunities.