>> Live, from Orlando, Florida. It's theCube covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity, and theCube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCube's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We have two guests for this segment, we have Ross Smith, the Principle Program Manager at Microsoft, and Greg Taylor, who is the Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft. Thank you so much for joining us! >> Thanks for having us. >> So, I want to start off by talking about messaging. You are both legends in the Microsoft messaging world, sorry to be obsequious here. >> That just means we're old. >> You've been around a while, it's not your first rodeo. >> No, no. >> So, talk a little bit about what's new, what the enhancements you're doing for Enterprise, it is the most used app. >> Yeah. >> So we're launching Exchange Server 2019 this year. It's another version of on-premises exchange, it's incredible. We had 2000 people registered for the session, we had 1000 in the room. There's still some love for on-prem exchange, no doubt, so that's been a big thing we're talking about at Ignite this year. For those customers, and I'll be honest it's very much a release aimed at large Enterprise customers who want to keep some exchange on-prem. We strongly believe that small-medium business should be in the cloud, so we've focused on the kind of features that really large Enterprises really want to get from Exchange. >> Yeah, and then from a app perspective, we've been heavily invested with ALUP, Fry, WES and Android to bring a unique and valuable experience for both consumers and commercial users using both Office 365 and Exchange on-premises. So we now have a hundred million users using Outlook Mobile today, and it's been a great experience and we continue to evolve the app on a weekly basis, now. >> Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of the app and what kinds of features and enhancements you're using for both the consumers and Enterprise? >> Right, yeah. So the app originally began as a consumer acquisition, which we've now targeted and rebranded it as Outlook, and we've been heavily focused on bringing Enterprise features that our users know and love. Office 365 Groups is a great example of an experience that we built into the app that no other native mail client or third-party mail client can deliver today. We've delivered other Enterprise security-specific features like Azure Active Directory conditional access so customers can lock down what mobile apps can access the service and prevent any other client from doing so. And then, of course, there's in-tune app protection policies which allow us to, and customers to, ensure only the corporate data is protected and exclude the personal data, so that we can ensure there's no data leakage scenarios going. >> I wonder if we can step back for a second. I think about messaging, it's very diverse. I remember back in the '90s, I was helping companies get access to this whole "internet thing" and LANs and setting up and oh, we're going to go from faxes and memos to emails, show how old I am in this business, too. But today, our mobile devices, a lot of what we're doing companies, whether they have their own data-centers or doing their cloud, there's usually lots of different ways we communicate. My joke is, the best way to communicate with someone is probably the one they prefer to and hopefully aren't buried in. >> Yes. Because we all have the Slacks and all those other things out there. How do you view the word's game, how does the Exchange and Outlook and those fit into the overall portfolio and interact with everything else. >> From the Exchange side, email is dead. I've heard email is dead for I don't know how many years and well, email is still one of the primary communication methods we all use and rely upon. And so Exchange was one of the applications that kind of coined the mission-critical application moniker, right? 22 years ago, 20 years ago, Exchange was one of the mission-critical apps. But we actually kind of think of Exchange now as almost a service, a commodity, like the power. And most people, it's kind of interesting, we have the front and the back end of things, right? I'm thinking about the messaging infrastructure of the back, and Ross is now working on the client side. Most people see the client features and think of them as Outlook and client features, but a lot of them are Exchange features which are servicing the client. It's been a real kind of evolution. We've got to a point where nobody really cares about the back end, unless it's not there, then that's a problem, but most of the things servicing the client. >> And so what we see is that the transition from typical on-premises infrastructure to the cloud service usually, generally begins with email into the Office 365 stack, and that starts lighting up additional features. And then from a mobility perspective, we're seeing that that begins the on-ramp into mobile. Because, like Greg mentioned, we've had email capability on mobile devices integrated into Exchange for 17 years now, so it's a very ubiquitous thing to have on a mobile device, so it's just a natural progression just to use email on a mobile device. And then that begins lighting up as customers begin to move to Office 365, they start lighting up additional features like teams integration or Skype for business or any of the other Office apps. And then they just light up naturally. And then through all of our protection mechanisms we're able to ensure that that entire experience is secure from a IT business, and protecting it. >> Just speaking of the evolution of messaging in and of itself, what do you see, people who've been in the industry a long time, what do you see as next, I mean, where do we go from here? Email, they say, is dead, we know it's not dead, but what are the next kinds of generation of features and enhancements that you see customers really needing, and that you're working on at Microsoft? >> Alright, I think that Exchange was really interesting from an Office 365 perspective, as Exchange isn't really just a messaging engine anymore, it's a data store that we are, through things like Graph and all the other applications, is giving businesses a whole new way of looking at the data, and so we're pulling data from all the different places. Exchange is becoming almost a plumbing kind of infrastructure piece, but it's a key data source and I think the data is still there, the communication is still there, but I think much of the future development is in the client-side apps and how people interact with the data, and the back-end just becomes the infrastructure, right? >> Actually you bring up a great point. A premise that my Head of Research at Wikibon had is talking about Microsoft's position in AI today, and Office 365 and the messaging that you have, there's so much data there if you wanted it. What are people worrying about? How can a company understand that? How can Microsoft help businesses in general? There's a touchpoint that even an infrastructure as a service-provider wouldn't have, but you really get to the end-point and the end users in productivity, and that's a huge opportunity for Microsoft in the future as long as you're not messing with our data, you're not as heavy into, you know some of the other messaging people out there, that you're like, wait, why am I getting ads for that stuff, or, I think I talked about that stuff. >> And that's a great point, Stu, because going back to Outlook Mobile as an example, right? We're heavily invested in AI-driven capabilities into that app, zero-touch search, as an instance. You can go right in the app, tap one button and you see your favorite contacts, you get your Discover information from the Office Graph your next itinerary and travel information, and we're lighting up that functionality across the board throughout the app. Location-rich data, using Cortana time-to-leave services, so that you can get to a meeting at the right time, as opposed to a typical oh, it reminded me at 15 minutes and I got to hop 45 minutes down the other end of, where are we, West? In the West building, right? So we're building all that functionality into clients like Outlook Mobile and the rest of the stack to help drive that type of capabilities. >> And all of that data's in the back end, right? You said email is this repository of incredible business information, and so the question is how you leverage that, how do you take what's in there and surface it in a way that makes sense to the users? It's a fascinating time at the moment, where the data's there, we just got to know how to use it in the right way. And I agree, using it in the right way and not using it to sell stuff, that's absolutely our approach to it, so, super important. >> And do you work closely with clients to come up with this new kind of functionality? One of the biggest challenges that so many technology companies face is staying on the cutting edge of these ideas and innovation, so how closely are you working with customers to dream up new functionality? >> Yeah, we're working with customers all the time. We do it through a variety of different channels. We have UserVoice, which allows customers and end users to directly interface and provide their ideas. We have private preview programs, where we target customers about specific new feature sets. TAP programs, like we're doing with Exchange 2019, as well as future releases within Office 365 that enable that type of experience. >> Exchange, I think, historically, has always been very customer focused, very community focused. We have a great bunch of MVPs, the TAP program, the Technology Adoption Program, is a bunch of customers that deploy our pre-production code in production for us, so we've got some real big customers who, they're running versions of Exchange that the world hasn't seen. >> One of the themes we heard in Satya's keynote yesterday is business productivity, and we know one of the biggest challenges out there is, you get this new stuff, and you're like, well, I'm going to pretty much just try to use it the way I always have been doing it, and some of us have been using emails for decades and decades and I look at my own usage and wow, I'm probably a bit out of date. If I could just wipe my brain and say 'okay, here's this cool new tool' that could do all this stuff, we wouldn't even call it email, we'd call it something different. I know you guys do things like the Channel 9 broadcast, I'm sure there's lots of things on the website, how do you help customers learn to use the new stuff and get rid of some of the things, the old habits that they had in using these technologies. And can you get everybody to stop 'reply to all' in the big group, that would be super helpful. >> Work on that please. >> That's interesting, we're building it into the apps, to be honest. We're doing a lot of work whenever we release new features to light up an experience within the app that guide the user on how to use that new functionality to help them understand what they can do with the app, as well as simplifying the overall app structure. You look at some of our apps, they become very bloated in terms of all the widgets you have available and knobs to control it and we're trying to simplify that stack. We're refreshing with Outlook 2019 and Office Pro Plus. We're refreshing the user interface on desktop, we're doing the same in Mac. We've done it in Outlook for iOS, we're redoing OA, as well, and Office 365, all to enhance and simplify the experience, and, as well, provide a consistent experience across all the endpoints, which will help. >> If the question is here, how do we wean people off email, how do we get them off email. >> Just their old habits and patterns. >> And you know, it's kind of funny, but it still works. I remember having a conversation with somebody once who, it was a presentation we did once, and it was a team who did more of a social kind of thing, and their view was, they put a picture of the Queen of England up on a slide and said 'Email is old, like the Queen of England.' And my response was, well so are fire and the wheel, but they seem to be hanging around pretty well, so far. So I think there are certain things for which email is still king, but it's evolving and changing. I think we're still waiting for the real killer app that replaces email. >> It's not Yammer. >> It's not what? (laughter) >> It's not Yammer. >> I'm not going on camera saying that. The way I prefer to think of it is, I don't really matter what the client is or how you all interact with it, if we can all use an app that suits our own style of working, right? My inbox is zero inbox. I'm a zero inbox kind of guy, right? If I can work like that and interact with people who want to work on a different client, I'm happy. >> Not to go on the Yammer piece, but you made me think a little bit about acquisitions. Big acquisitions, like LinkedIn and Github, messaging ties into both of those quite a bit. Any visibility you can give? I know there's some integrations there, but how does that look? >> So we're launching LinkedIn integration with Outlook for iOS and Android as we speak. That's something we'll be rolling out shortly, and it enables, within the people or contact card, you can quickly see information from their LinkedIn data set, as well as the ability for us to push data from Office 365 into LinkedIn, so that LinkedIn users can also see relevant information about who that person's interacting with from a calendar type of perspective. So we're definitely taking that availability and providing that through our mutual customers. >> Great. Well, Ross and Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show, it was >> Thanks for having us. really a pleasure having you. >> Yeah, it was great. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCube's live coverage from the Orange County Civic Center Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (electronic music)