>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders >>all around the world. >>This is a cube conversation. Hi, and welcome to a special production of the Cube. We're talking to the Amazon Web services, public sector, their partner awards program. I'm your host stew minimum, and we're digging in on education is one of the sectors. Of course, public sector looks at non profits. It looks at the government sectors. Education, Of course, when we talk about remote learning is such a huge, important topic, especially right now in 2020 with a global pandemic so happy to welcome to the program. We have two guests. First of all, we're representing the award winning company Mohammad. He is the co founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering with Lumen and joining his one of his customers, Damien Doyle, who is the associate vice president of Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, or UMBC. As it's known, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>Alright. First of all, Mohammed, congratulations. As I said in my intro, you know, such an important topic and I have two Children that are, you know, dealing with remote learning have lots of friends that were in higher education and, you know, in the technology space. So your company is the 2020 AWS Public Sector Award winner for best remote learning. I'm sure there is a space that has a lot of competition on. Of course, leveraging public cloud is a great way to be able to ramp this sort of thing up rather fast. Give us a little bit. You know, you are the co founder. So would love to hear a little bit of the origin story, your background and Ellis about what differentiates the looming >>sure loom in we provide ah manage products and services around end user compute with a focus on education for providing access to applications and other technology. Resource is, of course, content course applications in the public cloud, so that users are able to use, you know, whatever device they have wherever they are, um so and have access to those applications that are required for completing that force work they could be in, you know, in at home, in their dorms, at a corner coffee shop on the side of a mountain in the Middle East wherever they may be. But leveling that playing fears playing field so that they could access, um, have access to any of the demanding applications on any device is what we're You know, What our goal is is to make sure that we're not having technology be a barrier to their learning. >>Fantastic. Damien, If if we could turn to you, then atyou NBC, maybe if you could give our audience Ah, thumbnail of you know, the university and I have some idea of the challenge that was put in front of you when you talk about the learning. But maybe you could give us a little bit of the pre cove it and, uh, you know what? What you were faced in and what you were looking at when it came to dealing with the current situation. >>Sure be happy to So where you? NBC is a mid sized public institution. We're sort of suburban, about 14,000 students, and we have undergrad, graduate and doctoral programs, and we have a heavy focus on a lot of the stem disciplines. And so pre cove, it very based in collaborative environments, active learning but but hands on. So a lot of our programs really do have a lot of that. We leverage technology very heavily, even if it's in whether it's an engineering biology, any of those kinds of programs. Uh huh. As you said that the challenge became how do you very quickly pivot into an entirely online model when you sort of scatter shot all of your students and you don't really have a great sense of what they're gonna have access to and, um, and the abilities and connectivity they're gonna have. So this this kind of thing was really critical for us as we made that transition. >>Excellent. Mohammed, Were you working with you, NBC before the current move toe Go, go remote. Give us a little bit about the relationship and how that started. >>I believe, actually that the pandemic was the impetus to kind of drive this forward. Damien and his team reached out to loom in looking for a solution that would allow them to kind of have students access the applications that they normally would have access to in their physical computer labs. But with ah the change and not having to access those labs anymore needed a remote learning solution. A remote access solution for being able to access those high compute high graphics processing or memory intensive applications through the cloud. Taking into account the fact that you know, students won't have you know, that the highest end computer laptop, you know, they probably be working on a chromebook or a lower and machine, but need that compute power on. And then we had to kind of provide a solution pretty quickly because it was, you know, schools were shutting down, essentially physically started shutting down and needing to continue on with their coursework. Coursework? >>Yeah, Dave and I like to understand from your side. Can you share with us a little bit that time frames, you know, how fast did you go from? Oh, my gosh, We need this. We need proposals. We need to roll this out, and we need to have students. Ah, in teachers back up and running. >>Well, you know, I think the one thing from our side we had already known of element and we've been looking at that pre cove it. We knew we needed a product that that provided us this kind of agility and really gave the students some better access to the computing tools that they need it. So once we identify that, the thing that was amazing to me is is we moved from our existing system over to production illumination. It was about 2.5 weeks sort of start to finish and, you know, to get all the images to get all the technology running tested and everything up and running in 2.5 weeks for a full solution for a campus is was pretty amazing. And that was one of the real benefits we saw was going to the cloud. We also looked at this outside of code as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so that they could work from anywhere at any time rather than be sort of tethered to that physical lab. >>Well, I'm glad you raised that. So if you could Damien a little bit, you know, help us understand. How much are you using A cloud before? And it sounds like you believe that, you know, in the you know, I guess if we say postcode world, you would probably have some hybrid model. Would that be fair to say, >>Yeah, I think before we did have a different solution that was still cloud based. It was part of our business continuity. So we still had some semblance of virtual computing solution in the cloud. But it wasn't that extensive. And a lot of our individual programs chemical engineering, geography and others were using physical labs that the students would sort of scheduled times and be able to work in as part of their coursework. Uh, coming out of this, we fully expect if, if we're going on extended period of time where students are able to access these materials and these demanding software packages at any time from any kind of device coming out of cove it they're not gonna want to go back to that model where they're asking, you know, they have to get permission and go in and limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward is that they have this kind of access and this kind of flexibility from now. >>Yeah, this is I mean, they've gotten a taste essentially, and so, you know, they they see how easy it is to complete their coursework without actually having to trek across campus into a lab and kind of fight with the population to find a seat. This basically will become an expectation of an offering. >>Mohammed, what I'd love if you could drill in a little bit for us there, Architecturally speaking, of course, the cloud is built to be able to scale and move fast. So if you need capacity and need to scale up fast, that's great if in the future you still want to leverage the solution. But you can scale down, that should be possible. So maybe give us a little bit of you know how aws arc. It actually supports what you're doing and, you know, just from a pricing solution standpoint, how you'll be able to support the customer in today's environment. And however that path goes down the road, you'll be able to support that, >>right? I mean, so, you know, with the AWS cloud, we're able to, as you said, scale up or down as demand is needed. But we we've taken that even a little bit further where we're scaling based off of, um, students scheduling. So if we've got, of course, that we know that is running from 10 AM to 11 AM Your prior to that core starting will scale the environment up so that it's available for those students. If it's not, you know, more of, ah, in course, lab session, um, and then spin things back down after the course is done so that we don't have that those many, many machines sitting there running and burning the hours and running up the bill. You know, physical environment. You know, once you've installed it, it's there. It's always running. You cannot do that. But with the power of the cloud, we're able to go up and down. We're able to take things. Uh, you know, scale things down off hours. If we look at the patterns for a student usage, you know, off hours overnight take things down because you don't need those machines sitting there running, running all the time. >>And this is one of the biggest differentiators so many times in higher ed. We struggle to have to explain to companies and vendors and providers what our needs are and how we're very. We're very different from corporations and other other verticals with the bloomin solution and the capabilities in AWS. But we're really having this Taylor to our students schedules to the class schedules, and that kind of flexibility makes the product economically viable for us. But it also means that we don't get nearly the kind of push back from the academic side because it is really Taylor to meet their needs versus just something we're kind of shoehorning in. So that makes a huge difference in terms of adoption and the way it's perceived from a marketing, marketing and acceptance standpoint. Yeah, >>Dave and I'm curious. Once you did that initial rollout, how much of an on ramp is there for both the education, the educators side as well as student side? And you talked about having some flexibility as to how and when students use thing. That sounds great, but do you have to change, you know, office hours or the hours that the staff are leveraging that I'm just trying to understand the you know, the ripple effect of what you're doing? >>No, it's It's a fair point. We have done fairly extensive training. The students picked it up very quickly. What we with students? If there is a tool that they can use to do their work more effectively. They're going to use it, whether it's something we provide or something they find through other means. But what we've done is is reached out to all of our faculty that were training, that we're teaching in our physical labs and try to work with them to understand what the solution is, how they can sort of rethink some of their classes. And a couple of our departments have actually taking a approach of rather than said everybody in a virtual lab the same way they would sit people in a physical lab. They're moving some of this team or a synchronous so that the students can serve, work at their own pace and rethink how they structure some of those classes because of the flexibility being provided. But it does take a lot of training from the instructional side and some rethinking off this. But it the end solution is something that reaches the students where they are and the way they want to learn, which is a really powerful thing. We're always trying to do >>excellent, Mohammed. I'm wondering just broadly learnings that you have from what what's been happening Obviously, I'm sure you've been quite busy and responding to things. You know, what's been the impact on your business, how as a ws been as a partner to support the needs of what you're doing. >>Well, as you can imagine, the other things that just really blown up, Um, in terms of demand and being able to again through the plant power of the cloud, just being able to scale up and rapid deployment, you know, as we talk about earlier this deployment was, you know, 2 2.5 weeks from start to finish. Being able to do that, being able to do that with AWS tools have been, um, critical and moving things forward. >>Excellent. Uh, Damien, it's a sit back to you on this. You know, obviously, if you had had, you know, more time be able to plan this out if there might be some things that you would do differently. But what have your learnings been with this? And if you've been talking to your peers, any advice that you would give, uh, you know, as you've moved through this this rapid acceleration of the move to remote >>you Certainly. I think we would have certainly done some things differently. But we have been talking about this move for three or four months ahead of Covitz. So for us it wasn't. It wasn't quite as rushed as the actual deployment wound up being. I think the big thing is having having a vendor and having a partner where you can understand all the options. So the good and bad of the cloud is there's 100 different ways to do almost anything you want to accomplish and taking the time to understand what the different features and the ramifications of how you how you deploy and how you think. Think through that for us. We deployed one way because we could do it very quickly. And then we took the rest of the semester and part of this summer to do some more thorough evaluations to really ask our constituents you like this method or do you like some of the other, possibly some of the other possibilities and see which user experience they liked more? And then we're able to work with illumination, and they've been ableto very nimble in adjusting the services to meet what we've gotten our feedback on. So I think if I had to do it again, I would have done that testing ahead of time. But that's a very minor thing. These air really sort of small tweaks to just make life a little easier. Not fundamental differences in the what we're providing. >>Yeah, I'm Damien. What? One last question if I could, um sorry. Sorry, Mohammed. Just I'm curious from the financial standpoint, you know how much you felt that you understood what costs would be in some of the levers as to what are you using in the impact there? We've seen, you know, great maturation over the last handful of years. As toe. Yeah, you know, transparency and understanding how cloud actually is build. But I'm just curious if you have any final comments on the financial piece things, seeing that, it probably wasn't something that was in your budget for the last quarter. Yeah, >>it wasn't. That's very true. But we also knew that it was essential so that what we realized was we didn't know how often a lot of our physical labs and these classes were being used. So we knew there was going to be some unknowns. We've moved to this would have to see what adoption was but be able to get the reporting out and working with Mohammed and others to really start customizing in the cloud. That's the beauty of it is we recognize we saw some really fascinating patterns where during the week people would use this sort of as you'd expect. But on the weekends it was in the evenings. Nobody, nobody is logging on Saturday or Sunday morning. But boy at eight PM there's a good bit of usage so we could tailor and do some of that off hours work and really slows things down. Having that visibility has made the economic piece much more viable and really being able to tweak the computing power with two different needs of the different classes. So it's actually been fairly easy to understand, but it was a ramp up where we have to sort of guess at first and then understand our own processes. But that's more sort of the If you don't have good data coming in, it's hard to get it. Get it out. Excellent. Mohammad, I >>want you to kind of give your lessons learned. Obviously, it's a technology space. You've been in. Ah, and it's just been an acceleration of some of the things you're working on. So lessons learned advice you would give Teoh, you know, other companies of the universities and education No facilities out there, >>Right? And, you know, this is again speaking to the power of the cloud, right? Some of that one of the biggest lessons learned here is you don't necessarily need to get it right the first time. It's name and saying was saying, You know, we went back kind of analyze what we were staying in after the initial deployment, took a look at the actual usage and kind of adjusted, based based off of that. According to that, taking and feedback from faculty members on how they were using a system in tweaking the presentation or tweaking applications on the back end for accommodating those needs. That's the power of the cloud being able to adjust on the fly. You're not. You don't have to be committed to every single bit there. Uh, and being able to change it on the fly is is just something that is kind of natural in the cloud these days. >>Excellent. Well, thank you both. So much for joining us, Damien. Thank you for joining and moving forward. Sharing your story. I wish you the best of luck going forward. And Mohammed Big. Congratulations on winning. You know, super important category. Especially here in 20. Funny congratulations to you and the team. >>Thank you. >>Yeah, Thank you. Alright, stay tuned for more coverage here from the AWS public sector is their partner awards program. I'm Stew men a man And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Good morning everyone. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite 2019 here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Donovan Brown. He is the Principal Cloud Advocate Manager of Methods and Practices Organizations at Microsoft. (laughing) A mouthful of a title. >> Yes. >> Rebecca: We are thrilled to welcome you on. >> Thank you so much. >> You are the man in the black shirt. >> I have been dubbed the man in the black shirt. >> So tell us what that's all about. You're absolutely famous. Whenever we were saying Donovan Brown's going to be here. "The man in the black shirt?" >> Yes. >> So what's that about? >> So it was interesting. The first time I ever got to keynote in an event was in New York in 2015 for Scott Guthrie, the guy who only wears a red shirt. And I remember, I was literally, and this is no exaggeration, wearing this exact black shirt, right, because I bring it with me and I can tell because the tag in the back is worn more than the other black shirts I have just like this one. And I bring this one out for big events because I was in a keynote yesterday and I knew I was going to be on your show today. And I wore it and it looked good on camera. I felt really good. I'm an ex-athlete. We're very superstitious. I'm like I have to wear that shirt in every keynote that I do from now on because if you look further back, you'll see me in blue shirts and all other colored shirts. But from that day forward, it's going to be hard pressed for you to find me on camera on stage without this black shirt on or a black shirt of some type. And there's a really cool story about the black shirt that was. This is what\ I knew it was a thing. So I pack about six or seven black shirts in every luggage. I'm flying overseas to Germany to go Kampf to do a keynote for, I think it was Azure Saturday. Flights were really messed up. they had to check my bag which makes me very uncomfortable because they lose stuff. I'm not too worried about it, it'll be okay. Check my bag, get to Europe. They've been advertising that the black shirt is coming for months and they lose my luggage. And I am now, heart's pounding out of my chest. (laughing) We go to the airport. I'm shopping in the airport because I don't even have luggage. I cannot find a black shirt and I am just thinking this is devastating. How am I going to go to a conference who's been promoting "the black shirt's coming" not wearing a black shirt? And my luggage does not show up. I show up at the event I'm thinking okay, maybe I'll get lucky and the actual conference shirt will be black and then we're all good. I walk in and all I see are white shirts. I'm like this could not be worse. And then now the speakers show up. They're wearing blue shirts, I'm like this cannot be happening. So I'm depressed, I'm walking to the back and everyone's starts saying, "Donovan's here, Donovan's here." And I'm looking to find my polo, my blue polo I'm going to put on. They're like no, no, no, no Donovan. They printed one black shirt just for me. I was like oh my goodness, this is so awesome. So I put the black shirt on, then I put a jacket on over it and I go out and I tell the story of how hard it was to get here, that they lost my luggage, I'm not myself without a black shirt. But this team had my back. And when I unzipped my shirt, the whole place just starts clapping 'cause I'm wearing >> Oh, I love it. >> a black shirt. >> Exactly. So now to be seen without a black shirt is weird. Jessica Dean works for me. We were in Singapore together and it was an off day. So I just wore a normal shirt. She had to take a double take, "Oh no, is that Donovan, my manager "'cause he's not wearing a black shirt?" I don't wear them all the time but if I'm on camera, on stage you're going to see me in a black shirt. >> Rebecca: All right, I like it. >> Well, Donovan, great story. Your team, Methods and Practices makes up a broad spectrum of activities and was relatively recently rebranded. >> Yeah. >> We've talked to some of your team members on theCUBE before, so tell our audience a little bit about the bridges Microsoft's building to help the people. >> Great. No, so that's been great. Originally, I built a team called The League. Right, there's a really small group of just DevOps focused diehards. And we still exist. A matter of fact, we're doing a meet and greet tonight at 4:30 where you can come and meet all five of the original League members. Eventually, I got tasked with a much bigger team. I tell the story. I was in Norway, I went to sleep, I had four direct reports. I literally woke up and I had 20 people reporting to me and I'm like what just happened? And the team's spanned out a lot more than just DevOps. So having it branded as the DevOps Guy doesn't really yield very well for people who aren't diehard DevOps people. And what we feared was, "Donovan there's people who are afraid of DevOps "who now report to you." You can't be that DevOps guy anymore. You have to broaden what you do so that you can actually focus on the IT pros in the world, the modern operations people, the lift and shift with Jeremy, with what Jeramiah's doing for me right, with the lift and shift of workloads . And you still have to own DevOps. So what I did is I pulled back, reduced my direct reports to four and now I have teams underneath me. Abel Wang now runs DevOps. He's going to be the new DevOps guy for me. Jeramiah runs our lift and shift. Rick Klaus or you know the Hat, he runs all my IT Pro and then Emily who's just an amazing speaker for us, runs all of my modern operations. So we span those four big areas right. Modern operations which is sort of like the ops side of DevOps, IT pros which are the low level infrastructure, diehard Windows server admins and then we have DevOps run by Abel which is still, the majority of The League is over there. And then we have obviously the IT pros, modern ops, DevOps and then the left and shift with Jeramiah. >> I'd like to speak a little bit as to why you've got these different groups? How do you share information across the teams but you know really meet customers where they are and help them along 'cause my background's infrastructure. >> Donovan: Sure. >> And that DevOps, was like that religion pounding at you, that absolutely, I mean, I've got a closet full of hoodies but I'm not a developer. Understand? >> Understood. (laughs) It's interesting because when you look at where our customers are today, getting into the cloud is not something you do overnight. It takes lots of steps. You might start with a lift and shift, right? You might start with just adding some Azure in a hybrid scenario to your on-prem scenario. So my IT pros are looking after that group of people that they're still on prem majority, they're trying to dip those toes into the cloud. They want to start using things like file shares or backups or something that they can have, disaster recovery offsite while they're still running the majority of what they're doing on-prem. So there's always an Azure pool to all four of the teams that I actually run. But I need them to take care of where our customers are today and it's not just force them to be where we want them tomorrow and they're not ready to go there. So it's kind of interesting that my team's kind of have every one of those stages of migration from I'm on-prem, do I need to lift and shift do I need to do modern operations, do I need to be doing full-blown DevOps pull all up? So, I think it's a nice group of people that kind of fit the spectrum of where our customers are going to be taking that journey from where they are to enter the cloud. So I love it. >> One of the things you said was getting to the cloud doesn't happen overnight. >> No, it does not. >> Well, you can say that again because there is still a lot of skepticism and reluctance and nervousness. How do you, we talked so much about this digital transformation and technology is not the hard part. It's the people that pose the biggest challenges to actually making it happen. >> Donovan: Right. >> So we're talking about meeting customers where they are in terms of the tools they need. But where do you meet them in terms of where they are just in their approach and their mindset, in terms of their cloud readiness? >> You listen. Believe it or not, you can't just go and tell people something. You need to listen to them, find out what hurts and then start with that one thing is what I tell people. Focus on what hurts the most first. Don't do a big bang change of any type. I think that's a recipe for disaster. There's too many variables that could go wrong. But when I sit down with a customer is like tell me where you are, tell me what hurts, like what are you afraid of? Is it a compliancies? Let me go get you in contact with someone who can tell you about all the comp. We have over 90 certifications on Azure. Let me. whatever your fear is, I bet you I can get you in touch with someone that's going to help you get past that fear. But I don't say just lift, shift, move it all like stop wasting, like no. Let's focus on that one thing. And what you're going to do is you're going to start to build confidence and trust with that customer. And they know that I'm not there just trying to rip and replace you and get out high levels of ACR. I'm trying to succeed with you, right, empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more. You do that by teaching them first, by helping them first. You can sell them last, right? You shouldn't have to sell them at all once they trust that what we we're trying to do together is partner with you. I look at every customer more as a partner than a customer, like how can I come with you and we do better things together than either one of us could have done apart. >> You're a cloud psychologist? Almost, right because I always put myself in their position. If I was a customer, what would I want that vendor to do for me? How would they make me feel comfortable and that's the way that I lead. Right, I don't want you going in there selling anything right. We're here to educate them and if we're doing our job on the product side, the answer is going to be obvious that you need to be coming with us to Azure. >> All right. So Donovan, you mentioned you used to be an athlete? >> Donovan: Yes. >> According to your bio, you're still a bit of an athlete. >> Donovan: A little bit, a little bit. >> So there's the professional air hockey thing which has a tie to something going on with the field. Give us a little bit of background. I've got an air hockey table in my basement. Any tips for those of us that aren't, you know? You were ranked 11th in the world. >> At one point, yeah, though I went to the World Championships. It was interesting because that World Championships I wasn't prepared. My wife plays as well. We were like we're just going to go, we're going to support the tournament. We had no expectations whatsoever. Next thing you know, I'm in the round playing for the top 10 in the world. And that's when it got too serious for me and I lost, because I started taking it too serious. I put too much pressure on myself. But professionally, air hockey's like professional foosball or pool. It's grown men taking this sport way too seriously. It's the way I'd describe it. It is not what you see at Chuck E. Cheese. And what was interesting is Damien Brady who works for me found that there is an AI operated air hockey table here on this floor. And my wife was like, oh my gosh, we have to find this machine. Someone tape Donovan playing it. Six seconds later, my first shot I scored it. And I just looked at the poor people who built it and I'm like yeah, I'm a professional air hockey player. This thing is so not ready for professional time but they took down all my information and said we'd love to consult with you. I said I'd love to consult with you too because this could be a lot of fun. Maybe also a great way for professionals to practice, right, because you don't always have someone who's willing to play hours and hours which it takes to get at the professional level. But to have an AI system that I could even teach up my attack, forcing me to play outside of my comfort zone, to try something other than a left wall under or right well over but have to do more cuts because it knows to search for that. I can see a lot of great applications for the professionalized player with this type of AI. It would actually get a lot better. Literally, someone behind me started laughing. "That didn't take long" because it in six seconds I had scored on it already. I'm like okay, I was hoping it was going to be harder than this. >> I'm thinking back to our Dave Cahill interview of AI for everyone, and this is AI for professional air hockey players. >> It is and in one of my demos, Kendra Havens showed AI inside of your IDE. And I remember I tell the story that I remember I started writing software back in the 90s. I remember driving to a software store. You remember we used to have to drive and you'd buy a box and the box would be really heavy because the manuals are in there, and not to mention a stack of floppy discs that you're going to spend hours putting in your computer. And I bought visual C++ 1.52 was my first compiler. I remember going home so excited. And it had like syntax highlighting and that was like this cool new thing and you had all these great breakpoints and line numbers. And now Kendra's on stage typing this repetitives task and then the editor stops her and says, "It looks like you need to do this a little bit more. "You want me to do this for you?" And I'm like what just happened? This is not syntax highlighting. This is literally watching what you do, identifying a repetitive task, seeing the pattern in your code and suggesting that I can finish writing this code for you. It's unbelievable. >> You bring up a great point. Back when I used to write, it was programming. >> Yes. >> And we said programming was you learn the structure, you learn the logic and you write all the lines of what's going to be there. Coding on the other hand usually is taking something that is there, pulling in the pieces, making the modification. >> Right. >> It sounds like we're talking about even the next generation where the intelligence is going to take over. >> It's built right inside of your IDE which is amazing. You were talking about artificial intelligence, not only for the air hockey. But I love the fact that in Azure, we have so many cognitive services and you just like pick these off the shelf. When I wanted to learn artificial intelligence when I was in the university, you had to go for another language called Lisp. That scared half of us away from artificial intelligence because you have to learn another language just to go do this cool thing that back then was very difficult to do and you could barely get it to play chess, let alone play air hockey. But today, cognitive services search, decision-making, chat bots, they're so easy. Anyone, even a non developer, can start adding the power of AI into their products thanks to the stuff that we're doing in Azure. And this is just lighting up all these new possibilities for us, air hockey, drones that are able to put out fires. I've just seen amazing stuff where they're able to use AI and they add it with as little as two lines of code. And all of a sudden, your app is so much more powerful than it was before. >> Donovan, one of the things that really struck me over the last couple years, looking at Microsoft, is it used to be, you'd think about the Microsoft stack. When I think about developers it's like, oh wait are you a .NET person? Well, you're going to be there. The keynote this morning, one of your team members was on stage with Scott Hanselman and was you know choose your language, choose your tools and you're going to have all of them out there. So talk to us a little bit about that transition inside Microsoft. >> Sure. One of the mantras that I've been saying for a while is "any language, any platform". No one believes me . So I had to start proving it. I'm like so I got on stage one year. It was interesting and this is a really rough year because I flew with three laptops. One had Mac OS on it, one of them had Linux on it and one of them had Windows. And what I did is I created a voting app and what I would do is I'd get on stage and say okay everyone that's in this session, go to this URL and start voting. They got to pick what computer I use, they got to pick what language I programmed in and they got to pick where in Azure-eyed I deployed it to. Was it to an app service was it to Docker? I'm like I'm going to prove to you I can do any language in any platform. So I honestly did not know what demo I was going to do. 20 minutes later, after showing them some slides, I would go back to the app and say what did you pick? And I would move that computer in front of me and right there on stage completely create a complete CI/CD pipeline for the language that that audience chose to whatever resources that they wanted on whatever platform that they wanted me. Was like, have I proven this to you enough or not? And I did that demo for an entire year. Any language that you want me to program in and any platform you want me to target, I'm going to do that right now and I don't even know what it's going to be. You're going to choose it for me. I can't remember the last time I did a .NET demo on stage. I did Python this week when I was on stage with Jason Zander. I saw a lot of Python and Go and other demos this year. We love .NET. Don't get us wrong but everyone knows we can .NET. What we're trying to prove right now is that we can do a lot of other things. It does not matter what language you program in. It does not matter where you want to deploy. Microsoft is here to help you. It's a company created by developers and we're still obsessed with developers, not just .NET developers, all developers even the citizen developer which is a developer which is a developer who doesn't have to see the code anymore but wants to be able to add that value to what they're doing in their organization. So if you're a developer, Microsoft is here to help full-stop. It's a powerful mission and a powerful message that you are really empowering everyone here. >> Donovan: Right. >> Excellent. >> And how many developers only program in one language now, right? I thought I remember I used to be a C++ programmer and I thought that was it, right. I knew the best language, I knew the fastest language. And then all of a sudden, I knew CSharp and I knew Java and I knew JavaScript and I brought a lot of PowerShell right now and I write it on and noticed like wow, no one knows one language. But I never leave Visual Studio code. I deploy all my workloads into Azure. I didn't have to change my infrastructure or my tools to switch languages. I just switched languages that fit whatever the problem was that I was trying to solve. So I live the mantra that we tell our customers. I don't just do .NET development. Although I love .NET and it's my go-to language if I'm starting from scratch but sometimes I'm going to go help in an open source project that's written in some other language and I want to be able to help them. With Visual Studio online, we made that extremely easy. I don't even have to set up my development machine anymore. I can only click a link in a GitHub repository and the environment I need will be provisioned for me. I'll use it, check in my commits and then throw it away when I'm done. It's the world of being a developer now and I always giggle 'cause I'm thinking I had to drive to a store and buy my first compiler and now I can have an entire environment in minutes that is ready to rock and roll. It's just I wish I would learn how to program now and not when I was on bulletin boards asking for help and waiting three days for someone to respond. I didn't have Stack Overflow or search engines and things like that. It's just an amazing time to be a developer. >> Yes, indeed. Indeed it is Donovan Brown, the man in the black shirt. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. Thank you for having me. >> It was really fun. Thank you. >> Take care. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)