>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone. You are watching the cube. We are the cube, the ESPN of tech, and we are here at the orange County convention center for Microsoft ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside of my co host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Dave Cahill. He is the principal PM Bonzai at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. Thanks for having me. It's been a while. Has been by your back. That's right. So you are now, you were the COO of Bonzai. You are now part of Microsoft. There was an acquisition about a year ago. Tell us a little bit about bonsai. It's the AI business system. Got a shout out from Satya on the main stage yesterday. Tell us a little bit about bonsai and then about the transition about now being part of Microsoft. >>Yeah, sure. So the, the big vision for Bonzai from the founders, Mark and Keene was how do you build a set of tools? This makes AI more accessible than to just data scientists. How do you open up, ended up to developers and subject matter experts. And so from day one they've been focusing on building this abstraction layer of platform set of tools. They really enables more than just data scientists access to the low-level mechanics of machine learning, of deeper enforcement learning. Um, everything we've been working on really they've been working on for four years prior to the acquisition was, uh, building out that tool chain. And from my side of the world it was where did we figure out where to point that? Where do we, where are we seeing the strongest traction and adoption for the tools? Early days, uh, from a go to market perspective. And so while they worked on the technology, we really found a pocket of interest, uh, in these real world, often industrial systems. Uh, and so inside Bonzai that's a lot of the work we were doing was taking that platform to market. Um, as part of Bonzai. And then, you know, of course post acquisition, we're doing a lot of the same >>thanks so accessible AI. I love the concept, but what does it really mean? So this is so that someone could be a subject matter expert in an industrial company and be able to still program. Can you explain a little bit, give us an example of, of what bonsai was? >>Yeah, sure. And I mean there's a lot of low level mechanics and machine learning, the algorithms, the toolkits, et cetera that are, that are difficult for just anyone to pick up and start programming. And so the idea here is how can you write an obstruction layer above that? And in this case, it takes a foamer for programming language that allows a developer or subject matter expert to break down the concepts of the problem they're trying to solve in, in, in business terms, right? And so if you think about a wind turbine or a drill or um, a baggage optimization system, it's not the data scientists that intimately understands the behaviors of that system and how it works. It's the subject matter expert that can practically stand next to it and understand or hear that it's starting to fail. Or they know the, the way to turn the knobs most optimally to figure out how to program that system. Now if you just took a of data and threw it at infrastructure, eventually it would figure it out the patterns and how to optimize that thing. But you have a subject matter expert inside the four walls of your organization that readily knows how to solve it like that. And so why not empower them with a, a programming language, really a mechanism to outline the core concepts that you want the AI to learn because they've spent their entire career, uh, trying to figure them out. All right, >>so yeah, Dave, yesterday, Satya Nadella talked a bit about the autonomous systems and if I got it right, he said, we're allowing those engineers to really build systems, become the teachers for what's going on there. So help help frame this a little bit as to where this fits into kind of the broader AI discussion that Microsoft's having with companies today. >>Yeah, I think there's, there's a obviously a massive AI portfolio at, at Microsoft and there's lots of different applications and systems and use cases that are fit for more and more intelligence in the form of AI and machine learning. What we've seen is that an opportunity in the real world and the physical domain that requires a different set of tools and techniques than maybe in the logical, you know, our data centric domains. And oftentimes in the press you see a lot of emphasis on supervised and unsupervised learning and very data centric use cases for the logical world, right? For, for databases or CRM systems or things like that. We believe there's this massive opportunity in the physical world. And when you get into the physical world and these vast practically infinite state spaces, you need different sets of tools and from a machine learning perspective, different sets of techniques. And so I think Microsoft looks at the entire portfolio and says, you need the right tool for the job. Um, as opposed to hammer nailing everything. And that's really the autonomous systems piece is really our effort in real world systems. So >>David, you know, when I'm listening to what you're saying there reminds me of some of the discussions we've been having the last five years or so about the industrial internet. A lot of the OT systems here, which really outside the domain of traditional it or though some of the same challenges that your your team's facing. >>Absolutely. So OT, it's interesting you bring that up. Um, oftentimes the teams that have time inside an organization to pick their head up from their day job to look at new emerging technologies aren't in operations. They're not in the business because they're running the business. And so you have to be able to bridge the gap between central technology, central and innovation teams and those that are actually running the business. And I view OT as kind of the, the kind of mortar between those two bricks oftentimes as the one that has to accept this technology and figure out how to deploy it. And that's just not technically that it works, but also kind of commercially and from a safety risk, trust perspective. So OT really has a, a big role in this. And understanding, not that it just solves the problem technically, but it actually can be deployed, um, in ways that fit within corporate security requirements, data privacy requirements, trust, et cetera. Um, it's not, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a lot of gaps to be bridged there. So I saw this, this, this, like autonomous systems have been projected to grow to more than 800 million in operation by 25. Right? >>That's a big number. So what are you doing within Microsoft to do prepare for that? >>Yeah, so I think I view autonomous systems. It's not a product, it's an endpoint, right? This is like 2000 when VMware came out and said, listen, you're on the journey to the virtual data center. Right? And their customers were in physical data centers trying to go virtual. The journey towards autonomous systems is kind of that we're on that same path. And really it's about providing customers the tools to, but I them along that journey from where they are today to kind of full autonomy, full autonomous systems. And it's a, it's a, it's a maturity, right? You start out, you know, just managing that system, you're maintaining it, then you're, maybe you're, you're optimizing it and you're, then you're controlling it a little bit better, but there's always a human in the loop and then you're at full autonomy. And I think along that path there's lots of different pieces or tools and technologies that we can bring to bear to help them on that journey. Um, technically, commercially. And then also from a safety and trust perspective. And so a lot of the work we're trying to do is build out that tool chain and, and we think Bonzai is a core piece of that actually at the, at the center of what we're trying to do. >>So how, how when you're talking about the human and the aluminum, I'm, I'm imagining a subject matter expert who is working in concert with you developing whatever, whatever tool it is that is going to automate something that they are the subject matter expert, as you said, can fix it like this. Calibrate the buttons and know when a system's about to fail. So how, how trusting are they in terms of, Oh, so this is no longer something I'm going to be doing here. How, how, how do you work with them and, and helping them understand? No, really you can trust this. >>I think it's really about, um, augmenting and scaling the work of the, of the experts and, and oftentimes in every customer engagement we have the subject matter experts are excited because they're literally caudifying their expertise and then figuring out how to scale it. Right? Those experts are frustrated because they are the subject matter expert by definition. They're the problem solver for that problem for everybody in the organization. And so the ability for them to take that expertise in scale, it means more time for them to do what they really want to do, which probably isn't solving problems tactically for everyone. That's not at the expertise level. They are at the executive level. It's about scaling that quality of work so that your expert, you know, your best expert for tuning this turbine can then be scaled across the organization and you're reducing, you know, training costs and other things because you can scale that expertise more effectively. >>Yeah. So Dave, what are some of the big challenges that customers are having? Is it the availability of the expertise and hiring the right people? Uh, you know, we, we've looked at, uh, you know, the, the big data wave, uh, you know, half of those deployments failed for, you know, so many different reasons there. You know, why, why, why, why will this be different? >>Yeah, I mean it's certainly not without challenges. I mean, I think the, one of the things where we run into, you know, data readiness, like I naively thought because we use simulations, we got, we got over the cold start problem that, you know, we don't have data, we'll just use a simulation instead, I think to get around the idea that simulations, there's this idea of a simulation, which is where we train our environment in. And I can kind of go into that in detail, but that's very different than a machine learning ready simulation and having a simulation that runs. It can be parallelized, it can run on Azure that works fast enough to train. These are all impediments to just getting to train these models before you even get to the actual model working in the real world. And so I think the pipeline for training these models is as intense in some cases as you know, data centric training environments. >>Once you get that model trained, it's been about deployment and you have a whole different set of challenges and that's where OT comes into play is starting to figure out, okay, how do we operationalize this model? Is a human in the loop? Is there a a mechanism to to stop the AI and defer to the human right. And we see a maturity model there as well where customers are starting with decision support, which means you know, the AI is not controlling the end system. It is making a recommendation and then a business analyst would then implement that in real time. But walking through what those procedures look like is something that most customers haven't done yet until they're like right at that last step ready to deploy to saying, wait, who's going to watch this? What, what is our safety procedure for deploying a drill, an autonomous drill? It usually doesn't exist in an organization today. >>Yeah, it sounds, it's a little bit different as to, as opposed to, you know, just your regular it operations and you kind of say, here's the five step model. Oh wait, I've always done this. You're, you're attacking some new challenges here. So are they a little bit more likely to move a little bit further and let the autonomy take over? Is that the case? >>Um, I mean, I think so, and it's, it's certainly lines of business, right? This is not, it is there to kind of manage the transition as needed and kind of watch over for security and privacy concerns. Um, I don't, I don't see the hesitation around the autonomous nature of it from the business users. It's, it's people around the periphery, whether that's security or compliance or safety that is most concerned about that. And organizations I think are still trying to get all of those people in the same room and develop policies around that. And oftentimes for better or worse, we're the, we're the forcing function to get them all in the same room and say, okay, what is this going to look like? But, but I, I see the businesses as really driving for the smarter and smarter and increasingly autonomous systems and excited about those pieces because the, the efficiencies to be gained from, from that are so significant. >>And a lot of these use cases I want to ask you about innovation. So this is, you are part of Bonzai and now you are part of Microsoft, which as big tech companies go is, is a rather mature company. We've had some guests on this week who've said that Microsoft actually feels like a lot like a startup. Yeah. I'm interested to hear the, the approach to innovation, the mindset that your new colleagues have and how you are keeping that, that more startup agile approach and that inclination in this big company. Yeah. So I can certainly speak to our experience with Bonzai. It's been pretty neat. I think as having been acquired a few different times by different companies, the way that Microsoft has landed this technology has actually been quite interesting. And we sit within a team within Microsoft research called business AI and business AI's entire charter is to incubate either required or organically developed technologies to the point that they're ready to graduate and scale across the organization. >>Up until that point in time, they're trying to figure out, you know, almost product market fit, but inside a larger organization, leveraging the tools that you know at their disposal that is the broader Microsoft, whether that's the field of the marketing engine or things like that. And then you seeing bonsai be able to take advantage of things like that. The keynote was Satya and, uh, you know, our access and collaboration with the Microsoft field, but we're still in that incubation mode trying to figure out exactly how the technology goes to market. Um, let be continuing to build out and mature the technology and figure out the right home for it. Um, the right partner for it. If it's a business unit or you know, whatever that may be. Um, and I think in that scenario, we're, we're a bit standalone in that regard while we figure this process out. >>So it's, it's, I think oftentimes you see innovation gets stymied when you, you, you force a premature integration of technologies like this and you almost kind of determine their destiny before even knowing really where they're trying to go. And just letting us breathe a little bit for a pointing for, for a period of time, I think allows a better outcome than if you tried to guess ahead of time. Cause at this early stage, you don't know the answer, right? You're still trying to figure out what is the ideal application, what is the ideal target audience? What is the ideal, um, port part of the portfolio where they should sit? Right? Those, those aren't, I think, guessing those up front, even a year ago when the acquisition closed would have been impossible. So that kind of, I don't know that gestation period is, is I think a key, uh, Dave, take us inside some of the conversations you're having at the show. >>Uh, key takeaways you want people to have of, of your group. Uh, out of Microsoft ignite. >> Yes. Right. I think a lot of the conversations are, you know, this, this big vision that is autonomous systems and that really is an end point. And what you really have to do is distill down, you know, where to get started. And that's not the glamorous kind of use cases are the ones that you see in the press or drones. Um, there are autonomous vehicles, right? It's, you know, things that likely fly or we saw on the Jetsons. But the reality is that like where customers are seeing the strongest business opportunity is, is drills, it's turbines, it's air conditioners, it's a extrusion process for some food that you've probably consumed right while you've been here at the conference. Um, that's, and so really kind of, I think dialing customers into surface level use cases that are a fit for deep reinforcement learning is refreshing because a lot of people come at it saying, well, I don't have an autonomous vehicle and I don't have a drone, so I must not be for you. >>And that couldn't be further from the truth. All you need is a control system. Right? If you have any sort of system run by a PID controller or model predictive control, you can optimize that system further with deeper enforcement learning and bonds as a mechanism for making that significant more accessible to your teams. So I think bringing it way back to like, Hey, I saw this big vision on stage, where do I start? It's just really been a bit of a, you know, a search inside their organization for the types of applications that are good fits >> AI. It's not just for the Jetsons anymore. That's right. Great. I'll take it. Dave Cahill. A pleasure having you on. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you both. It's good to be back. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage.

okay we're back this is Dave Volante I'm back I was just meeting with Joe Tucci and Mike cappellas and in an analyst breakout and got some good information I'll share with you a moment this is Silicon angle TVs continuous coverage of EMC world and we're live here in Las Vegas and we have a good friend Dave Cahill from SolidFire on we met SolidFire a year ago at EMC world the CEO Dave Wright popped out of Rackspace conceived and founded SolidFire to be exclusively focused on the cloud service provider market flash all flash array focused on the cloud service provider market like no other company most companies sell flash arrays all flash array sort of broad set of use cases SolidFire is uniquely focusing on the cloud service provider space and we're going to get into that with with David Cahill David welcome to the cube it would be back so you moved to Colorado a lot of interesting personal stuff going on and it's it's it's great to see you you know doing so well personally and it seems like SolidFire is really making some progress you guys are as I said before are uniquely positioned in the cloud service provider space but so why don't we get into it maybe give us the bumper sticker because you could maybe maybe add some color to what I just said yeah and then give us an update on where we're at yeah sure so so guys that are building large-scale multi tenant clouds it's a unique customer set in the last year has done nothing but validate that for us we've been in early access with a handful of partners and our cloud service providers in that regard and continue to expand out that program now and it's it's as evident now as it was then that this customer set has unique challenges around scale around automation around performance and around efficiency that you don't traditionally see in the prize and so we continue to be laser focused on that customer set large-scale multi-tenant clouds and there's plenty of them being built yeah so um so where are you at you guys go through your beta program and yeah so we're heading the crap out of the kick in the beating the crap out of the system we are heads down charging towards full GA later in the year but the purpose of the early access program really is was to get some select cloud service providers to beat the crap out of the system and let them continue to you know evolve the services that they're gonna offer based on the SolidFire system and and make it a better offering GA both from a infrastructure standpoint but also from a services standpoint because you know these guys are advancing the way that we think about the cloud cloud 100 was let's move your data to the cloud cloud 2.0 is let's move your apps to the cloud and so that's a mindset shift which requires evangelism on the part of the cloud service provider to the end customer in addition to the infrastructure right if you if you if you crack the code on the economics of high performance in the cloud you open it up to a much broader application set that's so um so actually Dave I want to see if it call inaudible here so you are you hanging out here you got it something to do after this so we are I'm around okay so Sanjay merchandani was the CIO of EMC we're gonna lose them if we don't bring him on I realized now look at the schedule yeah I take off for 20 minutes everything gets behind so if you wouldn't mind I want to bring take a quick break when I bring Sanjay in interview him and then bring you back and then pick this up with me okay all right so listen keep it right there we're going to come right back with Sanjay merchandani CIO of EMC we're right back you the cube is this conceptual box if you will we bring people inside of the cube and then we share ideas the cube is a comfortable place it's a place where people feel happy and are happy to share their knowledge with the world and we're happy to be ambassadors of that knowledge transfer yeah can I get okay we're back and this is the segment with Sanjay Mirchandani CIO of EMC now Santi has been on the cube a couple of times and really has been leading emcs transformation efforts internally so the company's not just talking about transformation actually transforming I was at the CIO event in October EMC CIO event Sanjay really he noted that event and was the sort of highlight at that show working with a number of EMC CIOs to help them understand how EMC was transforming Sanjay was a really first of all welcome to the cube thank you good to be here and so that was a great event it was the MCS first real effort to bring together CIOs and and they used you EMC usually was a showcase which is smart you guys are doing some internal transformations but there was a lot of interest around what you were doing obviously a lot of talk about infrastructure transformation but also new metrics and things like that what did you take away from that event well you know the whole thing is that people want proof points the whole thing today is about proof points and we've been on this journey first in virtualization then we move that to cloud and we've now incorporated obviously big data into that but nobody builds infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure you want to drive value out of it and we translated value for the business for EMC is a customer internally around agility speed time to market and there's been a shift in the way our internal customers think about things because it's all about hey give it was faster doesn't have to be perfect out of the gate but give it us quicker so we could work together and get it right so we've been we've been we've built out our cloud and now we're working through the layers of in layers on top of that of that cloud of you words are things like platform-as-a-service true business intelligence as a service connectivity between our infrastructure and our legacy applications or if I have the liberty of building our new applications how do you do that and then on top of all of that these devices we're having thousands of these devices a month into the network how do you bring a true user experience and give our users productivity outside of email mm-hmm on this device so that's what we took away that customers were interested in these layers so so when I hear something like VI as a service I think I get excited as a business person I said can I get access to a self-service bi portal right and actually begin to interact with data you know without having to call up you know an army of IT people is that the vision is that you're actually doing that right right and right so talk about the hello yes we should go it's actually very exciting because it's the first layer of value that we're adding directly on top of our cloud infrastructure right so the number one area where you have rogue IT or shadow IT whatever you like to call it is some form of business reporting so users will say IT can't provide me my reports fast enough or IT can't provide me the reports the way I want them or in the format that I want them or as frequently as I want so it's usually shadow IT usually the big percentage of it is there on some kind of reporting system so what we decided to do was we built a cloud infrastructure we've got the capabilities we've got green plumbing plays so what we're doing is we're creating as much of this data that the custom that our internal customers want access to give them one version of the truth so you take away the noise about where is the data and instead spend time on two things helping our internal customers build the skills to do the analytics the way they wanted and give them data scientists as a service as a human service to really enable them because we see the data left to right nobody else does all elements of data within the company mm-hmm so so we give them data scientists as a service and we'll give them the ability will give them skills around tool sets that they want to use a Microsoft reporting tool or SAS or something else on top of the green flap we're enabling the platform we're enabling some competency around the tools when we're enabling data scientists with subject matter expertise in the data and then the and then our internal customers can go off and have a nice day with that information any way they want it so how do you deal with the issue of credentials like who gets to see you which data well obviously we put business rules behind all that so our security officers involved you know and we we are now tearing the data based on access based on you know profiles etc so all of that has to come together so it's not an all-or-nothing formula you know we're bringing best practices into play and and making sure those those are things that you understand how to do in a traditional world right and and if it's rogue IT or shadow IT as you you know that now comes into picture so you have better control over that stuff yeah so um we actually just did you mentioned shadow IT we just did a survey on IT transformation we had one of the questions we asked is you know what percent of your your IT budget or organization's IT budget is managed by a centralized organization and only about when I say only about 38% said 100% yeah so if more than half had some kind of shadow IT and about 20% had a 25% of the spend or more going to shadow I mean and let's be honest it was cloud computing stuff that was in the arsenal of IT for years is out in the open you can get access to the credit card for the same amount of infrastructure and in a drop of a hat that my IT guys need so it's just shadow IT has gone out of the dark corners of the organization right into the open into the plow yeah it's okay you know and so it's a whack-a-mole syndrome yeah so we're saying you got to either embrace it or get out of the way yeah and so you know the pitch that my my leadership team and I are making to our organization is we have to be the brokers of value it's not about authorship it's not about where it was built or where it was written it's about how soon can we add value to the business and we have to be the brokers of value all right and not it's not all about hey if it wasn't written here it isn't good enough for this for this company so yeah you've always been very forward-thinking about that I mean you know shadow IT freaks out some people oh we got to pull it in but you're like okay fine so now I want to tie it into the messaging that you were hearing at EMC world so it's it's IT transformation transform IT or sorry its transformation transform IT business and in yourself yeah we've said okay IT transformation that's about the cloud the new new cloud infrastructure Bob as well the business transformation is about data unlocking data value data value and then self obviously will you make cloud architect maybe that's a piece of what I'm gonna talk about to are so-so is that a reasonable way to look at what the messaging is and how that maps from a practitioners perspective and I'm trying to squint through okay how much of that is marketing and how much is actually implementable so you've talked about the the cloud transformation internally at EMC IT as a service um how about the data piece you talked about bi self-service bi but how about even going beyond that you're actually getting into that point where you're leveraging that yeah are you able to monetize yes great question by the way and there's lots of new answers to that to that question because when you chunk something down to saying you know IT is about you know transforming I tease about infrastructure well transforming IT is about infrastructure self service automation cataloging and creating the capability to present IT as a service did that make sense yeah my goal is to break down the big black box of IT into little box black boxes of IT so customers internally can pick and choose what they want at the price points they want and at the service level they want and I present that up and as much of an automated Service Catalog as I can now that is transforming IT there's a lot of process transformation alongside technology transformation and the you as human transformation which I'll get to in a minute once I built that what do our internal customers want they want big data we talk about big data they want Anytime Anywhere computing capabilities so if you've got that sleek little MacBook Air in front of you or the latest Android device that has showed up at your door or an iOS device they want to be able to compute any way they like on any form factor any screen anywhere we have to render that so for us today Mobile is an opt-out strategy so you ever tell me explicitly that you don't want mobile when I give you a solution it's automatically opt-in yeah two years ago it was the other way round hello I mean okay now how do you do that you do that based on the fact that I've got a cloud infrastructure and I'm building mobile capabilities on top of that bad infrastructure to expose elements of that data manage those devices create that user experience on top of that infrastructure security apps the hole in your login monitoring authentication you know so on and so forth and so how do you do that so that's that's to be transforming you know the business how they use it how they consume it what they want to do with it etc said differently in the first so transformed IT transformed the business is transformed IT was building the factory floor building the production line it was all about IT transform the business is all about the business it's where you're building the widgets you want off that factory floor transform you is what gets the lease attention but it's probably the most pivotal thing in all of this is the bits are gonna be just really cool bits on the on the data center floor unless somebody knows what to do with them and really drive value with it and so for me the focus of my leadership team and myself is not so much just about the architectural roadmap but it's bringing the thousands of people that are involved with IT whether it be our own people or partners that helped us along with us in this journey in a way that they're showing us the way I mean I could come up with s best roadmaps somebody's got to make them happen yeah and I think you're hitting on a really important point you know the people piece we always sort of ignore that we talk about the technology but you know well when you look at the spending that goes on in this industry the vast majority of his own people which you know on the one hand says okay that's important we're investing in our people but we're in a labor-intensive IT economy and and that's stifling innovation you've talked frequently as have your colleagues about the 70/30 mix 70% goes to running the business 30% goes to the innovation but decades of infrastructure investment in silos have really stifled yes innovation and so yes you got attack the processing and the people problem right or else that's not gonna change which slaves to that yeah trust me that's that's what it is yeah and so so that in order for us to move the industry forward Palmer talks about getting deeper into the business integration you can't get there you know if you're you know stuck in all this infrastructure right you sort of bring the first five minutes of my presentation you know and and but that's exactly true you know we've we've you know we say 70% is lights on 30 percent 25 30 percent is innovation it's not even innovation it's just new stuff compared to old stuff yeah it's not me I mean yeah yeah that's that's the binary call you need to get beyond that into true innovation and and you know that that takes a lot of effort and people are so stuck in I gotta get this done I gotta get this out you know I gotta work do this work around I got a triage this problem that the technology and the processes are so institutionally complex the business has gone this way I teeka's continue to run this way because we haven't had time to move this way I think today and I say today I mean the period of the technology that were in is the technology lends itself to agility the business is open to how it needs it and open and and welcoming to how it wants it consumed the technology good enough iterate agile and it's up to IT to adapt at this point to say I'm willing to bring those two things together and really change how I do things for the business that makes sense yeah and well it does especially when the context of the IT services discussion we had earlier and we talked about you said binary you know it's either you're you're maintaining or you're doing something else right I think when organizations if you can present IT as a service can start to really align with their their their objectives of their entry to like a portfolio right run the business grow the business transform the business right and maybe align it to business unit and really start to make IT a much more fundamental part of the strategic plan and the operating plan and that's what excites me listen I had one more question for you I've been hearing a lot about propel I heard first heard a couple months ago we heard more about it last week at sa P sapphire you did yeah okay yep that Jo was just talking about Jo Tucci so you know I know talk about propel yeah I didn't use that word but he talked about OSAP and he said hey it's going live soon I heard it's going live this summer but my fifth great so what's that all about okay so you know as as here's how I like I like to think about it for a few years we were building on infrastructure and it was a drive for efficiency in the business so you it's what I call you know when you start trimming the fat but you got to build back some muscle and the muscle we were trying to build back was a cloud infrastructure and applications that took us into the future right the business wasn't slowing down their plans because I couldn't keep up with them they were going just as fast as they had to go driving shareholder value creating new markets new products getting and doing the things they had to do we were working with 10 12 year-old legacy systems like every other company in our class it grow fast grow globally acquire companies you're just trying to tread water sometimes and just stay afloat we made a conscious call up two and a half years ago to revamp our core systems align a business systems no different than a retail bank pulling out their core retail banking systems and back-end systems and putting in new ones once they've used on a main route for many years very trivial but we just we didn't just stop at the a player we're completely building out this this new line of business solutions on and on what is essentially an EMC VMware RSA and partner friendly technology so it's s ap on the top and the a player Vblock architecture we've used in the spring frameworks gem fire all of the other products you know the middleware products that that allow us to move into the cloud from VMware all built on a V you know running on everything V yeah right so the only thing that we're bringing over over 12 years is data that we're spending a lot of time transforming so they're ready for big data and the database physically everything else is brand-spanking-new so at every layer of that stack we are transforming IT the business and ourselves I mean if you know what I encapsulate the the the the theme for this event we're living it July 5th my team's been working for the last couple of years the last couple of months have been torture as you would imagine anything of the scale you know we closed the quarter we turn on the lights the next morning and we're in a new system and we got to take our users through it so you know the teams in the next you know stellar job but we still have a little bit ahead of us so I said you'll be in the beach but Sanjay's team as the IT I always pulls the shorts we don't get we don't get a long weekend we don't get a very long month actually Dante merchandani one of the best CIOs in the business we had Oliver Bushman on last week and other real innovators I really appreciate names good to be here as always I keep it right there and we'll be right back

okay we're back this is Dave vellante and silicon angles continuous coverage of EMC well we're back with Dave Cahill we had to take a break to interview Sanjay mirchandani and Dave thanks for letting us call inaudible there we were talking about SolidFire you unique focus on cloud service bars you're the only all flash array company focusing exclusively on cloud service providers you were talking about how you're in beta you're working at aha get a lot of good feedback bring us back to that and give us a quick update on that program yeah so we are like I said before we're in early access for the select group of cloud provider customers will continue to beat on the product with them over the course of the next few months and then towards the end of the year will go full GA to the broader market you know when market focus from our standpoint is large-scale multi-tenant clouds and where that's most prevalent today is public clouds large-scale virtual private clouds and private cloud providers yeah so um seen a lot of action in this space obviously across the entire hierarchy right and we saw EMC were here at emc world they just made a big acquisition I don't know how big actually there's a lot of rumors about the number yeah yeah I had rich Napolitano on earlier the acquisitions going to be part of his group and he said we never announced the number you don't know that I'm I said I called 400 the globe did I called 400 the global be fact what they'd say for 20 30 for 30 I had called 400 but I mean you know yeah the mark is frothy but it's a huge market it's got to be 20 plus billion yeah you know of total available market and you guys got to be excited about that on the one hand it's validation on the other hand it might be like oh oh yeah now we got to move yeah you know it when you're at the intersection of flash and cloud your life's noisy to begin with right and so in some ways EMC doesn't do us any favors by paying for 30 million for extreme I oh but but at the end of the day it's an incredible validation of the opportunity and the opportunity here isn't flesh EMC did not pay 430 million for flash they paid for a next gen art architecture capable of scaling out on a new medium and that's the difference I mean you can look at this market and it is it is so noisy and everyone's raising their hand and throwing I ops in a box and saying I'm in business but the trick is you know when you're architecting for scale it's a totally different set of design constraints and I think what you saw with emc is they're so close to the flash market that they were able to see that hey you know what we cannot retrofit an existing architecture into this problem we need to go get our own you know extreme IO slot it in they grabbed it early enough they can influence development they can spread it across their lineup I mean I think it's a great move but for us it's an incredible validation of the challenge that we're trying to solve every day which is scale out next-gen scale-out storage systems with flash as a means to an end but but flash is just the beginning of the story otherwise you're dead in this space so you're saying that the EMC moved to acquire extremely Oh was an admission that can do that the traditional controller-based architectures aren't going to cut it in this market space and so they had that piece with the enterprise flash drives and they had a PCI you know connect with VF cash and is a big opportunity in between that they were missing well I mean you know they have a whole portfolio right they called it baskin-robbins you could take you take VF cash you take thunder whenever it comes out you take extreme I oh and then you take their legacy and then you let you know emc Salesforce as long as you position it accordingly have at it but the trick is you know when do those flavors start dripping into each other right and as long as you segment them based on workload of customers that appropriately that's fine this is the key Dave the software and the management capabilities around that infrastructure and that's you know listen the flash is a is a commodity component of the architecture you know we're in and to me it is it is just the beginning of the innovation you take this hardware without the ability to scale without efficiency without performance control without complete automation you can't drive the economics necessary to take this flash and you know let's go at two for two or three percent of the market today with super high performance I ops to open up the rest of that market you need software and you've got to crack the code on the economics of efficiency automation performance control to open up that market much wider than just that two to three percent of the workloads that needs screaming fast I ops you know last year at vmworld we talked to some of your early customers and one of the things that we uncovered in those discussions was their different from the traditional enterprise guys right there thinking about running a business we were just talking to Sanjay Mirchandani about transforming IT go do an IT as a service and I'll tell you he's way ahead of the average I teashop most I tea shops are just starting to think about this transformation where's cloud service providers that's their business yeah and so one of things they said to us was look we're looking we're interested in the capability that companies like SolidFire bring because we can add value on top of that or we can sell that value to our customers right so it's not a cost plus model it's a hey this is something you need and you'll pay through the nose for because it's quality of service around applications is that is that bearing out to be true in your early beta trials and I mean this the cloud provider market is survival of the fittest right the biggest difference at the highest level is you know you've got guys traditional enterprises where I t is a cost center for this cloud service provider set I t is a profit center right and these guys look at it in terms of quality of service cost of service or breadth of service and if they're not improving or differentiating relative to the gorillas in the space on you know quality of service cost of service of breathless service that they're going to be out of business and that's the mandate that they have and so it is totally about delivering a service to their end customers not just turning a bunch of knobs to a captive user base which is what traditional enterprise IT is about ok so I'll give you the last word you know what's next what should we be looking for from from from SolidFire over the next six months yeah so from a SolidFire perspective and I think the most interesting thing for us is is just heads down and development right now so over the next six months we're going to continue to push forward with the early access customers let them prove out the solution and let them start to charge to market with their respective services and also I think you're going to see the market developed as well where cloud providers realize that it's not just about hosting data they need to host applications they need to compete on breadth of services relative to Amazon and for that that requires different mindsets and requires different architectures you think we're going to see you emerge this year a new definition of what's what was traditionally known as tier 1 storage you know the emc v-max the the IBM ds8000 HDS I mean those are it goes guys are the only tier 1 players you think that we're going to see a new definition there that's around multi-tenant around supporting horizontal applications across the port so I don't as much look at it in terms of tears I always break the market into either workloads or customer sets and I think of or than anything else you're going to see this customer set continue to emerge that cares about large-scale multi-tenant cloud environments yeah when I say to I don't mean tiering I don't confuse you with that I mean do you mean the last you're right versus module yeah ok ok all right ya know in that sense I do think that yes there is a new class of guys going at that performance tier I mean that's another thing that emc did with extreme IO is you know look at the Prophet pool that was at risk where is the MC you know that sin is flowering and market right edge end of the day 430 million is because of barges nothing yeah relative to the opportunity there Dave Cahill hey thanks very much great to see you man right that's all a good trip back keep it right there with right back

>> 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)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by, Cohesity. >> Good morning everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here in the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. Stu, this is Microsoft's Big Show. 26,000 people from around the globe, all descending on Orlando. This is the big infrastructure show. Thoughts, impressions, now that we're on day two of a three day show. >> Yeah, Rebecca. Last year I had this feeling that it was a little bit too much talking about the Windows 10 transition and the latest updates to Office 365. I could certainly want to make sure that we really dug in more to what's going on with Azure, what's happening in 6the developer space. Even though they do have a separate show for developers, it's Microsoft build. They actually have a huge partner show. And so, Microsoft has a lot of shows. So it's, what is this show that is decades old? And really it is the combination of Microsoft as a platform today. Satya Nadella yesterday talked about empowering the world. This morning, Scott Hanselman was in a smaller theater, talking about app devs. And he came out and he's like, "Hey, developers, isn't it a little bit early for you this morning?" Everybody's laughing. He said, "Even though we're kicking off at 9:00 a.m., Eastern." He said, "That's really early, especially for anybody coming from the West Coast." He was wearing his Will Code For Tacos shirt. And we're going to have Scott on later today, so we'll talk about that. But, where does Microsoft sit in this landscape? Is something we've had. I spent a lot of time looking at the cloud marketplace. Microsoft has put themselves as the clear number two behind AWS. But trying to figure out because SaaS is a big piece of what Microsoft does. And they have their software estate in their customer relationship. So how many of those that are what we used to call window shops. And you had Windows people are going to start, Will it be .NET? Will it be other operating systems? Will it come into Azure? Where do they play? And the answer is, Microsoft's going to play a lot of places. And what was really kind of put on with the point yesterday is, it's not just about the Microsoft solutions, it is about the ecosystem, they really haven't embraced their role, very supportive of open source. And trust is something that I know both you and I have been pointing in on because, in the big tech market, Microsoft wants to stand up and say, "We are the most trusted out there. And therefore, turn to us and we will help you through all of these journeys." >> So you're bringing up so many great points and I want to now go through each and every one of them. So, absolutely, we are hearing that this is the kinder, gentler Microsoft, we had Dave Totten on yesterday. And he was, as you just described, just talking about how much Microsoft is embracing and supporting customers who are using a little bit of Microsoft here, a little bit of other companies. I'm not going to name names, but they're seemingly demanding. I just want best to breed, and this is what I'm going to do. And Microsoft is supporting that, championing that. And, of course we're seeing this as a trend in the broader technology industry. However, it feels different, because it's Microsoft doing this. And they've been so proprietary in the past. >> Yeah, well, and Rebecca, it's our job on theCUBE actually, I'm going to name names. (laughs) And actually Microsoft is-- >> Okay. >> Embracing of this. So, the thing I'm most interested in at the show was Azure Arc. And I was trying to figure out, is this a management platform? And at the end of the day really, it is, there's Kubernetes in there, and it's specifically tied to applications. So they're going to start with databases specifically. My understanding, SQL is the first piece and saying, it sounds almost like the next incarnation of platform as a service to our past. And say, I can take this, I can put it on premises in Azure or on AWS. Any of those environments, manage all of them the same. Reminds me of what I hear from VMware with Hangzhou. Vmworld, Europe is going on right now in Barcelona. Big announcement is to the relationship with VMware on Azure. If I got it right, it's actually in beta now. So, Arc being announced and the next step of where Microsoft and VMware are going together, it is not a coincidence. They are not severing the ties with VMware. VMware, of course partners with all the cloud providers, most notably AWS. Dave Totten yesterday, talked about Red Hat. You want Kubernetes? If you want OpenShift, if you are a Red Hat customer and you've decided that, the way I'm going to leverage and use and have my applications run, are through OpenShift, Microsoft's is great. And the best, most secure place to run that environment is on Azure. So, that's great. So Microsoft, when you talk about choice, when you talk about flexibility, and you talk about agility cause, it is kinder and gentler, but Satya said they have that tech intensity. So all the latest and greatest, the new things that you want, you can get it from Microsoft, but they are also going to meet you where you are. That was Jeremiah Dooley, the Azure advocate, said that, "There's, lots of bridges we need to make, Microsoft has lots of teams. It's not just the DevOps, it's not just letting the old people do their own thing, from your virtualization through your containerization and everything in between microservices server list, and the like. Microsoft has teams, they have partners. Sure that you could buy everything in Microsoft, but they know that there are lots of partners and pieces. And between their partners, their ecosystem, their channel, and their go-to-market, they're going to pull this together to help you leverage what you need to move your business forward. >> So, next I want to talk about Scott Hanselman who was up on the main stage, we're going to have him on the show and he was as you said, adorned in coder dude, attire with a cool t-shirt and snappy kicks. But his talk was app development for everyone. And this is really Microsoft's big push, democratizing computing, hey, anyone can do this. And Satya Nadella, as we've talked about on the show. 61% of technologist's jobs are not in the technology industry. So this is something that Microsoft sees as a trend that's happening in the employment market. So they're saying, "Hey, we're going to help you out here." But Microsoft is not a hardware company. So how does this really change things for Microsoft in terms of the products and services-- >> Well right, >> It offers. >> So really what we're talking about here, we're talking about developers right? 61% of jobs openings for developers are outside the tech sector. And the high level message that Scott had is your tools, your language, your apps. And what we have is, just as we were talking about choice of clouds, it's choice of languages. Sure they'd love to say .NET is wonderful, but you want your Java, your PHP, all of these options. And chances are, not only are you going to use many of them, but even if you're working on a total solution, different groups inside your company might be using them and therefore you need tools that can spam them. The interesting example they use was Chipotle. And if there's a difference between when you're ordering and going through the delivery service, and some of the back-end pieces, and data needs to flow between them, and it can't be, "Oh wait, I've got silos of my data, I've got silos of all these other environments." So, developer tools are all about, having the company just work faster and work across environments. I was at AnsibleFest show earlier this year. And, Ansible is one of those tools that actually, different roles where you have to have the product owner, the developer, or the the operations person. They all have their way into that tool. And so, Microsoft's showing some very similar things as to, when I build something, it's not, "Oh, wait, we all chose this language." And so many of the tools was, " Okay, well, I had to standardize on something." But that didn't fit into what the organization needed. So I need to be able to get to what they all had. Just like eventually, when I'm picking my own taco, I can roll it, bowl it, soft or hard shell-- >> It was a cool analogy. >> And choose all my toppings in there. So it is Taco Tuesday here-- >> Yes. >> At Microsoft Ignite and the developers like their choices of tools, just like they like their tacos. >> And they like their extra guac. So going back to one of the other points you made at the very opening. And this is the competitive dynamic that we have here. We had David Davis and Scott Lowe on yesterday from a ActualTech Media. Scott was incredibly bullish about Microsoft. And saying it could really overtake AWS, not tomorrow, but within the next decade. Of course, the choice for JEDI certainly could accelerate that. What do you make of it? I mean, do you think that's still pie in the sky here? AWS is so far ahead. >> So look, first of all, when you look at the growth rates, first of all, just to take the actual number, we know what AWS's, revenue is. Last quarter, AWS did $9 billion. And they're still growing at about a 35% clip. When I look at Microsoft, they have their intelligent cloud bucket, which is Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server and GitHub. And that was 10.8 billion. And you say, "Oh, okay, that's really big." But last year, Azure did about $12 billion dollars. So, AWS is still two to three times larger when you look at infrastructure as a service. But SaaS hugely important piece of what's going on in the cloud opportunity. AWS really is more of the platform and infrastructure service, they absolutely have some of the PaaS pieces. Azure started out as PaaS and has this. So you're trying to count these buckets, and Azure is still growing at, last quarter was 64%. So if you look at the projection, is it possible for Azure to catch up in the next three years? Well, Azure's growth rate is also slowing down, so I don't think it matters that much. There is a number one and a number two, and they're both clear, valid choices for a customer. And, this morning at breakfast, I was talking to a customer and they are very heavily on Microsoft shop. But absolutely, they've got some AWS on the side. They're doing Azure, they've got a lot of Azure, being here at our Microsoft show. And when I go to AWS, even when I talked to the companies that are all in on AWS, " Oh, you got O 365?" "Of course we do." "Oh, if you're starting to do O 365, are there any other services that you might be using out of Azure?" "Yeah, that's possible." I know Google is in the mix. Ali Baba's in the mix. Oracle, well, we're not going to talk about Oracle Cloud, but we talked about Oracle, because they will allow their services to run on Azure specifically. We talked about that a lot yesterday, especially how that ties into JEDI. So, look, I think it is great when we have a healthy competitive marketplace. Today really, it is a two horse race. It is, AWS and Azure are the main choices for customers. Everyone else is really a niche player. Even a company like IBM, there's good solutions that they have, but they play in a multi cloud world. Google has some great data services, and absolutely a important player when you talk about multi cloud for all they've done with Kubernetes and Istio. I'm going to be at Kube Con in a couple of weeks and Google is front and center there. But if you talk about the general marketplace, Microsoft has a lot of customers, they had a lot of applications and therefore, can they continue to mature that market and grow their environment? Absolutely. AWS has so many customers, they have the marketplace is stronger. It's an area that I want to dig in a little bit more at this show is the Azure Marketplace, how much we talked about the ecosystem. But, can I just procure through the cloud and make it simpler? Big theme we've talked about is, cloud in the early days was supposed to be cheap and simple. And it is neither of those things. So, how do we make it easier, so that we can go from the 20% of applications in the public cloud, up to 50% or more? Because it is not about all everything goes to the public cloud, but making customers put the applications and their data in the right place at the right time with the right services. And then we haven't even talked about edge computing which Microsoft has a big push on, especially with their partners. We talked to HP, a little bit about that yesterday. But really the surface area that this show and Microsoft covers is immense and global. >> It is indeed, and we are going, this is our second day of three days of coverage and we're going to be getting into all of those things. We've got a lot of great guests. We have Cute Host, Keith Townsend, Dave Cahill, a former Wikibon guy, a lot of other fantastic people. So I'm excited to get it on with you today, Stu. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Great stuff. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music`)