>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube at Lisa Martin with Steve men and men and we are coming to you alive from combo go 19 please to welcome to the cube, a gent from Microsoft Azure. We've got Ben call principal program manager. Ben, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So Microsoft combo, what's going on with the partnership? >>They wouldn't have have great storage pond is in data management space. We've been working with Convult for 20 years now in Microsoft and and they've been working with us on Azure for that as long as I can remember not being on that the Azure business for about seven years now. So just a long time in cloud terms like dog ears and it's sort of, they've been doing a huge amount there around getting customer data into the cloud, reducing costs, getting more resiliency and then also letting them do more with the data. So they're a pretty good partner to have and they make it much easy for their customers to to go and leverage cloud. >> So Ben, you know, in my career I've had lots of interactions with the Microsoft storage team. Things have changed a little bit when you're now talking about Azure compared to more, it was the interaction with the operating system or the business suite at had. >>So maybe bring us up to date as those people that might not have followed where kind of the storage positioning inside of Microsoft is now that when we talk about Azure and your title. Yeah, we, we sort of can just, just briefly, we worked very heavily with our own premises brethren, they are actually inside the O team is inside of the Azure engineering old male, which is kind of funny, but we do a load of things there. If he started looking at, firstly on that, that hybrid side, we have things like Azure files. It's a highly resilient as a service SMB NFS file Shafter a hundred terabytes, but that interacts directly with windows server to give you Azure file sync. So there is sort of synergies there as well. What I'm doing personally, my team, we work on scale storage. The big thing we have in there is owl is out blood storage technology, which really is the underpinning technology fault. >>Preapproval storage and Azure, which is an including our SAS offerings, which are hosted on Azure too. So disc is on blood storage of files on blood storage. You look at Xbox live, all these kind of stuff is a customer to us. So we build that out and we were doing work there and that's, that's really, really interesting. And how we do it. And that's not looking at going, we're gonna buy some compute, we're going to buy some storage, we're going to build it out, we're going to run windows or hyper V or maybe VM-ware with hoc with windows running on the VMware, whatever else. This is more a story about we're gonna provide you storage as a service. You didn't get a minimum of like 11 nines at your ability. And and be able to have that scale to petabytes of capacity in one logical namespace and give you multiple gigabytes, double digit gigabytes of throughput to that storage. >>And now we're even that about to multiple protocols. So rest API century. Today we've got Azure stack storage, EU API, she can go and use, but we give you that consistency of the actual backend storage and the objects and the data available via more than just one protocol. You can go and access that via HDFS API. We talk about data lakes all the time. For us, our blood storage is a data Lake. We turn on hierarchal namespace and you can go and access that via other protocols like as I mentioned HDFS as well. So that is a big story about what we want to do. We want to make that data available at crazy scale, have no limits in the end to the capacity or throughput or performance and over any protocol. That's kind of our lawn on the Hill about what we want to get to. >>And we've been talking to the Combolt team about some of the solutions that they are putting in the cloud. The new offering metallic that came out. They said if my customer has Azure storage or storage from that other cloud provider, you could just go ahead and use that. Maybe how familiar and how much I know you've been having about run metallic. >> We were working, we work pretty tightly with the product team over Convolt around this and my team as well around how do we design and how do we make it work the best and we're going to continue working to optimize as they get to beyond initial launch to go, wow, we've got data sets we we can analyze. We knew how to, we wanted out of tune it. Now really we love the solution particularly more because you know the default if you don't select the storage type where you want to go, you will run on Azure. >>So really sort of be cued off to the relationship there. They chose us as a first place we'll go to, but they've also done the choice for customers. So some customers may want to take it to another cloud. That's fine. It's reasonable. I mean we totally understand it's going to be a multicloud world and that's a reality for any large company. Our goal is to make sure we're growing faster than the competitors, not to knock out the competitors altogether because that just won't happen. So they've got that ability to go and, yeah, Hey, we'll use Azure as default because they feel we're offering the best support and the best solution there. But then if they have that customer, same customer wants to turn around and use a competitor of ours, fine as well. And I see people talking about that today where they may want to mitigate risks and say, I'm going to do, I'm doing off office three, six five on a, taken off this three 65 backup. It's cool. You use metallic, it'll take it maybe to a different region in Asia and they're backing up. They still going, well, I'm still all in on Microsoft. They may want to take it to another cloud or even take it back to on premise. So that does happen too because just in case of that moment we can get that data back in a different location. Something >>so metallic talking about that is this new venture is right. It's a Convolt venture and saw that the other day and thought that's interesting. So we dug into it a little bit yesterday and it's like a startup operating within a 20 year old company, which is very interesting. Not just from an incumbent customer perspective, but an incumbent partner perspective. How have you seen over the last few years and particularly bad in the last nine months with big leadership and GTM changes for condo? How has the partnership with Microsoft evolved as a result of those changes? >>Um, it's always been interesting. I guess when you start looking at adventure and everything seems to, things change a little bit. Priorities may change just to be fair, but we've had that tight relationship for a long time and a relationship level and an exec leadership level, nothing's really changed. But in the way they're building this platform, we, we sit down out of my team at the Azure engineering group and we'll sit down and do things like ideations. Like here's where we see gaps in the markets, here's what we believe could happen. And look back in July, we had inspire, which is our partner conference in Las Vegas and we sat down with their OT, our OT in a room, we'll talking about these kinds of things. And this is I think about two months after they may have started the initial development metallic from what I understand, but we're talking about exactly what they're doing with metallic offered as a service in Azure as, Hey, how about we do this? So we think it's really cool. It opens up a new market to convert I think too. I mean they're so strong in the enterprise, but they don't do much in the smaller businesses because with the full feature product, it also has inherent complexibility complexity around it. So by doing metallic, is it click, click, next done thing. They really opening I think new markets to them and also to us as a partner. >>I was going to add, you know, kind of click on that because they developed this very quickly. This is something that I think what student were here yesterday, metallic was kind of conceived, designed, built in about six months. So in terms of like acceleration, that's kind of a new area for Combolt. >>Yeah, and I think, I think they're really embracing the fact about let's release our code in production for, for products which are sort of getting the, getting to the, Hey, the product is at the viable stage now, not minimum viable, viable, let's release in production, let's find out how customers are using it and then let's keep optimizing and doing that constant iteration, taking that dev ops approach to let's get it out there, let's get it launched, and then let's do these small batches of changes based on customer need, based on tele telemetry. We can actually get in. We can't get the telemetry without having customers. So that's how it's going to keep working. So I think this initial product we see today, it's just going to keep evolving and improving as they get more data, as they get more information, more feedback, which is exactly what we want to see. >>Well, what will come to the cloud air or something you've been living in for a number of years. Ben, I'd love to hear you've been meeting with customers, they've been asking you questions, gives us some of the, you know, some of the things that, what's top of mind for some of the customers? What kinds of things did they come into Microsoft, Dawn, and how's that all fit together? >>There's many different conferences of interrelate, many different conversations and there'll be, we'll go from talking about, you know, Python machine learning or AI fits in PowerPoint. >>Yeah. >>It's a things like, you know, when are we gonna do incremental snapshots from the manage disks, get into the weeds on very infrastructure centric stuff. We're seeing range of conversations there. The big thing I think I see, keep seeing people call out and make assumptions of is that they're not going to be relevant because cloud, I don't know cloud yet. I don't know this whole coup cube thing, containers, I don't really understand that as well as I think I need to. And an AI, Oh my gosh, what do we even do there? Cause everyone's throwing the words and terms around. But to be honest, I think would still really evident is cloud is still is tiny fraction of enterprise workloads. So let's be honest, it's growing at a huge rate because it is that small fraction. So again, there's plenty of time for people to learn but they shouldn't go and try. >>And so it's not like you go and learn everything in the technology stack from networking to development to database management to, to running a data set of power and cooling. You learn the things that are applicable to what you're trying to do. And the same thing goes to cloud. Any of these technologies go and look at what you need to build for your business. Take it that step and then go and find out the details and levels you want to know. And as someone who's been on Azure for, like I said, almost seven years, which is crazy long. That was, that was literally like being in a startup instead of Microsoft when I joined and I wasn't sure if I wanted to join a licensing company. It's been very evident to me. I will not say I'm an Azure expert and I've been seven years in the platform. >>There are too many things for for me to be an expert in everything on, and I think people sort of just have to realize that anyone's saying that it's bravado. Nothing else. Oh, people. The goal is Microsoft as a platform provider. Hopefully you've got the software and the solution does make a lot of this easier for the customer, so hopefully they shouldn't need to become a Coobernetti's expert because it's baked into your platform. They shouldn't have to worry about some of these offerings because it's SAS. Most customers are there. Some things you need to learn between going from exchange to go into Oh three 65 absolutely. There's some nuances and things like that, but once you get over that initial hurdle, it should be a little easier. I think it's right and I think going back to that, sort of going back to bear principles going, what is the highest level of distraction that's viable for your business or that application or this workload has to always be done with everything. If it's like, well, class, not even viable, running on premises, don't, don't need to apologize for not running in cloud. If I as this, what's happening for you because of security, because of application architecture, run it that way. Don't feel the need and the pressure to have to push it that way. I think too many people get caught up in this shiny stuff up here, which is what you know 1% of people are doing versus the other 99% which is still happening in a lot of the areas we work and have challenges in today. >>That's a great point that you bring up because there is all the buzz words, right? AI, machine learning cloud. You've got to be cloud ready. You've got to be data-driven to customer. To your point going, I just need to make sure that what we have set up for our business is going to allow our business one to remain relevant, but to also be able to harness the power of the data that they have to extract new opportunities, new insights, and not get caught up with, shoot, should we be using automation? Should we be using AI? Everybody's talking about it. I liked that you brought up and I find it very respectfully, he said, Hey, I'm not an Azure expert. You'd been there seven, seven dog years like you said. And I think that's what customers probably gained confidence in is hearing the folks like you that they look to for that guidance and that leadership saying, no, I don't know everything to know. But giving them the confidence that their tribe, they're trusting you with that data and also helping look, trusting you to help them make the right decisions for their business. >>Yeah, and that's, we've got to do that. I mean, I as a tech guy, it's like I've, I've loved seeing the changes. When I joined Microsoft, I, I wasn't lying. I was almost there go enough. I really want to join this company. I was going to go join a startup instead and I got asked to one stage in an interview going, why do you want to join Microsoft? We see you've never applied to, I'd never wanted to. A friend told me to come in and it's just been amazing to see those changes and I'm pretty proud on that. So when we talk about those things we're doing, I mean, I think there is no shame going, I'm just going to lift and shift machines because cloud's about flexibility. If you're doing it just on cost, probably doing it for the wrong reason. It's about that flexibility to go and do something. >>Then change within months and slowly make steps to make things better and better as you find a need as you find the ability, whatever it may be. And some of the big things that we focus on right now with customers is we've got a product called Azure advisor. It'll go until people, when one, you don't build things in a resilient manner. Hey, do you know this has not ha because of this and you can do this. It's like, great. We'll also will tell you about security vulnerabilities that maybe should a gateway here for security. Maybe you should do this or this is not patched. But the big thing of that, it also goes and tells you, Hey, you're overspending. You don't need this much. It provisions, you provision like a Ferrari, you need a, you just need a Prius. Go and run a Prius because it's going to do what you need. >>I need a paler list and that's part of that trusted suit. Getting that understanding, and it's counterintuitive, but we're now like, it's coming out of mozzarella too, which is great. But seeing these guys were dropping contracts and licenses and basically, you know, once every three years I may call the customer, Hey, how about renewal? Now, go from that to now being focused on the customer's actual success. I've focused on their growth in Azure as a platform. Our services growth, like utilization not in sales has been a huge change. It scared some people away, but it's brought a lot more people in and and that sort of counterintuitive spend less money thing actually leads in the longterm to people using more. >>Absolutely. That's definitely not the shrink wrap software company of Microsoft that I remember from the 90s yeah. might be similar to, you know, just as to get Convolt to 2019 is not the same combo that many of us know from 15 years ago. A good >>mutual friend of ours, sort of Simon and myself before I took this job, he and I sat down, we're having a beer and discussing the merits, all not Yvette go to things like that. Same with Convolt there. They're changing such such a great deal with, you know, what they're putting in the cloud, what they're doing with the data, where they're trying to achieve with things like for data management across on premises and cloud with microservices applications and stuff going, Hey, this won't work like this anymore. When you now are doing it on premises and with containers, it's pretty good to see. I'm interested to see how they take that even further to their current audience, which is product predominantly. You know the it pro, the data center admin, storage manager. >>It's funny when you talked about just the choice that customers have and those saying, aye, we shouldn't be following the trends because they're the trends. We actually interviewed a couple of hours ago, one of customers that is all on prime healthcare company and said, he's like, I want to make a sticker that says no cloud and proud and it just what there was, we don't normally hear from them. We always talk about cloud, but for a company to sit down and look at what's best for our business, whether it's, you know, FedRAMP certification challenges or HIPAA or GDPR, other compelling requirements to keep it on prem, it was just refreshing to hear this customer say, >>yeah, I mean it's just appropriate for them. You do what's right for you. I, yeah, it's no shame in any of it. It's, I mean you don't, you definitely don't get fans by it by shaming people about not doing something right. And I mean I've, I'm personally very happy to fee fee, you know, see sort of hype around things like blockchain die down a little bit. So it's a slow database and we should use it for this specific case of that shared ledger. You know, things like that where people don't have to know blockchain. Now I have to know IOT. It's like, yeah, and that hype gets people there, but it also causes a lot of anxiety and it's good to see someone actually not be ashamed of it. And they agree the ones when they do take a step and use cloud citizen may be in the business already, they're probably going to do it appropriately because have a reason, not just because we think this would be cool, right? >>Well not. And how much inherit and complexity does that bring in if somebody is really feeling pressured to follow those trends. And maybe that's when you end up with this hodgepodge of technologies that don't work well together. You're spending way more in as as business it folks are consumers, you know, consumers in their personal lives, they expect things to be accessible, visible, but also cost efficient because they have so much choice. >>Yeah, the choice choice is hard. It's just a, just the conversation I was having recently, for example, just we'll take the storage cause of where we are, right? It's like I'm running something on Azure, I'm a, I'm using Souza, I want an NFS Mount point, which is available to me in Fs. Great, perfect. what do I use as like, well you can use any one of these seven options like that, but what's the right choice? And that's the thing about being a platform can be, we give you a lot of choices, but it's still up to you or up to app hotness. It can really help the customers as well to make the most appropriate choice. And, and I, I pushed back really hard in terms of best practices and things. I hate it because again, it's making the assumption this is the best thing to do. >>It's not. It's always about, you know, what are the patterns that have worked for other people? What are the anti-patterns and what's the appropriate path for me to take? And that's actually how we're building our docs now too. So we, we keep, we keep focusing on our Azure technology and we're bringing out some of the biggest things we've done is how we manage our documentation. It's all open sourced, it's all in markdown on get hub. So you can go in and read a document from someone like myself is doing product management going, this is how to use this product and you're actually, this bit's wrong, this bit needs to be like this and you can go in yourself even now, make a change and we can go, Oh yeah and take that committed in and dual this kind of stuff in that way. So we're constantly taking those documents in that way and getting realtime feedback from customers who are using it, not just ourself in an echo chamber. >>So you get this great insight and visibility that you never had before. Well, Ben, thank you, Georgie stew and me on the queue this afternoon. Excited to hear what's coming up next for Azure. Makes appreciate your time. Thank you for steam and event. I, Lisa Martin, you're watching the cue from Convault go 19.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the Q but Lisa Martin with men and men and we are coming to you alive from Conn logo 19 please to welcome to the cube, a gent from Microsoft Azure. We've got Ben Nichol, principal program manager. Ben, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So Microsoft combo, what's going on with the partnership? >>They wouldn't have have great storage pond is in data management space. We've been working with Convolt for 20 years now in Microsoft and and they've been working with us on Azure for about as long as I can remember not being on that the Azure business RET seven years now. So just a long time in cloud terms like doggies and it sort of, they'd been doing a huge amount of their around getting customer data into the cloud, reducing costs, getting more resiliency and then also letting them do more with the data. So they were a pretty good partner to have and they make it much easy for their customers to to go and leverage cloud. So Ben, you know, in my career I've had lots of interactions with the Microsoft storage team. Things have changed a little bit when you're now talking about Azure compared to, you know, more. >>It was the interaction with the operating system or the business suite had. So maybe bring us up to date as those people that might not have followed. You know, we're kind of the storage positioning inside of Microsoft is now that when we talk about Azure and your title. Yeah, we, we sort of look and just just briefly, we worked very heavily with our on premises brethren. They actually inside the O S team is inside of the Azure engineering old male, which is kind of funny, but we do a lot of things there. If he started looking at, firstly on that hybrid side, we have things like Azure files. It's a highly resilient as a service SMB NFS file share up to a hundred terabytes but that interacts directly with windows server to give you Azure file sync. So there is sort of synergies there as well. When I'm doing personally my team, we work on scale storage. >>The big thing we have in there is Al is out blood storage technology, which really is the underpinning technology, full Priya tool storage and Azure which is including our SAS offerings which are hosted on Azure too. So disc is on blood storage, our files on blood storage, you look at Xbox live, all these kinds of stuff is a customer to us. So we build that out and we, we are doing work there and that's really, really interesting and how we do it and that's not looking at going we're going to buy some compute, we're going to buy some storage, we're going to build it out, we're going to run windows or hyper V or maybe VMware with windows running on the VMware, whatever else. This is more a story about wigging to provide you storage as a service. You didn't get a minimum of like 11 nines at your ability and and be able to have that scale to petabytes of capacity in one logical namespace and give you multiple gigabytes, double digit gigabytes of throughput to that storage. >>And now we're even moving about to model multiple protocols. So rest API century today we've got Azure stack storage, you pay API, she can go and use, but we give me that consistency of the actual back end storage and the objects and the data available via more than just one protocol. You can go and access that via HDFS API. As we talk about data lakes all the time. For us, our blood storage is a data Lake. We turn on hierarchal namespace and you can go and access that via our other protocols like as I mentioned HDFS as well. So that is a big story about what we want to do. We want to make that data available at crazy scale, have no limits in the end to the capacity or throughput or performance and over any protocol. That's kind of our line in the Hill about what we want to get to. >>And we've been talking to vault team about some of the solutions that they are putting in the cloud. The new offering metallic that came out. They said if my customer has Azure storage or storage from that other cloud provider, you could just go ahead and use that. Maybe how familiar and how much, I know you've been having a run metallic. We were working, we were pretty tightly with the product team over Convolt around this and my team as well around how do we design and how do we make it work the best and we're going to continue working to optimize as they get beyond initial launch to go, wow, we've got data sets we can analyze, we know how to, we wanted out of tune it. Now really we love the solution particularly more because the default, if you don't select the storage type where you want to go, you will run on Azure. >>So really sort of be kudos to the relationship there. They chose us as a first place we'll go to, but they've also done the choice for customers. Say some customers may want to take it to another cloud. That's fine. It's reasonable. I mean, we totally understand it's going to be a multi-cloud world and that's a reality for any large company. Our goal is to make sure we're growing faster than the competitors, not to knock out the competitors all together because that just won't happen. So they've got that ability to go and yet, Hey, we'll use Azure as default because they feel that way, offering the best support and the best solution there. But then if they have that customer, same customer wants to turn around and use a competitor, Val's fine as well. And I see people talking about that today where they may want to mitigate risks and say, I'm going to do, I'm doing all of office three, six, five on a taken office, three, six, five backup. It's cool. Use metallic, it'll take it maybe to a different region in Asia and they're backing up and they still going, well I'm still all in on Microsoft. They may want to take it to another cloud or even take it back to on premises. So that does happen too because just in case of that moment we can get that data back in a different location. Something happens. >>So metallic talking about that is this new venture is right. It's a Combolt venture and saw that the other day and thought that's interesting. So we dug into it a little bit yesterday and it's like a startup operating within a 20 year old company, which is very interesting. Not just from an incumbent customer perspective, but an incumbent partner perspective. How have you seen over the last few years and particularly bad in the last nine months with big leadership and GTM changes for combo? How has the partnership with Microsoft evolved as a result of those changes? >>Um, it's always been interesting. I guess when you start looking at adventure and everything, since things change a little bit, priorities may change just to be fair, but we've had that tight relationship for a long time. At a relationship level and an exec leadership level, nothing's really changed. But in the way they're building this platform, we sit down out of my team, out of the Azure engineering group and we'll sit down and do things like ideations, like here's where we see gaps in the markets, here's what we believe could happen. And look back in July, we had inspire, which is our partner conference in Las Vegas. When we sat down with their OT, our OT in a room, we'll talking about these kinds of things and this is I think about two months after they may have started the initial development metallic from what I understand, but we will talking about exactly what they're doing with metallic offered as a service in Azure is, Hey, how bout we do this? So we think it's really cool. It opens up a new market to Convolt I think too. I mean they're so strong in the enterprise, but they don't do much in smaller businesses because with a full feature product, it also has inherent complexibility complexity around it. So by doing metallic, is it click, click, next done thing. They're really opening, I think, new markets to them and also to us as a partner. >>I was going to ask, you know, kind of click on that because they developed this very quickly. This is something that I think what student were here yesterday, metallic was kind of conceived design built in about six months. So in terms of like acceleration, that's kind of a new area for Combalt. >>Yeah, and I think, I think they're really embracing the fact about um, let's release our code in production for products, which are sort of getting, getting to the, Hey that product is at the viable stage now, not minimum viable, viable, let's release in production, let's find out how customers are using Atlin, let's keep optimizing and doing that constant iteration, taking that dev ops approach to let's get it out there, let's get it launched. And then let's do these small batches of changes based on customer need, based on tele telemetry. We can actually get in. We can't get the telemetry without having customers. So that's how it's going to keep working. So I think this initial product we see today, it's just going to keep evolving and improving as they get more data, as they get more information, more feedback. Which is exactly what we want to see. >>Well, what will come to the cloud air or something you've been living in for a number of years. Ben, I'd love to hear you've been meeting with customers. They've been asking you questions, gives us some of the, you know, some of the things that, what's top of mind for some of the customers? What kinds of things did they come into Microsoft, Dawn, and how's that all fit together? >>There's many different conferences of interrelate, many different conversations and they'll, we will go from talking about, you know, Python machine learning or AI PowerPoint. >>Yeah. >>It's a things like, you know, when are we going to do incremental snapshots from a manage disks? Get into the weeds on very infrastructure century staff. We're seeing range of conversations there. The big thing I think I see, keep seeing people call out and make assumptions of is that they're not going to be relevant because cloud, I don't know cloud yet. I don't know this whole coup cube thing. Containers. I don't, I don't really understand that as well as I think I need to. And an AI, Oh my gosh, what do I even do there? Because everyone's throwing the words and terms around. But to be honest, I think what's still really evident is cloud is still is tiny fraction of enterprise workloads. Let's be honest, it's growing at a huge rate because it is that small fraction. So again, there's plenty of time for people to learn, but they shouldn't go and try and slip. >>It's not like you're going to learn everything in a technology stack, from networking to development to database management to, to running a data set of power and cooling. You learn the things that are applicable to what you're trying to do. And the same thing goes to cloud. Any of these technologies, go and look at what you need to build for your business. Take it to that step and then go and find out the details and levels you want to know. And as someone who's been on Azure for like a cinema seven years, which is crazy long. That was a, that was literally like being in a startup instead of Microsoft when I joined and I wasn't sure if I wanted to join a licensing company. It's been very evident to me. I will not say I'm an Azure expert and I've been seven years in the platform. >>There are too many things throughout my for me to be an expert in everything on and I think people sort of just have to realize that anyone saying that it's bravado, nothing else. The goal is Microsoft as a platform provider. Hopefully you've got the software and the solution to make a lot of this easier for the customer, so hopefully they shouldn't need to become a Kubernetes expert because it's baked into your platform. They shouldn't have to worry about some of these offerings because it's SAS. Most customers are there some things you need to learn between going from, you know, exchange to go into oath bricks, these five. Absolutely. There are some nuances and things like that, but once you get over that initial hurdle, it should be a little easier. I think it's right and I think going back to that, sort of going back to bare principles going, what is the highest level of distraction that's viable for your business or that application or this workload has to always be done with everything. >>If it's like, well, class, not even viable, run it on premises. Don't, don't need to apologize for not running in cloud. If I as is what's happening for you because of security, because of application architecture, run it that way. Don't feel the need and the pressure to have to push it that way. I think too many people get caught up in the shiny stuff up here, which is what you know 1% of people are doing versus the other 99% which is still happening in a lot of the areas we work and have challenges in today. >>That's a great point that you bring up because there is all the buzz words, right? AI, machine learning cloud. You've got to be cloud ready. You've gotta be data-driven to customer, to your point going, I just need to make sure that what we have set up for our business is going to allow our business one to remain relevant, but to also be able to harness the power of the data that they have to extract new opportunities, new insights, and not get caught up with, shoot, should we be using automation? Should we be using AI? Everybody's talking about it. I liked that you brought up and I find it very respectfully, he said, Hey, I'm not an Azure expert. You'd been there seven, seven dog years like you said. And I think that's what customers probably gained confidence in is hearing the folks like you that they look to for that guidance and that leadership saying, no, I don't know everything. To know that giving them the confidence that they're true, they're trusting you with that data and also helping trusting you to help them make the right decisions for their business. >>Yeah. And that that's, we've got to do that. I mean, I, as a tech guy, it's like I've, I've loved seeing the changes. When I joined Microsoft, I, I wasn't lying. I was almost there go inf I really want to join this company. I was going to go join a startup instead. And I got asked to one stage in an interview going, why do you want to join Microsoft? We see you've never applied to that. I never wanted to, a friend told me to come in and it's just been amazing to see those changes and I'm pretty proud on that. Um, so when we talk about, you know, those, the things we're doing, I mean I think there is no shame going, I'm just going to lift and shift machines because cloud is about flexibility. If you're doing it just on cost, probably doing it for the wrong reason, it's about that flexibility to go and do something. >>Then change within months of slowly make steps to make things better and better as you find a need as you find the ability, whatever it may be. And some of the big things that we focus on right now with customers is we've got a product called Azure advisor. It'll go until people want one. You know, you don't build things in a resilient manner. Hey, do you know this is not ha because of this and you can do this. It's like great. Also will tell you about security vulnerabilities that maybe she had a gateway here for security. Maybe you should do this or this is not patched. But the big thing is that it also goes and tells you, Hey, you're overspending. You don't need this much. It provisions, you provision like a Ferrari, you need a, you just need a Prius, go and run a Prius because it's going to do what you need and need to pay a lot less. >>And that's part of that trust. Getting that understanding. And it's counterintuitive that we're now like it's coming out of my team a lot too, which is great. But seeing these guys were dropping contracts and licenses and basically, you know, once every three years I may call the customer, Hey, how bout a renewal now go from that to now being focused on the customer's actual success and focused on their growth in Azure as a platform of our vast services growth like utilization not in sales has been a huge change. It scared some people away but it's brought a lot more people in and and that sort of counterintuitive spin less money thing actually leads in the longterm to people using more. >>Absolutely. That's definitely not the shrink wrap software company of Microsoft that I remember from the 90s yeah, very might be similar to you know, just as volt to 2019 is not the same combo, but many of us know from with 15 >>years and a good mutual friend of ours, sort of Simon and myself before I took this job, he and I sat down, we're having a beer and discussing the merits, all the not evacuate and things like that. Same with. They are changing such, such a great deal with, you know, what they're putting in the cloud, what they're doing with the data, where they're trying to achieve with things like Hedvig for data management across on premises and cloud with microservices applications and stuff going, Hey, this won't work like this anymore. When you now are doing an on premises and we containers, it's pretty good to see. I'm interested to see how they take that even further to their current audience, which is product predominantly, you know, the it pro, the data center admin, storage manager. >>It's funny when you talked about, um, just the choice that customers have and those saying I, we shouldn't be following the trends because they're the trends. We actually interviewed a couple of hours ago, one of Combolt's customers that is all on prime healthcare company and said, he's like, I want to make a secret that says no cloud and proud and it just, what that was, we don't normally hear from them. We always talk about cloud, but for a company to sit down and look at what's best for our business, whether it's, you know, FedRAMP certification challenges or HIPAA or GDPR or other compelling requirements to keep it on prem, it was just refreshing to hear this customer say, >>yeah, I mean it's, it's appropriate for the do what's right for you. I, yeah, it's no shame in any of them. It's, I mean, you don't, you definitely don't get fans by, by shaming people and not doing something right. And I mean, I, I'm personally very happy with the feet, you know, see sort of hype around things like blockchain died down a little bit. So it's a slow database unless you're using for the specific case of that shared ledger, you know, things like that where people don't have to know blockchain. Now I have to know IOT. It's like, yeah. And that hype gets people there, but it also causes a lot of anxiety and it's good to see someone actually not be ashamed of and like, and they grade the ones when they do take a step and use cloud citizen may be in the business already. They're probably going to do it appropriately because have a reason, not just because we think this would be cool. >>Well not and how much inherent and complexity does that bring in if somebody is really feeling pressured to follow those trends and maybe that's when you end up with this hodgepodge of technologies that don't work well together, you're spending way more in as as business it folks are consumers, you know, consumers in their personal lives, they expect things to be accessible, visible, but also cost efficient because they have so much choice. >>Yeah, the choice choice is hard. It's just a, just the conversation is having recently, for example, just we'll take the storage cause of where we are, right? It's like I'm running something on Azure. I'm a, I'm using Souza. I want an office Mount point, which is available to me in Fs. Great. Perfect. what do I use? It's like, well you use any one of these seven options, like what's the right choice? And that's the thing about being a platform company. We give you a lot of choices but it's still up to you or up to harness. It can really help the customers as well to make the most appropriate choice. And I pushed back really hard on terms like best practices and things. I hate it because again, it's making the assumption this is the best thing to do. It's not. It's always about, you know, what are the patterns that have worked for other people, what are the anti-patterns and the appropriate path for me to take. >>And that's actually how we're building our docs now too. So we keep, we keep focusing at our Azure technology and we're bringing out some of the biggest things we've done is how we manage our documentation. It's all open sourced. It's all in markdown on get hub. So you can go and read a document from someone like myself is doing product management going, this is how to use this product and you're actually this bits wrong. This bit needs to be like this, and you can go in yourself, even now, make a change and we can go, Oh yeah, and take that committed in and do all this kind of stuff in that way. So we're constantly taking those documents in that way, in getting real time feedback from customers who are using it, not just ourself and an echo chamber. >>So you get this great insight and visibility that you never had before. Well, Ben, thank you, Georgie stew and me on the Q this afternoon. Excited to hear what's coming up next for Azure. May appreciate your time. Thank you for streaming event. I, Lisa Martin, you're watching the cue from convo. Go 19.