>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost. We are joined by Jeffrey Snuffer. He is a technical fellow, Oh three 65 intelligence substrate at Microsoft. Most famous for being the father of PowerShell and one of the key architects of the window server. Thank you so much for coming on, for returning to the show. Yeah, thanks. It's great to be back. So first of all, define your, you're relatively new to this role, so tell us a little bit about what you're doing and what is the intelligent substrate. >> Yes, so you know, a lot of people get this confused as intelligence substrate. There's all three 65 the Microsoft graph. And when I do, as I say, Hey, the best way to think about this as an analogy to an operating system, operating systems are complex, but at the end of the day, they're really, really simple. >>They only do three things. They manage and protect resources. They provide services for developers, right services, API APIs and common controls. And then they provide a base set of applications and a way to get additional applications. So windows manage, CPU, memory, the services when 32 API eyes and then the applications like the browser, et cetera. So all three 65 can really be viewed as an operating system. Sounds strange. Why? Because most operating systems have been operating systems for devices, an operating system for phone, an operating system for a PC and operating system for a server. This is an operating system for people and organizations. So when we think about those three responsibilities, resources and you know, protecting and managing resources, these are the resources for people in organizations. So it's their identity, their, their emails, their chats, their documents, services for developers. These where there's wind 32 for windows, we have ms graph, that's our public API, but then we have services to be able to create, collaborate and communicate documents and interactions. >>And then the applications are things like teams and outlook, et cetera. And so then, Oh, sorry. Then the substrate, the substrate, sort of at the core of it. That's one of our core services. It is storage and then a set of services to manage that and set of services. So the storage is basically a planetary scale, no sequel data store. So every time you create a chat and email document or whatever, it gets stored in the substrate and then three additional copies are created, one of them at least 250 miles away. That's why our date availability and high availability are one thing. So everything gets stored there and then that allows us to do common services like search against it. Does that make sense, >>Jeffrey? Well, one of the biggest challenge people have is when you learn about something and then it has changed an awful lot. Yeah. I think back to the first time I used Microsoft word, Microsoft Excel, it wasn't connected to the internet exactly. Let alone talking about the era of global scale in AI and all of these things that can do in. So maybe give us a fresh as if I'm a brand new person and I, you know, I don't have the, you know, all of the legacy history with the Microsoft office family. What, what is the new, you know, people O us that you're talking about? >>Yeah. So I like to think of it as a back to the original office 1.0, if you remember the original office 1.0, you'd had word, Excel and PowerPoint. And I like to joke, I say it was integrated with the advanced technology at that day of called cardboard, right? We just took the, the, the floppy disks from each one of those products, put it in a cardboard box and said it's a suite. But then it was a vision to a vision of how things should work together to help the individual. And then after that version one, then we reorganized the organization to have common technology teams. And that's when we started to get common controls, common user experience, et cetera, common file formats. Uh, and then it became a true integrated suite. Same thing happened when we went to the cloud. We had all these products that would have a front end couple to a back end, another front end, couple to a back end, another front end coupled a backend. >>Each one would have one or more SDKs, et cetera. And when we first brought them to the cloud, it was the same sort of thing, integrate it with an offering and a name. But there was a vision there. And then that vision drove the reality. And what we did was we said, Hey, let's figure out how to have a common storage for these things. Common backend, a common way to communicate, a common way to do messaging. And then that took a number of years. But that's what drives this consistency. And so that's why when you go and you say, I would like to search for something, you'll find that term, whether it's in your word documents or it's in your emails or your team chats or anything. It's that commonality that makes it answered question. It >>does. Um, so it's, I think about, you know, the era of collaboration and, you know, there were competitors to Microsoft that came out that were built on the internet and you know, deliver those solutions. So this week we've talked to, we haven't dug deep deep into teams, but everyone we've talked to that's using it, it's like, no, really this is a really great product and almost like, you know, forget about some of the things you might have remembered through some of those iterations and changes and things not working together. You know, teams has been built and is allowing some great collaboration, communication with remote workers, smaller businesses, the likes. So it's tough because especially if you're using one tool and you've gone over to some other tool set, it's like, Oh, I don't, why would I go back to that? But it's a very different, uh, Microsoft productivity suite today than, than we might have used in the past. >>That's exactly correct. And then the, into the, uh, uh, intelligent substrate is this layer of AI on top of the substrate, right? So part of that is search, but then we're also doing natural language processing. So basically imagine you saw a store of file in in a one drive that gets stored in one drive and a workflow gets kicked off and that workflow then goes and analyzes the contents of that file and create search terms, et cetera. So we then have common search and then we've got natural language processing that'll go and find, Hey, what are the key points for that document? How do I summarize that document? So then if you see it somewhere you can say, Oh, show me the file card. And I'll say, here's this document. You don't have to read the whole thing. Here are the three key points about it. >>And so the, this is, so to answer the question, why would a, why would a platform guy be working in office? It turns out that to build this AI infrastructure, it's really sort of a platform play. There's key advances that need to be made in, in AI. But actually when you get involved in AI, what you realize is what we really need is more engineering than more science. We need more science, no doubt about it. But boy, is there a need for engineering? Like I need to figure out how to get three to five to seven orders of magnitude more volume of AI going through the system. So when you talk about these key advances in AI that need to be made in terms of of applying them to O three 65 describe them for us and talk about how they will change the future of work and the way we collaborate with our team members in the way we communicate with our team members and, and in our productivity. >>Yeah. So this is where I get so excited about Microsoft's play, right? Because when I decided at the end of last year that I was gonna make a new change, I had a number of opportunities both inside and outside the company. And so the, the thing that really made me say, this is where I want to go was, well, one, it was most important new technology, AI on our most precious business asset, our customers data. So that was very exciting for really got me over the edge was Microsoft's approach to AI. Microsoft takes a very different approach to AI than our competitors, right? The heart of most AI is trying to figure out you and you to achieve some result. Now our competitors do that to try and get you to click a button to buy an ad or to buy something you don't need or subvert some government that they want subverted, right? >>That's none of our peg objectives. We want to understand you for exactly one reason to make you successful, right? How do we, like in the past, people would throw the rock at Microsoft, say, Oh, you know, when I use Microsoft products, I got to understand the Microsoft org chart. You know, you ship my org chart. What they're really saying is that they have to understand the tools to get their job done. They have to navigate the tools. What we're trying to do is have the tools understand the person to help the person, help that person get their job done. So there's this great show, I think it was called the remains of day today, the movie with Anthony Hopkins, he played a Butler. And in that he did some research and he talked to the Butler of Buckingham palace who'd been there for 50 years and he said the essence of a great Butler is that he makes the room emptier when he enters. >>What's that mean? Well, when the, when someone sits down the magazine that they want, is there, the drink that they want is there. It just, it just all works out. Well, that's not my experience with computers today. I mean, how many times do you, you know, you end up at the end of the day and you're like, your spouse says, what'd you do to you day? You're like, wow, I dunno. I dunno. I'm just exhausted. Well, it shouldn't, doesn't have to be that way. What we want to do is to have the computer understand you, understand your objectives and not have some big splashy AI. It just, Oh, things just work. Oh, I'm coming to this meeting. Oh, the information I need for that meeting is just there. Oh, it prepped me and knew that I had a few minutes. And so it gave me a few minutes where it's a prep and things just flow. And at the end of the, you know, success will be when you end the day with more energy than you start it. Like that's a big tall tale, a big tall effort. But that's where we're going for that. Get stalled. >>Yeah. Well we, we found that the, the word that has summarized this week for us is one that Satya said over and over again and it was trust. So in today's day and age, there's a lot of cynicism and especially looking at big tech companies, you did a presentation talking about AI in social responsibility. You tease out a little bit of it there as to why you believe Microsoft is well intentioned with AI, but maybe share a little bit more about that vision for social responsibility and you know, where we need to go with AI as an industry as a whole. >>Yeah, exactly. So there's kinda two key points. First is I think there's a, a very vast, uh, misunderstanding of the state of AI Kang. It really is best understood as software 2.0 and we've been at software 1.0 for about 75 years and I don't think anybody thinks we're doing a particularly great job at event. I think we've started to make progress starting around the 1990s with the, with the core principles of, of uh, the worldwide web. That's when we started to really make some progress. But we still have lots of world's problems. So we're at software 2.0 we're at the very beginning of the beginning of the beginning. Now here's the point. The innovators set the field, the innovators set the path. And in AI it's important for Microsoft to be one of the key innovators here because of our approach, because we're standing up and saying, wait, there's great promise. >>There's great challenges, right? There are privacy challenges. There's data bias challenges, there's inclusivity challenges. There are things that really need to be addressed by governments, local legislation and global governments. Brad Smith has been particularly vocal on this and the need for a digital, the only way you're going to solve the problem of autonomous killer robots, which is a real thing, is by a digital Geneva convention. We, Microsoft can't solve that. IBM can solve that. Google can't solve that. Governments need to solve that. And so Microsoft is being very proactive in engaging the communities around these problems. For myself, for instance, I've been working with some of the security researchers to say, okay, well, software 2.0 how do you do threat model on machine learning? Nobody knows. Like literally nobody knows. And so we've been working over the course of the last year to produce a taxonomy of attacks. Now this is the initial thing, but it sparks a conversation as we've shown it to various government people and other, uh, competitors. Uh, they're very excited about this, about trying to join this in, to identify the class of attacks. Because once you can understand the class of attacks, then you begin understanding, well, how do I defend against those? But literally it doesn't exist. So, >>so talking about autonomous killer robots, I'm very worried now. So how do you, Jeffrey said you're talking about Microsoft's more measured approach and as you said, you are working with governments and work in reaching out to policy makers and regulators to talk about these things. Maybe unlike some other technology companies that aren't doing that. How do, are you a tech optimist at the end of the day or are you, but does it keep you up at night these, these, Nope. Nope, >>not at all. Not at all. No. I'm a wild Technomic dumbest people like are very pessimistic and I just like, yeah. You know, no. Like, let me give you an example, right? There's this, this thing that says, Oh, an autonomous car turns the corner at a high speed and it has to decide between killing two old man and a and a woman in a baby carriage. Right? And it's wide. This is a Philip philosophic philosophy problem called the trolley problem. Oh, a trolley driver has to pull a switch a, uh, and it was like over a hundred years old in the a hundred plus years that that's upon posited, there's been exactly zero trolley drivers ever put in this position. Just, it's just not an issue. Look, there are real issues. We do have to work these things. I'd say the biggest worry is not these killer robots or the autonomous cars going wild. >>It is complacency. It is overconfidence. It says, Oh, I got something to work. Let's just ship it. Like there's a lot of brittleness in these AI systems, right? Like, Oh, this works and it can be spectacular, but then this is a complete disaster and that's a complete disaster. So how do we get that taxonomy of like, Hey, when do we know when we're done? How do we test these things? How do I have like a, a secure supply chain for the data models as well as the code itself? You know, so. So I think that software one no doubt does not provide us any of the answers to the challenges of software 2.0 but I do believe that software 1.0 and its challenges tell us the areas that we need to apply our, our mindset to. And that's what we're doing. So >>Jeffrey, before we let you go, we do need to get the update on PowerShell. I have to say, ever since I've first talked to you, I feel like more and more when I go to shows, I hear people just talking about how it's helping their career, helping their business and in doing it, I don't know if it's just because you know, it was brought to the front of the mind and it's like, Oh no, I'm used to seeing that car model out there. But can you give us the latest on power shell even though you're no longer in that group? Oh yeah. I continue to meet with them all the time. >>I'm very active in PowerShell. So we took power shell and made a cross platform to run analytics. We've talked about that and I don't know where we were when we talked about that, but basically we sort of did it for our own purposes, right? We need to manage the world's estate and so we want to have a common infrastructure for doing that. And the joke was that the point is like, look, we're not confused. We don't think that the Unix people are going to greet us as liberator's. Like all, thank heavens, you know, I've been dying under this bash and such. Thank God Microsoft came to save us, right? There's no confusion. We'll surprise. We shifted and then the vast majority, the numbers are crazy. How many Linux people are using PowerShell. It's just insane and we don't really understand it. We're out there talking to people, but they just love it. >>So anyway, so PowerShell version seven is coming out. It'll come out officially at the end of the year, beginning of next year, and this really is the tool that then you can use to manage everything. Both windows and Linux. We have parallel for each, so you can do massive scale. But that's the one that really just brings all the pieces together and gains the critical mass. So we're very excited about it. always a scintillating conversation when you come on the show. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite.

(electronic music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Jeffrey Snover. He is the technical fellow and chief architect for Azure Storage and Cloud Edge at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming, for returning to theCUBE, I should say, Jeffrey, you're a CUBE alum. >> Yes, I enjoyed the last time. So can't wait to do it again this time. >> Well we're excited to have you. So before the camera's were rolling, we were talking about PowerShell. You invented PowerShell. >> Yeah, I did. >> It was invented in the early 2000's, it took a few years to ship, as you said. But can you give our viewers an update of where we are? >> Yeah, you know, it's 2018, and it's never been a better time for PowerShell. You know, basically the initial mission is sort of complete. And the mission was provide sort of general purpose scripting for Windows. But now we have a new mission. And that new mission is to manage anything, anywhere. So we've taken PowerShell, we've open sourced it. It's now running, we've ported it to macOS and Linux. There's a very large list of Linux distributions that we support it on, and it runs everywhere. And so, now, you can manage from anywhere. Your Windows box, your Linux box, your Mac box, even in the browser, you can manage, and then anything. You can manage Windows, you can manage Linux, you can manage macOS. So manage anything, anywhere. Any cloud, Azure, or AWS, or Google. Any hypervisor, Hyper-V or VMware, or any physical server. It's amazing. In fact, our launch partners, when we launched this, our launch partners, VMware, Google, AWS. Not Microsoft's traditional partners. >> That's great to hear. It was actually, one of the critiques we had, at the key note this morning, was partnerships are critically important. But felt that Satya gave a little bit of a jab towards, the kind of, the Amazon's out there. When we talk to customers, we know it's a heterogeneous, multi-cloud world. You know, you work all over the place, with your solutions that you had. There's not, like, Azure, Azure Stack, out to The Edge. The Edge, it is early, it's going to be very heterogeneous. So connect the dots for us a little. You know, we love having the technical fellows on, as to, you go from PowerShell, to now this diverse set of solutions that you work on today. >> Yeah, exactly. So basically, from PowerShell, they asked me to be the chief architect for Windows Server. Right, because if you think about it, an operating system is largely management, right? And, so, that's what I did, resource management. And, so, I was the chief architect for that, for many years, and we decided that, as part of that, we were developing cloud-inspired infrastructure. So, basically, you know, Windows Server had grown up. You know, sort of focused in on a machine. Azure had gone and needed to build a new set of infrastructure for the cloud. And we looked at what they were doing. And they say, hey, that's some great ideas. Let's take the ideas there, and put them into the general purpose operating system. And that's what we call our software-defined data center. And the reason why we couldn't use Azure's directly is, Azure's, really, design center is very, very, very large systems. So, for instance, the storage stamp, that starts at about 10 racks. No customer wants to start with 10 racks. So we took the inspiration from them and re-implemented it. And now our systems can start with two servers. Our Azure Stack systems, well, so, then, what we decided was, hey, this is great technology. Let's take the great cloud-inspired infrastructure of Windows Server, and match it with the Azure services themselves. So we take Azure, put it on top of Windows Server, package it as an appliance experience, and we call that Azure Stack. And that's where I have been mostly focused for the last couple of years. >> Right, can you help us unpack a little bit. There's a lot of news today. >> Yes. >> You know, Windows 2019 was announced. I was real interested in the Data Box Edge solution, which I'm sure. >> Isn't that crazy? >> Yeah, really interesting. You're like, let's do some AI applications out at the Edge, and with the same kind of box that we can transport data. Because, I always say, you got to follow customers applications and data, and it's tough to move these things. You know, we've got physics that we still have to, you know, work on until some of these smart guys figure out how to break that. But, yeah, maybe give us a little context, as to news of the show, things your teams have been working on. >> Yeah, so the Data Box Edge, big, exciting stuff. Now, there's a couple scenarios for Data Box Edge. First is, first it's all kind of largely centered on storage and the Edge. So Storage, you've got a bunch of data in your enterprise, and you'd like it to be in Azure. One flavor of Data Box Edge is a disk. You call us up, we send you a disk, you fill up that disk, you send it back to us, it shows up in Azure. Next. >> A pretty big disk, though? >> Well, it can be a small disk. >> Oh, okay. >> Yeah, no, it can be a single SSD, okay. But then you can say, well, no, I need a bunch more. And so we send you a box, the box is over there. It's like 47 pounds, we send you this thing, it's about 100 terabytes of data. You fill that thing up, send it to us, and we upload it. Or a Data Box Heavy. Now this thing has a handle and wheels. I mean, literally, wheels, it's specially designed so that a forklift can pick this thing up, right? It's like, I don't know, like 400 pounds, it's crazy. And that's got about a petabyte worth of storage. Again, we ship it to you, you fill it up, ship it back to us. So that's one flavor, Data Box transport. Then there's Data Box Edge. Data Box Edge, you go to the website, say, I'd like a Data Box Edge, we send you a 1u server. You plug that in, you keep it plugged in, then you use it. How do you use it? You connect it to your Azure storage, and then all your Azure storage is available through here. And it's exposed through SMB. Later, we'll expose it through NFS and a Blob API. But, then, anything you write here is available immediately, it gets back to Azure, and, effectively, it looks like near-infinite storage. Just use it and it gets backed up, so it's amazing. Now, on that box, we're also adding the ability to say, hey, we got a bunch of compute there. You can run IoT Edge platforms. So you run the IoT Edge platform, you can run gateways, you can run Kubernetes clusters on this thing, you can run all sorts of IoT software. Including, we're integrating in brainwave technology. So, brainwave technology is, and, by the way, we'll want to talk about this a little bit, in a second. It is evidence of the largest transformation we'll see in our industry. And that is the re-integration of the industry. So, basically, what does that mean? In the past, the industry used to be, back when the big key players were digital. Remember digital, from DEC? We're all Massachusetts people. (Rebecca laughs) So, DEC was the number one employer in Massachusetts, gone. IBM dominant, much diminished, a whole bunch of people. They were dominant when the industry was vertically integrated. Vertically integrated meant all those companies designed their own silicone, they built their own boards, they built their own systems, they built their OS, they built the applications, the serviced them. Then there was the disintegration of the computer industry. Where, basically, we went vertically integrated. You got your chips from Intel or Motorola. The operating system, you got from Sun or Microsoft. The applications you got from a number of different vendors. Okay, so we got vertically integrated. What you're seeing, and what's so exciting, is a shift back to vertical integration. So Microsoft is designing its own hardware, right? We're designing our own chips. So we've designed a chip specially for AI, we call it a brainwave chip, and that's available in the Data Box Edge. So, now, when you do this AI stuff, guess what? The processing is very different. And it can be very, very fast. So that's just one example of Microsoft's innovation in hardware. >> Wow, so, I mean. >> What do you do with that? >> One of the things that we keep hearing so much, at this conference, is that Microsoft products and services are helping individual employees tap into their own creativity, their ingenuity, and then, also, collaborate with colleagues. I'm curious about where you get your ideas, and how you actually put that into practice, as a technical fellow. >> Yeah. >> How do you think about the future, and envision these next generation technologies? >> Yeah, well, you know, it's one of those things, honestly, where your strength is your weakness, your weakness is your strength. So my weakness is, I can't deal with complexity, right. And, so, what I'm always doing is I'm taking a look at a very complex situation, and I'm saying, what's the heart of it, like, give me the heart of it. So my background's physics, right? And so, in physics, you're not doing, you're looking for the F equals M A. And if you have that, when you find that, then you can apply it over, and over, and over again. So I'm always looking at what are the essential things here. And so that's this, well, you see a whole bunch of confusing things, like, what's up with this? What's with this? That idea of there is this narrative about the reintegration of the computer industry. How very large vendors, be it Microsoft, or AWS, are, because we operate at such large scales, we are going to be vertically integrated. We're developing our own hardware, we do our own systems, et cetera. So, I'm always looking for the simple story, and then applying it. And, it turns out, I do it pretty accurately. And it turns out, it's pretty valuable. >> Alright, so that's a good set up to talk about Azure Stacks. So, the value proposition we heard, of course, is, you know, start everything in the cloud first, you know, Microsoft does Azure, and then lets, you know, have some of those services in the same operating model in your data center, or in your hosting service provider environment. So, first of all, did I get that right? And, you know, give us the update on Azure Stack. I've been trying to talk to customers that are using it, talking to your partners. There is a lot of excitement around it. But, you know, proof points, early use cases, you know, where is this going to be pointing towards, where the future of the data center is? >> So, it's a great example. So what I figured out, when I thought about this, and kind of drilled in, like what's really, what really matters here? What I realized was that what the gestalt of Azure Stack is different than everything we've done in the past. And it really is an appliance, okay? So, in the past, I just had a session the other day, and people were asking, well, when are you going to, when is Azure Stack going to have the latest version of the operating system? I said, no, no, no, no, no. Internals are internal, it's an appliance. Azure Stack is for people who want to use a cloud, not for people who want to build it. So you shouldn't be concerned about all the internals. You just plug it in, fill out some forms, and then you use it, just start using it. You don't care about the details of how it's all configured, you don't do the provisioning, we do all that for you. And so that's what we've done. And it turns out that that message resonates really well. Because, as you probably know, most private clouds fail. Most private clouds fail miserably. Why? And there's really two reasons. There's two flavors of failure. But one is they just never work. Now that's because, guess what, it's incredibly hard. There are so many moving pieces and, guess what, we learned that ourselves. The numbers of times we stepped on the rakes, and, like, how do you make all this work? There's a gazillion moving parts. So if any of your, you have a team, that's failed at private cloud, they're not idiots. It's super, super, super hard. So that's one level of failure. But even those teams that got it working, they ultimately failed, as well, because of lack of usage. And the reason for that is, having done all that, they then built a snowflake cloud. And then when someone said, well, how do I use this? How do I add another NIC to a VM? The team that put it together were the only ones that could answer that. Nope, there was no ecosystem around it. So, with Azure Stack, the gestalt is, like, this is for people who want to use it, not for people who want to build it. So you just plug it in, you pick a vendor, and you pick a capacity. This vendor, four notes, this vendor 12 or 16 notes. And that's it. You come in, we ask you what IP range is, how do I integrate with your identity? Within a day, it's up and running, and your users are using it, really using it. Like, that's craziness. And then, well what does it mean to use it? Like, oh, hey, how do I ad a NIC to a VM? It's Azure, so how does Azure do it? I have an entire Azure ecosystem. There's documentation, there's training, there's videos, there's conferences. You can go and put on a resume, I'd like to hire someone with Azure skills, and get someone, and then they're productive that day. Or, and here's the best part, you can put on your resume, I have Azure skills, and you knock on 10 doors, and nine of them are going to say, come talk to me. So, that was the heart of it. And, again, it goes back to your question of, like, the value, or what does a technical fellow do. It's to figure out what really matters. And then say, we're all in on that. There was a lot of skepticism, a lot of customers like, I must have my security agent on there. It's like, well, no, then you're not a good candidate. What do you mean? I say, well, look, we're not going to do this. And they say, well you'll never be able to sell to anyone in my industry. I said, no, you're wrong. They say, what do you mean, I'm wrong? I say, well, let me prove it to ya, do you own a SAN? They say, well, of course we own a SAN. I said, I know you own a SAN. Let me ask you this, a SAN is a general purpose server with a general purpose operating system. So do you put your security and managing agents on there? And they said, no, we're not allowed to. I said, right, and that's the way Azure Stack is. It's a sealed appliance. We take care of that responsibility for you. And it's worked out very, very well. >> Alright, you got me thinking. One of the things we want to do is, we want to simplify the environment. That's been the problem we've had in IT, for a long time, is it's this heterogeneous mess. Every group did their own thing. I worry a multi-cloud world has gotten us into more silos. Because, I've got lots of SAS providers, I've got multiple cloud providers, and, boy, maybe when I get to the Edge, every customer is going to have multiple Edge applications, and they're going to be different, so, you know. How do you simplify this, over time, for customers? Or do we? >> Here's the hard story, back to getting at the heart of it. Look, one of the benefits of having done this a while, is I've stepped on a lot of these rakes. You're looking at one of the biggest, earliest adopters of the Boolean cross-platform, Gooey Framework. And, every time, there is this, oh, there's multiple platforms? People say, oh, that's a problem, I want a technology that allows me to bridge all of those things. And it sound so attractive, and generates a lot of early things, and then it turned out, I was rocking with this Boolean cross-breed platform. I wrote it, and it worked on Mac's and Windows. Except, I couldn't cut and paste. I couldn't print, I couldn't do anything. And so what happens is it's so attractive, blah, blah, blah. And then you find out, and when the platforms aren't very sophisticated, the gap between what these cross-platform things do, and the platform is not so much, so it's like, eh, it's better to do this. But, over time, the platform just grows and grows and grows. So the hard message is, people should pick. People should pick. Now, one of the benefits of Azure, as a great choice, is that, with the other guys, you are locked to vendor. Right, there is exactly one provider of those API's. With Azure, you can get an implementation of Azure from Microsoft, the Azure Public Cloud. Or you can get an implementation from one of our hardware vendors, running Azure Stack. They provide that to you. Or you can get it from a service provider. So, you don't have to get, you buy into these API's. You optimize around that, but then you can still use vendor. You know, hey, what's your price for this? What's your price for that, what can you give me? With the other guys, they're going to give you whatcha give ya, and that's your deal. (Rebecca laughs) >> That's a good note to end on. Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for coming on theCUBE again. It was great talking to you. >> Oh, that was fast. (Rebecca laughs) Enjoyed it, this was great. >> Great. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, stay tuned to theCUBE. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Sai Mukundan. He is the Director of Product Management, Cloud Solutions at Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks, Rebecca, thanks. So nice to have you guys here at the Cohesity booth. >> And thank you for hosting us, I should say, yes. >> Absolutely, it's been wonderful. >> So we already had you colleague Lynn Lucas on this morning, she was terrific. And she gave us a high level vision of the news. Why don't you break it down for us. Explain to our viewers exactly what Cohesity was announcing here at Ignite. >> Sure. So, broadly speaking, we announced three things this morning. The first one, we've seen a lot of customers, Optic Office 365, in fact, that's one of the first or initial use cases of how they adopt Microsoft's solutions more off as a service. So the ability to now backup and recover old 365 has come up quite a bit in our customer conversations. So we announced a solution that will be available shortly, so customers can leverage the same Cohesity platform that we had up until now to also backup and recover old 365. So that was number one. Number two was around Azure Databox. So, this is a relatively new offering from Azure. It was up until now, it was in preview, and now it's going GA. So the fact that we can now integrate with Azure Databox as a means for customers to move data from on-premise to Azure, a great initial seeding for long term retention. And the fact that we integrate seamlessly with that, that was the second piece of the news. And then the third one is really around a hybrid Cloud message in the margin. Really, hybrid, I know-- Stu, you like to refer to it more as it's an operational model. It's not about what the Cloud is but it's more of an operation model. And in that model, customers are always looking to leverage it for disaster recovery purposes. And their ability to fade over to Azure and then bring it back on-premise, fade back, that capability is the third underpinning of the announcement this morning. >> And Sai, one of the challenges that we have is, if we look at Cloud and say it's an operating model. Well, the challenge we have is it really is a multi-cloud world. If you look especially here in the Microsoft ecosystem, absolutely, start with Office 365. Microsoft pushed a lot of customers to the SAS model. I have my data center, I'm probably modernizing things there, and then I have the public cloud. Well, when I look at my data, I want to be able to manage and interact and leverage my data no matter where it lives. So, that's where-- I said Microsoft lives in all those places, and it sounds like your integrations are going to help customers span and get their arms around their data and leverage their data no matter where it lives. >> Yeah, I particularly like the use of the word span, because as you may know, we call our underlying distributor file system the spanifest. (laughing) Right? So the idea is that it spans on-premise Cloud, and your point, multi-cloud as well. So the ability to use the same platform, and that's really what drives customers today. When you look at what are the three aspects of our solution that they like, I would say one is the scale ability. The fact that they can start small and then scale as their environment grows, that's important. The second is around, everything plays around automation, API driven, API first architecture, right. And the fact that we are policy based, API driven really really resonates with them. And the third one is the simplicity and ease of management. I mean, you can build all these solutions, but at the end of the day, it has to be simple for customers to consume. And that's something that really resonates with prospects, partners, and customers we talk to. >> Sai, wondering on the Azure Databox, if you could help unpack that a little. We have some Microsoft guests on, Jeffery Snover walked us through. There's a couple of different versions of them. Some are for data movement, some of them there will be really kind of edge, compute, and AI capabilities there. Which ones do Cohesity use, what do you see is the use cases that you'll be playing in? >> Sure, so before I go into the solution and the use case. I think one of the key aspects of why that announcement is important for us, is it also shows the kind of engagement and close technology partnership that we have established with Microsoft, Azure, right. The fact that we are one of their launch partners, both during the preview and now in the GA timeframe. It's important for both customers and partners, because that gives them a good, sort of, understanding that we are there in establishing thought leadership. We are there in working closely with Microsoft in this case, along with other technology partners out there. Just coming back to the solution itself, there are a couple of flavors of Databox. So the one that we have done extensive integration with is Databox. There's another version offered, which is called the Databox Edge, which also has Compute in it. But the idea here, the use case is really around when customers are looking at Cohesity, there is backup and recovery that they can do from on-premise. But Azure and Azure Blob Storage in particular becomes a seamless extension for long term retention. Now, there are a few customers, and I can relate to several who asked, "Hey, I have a large enough "data set that needs to be seeded initially." And obviously the network becomes a bottle neck in that case. So with Databox, the ability to now transfer the data into your on-prem, like you get the Databox shipped to your on-premise, get it loaded, true Cohesity. Seamlessly get it hydrated in our Azure account, and from that point on we only send the changes or the incremental data. So that is really appealing to both customers, as well as partners who are really engaged in these migration projects in some cases. >> I'm really interesting what you're talking about with the thought leadership and your approach to partnerships, because Microsoft selecting Cohesity as a partner, it's a real stamp of approval for Cohesity, a real validation that this company's for real. How do you then think about who you will partner with? Particularly if the company is, say, only five years old or pretty new to the space or maybe not as well known. >> I think one of the things that Mohit Aron, and he's a pioneer in the spirit systems and is the founder of Cohesity. One of the things that he established, right from the get go is the ability for the product to scale, scale on-premise, but also that the Cloud has to be very seamless. It's a natural extension of what the architecture is intended to do or achieve. And so that kind of made it easier for us on the product team to figure out who is it that we need to partner with. Azure is obviously a leader in that space, particularly over the last few years. I want to go back to something that was mentioned in the keynote yesterday. It's not a know it all, but it's a learn it all, right. The learning that we have had as we have grown Cohesity and the product has grown and as we acquired customers and talked to prospects is they want to work with the likes of Microsoft Azure, leverage the infrastructure that they have to offer. So we started there. We said if customers are asking for it, we do it and we learn along with them on why and what the use cases are. And it started with, going back to my earlier comment, long term retention. And now, as an extension to that, with the hybrid cloud where not only storage, but leveraging disks, leveraging Azure Compute, that's now become an extension of what we started off with. And so we have Azure DataPlatform Cloud Edition, which is Cohesity running on Azure. So I would say how we made the decision in this case, A. the product and the foundation really set that for us, but B., more importantly, the customers really asking for it and asking for that integration made it easier for us to determine that, hey we absolutely need to partner with the cloud renders. >> Sai, I'd like to build off of that, the customers and what they're asking for. This is a very large ecosystem here. To be honest, we know that Azure, Microsoft is a big player in Cloud, when I look at this show, Azure's a piece of the overall discussion. So, I was a little surprised. Not that we're hearing more about Azure here, but, it's because if you look at just order magnitude, how many customers Microsoft has on Windows and Office, obviously that's going to dwarf customer adopts in general. Where are your customers when the talk about Cloud adoption, your customers? Do you find them more in a Windows customers in their own data center versus Azure? What are your customers doing and adoption of Cohesity Cloud products in general? >> So if you look at the typical on ramp of customers, more often than not, at least I would say over the last couple of years, our customers have typically started with the on-premise. Because their immediate pain point was the platform can do a lot of things. Customers are always looking to also solve that immediate pain point while looking into the future. So the immediate pain point was really around how do I make my backup and data protection systems, first of all, simple, efficient, and less fragmentation. And while I'm doing that, how can I then potentially invest in the platform that is capable of doing more. And that's something that Cohesity offered in the on-premise world. And as a natural extension to that, as both from the bottoms up, as storage admins and backup admins started looking at leveraging Cloud or Azure in particular for as an extension of their storage infrastructure, as well as from the top down. You know, more of like the business decision makers and the CIOs driving that mandate of, hey, I want you to think about Cloud first and have that mindset. I think it really appealed to them. Because now they could start leveraging Azure Blob, again, back to that long term retention, legal hold, compliance standpoint. And then building off of that, building off of that to do test dev. We have a great feature, it's called Cloud Spend. The ability to take some of the on-premise infrastructure. And your earlier questions too, we have seen customers both VMware, Windows Hyper-v environments. Believe it or not, some customers still have physical systems. And the fact that Cohesity can take care of all that in the on-prem world, while seamlessly helping them adopt Cloud is really the kind of customers that we have seen in this journey that we have taken along with our customers and partners. >> Well this is theCUBE's first time at Ignite. I know you're relatively new to Ignite. >> I'm even surprised about that. I would think you guys would have made a number of appearances, but I'm glad it's the first time and it's at the Cohesity booth, so wonderful. >> We're so excited, but what are some of the things you're going to take back with you from this conference? >> I think for me, this conference, as has any other such conference in particular, it's really the excitement. You go back and you reflect on the last three, four days you spend here, and it's about all the great conversations that we have had with customers, prospects, and partners. Secondly, we heard a session earlier this morning, a Cohesity session, we had Brown University join us. And then there's going to be another one tomorrow. We're going to have UPenn and HKS. We are working on your alma mater Cornell, by the way, Stu. So we'll get them soon. >> Excellent, excellent. Go Big Red. >> So the fact that we have all these sessions and some really great attendance. And attendance from folks who are yet to embrace the Cohesity solutions. So it's great for us to get our message out. >> Getting the word out. >> Get our word out there. And I would say the last thing for us is also showcasing to Microsoft here in particular, the fact that we have this big presence here and the excitement it's having is a great message to the Microsoft executives and the leadership team that we work with as well to show more love, we already have enough that we get attention from them. But this is more of a validation for them to say there's more that we should be doing and could be doing with Cohesity. So I think those are probably the three things I'll walk away with and build on what we learned from Ignite here. >> Excellent, well thank you so much, Sai, for coming on the show. It was great having you here. >> Thanks, likewise. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more at theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft's Ignite in just a little bit. (techno music)