(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science 2023 live from Stanford University. This is Lisa Martin. My co-host is Tracy Yuan. We're excited to be having great conversations all day but you know, 'cause you've been watching. We've been interviewing some very inspiring women and some men as well, talking about all of the amazing applications of data science. You're not going to want to miss this next conversation. Our guest is Gabriela de Queiroz, Principal Cloud Advocate Manager of Microsoft. Welcome, Gabriela. We're excited to have you. >> Thank you very much. I'm so excited to be talking to you. >> Yeah, you're on theCUBE. >> Yeah, finally. (Lisa laughing) Like a dream come true. (laughs) >> I know and we love that. We're so thrilled to have you. So you have a ton of experience in the data space. I was doing some research on you. You've worked in software, financial advertisement, health. Talk to us a little bit about you. What's your background in? >> So I was trained in statistics. So I'm a statistician and then I worked in epidemiology. I worked with air pollution and public health. So I was a researcher before moving into the industry. So as I was talking today, the weekly paths, it's exactly who I am. I went back and forth and back and forth and stopped and tried something else until I figured out that I want to do data science and that I want to do different things because with data science we can... The beauty of data science is that you can move across domains. So I worked in healthcare, financial, and then different technology companies. >> Well the nice thing, one of the exciting things that data science, that I geek out about and Tracy knows 'cause we've been talking about this all day, it's just all the different, to your point, diverse, pun intended, applications of data science. You know, this morning we were talking about, we had the VP of data science from Meta as a keynote. She came to theCUBE talking and really kind of explaining from a content perspective, from a monetization perspective, and of course so many people in the world are users of Facebook. It makes it tangible. But we also heard today conversations about the applications of data science in police violence, in climate change. We're in California, we're expecting a massive rainstorm and we don't know what to do when it rains or snows. But climate change is real. Everyone's talking about it, and there's data science at its foundation. That's one of the things that I love. But you also have a lot of experience building diverse teams. Talk a little bit about that. You've created some very sophisticated data science solutions. Talk about your recommendation to others to build diverse teams. What's in it for them? And maybe share some data science project or two that you really found inspirational. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I do love building teams. Every time I'm given the task of building teams, I feel the luckiest person in the world because you have the option to pick like different backgrounds and all the diverse set of like people that you can find. I don't think it's easy, like people say, yeah, it's very hard. You have to be intentional. You have to go from the very first part when you are writing the job description through the interview process. So you have to be very intentional in every step. And you have to think through when you are doing that. And I love, like my last team, we had like 10 people and we were so diverse. Like just talking about languages. We had like 15 languages inside a team. So how beautiful it is. Like all different backgrounds, like myself as a statistician, but we had people from engineering background, biology, languages, and so on. So it's, yeah, like every time thinking about building a team, if you wanted your team to be diverse, you need to be intentional. >> I'm so glad you brought up that intention point because that is the fundamental requirement really is to build it with intention. >> Exactly, and I love to hear like how there's different languages. So like I'm assuming, or like different backgrounds, I'm assuming everybody just zig zags their way into the team and now you're all women in data science and I think that's so precious. >> Exactly. And not only woman, right. >> Tracy: Not only woman, you're right. >> The team was diverse not only in terms of like gender, but like background, ethnicity, and spoken languages, and language that they use to program and backgrounds. Like as I mentioned, not everybody did the statistics in school or computer science. And it was like one of my best teams was when we had this combination also like things that I'm good at the other person is not as good and we have this knowledge sharing all the time. Every day I would feel like I'm learning something. In a small talk or if I was reviewing something, there was always something new because of like the richness of the diverse set of people that were in your team. >> Well what you've done is so impressive, because not only have you been intentional with it, but you sound like the hallmark of a great leader of someone who hires and builds teams to fill gaps. They don't have to know less than I do for me to be the leader. They have to have different skills, different areas of expertise. That is really, honestly Gabriela, that's the hallmark of a great leader. And that's not easy to come by. So tell me, who were some of your mentors and sponsors along the way that maybe influenced you in that direction? Or is that just who you are? >> That's a great question. And I joke that I want to be the role model that I never had, right. So growing up, I didn't have anyone that I could see other than my mom probably or my sister. But there was no one that I could see, I want to become that person one day. And once I was tracing my path, I started to see people looking at me and like, you inspire me so much, and I'm like, oh wow, this is amazing and I want to do do this over and over and over again. So I want to be that person to inspire others. And no matter, like I'll be like a VP, CEO, whoever, you know, I want to be, I want to keep inspiring people because that's so valuable. >> Lisa: Oh, that's huge. >> And I feel like when we grow professionally and then go to the next level, we sometimes we lose that, you know, thing that's essential. And I think also like, it's part of who I am as I was building and all my experiences as I was going through, I became what I mentioned is unique person that I think we all are unique somehow. >> You're a rockstar. Isn't she a rockstar? >> You dropping quotes out. >> I'm loving this. I'm like, I've inspired Gabriela. (Gabriela laughing) >> Oh my God. But yeah, 'cause we were asking our other guests about the same question, like, who are your role models? And then we're talking about how like it's very important for women to see that there is a representation, that there is someone they look up to and they want to be. And so that like, it motivates them to stay in this field and to start in this field to begin with. So yeah, I think like you are definitely filling a void and for all these women who dream to be in data science. And I think that's just amazing. >> And you're a founder too. In 2012, you founded R Ladies. Talk a little bit about that. This is present in more than 200 cities in 55 plus countries. Talk about R Ladies and maybe the catalyst to launch it. >> Yes, so you always start, so I'm from Brazil, I always talk about this because it's such, again, I grew up over there. So I was there my whole life and then I moved to here, Silicon Valley. And when I moved to San Francisco, like the doors opened. So many things happening in the city. That was back in 2012. Data science was exploding. And I found out something about Meetup.com, it's a website that you can join and go in all these events. And I was going to this event and I joke that it was kind of like going to the Disneyland, where you don't know if I should go that direction or the other direction. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And I was like, should I go and learn about data visualization? Should I go and learn about SQL or should I go and learn about Hadoop, right? So I would go every day to those meetups. And I was a student back then, so you know, the budget was very restricted as a student. So we don't have much to spend. And then they would serve dinner and you would learn for free. And then I got to a point where I was like, hey, they are doing all of this as a volunteer. Like they are running this meetup and events for free. And I felt like it's a cycle. I need to do something, right. I'm taking all this in. I'm having this huge opportunity to be here. I want to give back. So that's what how everything started. I was like, no, I have to think about something. I need to think about something that I can give back. And I was using R back then and I'm like how about I do something with R. I love R, I'm so passionate about R, what about if I create a community around R but not a regular community, because by going to this events, I felt that as a Latina and as a woman, I was always in the corner and I was not being able to participate and to, you know, be myself and to network and ask questions. I would be in the corner. So I said to myself, what about if I do something where everybody feel included, where everybody can participate, can share, can ask questions without judgment? So that's how R ladies all came together. >> That's awesome. >> Talk about intentions, like you have to, you had that go in mind, but yeah, I wanted to dive a little bit into R. So could you please talk more about where did the passion for R come from, and like how did the special connection between you and R the language, like born, how did that come from? >> It was not a love at first sight. >> No. >> Not at all. Not at all. Because that was back in Brazil. So all the documentation were in English, all the tutorials, only two. We had like very few tutorials. It was not like nowadays that we have so many tutorials and courses. There were like two tutorials, other documentation in English. So it's was hard for me like as someone that didn't know much English to go through the language and then to learn to program was not easy task. But then as I was going through the language and learning and reading books and finding the people behind the language, I don't know how I felt in love. And then when I came to to San Francisco, I saw some of like the main contributors who are speaking in person and I'm like, wow, they are like humans. I don't know, it was like, I have no idea why I had this love. But I think the the people and then the community was the thing that kept me with the R language. >> Yeah, the community factors is so important. And it's so, at WIDS it's so palpable. I mean I literally walk in the door, every WIDS I've done, I think I've been doing them for theCUBE since 2017. theCUBE has been here since the beginning in 2015 with our co-founders. But you walk in, you get this sense of belonging. And this sense of I can do anything, why not? Why not me? Look at her up there, and now look at you speaking in the technical talk today on theCUBE. So inspiring. One of the things that I always think is you can't be what you can't see. We need to be able to see more people that look like you and sound like you and like me and like you as well. And WIDS gives us that opportunity, which is fantastic, but it's also helping to move the needle, really. And I was looking at some of the Anitab.org stats just yesterday about 2022. And they're showing, you know, the percentage of females in technical roles has been hovering around 25% for a while. It's a little higher now. I think it's 27.6 according to any to Anitab. We're seeing more women hired in roles. But what are the challenges, and I would love to get your advice on this, for those that might be in this situation is attrition, women who are leaving roles. What would your advice be to a woman who might be trying to navigate family and work and career ladder to stay in that role and keep pushing forward? >> I'll go back to the community. If you don't have a community around you, it's so hard to navigate. >> That's a great point. >> You are lonely. There is no one that you can bounce ideas off, that you can share what you are feeling or like that you can learn as well. So sometimes you feel like you are the only person that is going through that problem or like, you maybe have a family or you are planning to have a family and you have to make a decision. But you've never seen anyone going through this. So when you have a community, you see people like you, right. So that's where we were saying about having different people and people like you so they can share as well. And you feel like, oh yeah, so they went through this, they succeed. I can also go through this and succeed. So I think the attrition problem is still big problem. And I'm sure will be worse now with everything that is happening in Tech with layoffs. >> Yes and the great resignation. >> Yeah. >> We are going back, you know, a few steps, like a lot of like advancements that we did. I feel like we are going back unfortunately, but I always tell this, make sure that you have a community. Make sure that you have a mentor. Make sure that you have someone or some people, not only one mentor, different mentors, that can support you through this trajectory. Because it's not easy. But there are a lot of us out there. >> There really are. And that's a great point. I love everything about the community. It's all about that network effect and feeling like you belong- >> That's all WIDS is about. >> Yeah. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Like coming over here, it's like seeing the old friends again. It's like I'm so glad that I'm coming because I'm all my old friends that I only see like maybe once a year. >> Tracy: Reunion. >> Yeah, exactly. And I feel like that our tank get, you know- >> Lisa: Replenished. >> Exactly. For the rest of the year. >> Yes. >> Oh, that's precious. >> I love that. >> I agree with that. I think one of the things that when I say, you know, you can't see, I think, well, how many females in technology would I be able to recognize? And of course you can be female technology working in the healthcare sector or working in finance or manufacturing, but, you know, we need to be able to have more that we can see and identify. And one of the things that I recently found out, I was telling Tracy this earlier that I geeked out about was finding out that the CTO of Open AI, ChatGPT, is a female. I'm like, (gasps) why aren't we talking about this more? She was profiled on Fast Company. I've seen a few pieces on her, Mira Murati. But we're hearing so much about ChatJTP being... ChatGPT, I always get that wrong, about being like, likening it to the launch of the iPhone, which revolutionized mobile and connectivity. And here we have a female in the technical role. Let's put her on a pedestal because that is hugely inspiring. >> Exactly, like let's bring everybody to the front. >> Yes. >> Right. >> And let's have them talk to us because like, you didn't know. I didn't know probably about this, right. You didn't know. Like, we don't know about this. It's kind of like we are hidden. We need to give them the spotlight. Every woman to give the spotlight, so they can keep aspiring the new generation. >> Or Susan Wojcicki who ran, how long does she run YouTube? All the YouTube influencers that probably have no idea who are influential for whatever they're doing on YouTube in different social platforms that don't realize, do you realize there was a female behind the helm that for a long time that turned it into what it is today? That's outstanding. Why aren't we talking about this more? >> How about Megan Smith, was the first CTO on the Obama administration. >> That's right. I knew it had to do with Obama. Couldn't remember. Yes. Let's let's find more pedestals. But organizations like WIDS, your involvement as a speaker, showing more people you can be this because you can see it, >> Yeah, exactly. is the right direction that will help hopefully bring us back to some of the pre-pandemic levels, and keep moving forward because there's so much potential with data science that can impact everyone's lives. I always think, you know, we have this expectation that we have our mobile phone and we can get whatever we want wherever we are in the world and whatever time of day it is. And that's all data driven. The regular average person that's not in tech thinks about data as a, well I'm paying for it. What's all these data charges? But it's powering the world. It's powering those experiences that we all want as consumers or in our business lives or we expect to be able to do a transaction, whether it's something in a CRM system or an Uber transaction like that, and have the app respond, maybe even know me a little bit better than I know myself. And that's all data. So I think we're just at the precipice of the massive impact that data science will make in our lives. And luckily we have leaders like you who can help navigate us along this path. >> Thank you. >> What advice for, last question for you is advice for those in the audience who might be nervous or maybe lack a little bit of confidence to go I really like data science, or I really like engineering, but I don't see a lot of me out there. What would you say to them? >> Especially for people who are from like a non-linear track where like going onto that track. >> Yeah, I would say keep going. Keep going. I don't think it's easy. It's not easy. But keep going because the more you go the more, again, you advance and there are opportunities out there. Sometimes it takes a little bit, but just keep going. Keep going and following your dreams, that you get there, right. So again, data science, such a broad field that doesn't require you to come from a specific background. And I think the beauty of data science exactly is this is like the combination, the most successful data science teams are the teams that have all these different backgrounds. So if you think that we as data scientists, we started programming when we were nine, that's not true, right. You can be 30, 40, shifting careers, starting to program right now. It doesn't matter. Like you get there no matter how old you are. And no matter what's your background. >> There's no limit. >> There was no limits. >> I love that, Gabriela, >> Thank so much. for inspiring. I know you inspired me. I'm pretty sure you probably inspired Tracy with your story. And sometimes like what you just said, you have to be your own mentor and that's okay. Because eventually you're going to turn into a mentor for many, many others and sounds like you're already paving that path and we so appreciate it. You are now officially a CUBE alumni. >> Yes. Thank you. >> Yay. We've loved having you. Thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> For our guest and for Tracy's Yuan, this is Lisa Martin. We are live at WIDS 23, the eighth annual Women in Data Science Conference at Stanford. Stick around. Our next guest joins us in just a few minutes. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with David Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also here. This is day two of our coverage of MWC 23 on theCUBE. We're super excited. We're in between hall four and five. Stop by if you're here. Dennis Hoffman is here. He's the senior vice president and general manager of the Telecom systems business at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Yousef Khalidi, who's the corporate vice president of Azure for Operators from Microsoft. Gents, Welcome. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you. >> So we saw Satya in the keynote. He wired in. We saw T.K. came in. No AWS. I don't know. They're maybe not part of the show, but maybe next year they'll figure it out. >> Indeed, indeed. >> Lots of stuff happened in the Telecom, but the Azure operator distributed service is the big news, you guys got here. What's that all about? >> Oh, first of all, we changed the name. >> Oh, you did? >> You did? >> Oh, yeah. We have a real name now. It's called the Azure Operator Nexus. >> Oh, I like Nexus better than that. >> David: That's much better, much better. >> Dave: The engineers named it first time around. >> I wish, long story, but thank you for our marketing team. But seriously, not only did we rename the platform, we expanded the platform. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So it now covers the whole spectrum from the far-edge to the public cloud as well, including the near-edge as well. So essentially, it's a hybrid platform that can also run network functions. So all these operators around you, they now have a platform which combines cloud technologies with the choice where they want to run, optimized for the network. >> Okay and so, you know, we've talked about the disaggregation of the network and how you're bringing kind of engineered systems to the table. We've seen this movie before, but Dennis, there are differences, right? I mean, you didn't really have engineered systems in the 90s. You didn't have those integration points. You really didn't have the public cloud, you didn't have AI. >> Right. >> So you have all those new powers that you can tap, so give us the update from your perspective, having now spent a day and a half here. What's the vibe, what's the buzz, and what's your take on everything? >> Yeah, I think to build on what Yousef said, there's a lot going on with people still trying to figure out exactly how to architect the Telecom network of the future. They know it's got to have a lot to do with cloud. It does have some pretty significant differences, one of those being, there's definitely got to be a hybrid component because there are pieces of the Telecom network that even when modernized will not end up centralized, right? They're going to be highly distributed. I would say though, you know, we took away two things, yesterday, from all the meetings. One, people are done, I think the network operators are done, questioning technology readiness. They're now beginning to wrestle with operationalization of it all, right? So it's like, okay, it's here. I can in fact build a modern network in a very cloud native way, but I've got to figure out how to do that all. And another big part of it is the ecosystem and certainly the partnership long standing between Dell and Microsoft which we're extending into this space is part of that, making it easier on people to actually acquire, deploy, and importantly, support these new technologies. >> So a lot of the traditional carriers, like you said, they're sort of beyond the technology readiness. Jose Maria Alvarez in the keynote said there are three pillars to the future Telecom network. He said low latency, programmable networks, and then cloud and edge, kind of threw that in. You agree with that, Yousef? (Dave and Yousef speaking altogether) >> I mean, we've been for years talking about the cloud and edge. >> Yeah. >> Satya for years had the same graphic. We still have it. Today, we have expanded the graphic a bit to include the network as one, because you can have a cloud without connectivity as well but this is very, very, very, very much true. >> And so the question then, Dennis, is okay, you've got disruptors, we had Dish on yesterday. >> Oh, did you? Good. >> Yeah, yeah, and they're talking about what they're doing with, you know, ORAN and all the applications, really taking account of it. What I see is a developer friendly, you know, environment. You got the carriers talking about how they're going to charge developers for APIs. I think they've published eight APIs which is nowhere near enough. So you've got that sort of, you know, inertia and yet, you have the disruptors that are going to potentially be a catalyst to, you know, cross the chasm, if you will. So, you know, put on your strategy hat. >> Yeah. >> Dave: How do you see that playing out? >> Well, they're trying to tap into three things, the disruptors. You know, I think the thesis is, "If I get to a truly cloud native, communications network first, I ought to have greater agility so that I can launch more services and create more revenue streams. I ought to be lower cost in terms of both acquisition cost and operating cost, right, and I ought to be able to create scale between my IT organization, everything I know how to do there and my Telecom network." You know, classic, right? Better, faster, cheaper if I embrace cloud early on. And people like Dish, you know, they have a clean sheet of paper with which to do that. So innovation and rate of innovation is huge for them. >> So what would you do? We put your Clay Christensen hat on, now. What if you were at a traditional Telco who's like, complaining about- >> You're going to get me in trouble. >> Dave: Come on, come on. >> Don't do it. >> Dave: Help him out. Help him out, help him out. So if, you know, they're complaining about CapEx, they're highly regulated, right, they want net neutrality but they want to be able to sort of dial up the cost of those using the network. So what would you do? Would you try to disrupt yourself? Would you create a skunkworks? Would you kind of spin off a disruptor? That's a real dilemma for those guys. >> Well for mobile network operators, the beauty of 5G is it's the first cloud native cellular standard. So I don't know if anybody's throwing these terms around, but 5G SA is standalone, right? >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> So a lot of 'em, it's not a skunkworks. They're just literally saying, "I've got to have a 5G network." And some of 'em are deciding, "I'm going to stand it up all by itself." Now, that's duplicative expense in a lot of ways, but it creates isolation from the two networks. Others are saying, "No, it's got to be NSA. I've got to be able to combine 4G and 5G." And then you're into the brownfield thing. >> That's the hybrid. >> Not hybrid as in cloud, but hybrid as in, you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a converge network. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> So, you know, I would say for a lot of them, they're adopting, probably rightly so, a wait and see attitude. One thing we haven't talked about and you got to get on the table, their high order bit is resilience. >> Dave: Yeah, totally. >> David: Yeah. >> Right? Can't go down. It's national, secure infrastructure, first responder. >> Indeed. >> Anytime you ask them to embrace any new technology, the first thing that they have to work through in their minds is, you know, "Is the juice worth the squeeze? Like, can I handle the risk?" >> But you're saying they're not questioning the technology. Aren't they questioning ORAN in terms of the quality of service, or are they beyond that? >> Dennis: They're questioning the timing, not the inevitability. >> Okay, so they agree that ORAN is going to be open over time. >> At some point, RAN will be cloud native, whether it's ORAN the spec, open RAN the concept, (Yousef speaking indistinctly) >> Yeah. >> Virtual RAN. But yeah, I mean I think it seems pretty evident at this point that the mainframe will give way to open systems once again. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> ERAN, ecosystem RAN. >> Any RAN. (Dave laughing) >> You don't have to start with the ORAN where they're inside the house. So as you probably know, our partner AT&T started with the core. >> Dennis: They almost all have. >> And they've been on the virtualization path since 2014 and 15. And what we are working with them on is the hybrid cloud model to expand all the way, if you will, as I mentioned to the far-edge or the public cloud. So there's a way to be in the brownfield environment, yet jump on the new bandwagon of technology without necessarily taking too much risk, because you're quite right. I mean, resiliency, security, service assurance, I mean, for example, AT&T runs the first responder network for the US on their network, on our platform, and I'm personally very familiar of how high the bar is. So it's doable, but you need to go in stages, of course. >> And they've got to do that integration. >> Yes. >> They do. >> And Yousef made a great point. Like, out of the top 30 largest Telcos by CapEx outside of China, three quarters of them have virtualized their core. So the cloudification, if you will, software definition run on industry standard hardware, embraced cloud native principles, containerized apps, that's happened in the core. It's well accepted. Now it's just a ripple-down through the network which will happen as and when things are faster, better, cheaper. >> Right. >> So as implemented, what does this look like? Is it essentially what we used to loosely refer to as Azure stacked software, running with Dell optimized Telecom infrastructure together, sometimes within a BBU, out in a hybrid cloud model communicating back to Azure locations in some cases? Is that what we're looking at? >> Approximately. So you start with the near-edge, okay? So the near-edge lives in the operator's data centers, edges, whatever the case may be, built out of off the shelf hardware. Dell is our great partner there but in principle, it could be different mix and match. So once you have that true near-edge, then you can think of, "Okay, how can I make sure this environment is as uniform, same APIs, same everything, regardless what the physical location is?" And this is key, key for the network function providers and the NEPs because they need to be able to port once, run everywhere, and it's key for the operator to reduce their costs. You want to teach your workforce, your operations folks, if you will, how to manage this system one time, to automation and so forth. So, and that is actually an expansion of the Azure capabilities that people are familiar with in a public cloud, projected into different locations. And we have technology called Arc which basically models everything. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So if you have trained your IT side, you are halfway there, how to manage your new network. Even though of course the network is carrier graded, there's different gear. So yes, what you said, a lot of it is true but the actual components, whatever they might be running, are carrier grade, highly optimized, the next images and our solution is not a DIY solution, okay? I know you cater to a wide spectrum here but for us, we don't believe in the TCO. The proper TCO can be achieved by just putting stuff by yourself. We just published a report with Analysys Mason that shows that our approach will save 36 percent of the cost compared to a DIY approach. >> Dave: What percent? >> 36 percent. >> Dave: Of the cost? >> Of, compared to DIY, which is already cheaper than classical models. >> And there's a long history of fairly failed DIY, right, >> Yeah. >> That preceded this. As in the early days of public cloud, the network operators wrestled with, "Do I have to become one to survive?" >> Dave: Yeah. Right. >> So they all ended up having cloud projects and by and large, they've all dematerialized in favor of this. >> Yeah, and it's hard for them to really invest at scale. Let me give you an example. So, your biggest tier one operator, without naming anybody, okay, how many developers do they have that can build and maintain an OS image, or can keep track of container technology, or build monitoring at scale? In our company, we have literally thousands of developers doing it already for the cloud and all we're doing for the operator segment is customizing it and focusing it at the carrier grade aspects of it. But so, I don't have half a dozen exterior experts. I literally have a building of developers who can do that and I'm being literal, here. So it's a scale thing. Once you have a product that you can give to multiple people, everybody benefits. >> Dave: Yeah, and the carriers are largely, they're equipment engineers in a large setting. >> Oh, they have a tough job. I always have total respect what they do. >> Oh totally, and a lot of the work happens, you know, kind of underground and here they are. >> They are network operators. >> They don't touch. >> It's their business. >> Right, absolutely, and they're good at it. They're really good at it. That's right. You know, you think about it, we love to, you know, poke fun at the big carriers, but think about what happened during the pandemic. When they had us shift everything to remote work, >> Dennis: Yes. >> Landline traffic went through the roof. You didn't even notice. >> Yep. That's very true. >> I mean, that's the example. >> That's very true. >> However, in the future where there's innovation and it's going to be driven by developers, right, that's where the open ecosystem comes in. >> Yousef: Indeed. >> And that's the hard transition for a lot of these folks because the developers are going to win that with new workloads, new applications that we can't even think of. >> Dennis: Right. And a lot of it is because if you look at it, there's the fundamental back strategy hat back on, fundamental dynamics of the industry, forced investment, flat revenues. >> Dave: Yeah. Right. >> Very true. >> Right? Every few years, a new G comes out. "Man, I got to retool this massive thing and where I can't do towers, I'm dropping fiber or vice a versa." And meanwhile, most diversification efforts into media have failed. They've had to unwind them and resell them. There's a lot of debt in the industry. >> Yousef: Yeah. >> Dennis: And so, they're looking for that next big, adjacent revenue stream and increasingly deciding, "If I don't modernize my network, I can't get it." >> Can't do it. >> Right, and again, what I heard from some of the carriers in the keynote was, "We're going to charge for API access 'cause we have data in the network." Okay, but I feel like there's a lot more innovation beyond that that's going to come from the disruptors. >> Dennis: Oh yeah. >> Yousef: Yes. >> You know, that's going to blow that away, right? And then that may not be the right model. We'll see, you know? I mean, what would Microsoft do? They would say, "Here, here's a platform. Go develop." >> No, I'll tell you. We are actually working with CAMARA and GSMA on the whole API layer. We actually announced a service as well as (indistinct). >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, right. >> And the key there, frankly, in my opinion, are not the disruptors as in operators. It's the ISV community. You want to get developers that can write to a global set of APIs, not per Telco APIs, such that they can do the innovation. I mean, this is what we've seen in other industries, >> Absolutely. >> That I critically can think of. >> This is the way they get a slice of that pie, right? The recent history of this industry is one where 4G LTE begot the smartphone and app store era, a bevy of consumer services, and almost every single profit stream went somewhere other than the operator, right? >> Yousef: Someone else. So they're looking at this saying, "Okay, 5G is the enterprise G and there's going to be a bevy of applications that are business service related, based on 5G capability and I can't let the OTT, over the top, thing happen again." >> Right. >> They'll say that. "We cannot let this happen." >> "We can't let this happen again." >> Okay, but how do they, >> Yeah, how do they make that not happen? >> Not let it happen again? >> Eight APIs, Dave. The answer is eight APIs. No, I mean, it's this approach. They need to make it easy to work with people like Yousef and more importantly, the developer community that people like Yousef and his company have found a way to harness. And by the way, they need to be part of that developer community themselves. >> And they're not, today. They're not speaking that developer language. >> Right. >> It's hard. You know, hey. >> Dennis: Hey, what's the fastest way to sell an enterprise, a business service? Resell Azure, Teams, something, right? But that's a resale. >> Yeah, that's a resale thing. >> See, >> That's not their service. >> They also need to free their resources from all the plumbing they do and leave it to us. We are plumbers, okay? >> Dennis: We are proud plumbers. >> We are proud plumbers. I'm a plumber. I keep telling people this thing. We had the same discussion with banks and enterprises 10 years ago, by the way. Don't do the plumbing. Go add value on the top. Retool your workforce to do applications and work with ISVs to the verticals, as opposed to either reselling, which many do, or do the plumbing. You'd be surprised. Traditionally, many operators do around, "I want to plumb this thing to get this small interrupt per second." Like, who cares? >> Well, 'cause they made money on connectivity. >> Yes. >> And we've seen this before. >> And in a world without telephone poles and your cables- >> Hey, if what you have is a hammer, everything's a nail, right? And we sell connectivity services and that's what we know how to do, and that both build and sell. And if that's no longer driving a revenue stream sufficient to cover this forced investment march, not to mention Huawei rip and government initiatives to pull infrastructure out and accelerate investment, they got to find new ways. >> I mean, the regulations have been tough, right? They don't go forward and ask for permission. They really can't, right? They have to be much more careful. >> Dennis: It is tough. >> So, we don't mean to sound like it's easy for these guys. >> Dennis: No, it's not. >> But it does require a new mindset, new skillsets, and I think some of 'em are going to figure it out and then pff, the wave, and you guys are going to be riding that wave. >> We're going to try. >> Definitely. Definitely. >> As a veteran of working with both Dell and Microsoft, specifically Azure on things, I am struck by how you're very well positioned in this with Microsoft in particular. Because of Azure's history, coming out of the on-premises world that Microsoft knows so well, there's a natural affinity to the hybrid nature of Telecom. We talk about edge, we talk about hybrid, this is it, absolutely the center of it. So it seems like a- >> Yousef: Indeed. Actually, if you look at the history of Azure, from day one, and I was there from day one, we always spoke of the hybrid model. >> Yeah. >> The third point, we came from the on-premises world. >> David: Right. >> And don't get me wrong, I want people to use the public cloud, but I also know due to physics, regulation, geopolitical boundaries, there's something called on-prem, something called an edge here. I want to add something else. Remember our deal on how we are partner-centric? We're applying the same playbook, here. So, you know, for every dollar we make, so many of it's been done by the ecosystem. Same applies here. So we have announced partnerships with Ericson, Nokia, (indistinct), all the names, and of course with Dell and many others. The ecosystem has to come together and customers must retain their optionality to drum up whatever they are on. So it's the same playbook, with this. >> And enterprise technology companies are, actually, really good at, you know, decoding the customer, figuring out specific requirements, making some mistakes the first time through and then eventually getting it right. And as these trends unfold, you know, you're in a good position, I think, as are others and it's an exciting time for enterprise tech in this industry, you know? >> It really is. >> Indeed. >> Dave: Guys, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Dave: It's great to see you. Have a great rest of the show. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. Thank you, Dave. >> All right, keep it right there. John Furrier is live in our studio. He's breaking down all the news. Go to siliconangle.com to go to theCUBE.net. Dave Vellante, David Nicholson and Lisa Martin, we'll be right back from the theater in Barcelona, MWC 23 right after this short break. (relaxing music)

(suspenseful music) >> Welcome back everyone, this is the SiliconANGLE news report, news flash, news update. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE founder and editor. Got our team in Mobile World Congress, MWC. But here's some news flash: the GSMA debuted API toolkit as AWS and Microsoft roll out their offerings to make the cloud part of the telco world. The GSMA association, which runs this program and is the most important organization in telecommunications, unveiled the GSMA Open Gateway. This is a toolkit designed for creating applications that integrate with multiple carrier networks. The technology debuted at MWC23. This is the largest trade show opened in the telco area. This Open Gateway allows carriers to support APIs created with the technology that'll interoperate with each other. That means interoperability and cloud is coming to the telecommunication carriers. That's your cell phone, that's wireless. This allows developers to move applications from one carrier to another without needing to port their code. This is a huge game-changer. This is big news, and, of course, Microsoft and AWS are pounding stories out there as well. They got 21 carriers worldwide adopted and it's created using an open-source API toolkit called CAMARA. And Amazon and AWS are jumping on the cloud bandwagon with this and driving it hard into telco. And that's the big story, and, of course, more actions happening, theCUBE is onsite for four days in Barcelona for MWC23 and keep the news flowing. Check out SiliconANGLE.com, you'll see all the news there, and, of course, theCUBE.net for the livestream. I'm John Furrier, that's the news brief. (atmospheric music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> This past week we saw two of the Big 3 cloud providers present the latest update on their respective cloud visions, their business progress, their announcements and innovations. The content at these events had many overlapping themes, including modern cloud infrastructure at global scale, applying advanced machine intelligence, AKA AI, end-to-end data platforms, collaboration software. They talked a lot about the future of work automation. And they gave us a little taste, each company of the Metaverse Web 3.0 and much more. Despite these striking similarities, the differences between these two cloud platforms and that of AWS remains significant. With Microsoft leveraging its massive application software footprint to dominate virtually all markets and Google doing everything in its power to keep up with the frenetic pace of today's cloud innovation, which was set into motion a decade and a half ago by AWS. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the immense amount of content presented by the CEOs of Microsoft and Google Cloud at Microsoft Ignite and Google Cloud Next. We'll also quantify with ETR survey data the relative position of these two cloud giants in four key sectors: cloud IaaS, BI analytics, data platforms and collaboration software. Now one thing was clear this past week, hybrid events are the thing. Google Cloud Next took place live over a 24-hour period in six cities around the world, with the main gathering in New York City. Microsoft Ignite, which normally is attended by 30,000 people, had a smaller event in Seattle, in person with a virtual audience around the world. AWS re:Invent, of course, is much different. Yes, there's a virtual component at re:Invent, but it's all about a big live audience gathering the week after Thanksgiving, in the first week of December in Las Vegas. Regardless, Satya Nadella keynote address was prerecorded. It was highly produced and substantive. It was visionary, energetic with a strong message that Azure was a platform to allow customers to build their digital businesses. Doing more with less, which was a key theme of his. Nadella covered a lot of ground, starting with infrastructure from the compute, highlighting a collaboration with Arm-based, Ampere processors. New block storage, 60 regions, 175,000 miles of fiber cables around the world. He presented a meaningful multi-cloud message with Azure Arc to support on-prem and edge workloads, as well as of course the public cloud. And talked about confidential computing at the infrastructure level, a theme we hear from all cloud vendors. He then went deeper into the end-to-end data platform that Microsoft is building from the core data stores to analytics, to governance and the myriad tooling Microsoft offers. AI was next with a big focus on automation, AI, training models. He showed demos of machines coding and fixing code and machines automatically creating designs for creative workers and how Power Automate, Microsoft's RPA tooling, would combine with Microsoft Syntex to understand documents and provide standard ways for organizations to communicate with those documents. There was of course a big focus on Azure as developer cloud platform with GitHub Copilot as a linchpin using AI to assist coders in low-code and no-code innovations that are coming down the pipe. And another giant theme was a workforce transformation and how Microsoft is using its heritage and collaboration and productivity software to move beyond what Nadella called productivity paranoia, i.e., are remote workers doing their jobs? In a world where collaboration is built into intelligent workflows, and he even showed a glimpse of the future with AI-powered avatars and partnerships with Meta and Cisco with Teams of all firms. And finally, security with a bevy of tools from identity, endpoint, governance, et cetera, stressing a suite of tools from a single provider, i.e., Microsoft. So a couple points here. One, Microsoft is following in the footsteps of AWS with silicon advancements and didn't really emphasize that trend much except for the Ampere announcement. But it's building out cloud infrastructure at a massive scale, there is no debate about that. Its plan on data is to try and provide a somewhat more abstracted and simplified solutions, which differs a little bit from AWS's approach of the right database tool, for example, for the right job. Microsoft's automation play appears to provide simple individual productivity tools, kind of a ground up approach and make it really easy for users to drive these bottoms up initiatives. We heard from UiPath that forward five last month, a little bit of a different approach of horizontal automation, end-to-end across platforms. So quite a different play there. Microsoft's angle on workforce transformation is visionary and will continue to solidify in our view its dominant position with Teams and Microsoft 365, and it will drive cloud infrastructure consumption by default. On security as well as a cloud player, it has to have world-class security, and Azure does. There's not a lot of debate about that, but the knock on Microsoft is Patch Tuesday becomes Hack Wednesday because Microsoft releases so many patches, it's got so much Swiss cheese in its legacy estate and patching frequently, it becomes a roadmap and a trigger for hackers. Hey, patch Tuesday, these are all the exploits that you can go after so you can act before the patches are implemented. And so it's really become a problem for users. As well Microsoft is competing with many of the best-of-breed platforms like CrowdStrike and Okta, which have market momentum and appear to be more attractive horizontal plays for customers outside of just the Microsoft cloud. But again, it's Microsoft. They make it easy and very inexpensive to adopt. Now, despite the outstanding presentation by Satya Nadella, there are a couple of statements that should raise eyebrows. Here are two of them. First, as he said, Azure is the only cloud that supports all organizations and all workloads from enterprises to startups, to highly regulated industries. I had a conversation with Sarbjeet Johal about this, to make sure I wasn't just missing something and we were both surprised, somewhat, by this claim. I mean most certainly AWS supports more certifications for example, and we would think it has a reasonable case to dispute that claim. And the other statement, Nadella made, Azure is the only cloud provider enabling highly regulated industries to bring their most sensitive applications to the cloud. Now, reasonable people can debate whether AWS is there yet, but very clearly Oracle and IBM would have something to say about that statement. Now maybe it's not just, would say, "Oh, they're not real clouds, you know, they're just going to hosting in the cloud if you will." But still, when it comes to mission-critical applications, you would think Oracle is really the the leader there. Oh, and Satya also mentioned the claim that the Edge browser, the Microsoft Edge browser, no questions asked, he said, is the best browser for business. And we could see some people having some questions about that. Like isn't Edge based on Chrome? Anyway, so we just had to question these statements and challenge Microsoft to defend them because to us it's a little bit of BS and makes one wonder what else in such as awesome keynote and it was awesome, it was hyperbole. Okay, moving on to Google Cloud Next. The keynote started with Sundar Pichai doing a virtual session, he was remote, stressing the importance of Google Cloud. He mentioned that Google Cloud from its Q2 earnings was on a $25-billion annual run rate. What he didn't mention is that it's also on a 3.6 billion annual operating loss run rate based on its first half performance. Just saying. And we'll dig into that issue a little bit more later in this episode. He also stressed that the investments that Google has made to support its core business and search, like its global network of 22 subsea cables to support things like, YouTube video, great performance obviously that we all rely on, those innovations there. Innovations in BigQuery to support its search business and its threat analysis that it's always had and its AI, it's always been an AI-first company, he's stressed, that they're all leveraged by the Google Cloud Platform, GCP. This is all true by the way. Google has absolutely awesome tech and the talk, as well as his talk, Pichai, but also Kurian's was forward thinking and laid out a vision of the future. But it didn't address in our view, and I talked to Sarbjeet Johal about this as well, today's challenges to the degree that Microsoft did and we expect AWS will at re:Invent this year, it was more out there, more forward thinking, what's possible in the future, somewhat less about today's problem, so I think it's resonates less with today's enterprise players. Thomas Kurian then took over from Sundar Pichai and did a really good job of highlighting customers, and I think he has to, right? He has to say, "Look, we are in this game. We have customers, 9 out of the top 10 media firms use Google Cloud. 8 out of the top 10 manufacturers. 9 out of the top 10 retailers. Same for telecom, same for healthcare. 8 out of the top 10 retail banks." He and Sundar specifically referenced a number of companies, customers, including Avery Dennison, Groupe Renault, H&M, John Hopkins, Prudential, Minna Bank out of Japan, ANZ bank and many, many others during the session. So you know, they had some proof points and you got to give 'em props for that. Now like Microsoft, Google talked about infrastructure, they referenced training processors and regions and compute optionality and storage and how new workloads were emerging, particularly data-driven workloads in AI that required new infrastructure. He explicitly highlighted partnerships within Nvidia and Intel. I didn't see anything on Arm, which somewhat surprised me 'cause I believe Google's working on that or at least has come following in AWS's suit if you will, but maybe that's why they're not mentioning it or maybe I got to do more research there, but let's park that for a minute. But again, as we've extensively discussed in Breaking Analysis in our view when it comes to compute, AWS via its Annapurna acquisition is well ahead of the pack in this area. Arm is making its way into the enterprise, but all three companies are heavily investing in infrastructure, which is great news for customers and the ecosystem. We'll come back to that. Data and AI go hand in hand, and there was no shortage of data talk. Google didn't mention Snowflake or Databricks specifically, but it did mention, by the way, it mentioned Mongo a couple of times, but it did mention Google's, quote, Open Data cloud. Now maybe Google has used that term before, but Snowflake has been marketing the data cloud concept for a couple of years now. So that struck as a shot across the bow to one of its partners and obviously competitor, Snowflake. At BigQuery is a main centerpiece of Google's data strategy. Kurian talked about how they can take any data from any source in any format from any cloud provider with BigQuery Omni and aggregate and understand it. And with the support of Apache Iceberg and Delta and Hudi coming in the future and its open Data Cloud Alliance, they talked a lot about that. So without specifically mentioning Snowflake or Databricks, Kurian co-opted a lot of messaging from these two players, such as life and tech. Kurian also talked about Google Workspace and how it's now at 8 million users up from 6 million just two years ago. There's a lot of discussion on developer optionality and several details on tools supported and the open mantra of Google. And finally on security, Google brought out Kevin Mandian, he's a CUBE alum, extremely impressive individual who's CEO of Mandiant, a leading security service provider and consultancy that Google recently acquired for around 5.3 billion. They talked about moving from a shared responsibility model to a shared fate model, which is again, it's kind of a shot across AWS's bow, kind of shared responsibility model. It's unclear that Google will pay the same penalty if a customer doesn't live up to its portion of the shared responsibility, but we can probably assume that the customer is still going to bear the brunt of the pain, nonetheless. Mandiant is really interesting because it's a services play and Google has stated that it is not a services company, it's going to give partners in the channel plenty of room to play. So we'll see what it does with Mandiant. But Mandiant is a very strong enterprise capability and in the single most important area security. So interesting acquisition by Google. Now as well, unlike Microsoft, Google is not competing with security leaders like Okta and CrowdStrike. Rather, it's partnering aggressively with those firms and prominently putting them forth. All right. Let's get into the ETR survey data and see how Microsoft and Google are positioned in four key markets that we've mentioned before, IaaS, BI analytics, database data platforms and collaboration software. First, let's look at the IaaS cloud. ETR is just about to release its October survey, so I cannot share the that data yet. I can only show July data, but we're going to give you some directional hints throughout this conversation. This chart shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or presence in the data, i.e., how pervasive the platform is. That's on the horizontal axis. And we've inserted the Wikibon estimates of IaaS revenue for the companies, the Big 3. Actually the Big 4, we included Alibaba. So a couple of points in this somewhat busy data chart. First, Microsoft and AWS as always are dominant on both axes. The red dotted line there at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated spending velocity and all of the Big 3 are above the line. Now at the same time, GCP is well behind the two leaders on the horizontal axis and you can see that in the table insert as well in our revenue estimates. Now why is Azure bigger in the ETR survey when AWS is larger according to the Wikibon revenue estimates? And the answer is because Microsoft with products like 365 and Teams will often be considered by respondents in the survey as cloud by customers, so they fit into that ETR category. But in the insert data we're stripping out applications and SaaS from Microsoft and Google and we're only isolating on IaaS. The other point is when you take a look at the early October returns, you see downward pressure as signified by those dotted arrows on every name. The only exception was Dell, or Dell and IBM, which showing slightly improved momentum. So the survey data generally confirms what we know that AWS and Azure have a massive lead and strong momentum in the marketplace. But the real story is below the line. Unlike Google Cloud, which is on pace to lose well over 3 billion on an operating basis this year, AWS's operating profit is around $20 billion annually. Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud generated more than $30 billion in operating income last fiscal year. Let that sink in for a moment. Now again, that's not to say Google doesn't have traction, it does and Kurian gave some nice proof points and customer examples in his keynote presentation, but the data underscores the lead that Microsoft and AWS have on Google in cloud. And here's a breakdown of ETR's proprietary net score methodology, that vertical axis that we showed you in the previous chart. It asks customers, are you adopting the platform new? That's that lime green. Are you spending 6% or more? That's the forest green. Is you're spending flat? That's the gray. Is you're spending down 6% or worse? That's the pinkest color. Or are you replacing the platform, defecting? That's the bright red. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score. Now one caveat here, which actually is really favorable from Microsoft, the Microsoft data that we're showing here is across the entire Microsoft portfolio. The other point is, this is July data, we'll have an update for you once ETR releases its October results. But we're talking about meaningful samples here, the ends. 620 for AWS over a thousand from Microsoft in more than 450 respondents in the survey for Google. So the real tell is replacements, that bright red. There is virtually no churn for AWS and Microsoft, but Google's churn is 5x, those two in the survey. Now 5% churn is not high, but you'd like to see three things for Google given it's smaller size. One is less churn, two is much, much higher adoption rates in the lime green. Three is a higher percentage of those spending more, the forest green. And four is a lower percentage of those spending less. And none of these conditions really applies here for Google. GCP is still not growing fast enough in our opinion, and doesn't have nearly the traction of the two leaders and that shows up in the survey data. All right, let's look at the next sector, BI analytics. Here we have that same XY dimension. Again, Microsoft dominating the picture. AWS very strong also in both axes. Tableau, very popular and respectable of course acquired by Salesforce on the vertical axis, still looking pretty good there. And again on the horizontal axis, big presence there for Tableau. And Google with Looker and its other platforms is also respectable, but it again, has some work to do. Now notice Streamlit, that's a recent Snowflake acquisition. It's strong in the vertical axis and because of Snowflake's go-to-market (indistinct), it's likely going to move to the right overtime. Grafana is also prominent in the Y axis, but a glimpse at the most recent survey data shows them slightly declining while Looker actually improves a bit. As does Cloudera, which we'll move up slightly. Again, Microsoft just blows you away, doesn't it? All right, now let's get into database and data platform. Same X Y dimensions, but now database and data warehouse. Snowflake as usual takes the top spot on the vertical axis and it is actually keeps moving to the right as well with again, Microsoft and AWS is dominant in the market, as is Oracle on the X axis, albeit it's got less spending velocity, but of course it's the database king. Google is well behind on the X axis but solidly above the 40% line on the vertical axis. Note that virtually all platforms will see pressure in the next survey due to the macro environment. Microsoft might even dip below the 40% line for the first time in a while. Lastly, let's look at the collaboration and productivity software market. This is such an important area for both Microsoft and Google. And just look at Microsoft with 365 and Teams up into the right. I mean just so impressive in ubiquitous. And we've highlighted Google. It's in the pack. It certainly is a nice base with 174 N, which I can tell you that N will rise in the next survey, which is an indication that more people are adopting. But given the investment and the tech behind it and all the AI and Google's resources, you'd really like to see Google in this space above the 40% line, given the importance of this market, of this collaboration area to Google's success and the degree to which they emphasize it in their pitch. And look, this brings up something that we've talked about before on Breaking Analysis. Google doesn't have a tech problem. This is a go-to-market and marketing challenge that Google faces and it's up against two go-to-market champs and Microsoft and AWS. And Google doesn't have the enterprise sales culture. It's trying, it's making progress, but it's like that racehorse that has all the potential in the world, but it's just missing some kind of key ingredient to put it over at the top. It's always coming in third, (chuckles) but we're watching and Google's obviously, making some investments as we shared with earlier. All right. Some final thoughts on what we learned this week and in this research: customers and partners should be thrilled that both Microsoft and Google along with AWS are spending so much money on innovation and building out global platforms. This is a gift to the industry and we should be thankful frankly because it's good for business, it's good for competitiveness and future innovation as a platform that can be built upon. Now we didn't talk much about multi-cloud, we haven't even mentioned supercloud, but both Microsoft and Google have a story that resonates with customers in cross cloud capabilities, unlike AWS at this time. But we never say never when it comes to AWS. They sometimes and oftentimes surprise you. One of the other things that Sarbjeet Johal and John Furrier and I have discussed is that each of the Big 3 is positioning to their respective strengths. AWS is the best IaaS. Microsoft is building out the kind of, quote, we-make-it-easy-for-you cloud, and Google is trying to be the open data cloud with its open-source chops and excellent tech. And that puts added pressure on Snowflake, doesn't it? You know, Thomas Kurian made some comments according to CRN, something to the effect that, we are the only company that can do the data cloud thing across clouds, which again, if I'm being honest is not really accurate. Now I haven't clarified these statements with Google and often things get misquoted, but there's little question that, as AWS has done in the past with Redshift, Google is taking a page out of Snowflake, Databricks as well. A big difference in the Big 3 is that AWS doesn't have this big emphasis on the up-the-stack collaboration software that both Microsoft and Google have, and that for Microsoft and Google will drive captive IaaS consumption. AWS obviously does some of that in database, a lot of that in database, but ISVs that compete with Microsoft and Google should have a greater affinity, one would think, to AWS for competitive reasons. and the same thing could be said in security, we would think because, as I mentioned before, Microsoft competes very directly with CrowdStrike and Okta and others. One of the big thing that Sarbjeet mentioned that I want to call out here, I'd love to have your opinion. AWS specifically, but also Microsoft with Azure have successfully created what Sarbjeet calls brand distance. AWS from the Amazon Retail, and even though AWS all the time talks about Amazon X and Amazon Y is in their product portfolio, but you don't really consider it part of the retail organization 'cause it's not. Azure, same thing, has created its own identity. And it seems that Google still struggles to do that. It's still very highly linked to the sort of core of Google. Now, maybe that's by design, but for enterprise customers, there's still some potential confusion with Google, what's its intentions? How long will they continue to lose money and invest? Are they going to pull the plug like they do on so many other tools? So you know, maybe some rethinking of the marketing there and the positioning. Now we didn't talk much about ecosystem, but it's vital for any cloud player, and Google again has some work to do relative to the leaders. Which brings us to supercloud. The ecosystem and end customers are now in a position this decade to digitally transform. And we're talking here about building out their own clouds, not by putting in and building data centers and installing racks of servers and storage devices, no. Rather to build value on top of the hyperscaler gift that has been presented. And that is a mega trend that we're watching closely in theCUBE community. While there's debate about the supercloud name and so forth, there little question in our minds that the next decade of cloud will not be like the last. All right, we're going to leave it there today. Many thanks to Sarbjeet Johal, and my business partner, John Furrier, for their input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast and Ken Schiffman as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does some wonderful editing. And check out SiliconANGLE, a lot of coverage on Google Cloud Next and Microsoft Ignite. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcast wherever you listen. Just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can always get in touch with me via email, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai, the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (gentle music)

>>In late 2009 when the industry was just beginning to offer so-called converged infrastructure, CI Nutanix was skating to the puck, so to speak, meaning unlike conversion infrastructure, which essentially bolted together compute and networking and storage into a single skew that was very hardware centric. Nutanix was focused on creating HCI hyperconverged infrastructure, which was a software led architecture that unified the key elements of data center infrastructure. Now, while both approaches saved time and money, HCI took the concept to new heights of cost savings and simplicity. Hyperconverged infrastructure became a staple of private clouds creating a cloudlike experience. OnPrem. As the public cloud evolved and grew, more and more customers are now taking a cloud first approach to it. So the challenge becomes how do you remodel your IT house so that you can connect your on-prem workloads to the cloud, to both simplify cloud migration, while at the same time creating an identical experience across your estate? >>Hello, and welcome to this special program, Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft Made Possible by By Nutanix and produced by the Cube. I'm Dave Ante, one of your hosts today. Now, in this session, we'll hear how Nutanix is evolving its initial vision of simplifying infrastructure, deployment and management to support modern applications by partnering with Microsoft to enable that consistent experience that we talked about earlier, to extend hybrid cloud to Microsoft Azure and take advantage of cloud native tooling. Now, what's really important to stress here, and you'll hear this in our second segment, substantive engineering work has gone into this partnership. A lot of partnerships are sealed with a press release. We sometimes call it a Barney deal. You know, I love you, you love me. Like Barney, the once popular children's dinosaur character. We dig into the critical engineering aspects that enable that seamless connection between on-prem infrastructure and the public cloud. >>Now, in our first segment, Lisa Martin talks to Alro Salise, who is the vice president of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chica, who is the vice president of business development for the cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Now, after that, Lisa will kick it back to me in our Boston studios to speak with Eric Lockard, who is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure specialized, along with Thomas Cornell, who is the senior vice president of products at Nutanix. And Indu Carey, who's the senior vice president of of engineering for NCI and NNC two at Nutanix. And we'll dig deeper into the announcement and it's salient features. Thanks for being with us. We hope you enjoy the program. Over to Lisa. >>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chika, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. The the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at their own pace, and more important to be sure that every one of them, as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much, they have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help? How can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and our Microsoft ISV partner ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. I, the Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security, and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite, >>Exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure, absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this solution quite a while, but really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill sets and leverage the most out of that. So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things consistent, cost on premises and the cloud are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course, going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing their apps. >>And of course, as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an on on footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technical reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on or even, and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're to offer customers. >>Let's dig into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation. You guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is, is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds or even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tones of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable ordinate services and cluster and data services on premise to a Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it. It's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers in beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our abital lines. It did. It means, but yeah, so like, like we, like you mentioned Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of, of cu not only customers, but also partners battle testing the solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have GN offered to everyone else, but one of our customers, Camper J was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Ncq and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, my, my migration and a risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications, maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Alva, the power of the ISV ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an V you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our partner ecosystem because at the same time, making our partners more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us. >>Abar, can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There is marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on enjoying opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna go into too much detail, but I will like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what Albar said, you know, it's not just about the product integration or it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually been worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customers. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a long alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focusing on the biggest problems that customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah, >>Let, go ahead. >>No, I would say, well say Michael, the, the one element that we complement, the, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and inspire, as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers in every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the ga that's J in Americas, but kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned, it's working from kind of the s backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for ega. We're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across, they're running their workload cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft, it's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've both done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in these complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspiring. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game, being sure that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge TA task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never as small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you AAR for joining >>Me. Thank you Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic. I looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Thanks to the audience. Exactly. And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave and product execs from both Microsoft. You won't wanna.

>>Okay, we're back with the hybrid Cloud power panel. I'm Dave Ante, and with me our Eric Lockard, who's the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure Specialized Thomas Corn's, the senior vice president of products at Nutanix. And Indu Carey, who's the Senior Vice President of engineering, NCI and nnc two at Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>It's to be >>Here. Have us, >>Eric, let's, let's start with you. We hear so much about cloud first. What's driving the need for hybrid cloud for organizations today? I mean, I not just ev put everything in the public cloud. >>Yeah, well, I mean the public cloud has a bunch of inherent advantages, right? I mean it's, it has effectively infinite capacity, the ability to, you know, innovate without a lot of upfront costs, you know, regions all over the world. So there is a, a trend towards public cloud, but you know, not everything can go to the cloud, especially right away. There's lots of reasons. Customers want to have assets on premise, you know, data gravity, sovereignty and so on. And so really hybrid is the way to achieve the best of both worlds, really to kind of leverage the assets and investments that customers have on premise, but also take advantage of, of the cloud for bursting or regionality or expansion, especially coming outta the pandemic. We saw a lot of this from work from home and, and video conferencing and so on, driving a lot of cloud adoption. So hybrid is really the way that we see customers achieving the best of both worlds. >>Yeah, it makes sense. I wanna, Thomas, if you could talk a little bit, I don't wanna inundate people with the acronyms, but, but the Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure, what is that? What problems does it solve? Give us some color there please. >>Yeah, there, so, you know, cloud clusters on Azure, which we actually call NC two to make it simple and SONC two on Azure is really our solutions for hybrid cloud, right? And you about hybrid cloud, highly desirable customers want it. They, they know this is the right way to do it for them, given that they wanna have workloads on premises at the edge, any public clouds, but it's complicated. It's hard to do, right? And the first thing that you did with just silos, right? You have different infrastructure that you have to go and deal with. You have different teams, different technologies, different areas of expertise and dealing with different portals, networkings get complicated, security gets complicated. And so you heard me say this already, you know, hybrid can be complex. And so what we've done, we then c to Azure is we make that simple, right? We allow teams to go and basically have a solution that allows you to go and take any application running on premises and move it as is to any Azure region where Ncq is available. Once it's running there, you keep the same operating model, right? And that's, so that's actually super valuable to actually go and do this in a simple fashion, do it faster, and basically do hybrid in a more cost effective fashion, know for all your applications. And that's really what's really special about NC two Azure today. >>So Thomas, just a quick follow up on that. So you're, you're, if I understand you correctly, it's an identical experience. Did I get that right? >>This is, this is the key for us, right? Is when you think you're sending on premises, you are used to way of doing things of how you run your applications, how you operate, how you protect them. And what we do here is we extend the Nutanix operating model two workloads running in Azure using the same core stack that you're running on premises, right? So once you have a cluster deploying C to an Azure, it's gonna look like the same cluster that you might be running at the edge or in your own data center using the same tools you, using the same admin constructs to go protect the workloads, make them highly available, do disaster recovery or secure them. All of that becomes the same. But now you are in Azure, and this is what we've spent a lot of time working with Americanist teams on, is you actually have access now to all of those suites of Azure services in from those workloads. So now you get the best of both world, you know, and we bridge them together and you get seamless access of those services between what you get from Nutanix, what you get from Azure. >>Yeah. And as you alluded to, this is traditionally been non-trivial and people have been looking forward to this for, for quite some time. So Indu, I want to understand from an engineering perspective, your team had to work with the Microsoft team, and I'm sure there was this, this is not just a press releases or a PowerPoint, you had to do some some engineering work. So what specific engineering work did you guys do and what's unique about this relative to other solutions in the marketplace? >>So let me start with what's unique about this, and I think Thomas and Eric both did a really good job of describing that the best way to think about what we are delivering jointly with Microsoft is that it speeds of the journey to the public cloud. You know, one way to think about this is moving to the public cloud is sort of like remodeling your house. And when you start remodeling your house, you know, you find that you start with something and before you know it, you're trying to remodel the entire house. And that's a little bit like what journey to the public cloud sort of starts to look like when you start to refactor applications. Because it wasn't, most of the applications out there today weren't designed for the public cloud to begin with. NC two allows you to flip that on its head and say that take your application as is and then lift and shift it to the public cloud, at which point you start the refactor journey. >>And one of the things that you have done really well with the NC two on Azure is that NC two is not something that sits by Azure side. It's fully integrated into the Azure fabric, especially the software defined network and SDN piece. What that means is that, you know, you don't have to worry about connecting your NC two cluster to Azure to some sort of an net worth pipe. You have direct access to the Azure services from the same application that's now running on an NC two cluster. And that makes your refactoring journey so much easier. Your management plan looks the same, your high performance notes let the NVMe notes, they look the same. And really, I mean, other than the facts that you're doing something in the public cloud, all the nutanix's goodness that you're used to continue to receive that, there is a lot of secret sauce that we have had to develop as part of this journey. >>But if we had to pick one that really stands out, it is how do we take the complexity, the network complexity of a public cloud, in this case Azure, and make it as familiar to Nutanix's customers as the VPC construc, the virtual private cloud construc that allows them to really think of that on-prem networking and the public cloud networking in very similar terms. There's a lot more that's gone on behind the scenes. And by the way, I'll tell you a funny sort of anecdote. My dad used to say when I drew up that, you know, if you really want to grow up, you have to do two things. You have to like build a house and you have to marry your kid off to someone. And I would say our dad a third do a flow development with the public cloud provider of the partner. This has been just an absolute amazing journey with Eric and the Microsoft team, and you're very grateful for their >>Support. I, I need NC two for my house. I live in a house that was built in, it's 1687 and we connect all to new and it's, it is a bolt on, but, but, but, and so, but the secret sauce, I mean there's, there's a lot there, but is it a PAs layer? You didn't just wrap it in a container and shove it into the public cloud, You've done more than that. I'm inferring, >>You know, the, it's actually an infrastructure layer offering on top of fid. You can obviously run various types of platform services. So for example, down the road, if you have a containerized application, you'll actually be able to TA it from OnPrem and run it on C two. But the NC two offer itself, the NCAA offer itself is an infrastructure level offering. And the trick is that the storage that you're used to the high performance storage that you know, define tenants to begin with, the hypervisor that you're used to, the network constructs that you're used to light MI segmentation for security purposes, all of them are available to you on NC two in Azure, the same way that we're used to do on-prem. And furthermore, managing all of that through Prism, which is our management interface and management console also remains the same. That makes your security model easier, that makes your management challenge easier, that makes it much easier for an application person or the IT office to be able to report back to the board that they have started to execute on the cloud mandate and they've done that much faster than they'll be able to otherwise. >>Great. Thank you for helping us understand the plumbing. So now Thomas, maybe we can get to like the customers. What, what are you seeing, what are the use cases that are, that are gonna emerge for the solution? >>Yeah, I mean we've, you know, we've had a solution for a while, you know, this is now new on Azure's gonna extend the reach of the solution and get us closer to the type of use cases that are unique to Azure in terms of those solutions for analytics and so forth. But the kind of key use cases for us, the first one you know, talks about it is a migration. You know, we see customers on that cloud journey. They're looking to go and move applications wholesale from on premises to public cloud. You know, we make this very easy because in the end they take the same concept that are around the application and make them, we make them available Now in the Azure region, you can do this for any applications. There's no change to the application, no networking change. The same IP will work the same whether you're running on premises or in Azure. >>The app stays exactly the same, manage the same way, protected the same way. So that's a big one. And you know, the type of drivers point politically or maybe I wanna go do something different or I wanna go and shut down location on premises, I need to do that with a given timeline. I can now move first and then take care of optimizing the application to take advantage of all that Azure has to offer. So migration and doing that in a simple fashion, in a very fast manner is, is a key use case. Another one, and this is classic for leveraging public cloud force, which are doing on premises, is disaster recovery. And something that we refer to as elastic disaster recovery, being able to go and actually configure a secondary site to protect your on premises workloads. But I think that site sitting in Azure as a small site, just enough to hold the data that you're replicating and then use the fact that you cannot get access to resources on demand in Azure to scale out the environment, feed over workloads, run them with performance, potentially fill them back to on premises and then shrink back the environment in Azure to again, optimize cost and take advantage of elasticity that you get from public cloud models. >>And then the last one, building on top of that is just the fact that you cannot get bursting use cases and maybe running a large environment, typically desktop, you know, VDI environments that we see running on premises and I have, you know, a seasonal requirement to go and actually enable more workers to go get access the same solution. You could do this by sizing for the large burst capacity on premises wasting resources during the rest of the year. What we see customers do is optimize what they're running on premises and get access to resources on demand in Azure and basically move the workload and now basically get combined desktop running on premises desktops running on NC two on Azure, same desktop images, same management, same services, and do that as a burst use case during, say you're a retailer that has to go and take care of your holiday season. You know, great use case that we see over and over again for our customers, right? And pretty much complimenting the notion of, look, I wanna go to desktop as a service, but right now, now I don't want to refactor the entire application stack. I just won't be able to get access to resources on demand in the right place at the right time. >>Makes sense. I mean this is really all about supporting customers', digital transformations. We all talk about how that was accelerated during the pandemic and, but the cloud is a fundamental component of the digital transformations. And Eric, you, you guys have obviously made a commitment between Microsoft and and Nutanix to simplify hybrid cloud and that journey to the cloud. How should customers, you know, measure that? What does success look like? What's the ultimate vision here? >>Well, the ultimate vision is really twofold. I think the one is to, you know, first is really to ease a customer's journey to the cloud to allow them to take advantage of all the benefits to the cloud, but to do so without having to rewrite their applications or retrain their, their administrators and or, or to obviate their investment that they already have in platforms like, like Nutanix. And so the, the work that companies have done together here, you know, first and foremost is really to allow folks to come to the cloud in the way that they want to come to the cloud and take really the best of both worlds, right? Leverage, leverage their investment in the capabilities of the Nutanix platform, but do so in conjunction with the advantages and and capabilities of of Azure, you know. Second, it is really to extend some of the cloud capabilities down onto the on-premise infrastructure. And so with investments that we've done together with Azure arc for example, we're really extending the Azure control plane down onto on-premise Nutanix clusters and bringing the capabilities that that provides to the Nutanix customer as well as various Azure services like our data services and Azure SQL server. So it's really kind of coming at the problem from, from two directions. One is from kind of traditional on-prem up into the cloud, and then the second is kind of from the cloud leveraging the investment customers have in in on-premise hci. >>Got it. Thank you. Okay, last question. Maybe each of you could just give us one key takeaway for our audience today. Maybe we start with with with with Thomas and then Indu and then Eric you can bring us home. >>Sure. So the key takeaway is, you know, you takes cloud clusters on Azure is ngi, you know, this is something that we've had tremendous demand from our customers, both from the Microsoft side and the Nutanix side going, going back years literally, right? People have been wanting to go and see this, this is now live GA open for business and you know, we're ready to go and engage and ready to scale, right? This is our first step in a long journey in a very key partnership for us at Nutanix. >>Great Indu >>In our Dave. In a prior life about seven or eight, eight years ago, I was a part of a team that took a popular patch preparation software and moved it to the public cloud. And that was a journey that took us four years and probably several hundred million dollars. And if we had had NC two then it would've saved us half the money, but more importantly would've gotten there in one third the time. And that's really the value of this. >>Okay. Eric, bring us home please. >>Yeah, I'll just point out like this is not something that's just both on or something. We, we, we started yesterday. This is something the teams, both companies have been working on together for, for years really. And it's, it's a way of, of deeply integrating Nutanix into the Azure Cloud and with the ultimate goal of, of again, providing cloud capabilities to the Nutanix customer in a way that they can, you know, take advantage of the cloud and then compliment those applications over time with additional Azure services like storage, for example. So it really is a great on-ramp to the cloud for, for customers who have significant investments in, in Nutanix clusters on premise, >>Love the co-engineering and the ability to take advantage of those cloud native tools and capabilities, real customer value. Thanks gentlemen. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank >>You. Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay, keep it right there. You're watching. Accelerate hybrid cloud, that journey with Nutanix and Microsoft technology on the cube. You're leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage >>Organizations are increasingly moving towards a hybrid cloud model that contains a mix of on premises public and private clouds. A recent study confirms 83% of businesses agree that hybrid multi-cloud is the ideal operating model. Despite its many benefits, deploying a hybrid cloud can be challenging, complex, slow and expensive require different skills and tool sets and separate siloed management interfaces. In fact, 87% of surveyed enterprises believe that multi-cloud success will require simplified management of mixed infrastructures >>With Nutanix and Microsoft. Your hybrid cloud gets the best of both worlds. The predictable costs, performance control and data sovereignty of a private cloud and the scalability, cloud services, ease of use and fractional economics of the public cloud. Whatever your use case, Nutanix cloud clusters simplifies IT. Operations is faster and lowers risk for migration projects, lowers cloud TCO and provides investment optimization and offers effortless, limitless scale and flexibility. Choose NC two to accelerate your business in the cloud and achieve true hybrid cloud success. Take a free self-guided 30 minute test drive of the solutions provisioning steps and use cases at nutanix.com/azure td. >>Okay, so we're just wrapping up accelerate hybrid cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft made possible by Nutanix where we just heard how Nutanix is partnering with cloud and software leader Microsoft to enable customers to execute on a true hybrid cloud vision with actionable solutions. We pushed and got the answer that with NC two on Azure, you get the same stack, the same performance, the same networking, the same automation, the same workflows across on-prem and Azure Estates. Realizing the goal of simplifying and extending on-prem workloads to any Azure region to move apps without complicated refactoring and to be able to tap the full complement of native services that are available on Azure. Remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news related to this announcement and all things enterprise tech. Please go to nutanix.com as of course information about this announcement and the partnership, but there's also a ton of resources to better understand the Nutanix product portfolio. There are white papers, videos, and other valuable content, so check that out. This is Dave Ante for Lisa Martin with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Thanks for watching the program and we'll see you next time.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISV Commercial Solutions at Microsoft. And Michael Luka, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so a, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Well, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. So the, the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at the own pace, and more important to ensure that every one of them as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living in. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much. They have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help, how can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and or Microsoft ISV power ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. The Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite >>Then exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Sure. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this quite a while. But really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as I mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about growing their top line, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill and leverage the most that, So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things cost on premises and are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing in their apps. >>And of course as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technic for reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on pre the cloud or even the edge and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're able to offer our joint customers. >>Let's into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation, you guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds of even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tons of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable services and cluster and data services on premise to the Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it, it's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>And can you comment a little bit further, maybe both of you, of our, starting with you and then Michael, what are some of those business outcomes that customers are coming to Microsoft and Nutanix saying, help us, we've gotta be more competitive, we've gotta get, we've gotta be able to get solutions to market faster, et cetera. What are those key outcomes that these two powerhouse companies are helping customers to unlock? >>Yeah, I will say, look, the range of imperative of customers varies greatly depending on the industry, depending on the positioning. I think that the fundamental question is given your imperative, do we have the ability to empower you to achieve the outcome that you want? And these days, of course, the tons of companies, given the the business context that are being very conscious on cost and efficiency, how do you do more with less? How do I keep innovating? Because innovation will be at the heart of the solutions, but I do that on my own pace with my own priorities. That higher level answer is the one that we're enabling through partnership, like the one we're we're sharing today to the market with Nutanix. >>Yeah, I think >>From you, >>Go ahead. I was just gonna comment ON'S pump as well is that absolutely really depends on the customer and what they're trying to achieve, right? As they think about the next set of innovation that they're trying to develop. But for example, we take a, a web, a use case that we've seen with some of the customers is like migration to the cloud, right? And you know, a lot of companies, they embark on that migration. We see there's a lot of data that says basically, you know, it's much harder than it looks, right? And a lot of these projects become years behind schedule and millions and millions of dollars over budget, right? So reducing that risk and saying, Hey, how do I, can I land in Azure? And then bit by bit start thinking, how do I continue to innovate to get, since now I have easy and secure access while I'm in Azure with, and seek with Nutanix Nutanix clusters on Azure to continue my innovation by taking advantage of Azure native services, right? But again, like Aaro said, it's, it really depends on what the customer goals are. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers and beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our rebuttal lines. It does means, but yeah, so like, like, like you mentioned, Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of CU not only s but also partners battle solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have offered to everyone else, but one of our customers Camp Day was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Nstitute and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, migration and risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Ava, the power of the ISB ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an isv, you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our power ecosystem. Because at the same time, making our powers more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us >>Of, Can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There's marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on joy opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna talk, go into too much detail, but I would like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what all Borrow said, you know, it's not just about the product integration area, it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually even worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customer. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a lot alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focus on the biggest problems the customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar drug organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah. >>Let me, Go ahead. >>No, I will say, well say Michael, I think that the, the one element that we complement, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and far as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I i, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>Yeah. And, and you know, with every hard problem there's challenges along the way, right? And so I'm actually really proud of both of the teams that stepped up and, you know, figure it out. How do we go solve some of these technical problems? How do we go solve, making sure we continue to provide world class support for sports organizations? And, you know, these weren't easy things to solve and, and you know, everyone really stepped up the challenge >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers and every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the GA that's J in Americas kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months. Look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned is working from kind of the customers backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for the ga, we're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across as they're running their workloads cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for them. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft. It's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've do both, done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Of our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know, you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in this complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspired. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game so that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never a small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement, Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you Avara for joining me. >>Thank you, Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic and looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Exactly. Thanks to the audience. >>Exactly. >>And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave Valante and product execs from both and Microsoft. You won't wanna miss it.

(gentle music) >> Okay, we're back with the hybrid cloud power panel. I'm Dave Vellante, and with me Eric Lockard who is the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure Specialized. Thomas Cornely is the Senior Vice President of Products at Nutanix and Indu Keri, who's the Senior Vice President of Engineering, NCI and NC2 at Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> It's good to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Eric, let's, let's start with you. We hear so much about cloud first. What's driving the need for hybrid cloud for organizations today? I mean, I want to just put everything in the public cloud. >> Yeah, well, I mean the public cloud has a bunch of inherent advantages, right? I mean it's, it has effectively infinite capacity the ability to, you know, innovate without a lot of upfront costs, you know, regions all over the world. So there is a trend towards public cloud, but you know not everything can go to the cloud, especially right away. There's lots of reasons. Customers want to have assets on premise you know, data gravity, sovereignty and so on. And so really hybrid is the way to achieve the best of both worlds, really to kind of leverage the assets and investments that customers have on premise but also take advantage of the cloud for bursting, originality or expansion especially coming out of the pandemic. We saw a lot of this from work from home and and video conferencing and so on driving a lot of cloud adoption. So hybrid is really the way that we see customers achieving the best of both worlds. >> Yeah, makes sense. I want to, Thomas, if you could talk a little bit I don't want to inundate people with the acronyms, but the Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure, what is that? What problems does it solve? Give us some color there, please. >> Yeah, so, you know, cloud clusters on Azure which we actually call NC2 to make it simple. And so NC2 on Azure is really our solutions for hybrid cloud, right? And you think about hybrid cloud highly desirable, customers want it. They, they know this is the right way to do it for them given that they want to have workloads on premises at the edge, any public clouds, but it's complicated. It's hard to do, right? And the first thing that you deal with is just silos, right? You have different infrastructure that you have to go and deal with. You have different teams, different technologies, different areas of expertise. And dealing with different portals, networking get complicated, security gets complicated. And so you heard me say this already, you know hybrid can be complex. And so what we've done we then NC2 Azure is we make that simple, right? We allow teams to go and basically have a solution that allows you to go and take any application running on premises and move it as-is to any Azure region where NC2 is available. Once it's running there you keep the same operating model, right? And that's, so that actually super valuable to actually go and do this in a simple fashion. Do it faster, and basically do hybrid in a more (indistinct) fashion know for all your applications. And that's what's really special about NC2 today. >> So Thomas, just a quick follow up on that. So you're, you're, if I understand you correctly it's an identical experience. Did I get that right? >> This is the key for us, right? When you think you're sitting on premises you are used to way of doing things of how you run your applications, how you operate, how you protect them. And what we do here is we extend the Nutanix operating model to workloads running in Azure using the same core stack that you're running on premises, right? So once you have a cluster, deploy in NC2 Azure, it's going to look like the same cluster that you might be running at the edge or in your own data center, using the same tools, using the same admin constructs to go protect the workloads make them highly available do disaster recovery or secure them. All of that becomes the same. But now you are in Azure, and this is what we've spent a lot of time working with Eric and his teams on is you actually have access now to all of those suites of Azure services (indistinct) from those workloads. So now you get the best of both world, you know and we bridge them together and you to get seamless access of those services between what you get from Nutanix, what you get from Azure. >> Yeah. And as you alluded to this is traditionally been non-trivial and people have been looking forward to this for quite some time. So Indu, I want to understand from an engineering perspective, your team had to work with the Microsoft team, and I'm sure there was this is not just a press release, this is, or a PowerPoint you had to do some some engineering work. So what specific engineering work did you guys do and what's unique about this relative to other solutions in the marketplace? >> So let me start with what's unique about this. And I think Thomas and Eric both did a really good job of describing that. The best way to think about what we are delivering jointly with Microsoft is that it speeds up the journey to the public cloud. You know, one way to think about this is moving to the public cloud is sort of like remodeling your house. And when you start remodeling your house, you know, you find that you start with something and before you know it, you're trying to remodel the entire house. And that's a little bit like what journey to the public cloud sort of starts to look like when you start to refactor applications. Because it wasn't, most of the applications out there today weren't designed for the public cloud to begin with. NC2 allows you to flip that on its head and say that take your application as-is and then lift and shift it to the public cloud at which point you start the refactor journey. And one of the things that you have done really well with the NC2 on Azure is that NC2 is not something that sits by Azure side. It's fully integrated into the Azure fabric especially the software-defined networking, SDN piece. What that means is that, you know you don't have to worry about connecting your NC2 cluster to Azure to some sort of a network pipe. You have direct access to the Azure services from the same application that's now running on an NC2 cluster. And that makes your refactor journey so much easier. Your management claim looks the same, your high performance notes let the NVMe notes they look the same. And really, I mean, other than the fact that you're doing something in the public cloud all the Nutanix goodness that you're used to continue to receive that. There is a lot of secret sauce that we have had to develop as part of this journey. But if we had to pick one that really stands out it is how do we take the complexity, the network complexity offer public cloud, in this case Azure and make it as familiar to Nutanix's customers as the VPC, the virtual private cloud (indistinct) that allows them to really think of their on-prem networking and the public cloud networking in very similar terms. There's a lot more that's done on behind the scenes. And by the way, I'll tell you a funny sort of anecdote. My dad used to say when I grew up that, you know if you really want to grow up, you have to do two things. You have to like build a house and you have to marry your kid off to someone. And I would say our dad a third, do a cloud development with the public cloud provider of the partner. This has been just an absolute amazing journey with Eric and the Microsoft team and we're very grateful for their support. >> I need NC2 for my house. I live in a house that was built and it's 1687 and we connect all the new and it is a bolt on, but the secret sauce, I mean there's, there's a lot there but is it a (indistinct) layer. You didn't just wrap it in a container and shove it into the public cloud. You've done more than that, I'm inferring. >> You know, the, it's actually an infrastructure layer offering on top of (indistinct). You can obviously run various types of platform services. So for example, down the road if you have a containerized application you'll actually be able to take it from on prem and run it on NC2. But the NC2 offer itself, the NC2 offering itself is an infrastructure level offering. And the trick is that the storage that you're used to the high performance storage that you know define Nutanix to begin with the hypervisor that you're used to the network constructs that you're used to light micro segmentation for security purposes, all of them are available to you on NC2 in Azure the same way that we're used to do on-prem. And furthermore, managing all of that through Prism, which is our management interface and management console also remains the same. That makes your security model easier that makes your management challenge easier that makes it much easier for an application person or the IT office to be able to report back to the board that they have started to execute on the cloud mandate and they've done that much faster than they would be able to otherwise. >> Great. Thank you for helping us understand the plumbing. So now Thomas, maybe we can get to like the customers. What, what are you seeing, what are the use cases that are that are going to emerge for this solution? >> Yeah, I mean we've, you know we've had a solution for a while and you know this is now new on Azure is going to extend the reach of the solution and get us closer to the type of use cases that are unique to Azure in terms of those solutions for analytics and so forth. But the kind of key use cases for us the first one you know, talks about it is a migration. You know, we see customers on that cloud journey. They're looking to go and move applications wholesale from on premises to public cloud. You know, we make this very easy because in the end they take the same culture that were around the application and we make them available now in the Azure region. You can do this for any applications. There's no change to the application, no networking change the same IP constraint will work the same whether you're running on premises or in Azure. The app stays exactly the same manage the same way, protected the same way. So that's a big one. And you know, the type of drivers for (indistinct) maybe I want to go do something different or I want to go and shut down the location on premises I need to do that with a given timeline. I can now move first and then take care of optimizing the application to take advantage of all that Azure has to offer. So migration and doing that in a simple fashion in a very fast manner is, is a key use case. Another one, and this is classic for leveraging public cloud force, which we're doing on premises IT disaster recovery and something that we refer to as Elastic disaster recovery, being able to go and actually configure a secondary site to protect your on premises workloads. But I think that site sitting in Azure as a small site just enough to hold the data that you're replicating and then use the fact that you cannot get access to resources on demand in Azure to scale out the environment feed over workloads, run them with performance potentially fill them back to on premises, and then shrink back the environment in Azure to again optimize cost and take advantage of the elasticity that you get from public cloud models. Then the last one, building on top of that is just the fact that you cannot get bursting use cases and maybe running a large environment, typically desktop, you know, VDI environments that we see running on premises and I have, you know, a seasonal requirement to go and actually enable more workers to go get access the same solution. You could do this by sizing for the large burst capacity on premises wasting resources during the rest of the year. What we see customers do is optimize what they're running on premises and get access to resources on demand in Azure and basically move the workloads and now basically get combined desktops running on premises desktops running on NC2 on Azure same desktop images, same management, same services and do that as a burst use case during say you're a retailer that has to go and take care of your holiday season. You know, great use case that we see over and over again for our customers, right? And pretty much complimenting the notion of, look I want to go to desktop as a service, but right now I don't want to refactor the entire application stack. I just want to be able to get access to resources on demand in the right place at the right time. >> Makes sense. I mean this is really all about supporting customer's, digital transformations. We all talk about how that was accelerated during the pandemic and but the cloud is a fundamental component of the digital transformations generic. You, you guys have obviously made a commitment between Microsoft and Nutanix to simplify hybrid cloud and that journey to the cloud. How should customers, you know, measure that? What does success look like? What's the ultimate vision here? >> Well, the ultimate vision is really twofold, I think. The one is to, you know first is really to ease a customer's journey to the cloud to allow them to take advantage of all the benefits to the cloud, but to do so without having to rewrite their applications or retrain their administrators and or to obviate their investment that they already have and platforms like Nutanix. And so the work that companies have done together here, you know, first and foremost is really to allow folks to come to the cloud in the way that they want to come to the cloud and take really the best of both worlds, right? Leverage their investment in the capabilities of the Nutanix platform, but do so in conjunction with the advantages and capabilities of Azure. You know, second is really to extend some of the cloud capabilities down onto the on-premise infrastructure. And so with investments that we've done together with Azure arc for example, we're really extending the Azure control plane down onto on-premise Nutanix clusters and bringing the capabilities that provides to the Nutanix customer as well as various Azure services like our data services and Azure SQL server. So it's really kind of coming at the problem from two directions. One is from kind of traditional on-premise up into the cloud, and then the second is kind of from the cloud leveraging the investment customers have in on-premise HCI. >> Got it. Thank you. Okay, last question. Maybe each of you could just give us one key takeaway for our audience today. Maybe we start with Thomas and then Indu and then Eric you can bring us home. >> Sure. So the key takeaway is, you know, cloud customers on Azure is now GA you know, this is something that we've had tremendous demand from our customers both from the Microsoft side and the Nutanix side going back years literally, right? People have been wanting to go and see this this is now live GA open for business and you know we're ready to go and engage and ready to scale, right? This is our first step in a long journey in a very key partnership for us at Nutanix. >> Great, Indu. >> In our day, in a prior life about seven or eight years ago, I was a part of a team that took a popular text preparation software and moved it to the public cloud. And that was a journey that took us four years and probably several hundred million dollars. And if we had NC2 then it would've saved us half the money, but more importantly would've gotten there in one third the time. And that's really the value of this. >> Okay. Eric, bring us home please. >> Yeah, I'll just point out that, this is not something that's just bought on or something we started yesterday. This is something the teams both companies have been working on together for years really. And it's a way of deeply integrating Nutanix into the Azure Cloud. And with the ultimate goal of again providing cloud capabilities to the Nutanix customer in a way that they can, you know take advantage of the cloud and then compliment those applications over time with additional Azure services like storage, for example. So it really is a great on-ramp to the cloud for customers who have significant investments in Nutanix clusters on premise. >> Love the co-engineering and the ability to take advantage of those cloud native tools and capabilities, real customer value. Thanks gentlemen. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay. Keep it right there. You're watching accelerate hybrid cloud, that journey with Nutanix and Microsoft technology on The Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (gentle music)

>> theCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, Europe, 2022. Brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud-native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain in KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend with my cohosts, Enrico Signoretti, Senior IT Analyst at GigaOm. >> Exactly. >> 7,500 people I'm told, Enrico. What's the flavor of the show so far? >> It's a fantastic mood, I mean, I found a lot of people wanting to track, talk about what they're doing with Kubernetes, sharing their you know, stories, some war stories that bit tough. And you know, this is where you learn actually. Because we had a lot of Zoom calls, webinar and stuff. But it is when you talk a video, "Oh, I did it this way, and it didn't work out very well." So, and, you start a conversation like this that is really different from learning from Zoom, when, you know, everybody talks about things that work it well, they did it right. No, it's here that you learn from other experiences. >> So we're talking to amazing people the whole week, talking about those experiences here on theCUBE. Fresh on the theCUBE for the first time, Chris Voss, senior software engineer at Microsoft Xbox. Chris, welcome to the theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So first off, give us a high level picture of the environment that you're running at Microsoft. >> Yeah. So, you know, we've got 20 well probably close to 30 clusters at this point around the globe, you know 700 to 1,000 pods per cluster, roughly. So about 22,000 pods total. So yeah, it's pretty, pretty sizable footprint and yeah. So we've been running on Kubernetes since 2018 and well actually might be 2017, but anyways, so yeah, that's kind of our footprint. Yeah. >> So all of that, let's talk about the basics which is security across multiple I'm assuming containers, microservices, etcetera. Why did you and the team settle on Linkerd? >> Yeah, so previously we had our own kind of solution for managing TLS certs and things like that. And we found it to be pretty painful, pretty quickly. And so we knew, you know we wanted something that was a little bit more abstracted away from the developers and things like that, that allowed us to move quickly. And so we began investigating, you know, solutions to that. And a few of our colleagues went to Kubecon in San Diego in 2019, Cloudnativecon as well. And basically they just, you know, sponged it all up. And actually funny enough, my old manager was one of the people who was there and he went to the Linkerd booth and they had a thing going that was like, "Hey, get set up with MTLS in five minutes." And he was like, "This is something we want to do, why not check this out?" And he was able to do it. And so that put it on our radar. And so yeah, we investigated several others and Linkerd just perfectly fit exactly what we needed. >> So, in general we are talking about, you know, security at scale. So how you manage security scale and also flexibility. Right? So, but you know, what is the... You told us about the five minutes to start using there but you know, again, we are talking about war stories. We're talking about, you know, all these. So what kind of challenges you found at the beginning when you started adopting this technology? >> So the biggest ones were around getting up and running with like a new service, especially in the beginning, right, we were, you know, adding a new service almost every day. It felt like. And so, you know, basically it took someone going through a whole bunch of different repos, getting approvals from everyone to get the certs minted, all that fun stuff getting them put into the right environments and in the right clusters, to make sure that, you know, everybody is talking appropriately. And just the amount of work that that took alone was just a huge headache and a huge barrier to entry for us to, quickly move up the number of services we have. >> So, I'm trying to wrap my head around the scale of the challenge. When I think about certification or certificate management, I have to do it on a small scale. And every now and again, when a certificate expires it is just a troubleshooting pain. >> Yes. >> So as I think about that, it costs it's not just certificates across 22,000 pods, or it's certificates across 22,000 pods in multiple applications. How were you doing that before Linkerd? Like, what was the... And what were the pain points? Like what happens when a certificate either fails? Or expired up? Not updated? >> So, I mean, to be completely honest, the biggest thing is we're just unable to make the calls, you know, out or in, based on yeah, what is failing basically. But, you know, we saw essentially an uptick in failures around a certain service and pretty quickly, pretty quickly, we got used to the fact that it was like, oh, it's probably a cert expiration issue. And so we tried, you know, a few things in order to make that a little bit more automated and things like that. But we never came to a solution that like didn't require every engineer on the team to know essentially quite a bit about this, just to get into it, which was a huge issue. >> So talk about day two, after you've deployed Linkerd, how did this alleviate software engineers? And what was like the benefits of now having this automated way of managing certs? >> So the biggest thing is like, there is no touch from developers, everyone on our team... Well, I mean, there are a lot of people who are familiar with security and certs and all of that stuff. But no one has to know it. Like it's not a requirement. Like for instance, I knew nothing about it when I joined the team. And even when I was setting up our newer clusters, I knew very little about it. And I was still able to really quickly set up Linkerd, which was really nice. And it's been, you know, essentially we've been able to just kind of set it, and not think about it too much. Obviously, you know, there're parts of it that you have to think about, we monitor it and all that fun stuff, but yeah, it's been pretty painless almost day one. It took a long time to trust it for developers. You know, anytime there was a failure, it's like, "Oh, could this be Linkerd?" you know. But after a while, like now we don't have that immediate assumption because people have built up that trust, but. >> Also you have this massive infrastructure I mean, 30 clusters. So, I guess, that it's quite different to manage a single cluster in 30. So what are the, you know, consideration that you have to do to install this software on, you know, 30 different cluster, manage different, you know versions probably, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. >> So, I mean, you know, as far as like... I guess, just to clarify, are you asking specifically with Linkerd? Or are you just asking in more in general? >> Well, I mean, you can take that the question in two ways. >> Okay. >> Sure, yeah, so Linkerd in particular but the 30 cluster also quite interesting. >> Yeah. So, I mean, you know, more generally, you know how we manage our clusters and things like that. We have, you know, a CLI tool that we use in order to like change context very quickly, and switch and communicate with whatever cluster we're trying to connect to and you know, are we debugging or getting logs, whatever. And then, you know, with Linkerd it's nice because again, you know, we aren't having to worry about like, oh, how is this cert being inserted in the right node? Or not the right node, but in the right cluster or things like that. Whereas with Linkerd, we don't really have that concern. When we spin up our clusters, essentially we get the route certificate and everything like that packaged up, passed along to Linkerd on installation. And then essentially, there's not much we have to do after that. >> So talk to me about your upcoming section here at Kubecon. what's the high level talking points? Like what attendees learn? >> Yeah. So it's a journey. Those are the sorts of talks that I find useful. Having not been, you know, I'm not a deep Kubernetes expert from, you know decades or whatever of experience, but-- >> I think nobody is. >> (indistinct). >> True, yes. >> That's also true. >> That's another story >> That's a job posting decades of requirements for-- >> Of course, yeah. But so, you know, it's a journey. It's really just like, hey, what made us decide on a service mesh in the first place? What made us choose Linkerd? And then what are the ways in which, you know, we use Linkerd? So what are those, you know we use some of the extra plugins and things like that. And then finally, a little bit about more what we're going to do in the future. >> Let's talk about not just necessarily the future as in two or three days from now, or two or three years from now. Well, the future after you immediately solve the low level problems with Linkerd, what were some of the surprises? Because Linkerd in service mesh and in general have side benefits. Do you experience any of those side benefits as well? >> Yeah, it's funny, you know, writing the blog post, you know, I hadn't really looked at a lot of the data in years on, you know when we did our investigations and things like that. And we had seen that we like had very low latency and low CPU utilization and things like that. And looking at some of that, I found that we were actually saving time off of requests. And I couldn't really think of why that was and I was talking with someone else and the biggest, unfortunately all that data's gone now, like the source data. So I can't go back and verify this but it makes sense, you know, there's the availability zone routing that Linkerd supports. And so I think that's actually doing it where, you know essentially, if a node is closer to another node, it's essentially, you know, routing to those ones. So when one service is talking to another service and maybe they're on the same node, you know, it short circuits that and allows us to gain some time there. It's not huge, but it adds up after, you know, 10, 20 calls down the line. >> Right. In general, so you are saying that it's smooth operations at this very, you know, simplifying your life. >> And again, we didn't have to really do anything for that. It handled that for us. >> It was there? >> Yep. Yeah, exactly. >> So we know one thing when I do it on my laptop it works fine. When I do it with across 22,000 pods, that's a different experience. What were some of the lessons learned coming out of Kubecon 2018 in San Diego? I was there. I wish I would've ran into the Microsoft folks, but what were some of the hard lessons learned scaling Linkerd across the 22,000 nodes? >> So, you know, the first one and this seems pretty obvious, but was just not something I knew about was the high availability mode of Linkerd. So obviously makes sense. You would want that in, you know a large scale environment. So like, that's one of the big lessons that like, we didn't ride away. No. Like one of the mistakes we made in one of our pre-production clusters was not turning that on. And we were kind of surprised. We were like, whoa, like all of these pods are spinning up but they're having issues, like actually getting injected and things like that. And we found, oh, okay. Yeah, you need to actually give it some more resources. But it's still very lightweight considering, you know, they have high availability mode but it's just a few instances still. >> So from, even from, you know, binary perspective and running Linkerd how much overhead is it? >> That is a great question. So I don't remember off the top of my head, the numbers but it's very lightweight. We evaluated a few different service missions and it was the lightest weight that we encountered at that point. >> And then from a resource perspective, is it a team of Linkerd people? Is it a couple of people? Like how? >> To be completely honest for a long time, it was one person Abraham, who actually is the person who proposed this talk. He couldn't make it to Valencia, but he essentially did probably 95% of the work to get into production. And then this was before, we even had a team dedicated to our infrastructure. And so we have, now we have a team dedicated, we're all kind of Linkerd folks, if not Linkerd experts, we at least can troubleshoot basically. And things like that. So it's, I think a group of six people on our team and then, you know various people who've had experience with it on other teams. >> But others, dedicated just to that. >> No one is dedicated just to it. No, it's pretty like pretty light touch once it's up and running. It took a very long time for us to really understand it and to, you know, get like not getting started, but like getting to where we really felt comfortable letting it go in production. But once it was there, like, it is very, very light touch. >> Well, I really appreciate you stopping by Chris. It's been an amazing conversation to hear how Microsoft is using a open source project. >> Exactly. >> At scale, it's just a few years ago when you would've heard the concept of Microsoft and open source together and like OS, just, you know-- >> They have changed a lot in the last few years. Now, there are huge contributors. And, you know, if you go to Azure, it's full of open source stuff, everywhere so. >> Yeah. >> Wow. The Kubecon 2022, how the world has changed in so many ways. From Valencia Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, along with Enrico Signoretti. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22, brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to Valencia Spain in co con cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend with my cohos on Rico senior. Etti senior it analyst at gig home. Exactly 7,500 people I'm told en Rico. What's the flavor of the show so far, >>It's a fantastic mood. I mean, I found a lot of people wanting to track talk about what they're doing with Kubernetes, sharing their, you know, stories, some word stories that meet tough. And you know, this is where you learn actually, because we had a lot of zoom calls, webinar and stuff, but it is when you talk a video, oh, I did it this way and it didn't work out very well. So, and, and you start a conversation like this that is really different from learning from zoom. When, you know, everybody talks about things that working well, they did it, right. No, it's here that you learn from other experiences. >>So we're talking to amazing people the whole week, talking about those experiences here on the queue, fresh on the queue for the first time, Chris Vos, senior software engineer at Microsoft Xbox, Chris, welcome to the queue. >>Thank you so much for having >>Me. So first off, give us a high level picture of the environment that you're running at Microsoft. >>Yeah. So, you know, we've got 20, well probably close to 30 clusters at this point around the globe, you know, 700 to a thousand pods per cluster, roughly. So about 22,000 pods total. So yeah, it's pretty pretty sizable footprint and yeah. So we've been running on Kubernetes since 2018 and well actually might be 2017, but anyways, so yeah, that, that's kind of our, our footprint. >>Yeah. So all of that, let's talk about the basics, which is security across multiple I'm assuming containers, work, microservices, et cetera. Why did you and the team settle on link or do >>Yeah, so previously we had our own kind of solution for managing TLS certs and things like that. And we found it to be pretty painful pretty quickly. And so we knew, you know, we wanted something that was a little bit more abstracted away from the developers and, and things like that that allowed us to move quickly. And so we began investigating, you know, solutions to that. And a few of our colleagues went to Cuban in San Diego in 2019 cloud native con as well. And basically they just, you know, sped it all up. And actually funny enough, my, my old manager was one of the people who was there and he went to the link D booth and they had a thing going that was like, Hey, get set up with MTLS in five minutes. And he was like, this is something we want to do, why not check this out? And he was able to do it. And so that, that put it on our radar. And so yeah, we investigated several others and Leer D just perfectly fit exactly what we needed. >>So, so in general, we are talking about, you know, security at scale. So how you manage security to scale and also flexibility, right. But you know, what is the you, this there, you told us about the five minutes to start using there, but you know, again, we are talking about word stories. We talk about, you know, all these. So what, what, what kind of challenges you found at the beginning when you start adopting this technology? >>So the biggest ones were around getting up and running with like a new service, especially in the beginning, right. We were, you know, adding a new service almost every day. It felt like. And so, you know, basically it took someone going through a whole bunch of different repos, getting approvals from everyone to get the SEARCHs minted, all that fun stuff, getting them put into the right environments and in the right clusters to make sure that, you know, everybody is talking appropriately. And just the amount of work that, that took alone was just a huge headache and a huge barrier to entry for us to, you know, quickly move up the number of services we have. So, >>So I'm, I'm trying to wrap my head around the scale of the challenge. When I think about certification or certificate management, I have to do it on a small scale and the, the, every now and again, when a certificate expires, it is just a troubleshooting pain. Yes. So as I think about that, it costs, it's not just certificates across 22,000 pods or it's certificates across 22,000 pods in multiple applications. How were you doing that before link D like, what was the, what and what were the pain points? Like? What happens when a certificate either fails or expired up not, not updated? >>So, I mean, to be completely honest, the biggest thing is we're just unable to make the calls, you know, out or, or in, based on yeah. What is failing basically. But, you know, we saw essentially an uptick in failures around a certain service and pretty quickly, I pretty quickly, we got used to the fact that it was like, oh, it's probably a cert expiration issue. And so we tried, you know, a few things in order to make that a little bit more automated and things like that, but we never came to a solution that like didn't require every engineer on the team to know essentially quite a bit about this, just to get into it, which was a huge issue. >>So talk about day two after you've deployed link D how did this alleviate software engineers and what was like the, the benefits of now having this automated way of managing >>Certs? So the biggest thing is like, there is no touch from developers, everyone on our team. Well, I mean, there are a lot of people who are familiar with security and certs and all of that stuff, but no one has to know it. Like it's not a requirement. Like for instance, I knew nothing about it when I joined the team. And even when I was setting up our newer clusters, I knew very little about it. And I was still able to really quickly set up blinker D, which was really nice. And, and it's been, you know, essentially we've been able to just kind of set it and not think about it too much. Obviously, you know, there are parts of it that you have to think about. We monitor it and all that fun stuff, but, but yeah, it's been pretty painless almost day one. It took a lot, a long time to trust it for developers. You know, anytime there was a failure, it's like, oh, could this be link or D you know, but after a while, like now we don't have that immediate assumption because people have built up that trust, but >>Also you have this massive infrastructure, I mean, 30 cluster. So I guess that it's quite different to manage a single cluster and 30. So what are the, you know, consideration that you have to do to install this software on, you know, 30 different cluster manage different, you know, versions probably etcetera, etcetera, et cetera. >>So, I mean, you know, the, the, as far as like, I guess, just to clarify, are you asking specifically with Linky or are you just asking in more in general? Well, >>I mean, you, you can take the, the question in the, in two ways, so, okay. Yeah. Yes. Link in particular, but the 30 cluster also quite interesting. >>Yeah. So, I mean, you know, more generally, you know, how we manage our clusters and things like that. We have, you know, a CLI tool that we use in order to like, change context very quickly and switch and communicate with whatever cluster we're trying to connect to and, you know, are we debugging or getting logs, whatever. And then, you know, with link D it's nice because again, you know, we, we, aren't having to worry about like, oh, how is this cert being inserted in the right node or, or not the right node, but in the right cluster or things like that. Whereas with link D we don't, we don't really have that concern when we spin up our, our clusters, essentially we get the root certificate and, and everything like that packaged up, passed along to link D on installation. And then essentially there's not much we have to do after that. >>So talk to me about your upcoming coming section here at Q con what's the, what's the high level talking points? Like what, what will attendees learn? >>Yeah. So it's, it's a journey. Those are the sorts of talks that I find useful. Having not been, you know, I, I'm not a deep Kubernetes expert from, you know, decades or whatever of experience, but I think >>Nobody is >>Also true. That's another story. That's a, that's, that's a job posting decades of requirements for >>Of course. Yeah. But so, you know, it, it's a journey it's really just like, Hey, what made us decide on a service mesh in the first place? What made us choose link D and then what are the ways in which, you know, we, we use link D so what are those, you know, we use some of the extra plugins and things like that. And then finally, a little bit about more, what we're gonna do in the future. >>Let's talk about not just necessarily the future as in two or three days from now, or two or three years from now. Well, the future after you immediately solve the, the low level problems with link D what were some of the, the surprises, because link D in service me in general has have side benefits. Do you experience any of those side benefits as well? >>Yeah, it's funny, you know, writing the, the blog post, you know, I hadn't really looked at a lot of the data in years on, you know, when we did our investigations and things like that. And we had seen that we like had very low latency and low CPU utilization and things like that. And looking at some of that, I found that we were actually saving time off of requests. And I couldn't really think of why that was, and I was talking with someone else and the biggest, unfortunately, all that data's gone now, like the source data. So I can't go back and verify this, but it, it makes sense, you know, there's the availability zone routing that linker D supports. And so I think that's actually doing it where, you know, essentially if a node is closer to another node, it's essentially, you know, routing to those ones. So when one service is talking to another service and maybe on they're on the same node, you know, it, it short circuits that, and allows us to gain some, some time there. It's not huge, but it adds up after, you know, 10, 20 calls down the line. Right. >>In general. So you are saying that it's smooth operations in, in ATS, very, you know, simplifying your life. >>And again, we didn't have to really do anything for that. It, it, it handled that for it was there. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, exactly. >>So we know one thing when I do it on my laptop, it works fine when I do it with across 22,000 pods, that's a different experience. What were some of the lessons learned coming out of KU con 2018 in San Diego was there? I wish I would've ran to the microphone folks, but what were some of the hard lessons learned scaling link D across the 22,000 nodes? >>So, you know, the, the first one, and this seems pretty obvious, but was just not something I knew about was the high availability mode of link D so obviously makes sense. You would want that in a, you know, a large scale environment. So like, that's one of the big lessons that like, we didn't ride away. No. Like one of the mistakes we made in, in one of our pre-production clusters was not turning that on. And we were kind of surprised. We were like, whoa, like all of these pods are spinning up, but they're having issues like actually getting injected and things like that. And we found, oh, okay. Yeah, you need to actually give it some, some more resources, but it's still very lightweight considering, you know, they have high availability mode, but it's just a few instances still. >>So from, even from a, you know, binary perspective and running link D how much overhead is it? >>That is a great question. So I don't remember off the top of my head, the numbers, but it's very lightweight. We, we evaluated a few different service missions and it was the lightest weight that we encountered at that point. >>And then from a resource perspective, is it a team of link D people? Is it a couple of people, like how >>To be completely honest for a long time, it was one person, Abraham who actually is the person who proposed this talk. He couldn't make it to Valencia, but he essentially did probably 95% of the work to get a into production. And then this was before we even had a team dedicated to our infrastructure. And so we have, now we have a team dedicated, we're all kind of Linky folks, if not Linky experts, we at least can troubleshoot basically. And things like that. So it's, I think a group of six people on our team, and then, you know, various people who've had experience with it >>On other teams, but I'm not dedicated just to that. >>I mean, >>No one is dedicated just to it. No, it's pretty like pretty light touch once it's, once it's up and running, it took a very long time for us to really understand it and, and to, you know, get like, not getting started, but like getting to where we really felt comfortable letting it go in production. But once it was there, like, it is very, very light touch. >>Well, I really appreciate you stopping by Chris. It's been an amazing conversation to hear how Microsoft is using a open source project. Exactly. At scale. It's just a few years ago, when you would've heard the concept of Microsoft and open source together and like, oh, that's just, you know, but >>They have changed a lot in the last few years now, there are huge contributors. And, you know, if you go to Azure, it's full of open source stuff, every >>So, yeah. Wow. The Cuban 2022, how the world has changed in so many ways from Licia Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, along with a Rico senior, you're watching the, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, covering Coupa Insp!re 2022. theCUBE is really happy to be here at this event. About 2,500 folks are here, which is great to see. I have two guests from Microsoft with me. Please, welcome Jonathan Allen, the director of global network modeling design and planning, and Cassie Wang, senior global network model and design engineer. Guys, thanks so much for joining me today. >> No problem. Thanks Lisa for having us. >> Thank you. >> So let's talk about what's going on at Microsoft, the Microsoft supply chain. Supply chain is a term that's on everyone's lips these days for some interesting reason, but talk to me a little bit about the Microsoft supply chain and how does it scale to meet the needs of business? >> Yeah, Lisa, it's really an interesting design at Microsoft. When you look at all the products we service, from Xbox consoles, controllers, Xbox games, Xbox Live cards, service devices for retail customers, for consumer customers and commercial customers. And then the way we go to market through distributors, retailers, and direct to consumer homes, we have to have a supply chain that actually executes across all the products and customer needs based on seasonality. When you think about our products, Xbox console heavy Christmas, heavy consumer, heavy retail commercial devices for service, heavy quarter ends, heavy periods of time back to school. So, we have to have a supply chain that effectively works across all of our products, all of our customers, and all the differences analogies that we have to manage. >> And do so globally? >> And do so globally. >> So talk to me about the transformation. That's a word that we talk a lot about digital transformation, right? >> Yes. >> Before COVID, now we've seen the acceleration of digital transformation during COVID, we've seen challenges with the supply chain. Talk to me about Microsoft supply chain journey from a digitalization perspective, what you guys have gone through. >> Yeah, absolutely. Data is the key. And I have a philosophy which is around managing a business by facts and figures. And so, when Cassie first came on about a year and a half ago, our focus was on digitizing our supply chain. So how do you take our physical supply chain, digitize it in a way that you have a digital mapping and a duplication of what's happening physically in a digital way across the supply chain. So about every single day, we're grabbing in about 500 gigabytes of data, that then allows us to understand the physical and the virtual world of our supply chain, to understand how it's moving, how it's executing and how it's delivering. As for example, we were able to, when the war began in Ukraine, to understand where our trains were, how they were moving, and if they were continuing to move versus stopping. On the second side, we're leveraging that data now to make decisions about where our supply chain is today, which is really focused in the changing environments that are real time occurring. That's driving opportunities, whether it's about reducing carbon, whether it's driving cost down or whether it's servicing the customers to make real time decisions, while at the same time planning for three to five years out based on our growth, our projections, and making sure we'll have the right infrastructure partner supply chain in place to service with those changes in growth. >> Basically you need a crystal ball? >> Basically. >> Essentially? >> Yes. >> And Cassie, it sounds like from what Jonathan just said, you joined the team during the pandemic? >> Yes. >> So, during a time of massive change? >> Fully remote, yeah. Talk to me a little bit about that and some of the opportunities that you saw in helping the supply chain modernization. >> Yeah, definitely. So when I joined Microsoft, it's great time. And it's all the risks and challenges and dynamic changing environment that's really involved. So we spent a long time, like from the time I joined Microsoft, we spent the time to set up this digital chain of our supply chain. So really to transform what is happening physically to how do we see it digitally. So just to bring the visibility of the supply chain. So the great thing is we are able to leverage the tool from Coupa, the digital transformation and also supply chain design optimization tool to help us really build the digital twin, and also the model for Microsoft device supply chain. >> Now, interesting comment. So when I met Casie, the first time I met her, was in person when I interviewed her. Second time I met her in person was here at Coupa, and I was afraid I wouldn't recognize her. (all laughing) >> Of course, challenges of last year. Talk to me about speaking of challenges, talk to me about some of the challenges that Microsoft saw and said, "We need a partner like Coupa to help us eliminate these challenges. We don't have time. Real time is no longer nice to have. We've got to be able to transform, so we have that visibility in real time." >> Absolutely. When you think about time, time and decisions, overnight, cities get locked down in China, cities get locked down in Europe. And if you wait days or wait hours, that could be the difference between product on a boat, product on a plane, or product not arriving to support your customer needs. >> Right. And then the question is knowing that with that real time, how are you making decisions real time to change, to alternate airports? Making changes on the products you're making to make sure that, I was making this but now I should make this, because I have a risk of getting product to show. >> And you've got to do all that with very limited amount of time. And of course, cause there's the consumer. I mean, we think about the Microsoft on the business side but the consumer side, you mentioned some of the consumer products you don't offend the Xbox, the service consumers. One of the things that was really in short supply during the pandemic and probably still is to some degree, is patience. >> Yes. >> The consumer experience is so critical for a brand. >> Correct. >> And as is the employee experience. >> Yes. >> Talk to me a little bit about, from a supply chain digitization perspective, what was some of the executive sponsorships? Who were some of those executive sponsors that were involved in going, "Yeah, we need to move in this direction with Coupa, and it's got to be now."? >> The real supporter behind that is, my manager, Jeff Davidson, and then his leader, which is Donna Wharton, where they are truly about what are we doing next? How are we going to leverage the tools and the capabilities that are provided by others that allow us to do our job? So let's be clear on, let's use those that are designed to do what they're supposed to do, and then build where we need to. And that was the big difference, the digitization of the data, create the data, create the information so that we could then leverage the tools to create the information, right? And that information is then about bringing the facts, the information and the data forward, to have very fact-based conversations, which is back to manage the business by facts and figures. >> Right. Well, Cassie, one of the things that we've also learned in the last couple years, is that every company is a data company. If they're not a data company they're probably not going to be around. I even think of my grocery store and all that data that they have on me to be able to surface up. What did I buy last time, and I want to buy that again? Talk to me a little bit about why was Coupa the right choice to help facilitate this data strategy so that the visibility and the supply chain and the ability to tweak things on demand is there? >> Yeah. So, the main stuff that we are leveraging from Coupa are the data group and also the supply chain group. So data group enable us to really, for the people who do not have a intensive data manipulation backgrounds, they can use data group very straightfowardly to work on the data so they can build, they can grab the data transactional level and aggregate to the leadership level to see data in different aspects, tell the trends to get the key information. So that's the power of getting the massive data on a level that's like everybody can say, "Oh, wow! This is what it means." And another is definitely leveraging the data to get into a model, which is what we just talked about, the digital twin of our physical supply chain. So, we are able to like make analysis based on very easy design, like sensitive analysis, what-if analysis, to test out what our future supply chain can be. And what is the cost benefits? What is all the impacts on the on the lead times? On the carbons? So, yeah. So that's the power of leveraging the data. >> Speaking of carbons, how is Microsoft working towards being carbon negative, zero waste? What's some of the things that are going on there from a corporate responsibility perspective? >> Yeah, that's a really important one. As known about two years ago, we came out with a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030. >> 2030. >> And so, the company as a whole is doing massive initiatives from different groups, but specifically in supply chain, we're constantly focusing on cutting our carbon footprint, whether it's the way we're making the products and designing the products, whether it's the way that we're designing our warehouses. So for example, just recently, we launched a Carbon Neutral DC in Europe, which is all solar panel based. We're about to do that as well in one of our US operations. We're working on other things that allow us to think about alternative pallets that eliminate the weight of wood, to a much lighter pallet that has a huge carbon reduction when you think about shipping things via the air and the carbon impact there. So, everything that we work on is really around three things; service, cost and sustainability. And our biggest objective is really taking all three of those objectives and trying to bring them closer to each other so that the decisions aren't as large against each other when you make one versus the other. That's our objective. So, how do we continue to move that ball forward, challenge the paradigms of the old, that we're so accustomed to and really move forward to changing? >> How does Coupa help with that? >> Oh, I can't say that, yeah. >> Yeah, so one of the actual dimensions, Microsoft our goal is to achieve carbon neutral by 2030. So traditionally, the trade off might be between cost and service, right? >> Okay. And now, the carbon is the most important priority. So the trade off, the balance, are between cost, service, time and carbon. So one of the great thing that Coupa can help us is in the network modeling. There is actually objective for lowering the carbon emissions. So that can be the top priority that you wanted to solve through your network modeling like in parallel to cost, to service. So you can just like very straightforwardly put more weight into carbon when you're making your decisions, like that can be a higher penalty cost when you have more carbon emissions. It's like a very straightforward way to translate the carbon goal into some quantifiable goal into the modeling and data. >> Jonathan, I'm curious from a Microsoft strategic partnership perspective, how important is it from Microsoft to partner with companies that have that strong commitment to help facilitate being carbon neutral by 2030, having a strong ESG initiative? >> It's critical. Microsoft for the most part is an outsourced supply chain in which we measure partners across the network. We have our partners run our distribution and centers, we have outsource manufacturing, we have outsourced logistics. And it's important that we're working with them about what their plans are, because they're just simply an extension of the Microsoft supply chain. >> Right. >> Right. They're not not just companies we work with, they're companies we partner with, to think about how can we change the future? What are the alternatives that we can do? How do we think about alternative fuels? How do we think about alternative shipping ways? How do we think about creating density in the network? So one of the biggest things when you really think about optimization is really around creating deensity. How do I create more with less, and make sure I'm taking, for every dollar spent, for every shipment made, I maximize it to its fullest, and leave no waste behind it? That's the goal. And so, partners challenging us is probably the most important piece because they're on the front line. They actually see our shipments, they see our loads, they see the work we're doing and how it's translating to their environment. And it's important that they give us that hard feedback back that allows us know where we're not meeting the bar. >> Got it. Cassie, you guys are giving a presentation in about a couple of hours. Talk to me about some of the things that the audience, like if you had to summarize the top three takeaways that the audience is going to learn from the top, what would they be? >> I think the first is sustainability. So we want everybody to know that this is the key mission for Microsoft. That's one of the priorities for the next eight years for Microsoft to achieve. And the second is just how Coupa can help us achieve that goal. And how do we leverage the the applications, the tools, the cutting edge technologies for us to achieve a sweet balance between sustainability and technology supplychain? >> I think one of the greatest things about conferences like this, is that Coupa is great with that customer centricity, is it the opportunity to hear from the voice of the customer? What challenges you had? Why you chose Coupa? How you resolved them? And that crystal ball that you talked about in terms of where we're going from here. I think that there's so much value. I'm sure in what you're going to share today with the audience. Jonathan, last question for you, for other folks in any industry that are about to embark on, or are in the midst of a supply chain, digital transformation, what's your advice? What recommendations would you give? >> For me, it's really about two things. First and foremost is about creating data. Focus on data, not an answer, not a conversation. What is the information that you require? And then the second piece about that is then how do you make sure you stitch it together? And how you create, whether it's manufacturing data, whether it's purchase order data, whether it's sales order data, whether it's shipment data, whatever it is, making sure that you can stitch end-to-end together, because each individual decision by itself, may be right, but could be wrong, because ultimately, it's about the decision for the whole, not the decision for the one. And then making sure you focus on the cultural change, which is around, it's just not my area, it's just not my thing, it's about the end, it's about the planet, it's about Microsoft, it's about the customer, it's about the future, and making sure you're really really focused on making that change, right? Not my change. >> Right, and Rob Bernstein even alluded to that a little bit this morning in his keynote talking about one of the things that Coupa breaks is silos. >> Yes. >> Organizations that, cause to your point, something might be really good for sales or operations, but not good for marketing or logistics, for example, need to be able to have that visibility across, but also another thing that Coupa is famous for is collaboration. >> Correct. >> Being able to enable that collaboration across lines of business, across teams, across partners. >> Yep. And an important statement of that is, when you think about change, think of it like a stream, right? Streams, they create pathways with persistence. When you believe in something and you're truly behind it, just stay the path, right? There'll be a time and a place, cause sometimes the decisions just aren't now, but they will become. There's a lot of things that, for example, myself and Cassie are constantly working on, that might not be right now, but they will be right in the future. And it takes sometimes, just the right opportunity, the right situation, but the key is making ysure you understand those things so when those opportunities present themselves, you can just step in. >> Yep. Another thing we've learned, I think in the last two years, I'm losing count, is it's not a matter of if, but when. >> Correct. >> And you can apply that general statement to pretty much anything these days. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking about Microsoft's transformation of the supply chain, the digital twin that you've created. Have a great time in your session. I'm sure folks are going to learn a lot from you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, my pleasure. For Jonathan Allen and Cassie Wang, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the the CUBE's coverage of Coupa Insp!re 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around, be right back with my next guest. (upbeat msuic)

>>Live from Stanford university on your host. Lisa Martin. My next guest joins me with many I, our corporate vice president at Microsoft, Rick Minnie. It's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having me. Tell me a little bit about your background. So you run Microsoft advertising, engineering organizations. You also manage a multi-billion dollar marketplace globally. Yes. Big responsibilities. >>A little bit >>About you and your role at Microsoft. >>So basically online advertising, you know, funds a lot of the consumer services like search, you know, feeds. And so I run all of the online advertising pieces. And so my team is a combination of machine learning in theory, software engineers, online services. So you think of you think of what needs to happen for running an online advertising ecosystem? That's billions of dollars. I have all these people on my team when I get to work with these fantastic people. So that's my >>Roles. We have a really diverse team. >>Yes. My background itself is in AI. So my PhD was in language modeling and natural language processing. That's how I got into the space. And then I did, you know, machine learning. Then I did some auctions and then I'd, you know, I basically have touched almost all pieces of the puzzle. So from, I appreciate what's required to run a business the size. And so from that perspective, you know, yeah, it is a lot of diverse people, but at the same time, I feel like I know what they do >>Right then interdisciplinary collaboration must be incredibly important and >>Powerful. It is. I mean, for machine learning engineer or machine learning scientists to be successful, when you're running a production system, they have to really appreciate what constraints are there, you know, required online. So you have to look at how much CPU you use, how much memory you need, how fast can your model inference run with your model. And so they have to work very closely with the soft, soft engineering field. But at the same time, the software engineering guys need to know that their job is not to constrain the machine learning scientists. So, you know, as the models get larger, they have to get more creative. Right. And if that balance is right, then you get a really ambitious product. If that balance is not right, then you end up with a very small micro micro system. And so my job is to really make sure that the team is really ambitious in their thinking, not always liking, pushing the borders of what can be done. >>I like that pushing the borders of what can be done. You know, we, we often, when we talk about roles in, in stammered technology, we've talked about the hard skills, but the soft skills you've mentioned creativity. I always think creativity and curiosity are two soft skills that are really important in data science and AI. Talk to me about what your thoughts are. There >>Definitely creativity, because a lot of the problems that you, you know, when you're in school, the problems you face are very theoretical problems. And when you go into the industry and you realize that you need to solve a problem using the theory you learned, then you have to either start making different kinds of assumptions or realize that some assumptions just can be made because life is messy and online. You know, users are messy. They don't all interact with your system the same way. So you get creative in what can be solved. And then what needs to be controlled and folks who can't figure that piece out, they try to solve everything using machine learning, and they become a perfectionist, but nothing ever gets done then. So you need this balance and, and creativity plays a huge role in that space. And collaboration is you're always working with a diverse group of people. So explaining the problem space to someone who's selling your product, say someone is, you know, you build this automated bidding engine and they have to take this full mouth full and sell it to a customer. You've got to give them the terminology to use, tell, explain to them what are the benefits if somebody uses that. So I, I feel people who can empathize with the fact that this has to be explained, do a lot better when they're working in a product system, you know, bringing machine learning to a production system. >>Right. There's a lot of enablement >>There. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. >>Were you always interested in, in stem and engineering and AIS from when you were small? >>Somewhat? I mean, I've been, I got to my college degree. I was very certain by that point I wanted to be an engineer and my path to AI was kind of weird because I didn't really want to do computer science. So I ended up doing electrical engineering, but in my last year I did a project on speech recognition and I got introduced to computer programming. That was my first introduction to computer programming at the end of it, I knew I was going to work in the space. And so I came to the U S with less than three or four months of a computer engineering background. You know, I barely knew how to code. I had done some statistics, but not nearly enough to be in machine learning. And, but I landed in a good place. And I came to be in Boston university and I landed in a great lab. And I learned everything on my feet in that lab. I do feel like from that point onwards, I have always been interested and I'm never satisfied with just being interested in what's hot right now. I really want to know what can be solved later in the future. So that combination, I think, you know, really keeps me always learning, growing, and I'm never happy with just what's being done. >>Right? Yeah. We here, we've been hearing a lot about that today at weds. Just the tremendous opportunities that are here, the opportunities for data science, for good drones, for good data science and AI in healthcare and in public transportation. For example, you've been involved in with winds from the beginning. So you've gotten to see this small movement grow into this global really kind of is a >>Phenomenon. It is, >>It's a movement. Yes. You talk to me about your involvement with winds from the beginning and some of the things that you're helping them do. And now, >>So I, I first met Karen and marble initially when I was trying to get students from ICME to apply for roles in Microsoft. I really thought they had the right mix of applied and research mindset and the skill sets that were coming out of ICME rock solid in their math and theoretical foundations. So that's how I got to know them. And then they were just thinking about bids at that point in time. And so I said, you know, how can I help? And so I think I've been a keynote speaker, Pam list run a workshop. And then I got involved with the woods high school volunteer effort. And I'd say, that's the most rewarding piece of my visit involvement. And so I've been with them every year. I never Ms. Woods. I'm always here. And I think it is, you know, Grace Hopper was the technology conference for women and, and it's, it's, it's an awesome conference. I mean, it's amazing to sit next to so many women engineers, but data science was a part of it, but not a critical part of it. And so having this conference, that's completely focused on data science and making it accessible. The talks are accessible, making it more personable to, to all the invitees here. I think it creates a great community. So for me, I think it's, I hope they can run this and grow this for >>Yeah. Over 200 online events this year in 60 countries, they're aiming to reach a hundred thousand people annually. It's, it's grown dramatically in a short time period. Yes, >>Absolutely. Yeah. It hasn't been that long. It hasn't been that long and every year they add something new to the table. So for this year, I mean last year I thought the high schoolers, they started bringing in the high schoolers and this year again, I thought the high school. >>Yeah, >>Exactly. And I think the mix of getting data science from across a diversity, because a lot of the conferences are very focused. Like, you know, they, they will be the focused on healthcare and data science or pure AI or pure machine learning. This conference has a mix of a lot of different elements. And so attendees get to see how it's something is being used in healthcare and how something is being used in recommendations. And I think that diversity is really valuable. >>Oh, it's hugely valuable that the thought diversity is this is probably the conference where I discovered what thought diversity was if only a few years ago and the power and the opportunities that it can unlock for people everywhere for businesses in any industry. Yes. >>I want to kind of play off one of the things you said before, you know, data science for good, the, the incredible part of data sciences, you can do good wherever you are with data science. So take online advertising, you know, we build products for all advertisers, but we quickly figured out that are really large advertisers. They have their own data science teams and they are optimizing and, you know, creating new ads and making sure the best ads are serving at all times. They have figured out, you know, they have machine learning pipelines, so they are really doing their best already. But then there's this whole tale of small advertisers who just don't have the wherewithal or the knowledge to do any of that. Now, can you make data, use data science and your machine learning models and make it accessible for that long table? Pretty much any product you build, you will have the symptom of heavy users and then the tail users. And can you create an experience that is as valuable for those tailored users as it is for the heavy users. So data science for good exists, whatever problem you're solving, basically, >>That's nice to hear. And so you're going to be participating in some of the closing remarks today. What are some of the pearls of wisdom that you're going to enlighten the audience with today? >>Well, I mean the first thing I, to tell this audiences that they need to participate, you know, in whatever they shaped form, they need to participate in this movement of getting more women into stem and into data science. And my reasoning is, you know, I joined the lab and my professor was a woman and she was very strong scientists, very strong engineer. And that one story was enough to convince me that I belong. And if you can imagine that we create thousands of these stories, this is how you create that feeling of inclusion, where people feel like they belong. Yeah. Look, just look at those other 50 people here, those other a hundred stories here. This is how you create that movement. And so the first thing I want the audience to do is participate, come back, volunteer, you know, submit papers for keynote speeches, you know, be a part of this movement. >>So that's one. And then the second is I want them to be ambitious. So I don't want them to just read a book and apply the theory. I really want them to think about what problem are they solving and could they have solved it in the, in the scale manner that it can be solved. So I'll give a few examples and problems and I'll throw them out there as well. So for instance, experimentation, one of the big breakthroughs that happened in a lot of these large companies in data science is experimentation. You can AB experiment pretty much anything. You know, we can, Google has this famous paper where they talk about how they experimented with thousands of different blues just to get the right blue. And so experimentation has been evolving and data scientists are figuring out that if they can figure out interactions between experiments, you can actually run multiple experiments on the same user. >>So at any given time, you may be subject to four or five different experiments. Now, can we now scale that to infinity so that you can actually run as many experiments as you want questions like these, you shouldn't stop with just saying, oh, I know how AB experimentation works. The question you should be asking is how many such experiments can I run? How do I scale the system? As one of the keynote speakers initially talked about the unasked questions. And I think that's what I want to leave this audience with that don't stop at, you know, answering the questions that you're asked or solving the problems. You know, of you think about the problems you haven't solved your blind spots, you know, those blind spots and that I think I want ambitious data scientists. And so that's the message I want to give this audience. >>I can feel your energy when you say that. And you're involved with, with, with Stanford program for middle school and high school girls. If we look at the data and we see, there's still only about a quarter of stem positions are filled by females, what do you see? Do you see an inspiring group of young women in those middle school and high school girls that, that you see we're, we're on trend to start increasing that percentage. >>So I had a high schooler who just went, you know, she, she, she just, she's at UCLA now shout out to her and she, but she just went through high school. And what I realized is it's the same problem of not having enough stories around you, not having enough people around you that are all echoing the sentiment for, Hey, I love math. A lot of girls just don't talk about us. Yeah. And so I think the reason I want to start in middle school and high school is I think the momentum needs to start there. Yes. Because they get to college. And actually you heard my story. I didn't know any programming until I came here and I had already finished my four years of college and I still figured it out. Right. But a lot of women lose confidence to change fields after four years of college. >>Yes. And so if you don't catch them in early and you're catching them late, then you need to give them this boost of confidence or give them that ramp up time to learn, to figure out, like, I have a few people who are joining me from pure math nowadays. And these kids, these kids come in and within six months they're off and running. So, you know, in the interview phase, people might say, oh, they don't have any coding skills. Six months later, if you interview them, they pick up coding skills. Yeah. And so if you can get them started early on, I think, you know, they don't have this crisis of confidence of moving, changing fields. That's why I feel, and I don't think we are there yet, to be honest, I don't think yet. I think >>You still think there are plenty of girls being told. Now you can't do computer science. No, you can't do physics. No, you can't do math. >>Actually. They are denying it to themselves in many cases because they say, Hey, I go to physics class and there are two boys, two girls out of 50 boys. And I don't think girls are in, you know, you get the stereotype that maybe girls are not interested in physics. And it's not about, Hey, as a girl, I'm doing really well in physics. Maybe I should take this as my career. So I do feel we need to create more resounding stories in the area. And then I think we'll drum up that momentum. That's >>A great point. More stories, more and names to success here so that she can be what she can see exactly what many it's been great having you on the program. Thank you for joining me and sharing your background and some of the pearls of wisdom that you're gonna be dropping on the audience shortly today. We appreciate your insights. Thank you. My pleasure. Who Rick, Minnie, I are. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage weds 2022. We'll be right back after a short break.

(lighthearted music) >> We're here now with Manoj Nair, who's the general manager of Metallic and Dave Totten CTO with Microsoft. And we're going to talk about some of the announcements that we heard earlier today and what Metallic and Microsoft are doing to meet customer needs around cyber threats and ensuring secure cloud data management. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you. >> Hey Manoj, let me start with you. We heard early this morning, Dave Totten was here, David Noe, talk a lot about security. Has the conversation changed, how has it changed when you talk to customers, Manoj? What's top of mind. >> Yeah, thank you, Dave. And thank you, Dave Totten. You know, great conversation earlier. Dave, you and I have talked about this in the past, right? Security long a big passion of mine. You know, having lived through nation state attacks in the past and all that. We're seeing those kinds of techniques really just getting mainstream, right? Ransomware has become a mainstream problem in the scourge in our lives. Now, when you look at it from a lens of data and data management, data protection, backup, all of this was very much a passive you know, compliance centric use case. It was pretty static you know, put it in tapes, haul it all over. And what has really changed with this ransomware and cybercrime change rate is data, which is now your most precious asset, is under attack. So now you see security teams, just like you talked with Dave Martin, from ADP earlier, they are looking for that bridge between SecurityOps and ITOps. That data management solution needs to do more. It needs to be part of an active conversation, you know? Not just, you know, recovery readiness. Can you ensure that, are you testing that, is it recoverable? That is your last mile of defense. So then you get questions like that from security teams. You get you know, the need for doing more, signals. Can I get better signals from my data management stack to tell me I might be under attack? So what we're seeing in the conversation is the need to have more active conversations around data management and the bridge between ITOps and SecurityOps is really becoming paramount for our customers. >> Yeah, Dave Totten I mean, I often say that I think data protection used to be this bolt on. Now it's a fundamental component of the digital business stack. Anything you would add to what Manoj just said. >> Yeah, I would just say exactly that. Data is an asset, right? We talked about it a lot about the competitive advantage that customers are now realizing that no longer is IT considered sort of this cost center element. We need to be able to leverage our interactions with customers, with partners, with supply chains, with manufacturers, we need to be able to leverage that to sort of create differentiation and competitive advantage in the marketplace. And so if you think about it, as that way as the fuel for economic profitability and business growth, you would do everything in your power to secure it, to support it, to make sure you had access to it, to make sure that you didn't have you know, bad intent users accessing it. And I think we're seeing that shift with customers as they think more about how to be more efficient with their investments in information technology and then how just to make sure that they protect the lifeblood of their businesses. >> Yeah, and that just makes it harder because the adversary is very capable. They're coming in through the digital supply chain. So it's complicated. And so Dave and maybe Manoj, you can comment as well after, Microsoft and Commvault, you guys have been working together for decades and so you've seen a lot of the changes, a lot of the waves. So I'm curious as to how the partnership has evolved. You've got a recent strategic announcement around Azure with Metallic. Dave, take us through that. >> Yeah, I mean you know, Commvault and Microsoft aren't newlyweds, we've been together now for 25 plus years. We send each other anniversary gifts, all that good stuff. And you know, listen, there's a couple things that are key to our relationship. One, we started believing in each other's engineering organizations, right? We hire the best, we train and retain the best. And we both put a lot of investment behind our infrastructure and the ability to work together to really innovate at real time, rapid speeds. Two, we use Commvault products so you know, there's no greater I think, advantage that if a major supplier or platform partner like Microsoft uses your products. We've used it for years in our Xbox group to support and store the data for a hundred million XBox live users. And we're very avid with it with our data centers, our access to Azure data centers, our Microsoft office products. And so we use Commvault services as well. And through that mutual relationship you know, obviously Commvault has seen the ins and outs of what's great about our services and where we're continuing to build and invest. And so they've been able to really you know, dedicate a team of engineers and architects to support all that Azure as a platform, as a service can provide. And then how to take the best of those features and build it into their own first party products. I think when you get close enough to somebody for so many years right, 25 plus years, you figure out what they're great at and you learn to take those advantages like Commvault has with Microsoft and Azure and use it to your advantage, right? To build the best in class product that Metallic actually is. And you're right, the announcement this week it feels culminating, it feels like it's a major milestone in first off, industry innovation but also in our relationship. But it's really not that big of a step change from what we've been doing and building and innovating on for the past you know, 25 years. >> Yeah so Manoj, that's got to be music to your ears. Because you come at it with this rich data protection stack, Microsoft there's so many capabilities. One of the courses, which is Azure. It's like the secret weapon, it's become the secret weapon. How do you think about that relationship, Manoj? >> Absolutely Dave said it right. We are strong partners, 25 years, founding in Western Commvault, mutual customers, partnership. You know, really when you look at it from a customer lens, what our customers have appreciated, over the last year of that strengthening of that partnership basically the two pillars of Commvault the leader of data protection, or you know, for the last 25 years, 10 out of 10 in the Gartner MQ comes together with Azure, the enterprise secure cloud leader in creating Metallic. Metallic, now with 1,000 plus customers around the world, there's a reason they trust it. It's now become part of how they protect their Office 365. No workload left behind, which is very unique, you know? So what we have architected together and now we're taking it to the next phase, our joint partners, right? Our joint customers, that those are some of the things that are really changing in terms of how we're accelerating the partnership. >> Manoj, you and I have talked about ransomware a lot, we did a special segment a while back on that. The adversary is very capable. And you know, I put in the chat this morning, at Commvault Connections, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomwarist. You can go on the dark web, you can buy ransomware as a service. All you need is access to a server and you can stick you know, some malware on it. So you know, it's very, very dangerous times. What is it about data management as a service that makes it a good fit right now from a customer perspective to solve this problem? >> Absolutely. Bad guys, real life, or in the cyber world, they have some techniques. First thing they do in a ransomware is you go after the exits. What are the exit doors? Now you back up data, they know that that backup data can be used to recover. So they go and try to defeat the backup products in that environment. That's number one game that changes with data management as a service. Your data management data protection environment is not inside your environment. Chances to do two simultaneous penetrations to try and anything is possible. But now you've got an additional layer of recovery readiness because that control plane secured on top of Microsoft, Azure, 3,500 security professionals, FedRAMP high standard only data management and service entity to get it. As one of our customers said, "A unicorn in the wild", that is what you have as your data management environment. So if something bad happens, worst case, this environment is ready. Our enterprise customers are starting to understand that this is becoming a big reason to shift to this model. You know, then it's okay if you're not ready to shift the entire model, you're given the easy button of just air gapping of your data. So if you're an existing Commvault customer, appliance, software, anything, secure air gap Metallic cloud storage on hardened Azure Blob protected jointly by us, start there. And finally things like active directory. Talk about shutting the exit path, right? Take that down, your entire environment is not accessible. We make it easy for you to recover that. And because of our partnership, we're able to get it for free to every one of our customers. Go protect your active directory environment using (speaks faintly) kind of three big reasons that we're seeing that entire conversation shift in the minds of our customers. >> Yeah, thank you for that. That's a no brainer. Dave, how do Metallic and Microsoft fit together? Where's the you know, kind of value chain if you will, when it comes to dealing with cyber protection or ransomware recovery, how are your customers thinking about that? >> Yeah well, first it's a shared responsibility model, right? When you've got the best in class platform like Azure with built in protections, scalable data centers all over the global footprint. But then also we spend 10 plus billion dollars a year in security and defense and our own data center environments, right? And so I always find it inspiring when companies believe that their investments in security and platform protection is going to do the job. That's true, that used to be true. Now with Azure, you can take advantage of this global scale and secure you know, footprint of investment that a company like Microsoft has done to really set your heart at ease. Now, what do you do with your actual applications and who has access to it, and how do you actually integrate like Manoj was talking about down to the individual or the individual account that's trying to get access to your environment? Well, that's where Commvault comes in at that point of attack or at that point of an actual data element. So if you've got that environment within Commvault system backed by the umbrella of the Azure security infrastructure, that's how the two sort of compliment each other. And again, it's about shared responsibility, right? We want every customer that leverages Azure to make sure that they know it's secure, it's protected. We've got a mechanism to protect your best interests. Commvault has that exact same mission statement, right? To make sure that every single element that comes into contact with their products is protected, is secure, is trustworthy. You know, I got a long lesson, long, long time ago, early in my career that says you can goof up a product feature, you can goof up the color scheme on a website but if you lose a customer's data or somebody trust, you never get it back. And so we don't take our relationships with customers very lightly. And I think our committed and joint responsibility to delight and support our customers is what has led to this partnership being so successful over the past couple of decades. >> Great, thank you, Dave. And so Manoj, I was saying earlier that data protection has become a fundamental component of your digital business stack. So that sounds good but what should customers be doing to make data protection and data management, a business value driver versus just a liability or exposure or cost factor that has to be managed? What do you think about that? >> No, and then David added earlier, right? It's no longer a liability. In fact it is you know, someone said data is the new oil, right? It is your crown jewels. You got to to start with thinking about an active data protection strategy, not you know, thinking about passive tools and looking at it in terms of a compliance or I need to keep the data around. So that's the number one part is like, how do I have something that protects all my workloads and everyone has a different pace of transformation. So unless you know, you're a company that just got created, you have environments that are on-prem, on the edge, in CoLOS, public cloud. You got you know, SaaS applications, all of those have a critical data that needs to come together. Look for breadth of data protection, something that doesn't leave your workloads behind. Siloed solutions, create a Swiss cheese that create light for the attackers to go after those gaps. You don't want to look for that, you know? And then finally trust. I mean you know, what are the pillars of trust that the solution is built on? You got to figure out how your teams can get to doing more productive things rather than patching systems. You know, making sure that the infrastructure is up. As Dave said you know, we invest a ton jointly in securing this infrastructure. Trust that and leverage that as a differentiator rather than trying to duplicate all of that. So those are some of the you know, key things. And you know, look for players who understand that hybrid is here, give you different entry points. Don't force you know, the single single mode of operation. Those are the things we have built to make it easier for our customers to have a more active data management strategy. >> Dave, Todd, I'll give you the last word we got to go but I want to hit on this notion of zero trust. It used to be a buzz word now it's mainstream. There's so much that this discussion, is it Prudentialist access? Every access is treated maybe as privileged but what does zero trust mean to you in less than a minute? >> Yeah you know, trust but verify, right? Every interaction you have with your infrastructure, with your data, with your applications and you do it at the identity level. We care about identity and we know that that's the core of how people are going to try and access infrastructure. Used to be protect the perimeter. The analogy I always use is we have locks on our houses. Now the bad guys are everywhere. They're getting inside our houses and they're not immediately taking things, they're hiding in the closet and they're popping out three weeks later before anybody knows it. And so being able to actually manage, measure, protect every interaction you have with your infrastructure and do it at the individual or application level, that's what zero trust is all about. So don't trust any interaction, make sure that you pass that authorization through with every ask. And then make sure you protect it from the inside out. >> Great stuff. Okay guys, we've got to leave it there. Thanks so much for the time today. All right next, right after a short break, we're headed into the CXL Power Panel to hear what's on the minds of the executives as it relates to data management in the digital era. Keep it right there, you're watching theCUBE. (lighthearted music)

(upbeat music) >> Thanks Adam from the studio. Dave, with the next interview, I had a great chance to sit down with Pete, from Microsoft Azure. Talk about 5G and all the advances in the innovation around Silicon and what's coming around under the hood. Obviously Microsoft big hyperscaler, top three cloud player. Let's hear from Pete my conversation and we'll come right back. (upbeat music) Well, we'll come back to the cubes coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021, we're onsite in-person and virtual. It's a hybrid event this year. It's in-person for the first time, since the winter of 2019 lots been passed, a lot's happened and theCube's got to cover it. Our next guest is Pete Bernard, senior director, Silicon and telecom at Azure edge devices, platform and services at Microsoft. Pete, thanks for coming on theCube for our remote coverage. Thanks for coming on. We'll be there live and as well as with the remote community. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, no, that's great to be here. I'm coming here from sunny Bellevue, Washington. I wish a wish I was going to be in Barcelona this year, but like, as you mentioned, I think the last time I was in Barcelona was 2019. So a lot has happened since then. Right? >> Well, let's get into it. First of all, we'll see you on the interwebs and the community, but let, let's get the content storyline after the number one story at mobile world. Congress is the rise of the modern developer overlay on top of this new infrastructure, 5g, what is the edge, super edge, AI edge, whatever we want to call it. It is an enabler. Okay. And it's also leveraging the assets of, of these telecom infrastructures and certainly the pandemic we've had great success, nothing crashed. It saved us. So what's your, what's your view on this? This is the big story. It's the most important story? What's your take? >> Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, a lot has happened and there's been a lot of advancements in this area and I think, you know, the part of what's happened with the pandemic is companies have really accelerated their strategies in this area. In terms of, you know, we have tons of commercial customers that are trying to solve really difficult problems using AI and edge and, and 5g now. So the demand is tremendous and the technology has really advanced quite a bit. And you know, we're, my team is specifically focused on sort of the intersection of 5g edge and AI, and it's sort of bringing together these kinds of existing credible technology advances and it's unlocking some amazing new scenarios and business models for, for customers and partners. For sure. >> So let's get it under the hood a little bit and talk about some of the technical issues. Obviously 5g is enabling a lot of commercial benefits cloud providers like Microsoft Azure is having great edge capabilities now with, with bringing the cloud to the edge, which opens up the obvious gamers Mehta versus AI, AR VR kind of things, low latency, applications, cars, and all that good stuff, all the data coming in and then new use cases. So it's a data problem. It's a typology challenge. It's a new architecture, unpack that for us. What, where are we in this? So. >> So I mean, as you mentioned, I mean, it was kind of an infinite set of problems to be solved. And one of the things that we found was that there was actually a lot of friction out there. It's almost like so many different partners and typologies and ways to put things together. Quite often, we get with a commercial customer and they're like, look, we just need to solve this particular problem in retail or healthcare energy. And so one of the things that we introduced as part of our kind of Azure portfolio is something called Azure percept, which is an end to end system for edge AI development and deployment that now works over 5g and L PWA as well. And so a lot of what we're trying to do as a platform company is help customers and partners kind of expedite and speed that development and deployment of solutions. Because like I said, there's no shortage of demand, but they're quite complex. And as you mentioned, you could have, you know, on-prem solutions, you could have hybrid solutions that talk to on-prem hardware and then go to the cloud. You can go direct to the cloud. But the question is like, how do you put these things together in a secure way? And it get an ROI quickly out of your edge AI deployments. And that's been kind of an interesting challenge. And I think when I talked to a lot of partners, telco partners, especially Silicon partners, were all struggling with how do we expedite, expedite? Because you know, the sooner we can get people to deploy and solve their problems, obviously, you know, the sooner they're happy, the sooner we all get paid. Right? And so that's one of the things we have to be careful of is with all the new technology, how do we really sort of titrate down to, you know, what does it take to actually get things from a POC to deployment as quickly as possible? >> And one of the big things is happening is not seeing the developer ecosystem is coming hardcore into the telco cloud, whatever you want to call it. And it's interesting, you know, the word operators is used a lot, the carriers, the operators, you don't hear that in it and say, you don't say that's the operator, the operators writes it department. So you have cloud native and this operating cultures coming together, dev ops dev sec ops coming to what is a carrier grade operating model, which is like a steady build solid foundation. That's what they expect. So you kind of have this classic OT it collision. And this has been talked about in the edge. What's different though, because now you've got to move faster. You got to have a lot of it like cloud scale with automation and AI at the same time I need full Bulletproof operations. Yeah. >> And so it's, you know, we're trying to expose a consistent developer fabric, you know, to our community. I mean, Microsoft's got millions of developers around the world using lots of, lots of tool, tool chains, and frameworks. And we want to sort of harness the power of that whole developer community to bring workloads and applications onto the telco network, right. In, in environments that they're familiar with. And we're seeing also sort of, you mentioned sort of colliding worlds in the edge world. There's kind of traditional embedded developers that are building cameras and devices and gateways. And then there's a lot of data science, AI developers as well. And what we're trying to do is sort of help both communities sort of learn these skills so that, you know, you have developers that are enabled to do, you know, AI workloads and scenarios and all of the business logic around those things and develop it in an environment, whether it's cloud-based or edge based that they're familiar with. And, you know, so therefore a lot of the complexities of the teleco network itself get sort of obfuscated or abstracted for them. So the developer doesn't have to become a telco expert, right. To build a 5g based camera system for their retail stores. Right. And so that's, that's exciting when we start to merge some of these communities together. >> Yeah. So what would be your message to the operators this year? I mean, obviously the edge is not something you need to educate people on, but they are trying to figure out how to, you know, swap the engine of the airplane out at 35,000 feet, as I say, they got, they want to innovate and this year what's your message. Yeah. >> I mean, there's kind of two things going on. One is yes. I think we're, we are deeply involved helping telcos Cloudify their network and take advantage of 5g and virtualization. And, you know, we have recent acquisitions as a metal switching affirmed and hold that whole thing. So that's, that's that chunk of work that's ongoing. I think the other thing that's happening is really thinking about telcos. We're seeing as a hunger for solutions. And so telcos thinking of themselves as solution providers, not just connectivity providers and, you know, getting into that mindset of saying, we're going to come in and work with this city or this, you know, big retailer and we're going to help solve the problems for them. And we love working with partners like that, that are actually delivering solutions as opposed to pieces of technology. >> What solutions do you think Pete are showing the most promise for helping the telco industry digitally transformed? >> Well, I think on the NGI space, there's a couple of big verticals. I mean, you know, obviously places like agriculture are huge, you know, where you need a wide deployments. We're seeing a lot of areas in around retail, you know, retail environments when I would have leveraged like low latency 5g. One of the pieces of feedback we heard was a lot of retailers actually want less hardware in their physical store and they want to leverage 5g more to get back to the cloud. And then we're seeing, you know, energy sectors, you know, and mining and other kind of difficult to reach areas where you can leverage ciliary networks. So a lot of these verticals are, you know, turning onto the fact that they could get some of their conductivity and edge AI solutions combined together and do some amazing things. >> Right. You just made me think of a question while I got you. I got to ask this because you know, you've brought up 5g and back haul, you know, and people in the, in this business always know backhaul is always the problem. We all know we've been to a concert or a game where we've got multiple bars on wifi, but nothing's loading. Right. So we all know, right. We've seen that that's back haul. That's a choke point. If 5g is going to give me more back haul to essentially another exchange, how has the core of the internet evolved? Because as I started poking around and research and there's more direct connects now, there's not many exchanges. It used to be, we had my west and my east, those are now gone. I'm like, what's going on in the backbone? Does that simple? Is it better or worse? Is that still a good thing? >> Well, yeah. One of the exciting things around kind of the virtualization of what's going on with networking is that we're able to partner with telcos to sort of extend the Azure footprint to help with some of those congestion points, right? So we can, we can bring heavy edge equipment, pretty darn close to where the action is, and actually have direct connections into teleco networks to help them sort of expand their footprint, you know, even farther out to the edge and they can leverage our hyperscaler to, to do that. So that that's a benefit of one of the architectural improvements of 5G around virtualization. >> That's awesome. And I'm looking forward to following up on that great point. And I think it's, it sells a digital divide problem. That's been going on for over a decade, 15, 20 years, this digital divide. Now you got city revitalizations going on. You have, I mean, just the, just the, the digital revitalization in global communities is everywhere. And I think, I think this is going to be an influx point. That's not yet written about in the press now, but I think it's going to be very clear. So, so with all that, I got to ask you the importance of how you guys see an ecosystem for this transformation, because it used to be the telcos ruled the world, and now it's not going that way. They still have a footprint. I mean, everyone, the rising tide helps everybody, as they say, what's the importance of a strong ecosystem in order to drive this nutrient? >> Well, you know, it's definitely a team sport. It's definitely a team sport. And, and you know, Microsoft's been a big partner company for decades, and I think it's something like $8, a part of revenue for every dollar of revenue from the Microsoft generate. So we're heavily invested in our device, builder partners, our telco partners, the ISV community. And, you know, I think what we're trying to do is work with telcos to sort of bring those communities together, to solve these kinds of problems that customers are having. So yeah, it's definitely a team sport. And like I said, the new entrance with some really innovative software platforms, it's an opportunity for telcos, I think, to sort of reinvent and to kind of rethink about how they want to be more agile and more competitive. Again, this will be businesses. >> Okay, great. And have you on, I got it. I got ask you, we've talked about the most important story, obviously 5g edge in AI. I think you nailed it. You're you're in this cross hairs of probably one of the most exciting areas in the tech industry as distributed computing goes that last mile, so to speak pun intended, what, but what's, in your opinion, the most important story that not many people are talking about that should be talking about, what do you think is something that's being written about, but to talk about, but it's super important that that needs to be true. >> Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, a lot of the marketing and talk about 5g is around phones, people talking about their speed on phones. And I think we're finally getting past the discussion of 5g on phones and talking about 5g for like more MTM communications and more, more kind of connecting really trillions of things together. And then that enabled me to is going to be a big, big deal moving forward. And I think that's, we'll start to see probably more coverage of that moving forward. We're on the inside of the industry. So we kind of know it, but I think on the outside of the industry, when people think 5g, they still think phones. And then hopefully that becomes, there's more of a story around all the other pieces being connected with 5g. >> Yeah. And I got to ask you about two quick things before we go open source, openness, interoperability, and security. What, how would you, what's your opinion on those two pillars? >> So I think security is kind of foundational for what we're we've been doing at Microsoft for a long time, whether it's Azure sphere that we're doing for end to end, you know, edge security or any of our security offerings that we have from services perspective. So we're trying to like with Azure percept, we actually build in like TPM encryption of AI models from edge to cloud, as an example of that. So security really is foundational to all of the stuff that we need to do. It cannot be something that you do later or add on it has to be designed in. And I think from an open source perspective, I mean, whether it's our, you know, stewardship of GitHub or the involvement in open source communities, you know, we're, we're totally excited about all the innovation that's happening there and you know, you got to let people participate. And in fact, one of the cool things that's been happening is the amount of developer reach in areas where maybe there isn't, you know, like we've had our build conferences and other Microsoft events. It enables everyone to participate virtually no matter where they are in the world, even if they can't get a ticket to Redmond Washington, and you can still be part of the developer community and learn online and be part of that. >> I think this whole embed developer market's going to come back in and massive volumes of new people as Silicon becomes important. And of course, I can't leave you without asking the Silicon angle question for our team. Silicon is becoming a competitive advantage for whether it's acceleration, offload and or core things, whether it's instance related or use case related, what's the future of Silicon and the telecom and cloud in general. >> For mine. Yeah. So I mean, the advances happening in the Silicon space are fantastic. Whether it's like process advances down to like five nanometers and below. So you're talking about, you know, much lower power consumption, much higher density, you know, packaging and, you know, AI acceleration built in as well as all these other, you know, containerized security things. So that's being driven by a lot by consumer markets, right? So more powerful PCs and phones. And that's also translating into the cloud and for some of the heavy infrastructure. So the leaps and bounds we're seeing even between now and the last MWC in person in 2019 in Silicon has been amazing. And that's going to unblock, you know, all kinds of workloads that could be done at the edge as well as incredible high-performance stuff to be done in the cloud. That's pretty exciting. >> Peter Love that word unblocked, because I think it's going to unblock them that big, you know, rock in the river. It's holding the water back. I think it's going to unleash creativity, innovation, computer science engineering down from Silicon to the modern application developer. Amazing opportunity. I think the edge is going to be the, an awesome area to innovate on. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Sounds good. Thanks for having me. >> People in our senior director, silica telecom as your edge devices for platform services at Microsoft, a lot going on big cloud player, hyperscaler at the edge. This is the final area. In my opinion, that's called the accident habits going to be great innovation. It's part of the cloud cloud is creating massive change in telecom. We've got to cover here in the queue. Thanks for watching. Okay, Dave, that was a great interview with Pete Bernard, senior director, Silicon telecom, Azure edge devices, platform, and services. Microsoft's got all those long titles in the, in the thing, but Silicon is a key thing. You heard my interview wide ranging conversation, obviously with that kind of pedigree and expertise. He's pretty strong, but he, at the end there a little gym on the Silicon. Yeah. Okay. Because that is going to be a power source. You you've been reporting on this. You've been doing a lot of breaking analysis. Microsoft's a hyperscaler they're they're the second player in cloud, Amazon. Number one, Microsoft number two, Google number three, Microsoft. They didn't really say anything. They have something Amazon has got grab a ton, but big directional signal shift there. >> Well, I think it was interesting. It was a great interview by the way, and the things that struck me pizza, and they're focused on the intersection of 5g edge and AI. So AI is all about data-driven workloads. If you look at AI today, most of the AI in the enterprise is done in the cloud and it's modeling, but the future of AI is going to be inferencing at the edge in real time. That's where the real expenses today. And that's where you need new computing architectures. And you're right. I've written about this one of my last breaking analysis on AWS, a secret weapon, and that secret weapon is a new computing architecture. That's not based on traditional x86 architectures. It's based on their own design, but based on arm, because arm is higher performance, lower cost, better price, performance, and way cheaper. And so I guarantee you based on what you just said that, well, Amazon clearly has set the direction with nitro and graviton and, and, and, you know, gravitate on to Microsoft is I think following that playbook. And it's interesting that Pete has Silicon in his title and telecom and an edge they're going after that because it doesn't require new low powered architectures that are going to blow away anything we've ever seen on x86. >> Yeah. I mean, I think that's a killer point. You and I have been covering the enterprise, the old guard rack and stack the boxes. Amazon was early on that clearly winning low power, high density looks like a consumer, like feel in cloud scale, changes the game on economics. And then he also teased out if you squint, there's a lot of stuff to decode. We're going to unpack that video and write probably six or five blog posts there, but he said, 5g is going to change the direct connect. They're already doing it. Microsoft's putting that to the edge, that right in the same playbook as AWS, right on the almost right on the number, put the edge, make it powerful, direct connects connectivity. >> We've seen this before. The consumer piece is key. The consumer leads, we know this and the consumer apple is leading in things like AI and, and Tesla is leading at the edge. That's where you have to look for the innovation. That's going to trickle into the enterprise. And so in the cloud guys, I kicked the hyperscale. You and Sergeant Joe Hall talked about this at the startup showcase that we did was that the cloud guys, the hyperscalers, and a really strong position for the edge. >> I got to tell you, we are on this go to the siliconangle.com. Obviously that's our website, the cube.net. We are reporting on this. It's very nuanced point. But if you look at the cloud players, you can see the telco digital revolution telco. Dr. Is a digital revolution back to you, Adam, in the studio for more coverage, we'll be back at the desk shortly.

(upbeat music) >> Thanks so much, and we're back here live. Live, I love saying that, at cloud city, at Mobile World Congress. Barcelona at the Fira. It's just been crazy here all week. We've been going wall to wall coverage. Am really excited to have John Savill here, as a principal cloud solutions architect at Microsoft. John, welcome to Barcelona, man. Come on in the cube. >> Oh yeah, thank you for having me. I'm not quite getting that Barcelona vibe here, but seems great. >> Well, you were just tell you look great. You just did an iron man up in Idaho, so awesome. Congratulations on completing that and many more in your future, I'm sure. You have a really interesting background. You know, in addition to your amazing cardiovascular capabilities. As a cloud architect, you've got a long history, 20 plus year history, you know, digging in at Microsoft. In your spare time you write books on architecture and you've got a great YouTube channel, a lot of subscribers. Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so it really started out 25 years ago. I was playing around with windows and technology and I just tried to share information. So I created a website artifact.com and I wrote magazine articles. And then people asked me to write some books and it's really evolved from there. And the most recent thing is actually the YouTube and I really enjoy doing the videos. It's a lot more rapid in terms of creating the content and sharing it, whereas the book takes six months. You'd write the book and then with technology moving as fast as it is, especially the cloud, you write a book on the cloud and then it's published and it's out on date. And so now this ability to create the content and get it to people a few minutes later, it's just phenomenal. So it's my hobby and my passion. And it's the best of both worlds for me. >> I love a CICD of books. Okay, Let's get into it. We've been talking all week about and actually drawing a lot of parallels with the traditional enterprise IT business and what's happening in Telco In one stop I just talking about the shifts in responsibilities for architects and the organizational roles, when you go from, you know, on-prem, everything's inside of a virtual machine, when you go to the cloud, there's a lot more optionality. As you just pointed out, things are a lot faster. What have you seen in your experience what's different? What should we be thinking about? >> Yeah, so exactly, as you said, it on premise really everything is a virtual machine. It's an OS that you have to manage, like the thing about the patching, the security, the policy. And then I have to put things inside this virtual machine, but that's my unit of work. Some coming to the site and look at containers on premises. And then they struggle with managing one even orchestrator. So I'm managing Kuberneters and ITs and there's work there. When you move to the cloud, you have all these other types of service. You think about serverless kind of at an end of a spectrum where, hey, I just have some code. I want to run based on some event, maybe a schedule, maybe a web hook, some trigger, some event happens. And I only pay for when it's doing work. But what I care about is my code or my focus is this is my code. I don't care about any of the other stuff that makes it work. I just can focus on my code, but you still have the options. I can do containers. I can do virtual machines if that's what I want to do. But my responsibility can really laser focus just on the business value. Generally as a company, I don't really care about managing an OS or patching, I want to see what differentiates my business from someone else. And when I moved to the cloud, I can shift my focus to just that business value and let the cloud vendor take care of the responsibility of keeping the things running, enables me to shift and just focus on value, which is key. >> And as a cloud vendor, that allows you to price by consumption in a very transparent way, and as a customer, now I know what I'm paying for and I can align that investment as you were just pointing out with the business value. >> Oh, absolutely. Right, so again, on premises, we have bits of equipment. We have this server, with memory and CPU, and generally we have different usage. We have peaks and we have lows. We have the same bit of hardware I'm paying for all of the time, we have disaster recovery. I'm paying for that all of the time. If I have customers all over the world, well, speed of light is speed of light. I have to wrap boxes all over the world in the cloud. I can have services dynamically scale based on the need, based on the work coming in. I can scale the amount of resource% I have available to meet that. So I'm optimizing my costs to only pay for what I actually need at any given moment. And of course we have regions all over the world. So suddenly now I can be super close to my customers. So its right, it completely changes how the companies can think about spending the money to only spend what they have to spend on what they want to spend it on. >> Yeah so the last decade clearly the aha moment for enterprise tech, just in terms of really understanding those benefits. And we saw it, you know, it actually first hit right around the financial crisis. When you know, all the CFOs said, "hey, shift your CapEx to OPEX immediately. And then we came out of that downturn and people said, "hey, this stuff, this cloud stuff actually is really good. Let's start to really change our business models around it." And, and there's a lot of relevance for Telco here. And you've talked about cloud as a, a flat layer, three network, what do you mean by that? >> Yes, if you think about on premises, you have bits of wire. Now that might be copper wire, it might be fiber, but you have these bits of wire that connects stuff. And I can think about connecting different bits of staff, to different network cards to enable me to separate systems and how they can communicate to each other and segregate. So that's how I've always thought about on premise is that why I separate stuff. A little bits of wire connecting different bits of network card. Well in the cloud, you don't have that. It's all software defined networking. If I think about a construct where I put my resources like a virtual network, it's just an IP of the layer three network there are no bits of wire. I can plug into different places. There are no different physical network cards. So we have to shift our thinking, and it can be very difficult. If I'm used to being an on-prem network admin, I'm used to the idea of the lines and cables and multiple nicks with different bits of copper plugged into them. When I go to the cloud, I have to shift that and think it is this flat layer three network. And when I want to segment things, now it's software defined networking walls, networks security groups, maybe botched appliances that can inspect the traffic. But it's a huge shift in thinking to how we now segregate and control how that networking actually functions. And of course, if you then want to extend that to hybrid connectivity, well, how does that then map to why my on-prem network? And I want to extend that to make it completely seamless into the cloud. >> Yeah, I don't want to come back to that, but I want to ask you about some of the organizational roles. 'Cause you've been at this for a couple of decades. So you've seen, you know, you remember the days of when you know, the expertise in managing a LAN a report was, you know, highly valued. It's not anymore. And so your colleagues, your peers in the industry, the architects that are your customers, they have to reinvent themselves. And that that's really now beginning to happen in Telco. So I wonder if you could talk about your thoughts, how you're thinking about cloud in telecom. >> Yeah, so I think what's happening is you still need skills. What shifts is, what is the type of skills you talked about LANs and managing storage. Well, you don't manage LANs anymore, but in the cloud, there's different types of storage service. There's different performance characteristics. IOPS throughput capacity. So we have to shift how we actually think about those skillings so I still need to architect accordingly. It's only to make sure I have the right characteristics, that it's just a different unit of work. I'm working with different tools now. And I think from a kind of telco perspective, they're really looking now, well, how can we leverage the cloud, Telcos in particular, have a huge pressure around very low latency. They have to be close to their customers. They deliver critical services. You can think about emergency services. They have to have super high availability. That's when you start moving to the cloud, they can now embrace the fact that well cloud has these various constructs like different physical structures within independent power calling communications. They have different regions, so I can be close my customers and kind of replicate between them. Through the Telco, you have to kind of firstly think about, well, okay, I still need to adhere to all of these core requirements. That quality of service, giving my customers a great experience, but now we have these different tools available in how we can actually deliver that. I think also a big shift is from a security perspective. I think especially Telcos love the idea of the network. The network is the be all and end all of security. When you start using the cloud network is still super important, but identity becomes this huge factor as well, because now I don't have this moat around my physical box. That copper wire doesn't have this disconnect. I'm in the cloud as so now we think about, well, how does the identity play into actually securing our resources? Because now we're going to have all these different cloud services that are going to talk to each other. We need to do that in a secure way. So the identity becomes this much bigger part of my architecture networks still super important, but now identity bumps up there as well. And I think that that's a key thing for Telcos is that there's a shift there. >> Yeah, well on speaking of shifts, a big conversation and Theme CubeCon this year was the shift left with security and designing security in. And really when you think about infrastructure as code, the programmable network, and you combine that with the cloud, I mean, Microsoft has gone through the greatest transformation of any tech company in the history of tech. And it did so with a cloud first mentality. And now you see that cloud expanding. It's clearly on prem you're bringing that you're connecting those, but now the edge. 5g networks and the it's very, you know, super exciting, you know, new compute architectures and new programming models. So this you're essentially building this abstraction layer that developers can really take advantage of having consistency across all those physical locations, really hiding the underlying complexity. I wonder if you could comment on that. >> Not, exactly. You're a 100% correct. So right Azure was a cloud service. So we had this cloud and we had services operating in that cloud, app services, data services, machine learning but you still have requirements for on-premises components. You talk about the edge. Well, hey, I may be, I'm using a private wireless network. I have my RAD, I have the core kind of packet switching components. Well, I still want things on premises then I need compute, I need workers running on my edge, close to where the data's being generated IOT sensors. What Azure has is yes, it has the public cloud services. Then it has things like Azure like edge, Azure stack hub, Azure like HCI that let me actually have things on premises in different form factors. But the can now run consistently like Azure services. I can manage them through Azure services, policy, security constructs, identity constructs, and then with things like if I have Kubernetes any kind of Kubernetes CNCF-compliant, I can actually now sync Azure arc, manage it through the cloud and I can deploy SQL manage instance, Postgres hyper-scale, machine learning, app services, serverless functions now running on-prem. So as a developer, as an architect, I create my solution, but now I can run it in the cloud, I can run it on premises. I don't have to make that conscious decision and do things differently. If my requirements change, I can move or do hybrid. So it really is a game changer. The customer gets the choice. I can leverage these technologies. I can write code and architect solutions and then run it where makes the most sense for me. >> Yeah, and we just got a couple of minutes here, just as we saw new applications emerge in the cloud, we're going to see new applications emerge at the edge. The developers will win the edge, I've said it many times. I'll give you the last thoughts, John. >> No, I just think it's a, it's an amazing, exciting time. I mean, you talked about kind of the whole shift left more and more companies are moving into kind of the whole infrastructures code and the dev ops models. And now we see security embedded all the way at the start of our pipeline. But I really just think this is the time now as a customer, as a Telco, you do have this fantastic set of capabilities available to you in the cloud, but you're always going to have, I think that on-premise is component as well. So you don't have to compromise. I don't have to say, well, I'd love to use this service, but wow, I had this anchor or I had this requirement on prem. I can use the same services. You have that complete choice. You can operate in the same way, the same pipelines, the same dev ops, the same security and one where it makes the most sense for you. I mean, it's a fantastic time. >> Well, John, thanks so much for virtually coming into Barcelona. We've got this great hybrid event, good luck in your career and in your Ironman competitions, all the best to you. Thank you. >> Thank you for having me, the pleasure. >> It's been our pleasure. So we're here, live at the, the Fira in Barcelona. We're in Cloud City. I'll tell you, I'll set it up. It's not like jammed packed where you can't move, you know, good thing we're in, still in the COVID, but it's like the post isolation economy here, but we're really excited to be sharing with you. We're going to go back to the studio to Adam Burns right now.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of dr khan 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube. We're here with Amanda Silver, corporate vice president, product developer division at Microsoft. Amanda, Great to see you you were on last year, Dr khan. Great to see you again a full year later were remote. Thanks for coming on. I know you're super busy with build happening this week as well. Thanks for making the time to come on the cube for Dr khan. >>Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm joining you like many developers around the globe from my personal home office, >>developers really didn't skip a beat during the pandemic and again, it was not a good situation but developers, as you talked about last year on the front lines, first responders to creating value quite frankly, looking back you were pretty accurate in your prediction, developers did have an impact this year. They did create the kind of change that really changed the game for people's lives, whether it was developing solutions from a medical standpoint or even keeping systems running from call centres to making sure people got their their their goods or services and checks and and and kept sanity together. So. >>Yeah absolutely. I mean I think I think developers you know get the M. V. P. Award for this year because you know at the end of the day they are the digital first responders to the first responders and the pivot that we've had to make over the past year in terms of supporting remote telehealth, supporting you know online retail, curbside pickup. All of these things were done through developers being the ones pushing the way forward remote learning. You know my kids are learning at home right behind me right now so you might hear them during the interview that's happening because developers made that happen. >>I don't think mom please stop hogging the band with, they've got a gigabit. Stop it. Don't be streaming. My kids are all game anyway, Hey, great to have you on and you have to get the great keynote, exciting to see you guys continue the collaboration with Docker uh with GIT hub and Microsoft, A great combination, it's a 123 power punch of value. You guys are really kind of killing it. We heard from scott and dan has been on the cube. What's your thoughts on the partnership with the developer division team at Microsoft with Doctor, What's it all about this year? What's the next level? >>Well, I mean, I think, I think what's really awesome about this partnership is that we all have, we all are basically sharing a common mission. What we want to do is make sure that we're empowering developers, that we're focused on their productivity and that we're delivering value to them so they can do their job better so that they can help others. So that's really kind of what drives us day in and day out. So what we focus on is developer productivity. And I think that's a lot of what dana was talking about in her session, the developer division. Specifically, we really try to make sure that we're improving the state of the art from modern developers. So we want to make sure that every keystroke that they take, every mouse move that they make, it sounds like a song but every every one of those matter because we want to make sure that every developers writing the code that only they can write and in terms of the partnership and how that's going. You know my team and the darker team have been collaborating a ton on things like dr desktop and the Doctor Cli tool integrations. And one of the things that we do is we think about pain points and various workflows. We want to make sure that we're shaving off the edges of all of the user experience is the developers have to go through to piece all of these applications together. So one of the big pain points that we have heard from developers is that signing into the Azure cloud and especially our sovereign clouds was challenging. So we contributed back to uh back to doctor to actually make it easier to sign into these clouds. And so dr developers can now use dr desktop and the Doctor Cli to actually change the doctor context so that its Azure. So that makes it a lot easier to connect the other. Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, I was just >>going to say, I love the reference of the police song. Every breath you take, every >>mouth moving. Great, >>great line there. Uh, but I want to ask you while you're on this modern cloud um, discussion, what is I mean we have a lot of developers here at dr khan. As you know, you guys know developers in your ecosystem in core competency. From Microsoft, Kublai khan is a very operator like focus developed. This is a developer conference. You guys have build, what is the state of the art for a modern cloud developer? Could you just share your thoughts because this comes up a lot. You know, what's through the art? What's next jan new guard guard? It's his legacy. What is the state of the art for a modern cloud developer? >>Fantastic question. And extraordinarily relevant to this particular conference. You know what I think about often times it's really what is the inner loop and the outer loop look like in terms of cycle times? Because at the end of the day, what matters is the time that it takes for you to make that code change, to be able to see it in your test environment and to be able to deploy it to production and have the confidence that it's delivering the feature set that you need it to. And it's, you know, it's secure, it's reliable, it's performance, that's what a developer cares about at the end of the day. Um, at the same time, we also need to make sure that we're growing our team to meet our demand, which means we're constantly on boarding new developers. And so what I take inspiration from our, some of the tech elite who have been able to invest significant amounts in, in tuning their engineering systems, they've been able to make it so that a new developer can join a team in just a couple of minutes or less that they can actually make a code change, see that be reflected in their application in just a few seconds and deploy with confidence within hours. And so our goal is to actually be able to take that state of the art metric and democratize that actually bring it to as many of our customers as we possibly can. >>You mentioned supply chain earlier in securing that. What are you guys doing with Docker and how to make that partnership better with registries? Is there any update there in terms of the container registry on Azure? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we we have definitely seen recent events and and it almost seems like a never ending attacks that that you know, increasingly are getting more and more focused on developer watering holes is how we think about it. Kind of developers being a primary target um for these malicious hackers. And so what it's more important than ever that every developer um and Microsoft especially uh really take security extraordinarily seriously. Our engineers are working around the clock to make sure that we are responding to every security incident that we hear about and partnering with our customers to make sure that we're supporting them as well. One of the things that we announced earlier this week at Microsoft build is that we've actually taken, get have actions and we've now integrated that into the Azure Security Center. And so what this means is that, you know, we can now do things like scan for vulnerabilities. Um look at things like who is logging in, where things like that and actually have that be tracked in the Azure security center so that not just your developers get that notification but also your I. T. Operations. Um In terms of the partnership with dR you know, this is actually an ongoing partnership to make sure that we can provide more guidance to developers to make sure that they are following best practices like pulling from a private registry like Docker hub or at your container registry. So I expect that as time goes on will continue to more in partnership in this space >>and that's going to give a lot of confidence. Actually, productivity wise is going to be a big help for developers. Great stuff is always good, good progress. They're moving the needle. >>Last time we >>spoke we talked about tools and setting Azure as the doctor context duty tooling updates here at dot com this year. That's notable. >>Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's one major thing that we've been working on which has a big dependency on docker is get help. Code space is now one of the biggest pain points that developers have is setting up a new DEV box, which they often have to do when they are on boarding a new employee or when they're starting a new project or even if they're just kicking the tires on a new technology that they want to be able to evaluate and sometimes creating a developer environment can actually take hours um and especially when you're trying to create a developer environment that matches somebody else's developer environment that can take like a half a day and you can spend all of your time just debugging the differences in environment variables, for example, um, containers actually makes that much easier. So what you can do with this, this services, you can actually create death environment spun up in the cloud and you can access it in seconds and you get from there are working coding environment and a runtime environment and this is repeatable via containers. So it means that there's no inadvertent differences introduced by each DEV. And you might be interested to know that underneath this is actually using Docker files and dr composed to orchestrate the debits and the runtime bits for a whole bunch of different stacks. And so this is something that we're actually working on in collaboration with the with the doctor team to have a common the animal format. And in fact this week we actually introduced a couple of app templates so that everybody can see this all in action. So if you check out a ca dot m s forward slash app template, you can see this in action yourself. >>You guys have always had such a strong developer community and one thing I love about cloud as it brings more agility, as we always talk about. But when you start to see the enterprise grow into, the direction is going now, it's almost like the developer communities are emerging, it's no longer about all the Lennox folks here and the dot net folks there, you've got windows, you've got cloud, >>it's almost >>the the the solidification of everyone kind of coming together. Um and visual studio, for instance, last year, I think you were talking about that to having to be interrogated dr composed, et cetera. >>How do you see >>this melting pot emerging? Because at the end of the day, you pick the language you love and you got devops, which is infrastructure as code doesn't matter. So give us your take on where we are with that whole progress of of making that happen. >>Well, I mean I definitely think that, you know, developer environments and and kind of, you know, our approach to them don't need to be as dogmatic as they've been in the past. I really think that, you know, you can pick the right tool and language and stand developer stack for your team, for your experience and you can be productive and that's really our goal. And Microsoft is to make sure that we have tools for every developer and every team so that they can build any app that they want to want to create. Even if that means that they're actually going to end up ultimately deploying that not to our cloud, they're going to end up deploying it to AWS or another another competitive cloud. And so, you know, there's a lot of things that we've been doing to make that really much easier. We have integrated container tools in visual studio and visual studio code and better cli integrations like with the doctor context that we had talked about a little bit earlier. We continue to try to make it easier to build applications that are targeting containers and then once you create those containers it's much easier to take it to another environment. One of the examples of this kind of work is now that we have WsL and the Windows subsystem for Lennox. This makes it a lot easier for developers who prefer a Windows operating system as their environment and maybe some tools like Visual Studio that run on Windows, but they can still target Lennox with as their production environment without any impedance mismatch. They can actually be as productive as they would be if they had a Linux box as their Os >>I noticed on this session, I got to call this out. I want to get your reaction to it interesting. Selection of Microsoft talks, the container based development. Visual studio code is one that's where you're going to show some some some container action going on with note and Visual Studio code. And then you get the machine learning with Azure uh containers in the V. S. Code. Interesting how you got, you know, containers with V. S. And now you've got machine learning. What does that tell the world about where Microsoft's at? Because in a way you got the cutting edge container management on one side with the doctor integration. Now you get the machine learning which everyone's talking about shifting, left more automation. Why are these sessions so important? Why should people attend? And what's the what's the bottom line? >>Well, like I said, like containers basically empower developer productivity. Um that's what creates the reputable environments, that's what allows us to make sure that, you know, we're productive as soon as we possibly can be with any text act that we want to be able to target. Um and so that's kind of almost the ecosystem play. Um it's how every developer can contribute to the success of others and we can amor ties the kinds of work that we do to set up an environment. So that's what I would say about the container based development that we're doing with both visual studio and visual studio code. Um in terms of the machine learning development, uh you know, the number of machine learning developers in the world is relatively small, but it's growing and it's obviously a very important set of developers because to train a machine learning uh to train an ml model, it actually requires a significant amount of compute resources, and so that's a perfect opportunity to bring in the research that are in a public cloud. Um What's actually really interesting about that particular develop developer stack is that it commonly runs on things like python. And for those of you who have developed in python, you know, just how difficult it is to actually set up a python environment with the right interpreter, with the right run time, with the right libraries that can actually get going super quickly, um and you can be productive as a developer. And so it's actually one of the hardest, most challenging developer stacks to actually set up. And so this allows you to become a machine learning developer without having to spend all of your time just setting up the python runtime environment. >>Yeah, it's a nice, nice little call out on python, it's a double edged sword. It's easier to sling code around on one hand, when you start getting working then you gotta it gets complicated can get well. Um Well the great, great call out there on the island, but good, good, good project. Let me get your thoughts on this other tool that you guys are talking about project tie. Uh This is interesting because this is a trend that we're seeing a lot of conversations here on the cube about around more too many control planes. Too many services. You know, I no longer have that monolithic application. I got micro micro applications with microservices. What the hell is going on with my services? >>Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, containers brought an incredible amount of productivity in terms of having repeatable environments, both for dev environments, which we talked about a lot on this interview already, but also obviously in production and test environments. Super important. Um and with that a lot of times comes the microservices architecture that we're also moving to and the way that I view it is the microservices architecture is actually accompanied by businesses being more focused on the value that they can actually deliver to customers. And so they're trying to kind of create separations of concerns in terms of the different services that they're offering, so they can actually version and and kind of, you know, actually improve each of these services independently. But what happens when you start to have many microservices working together in a SAS or in some kind of aggregate um service environment or kind of application environment is it starts to get unwieldy, it's really hard to make it so that one micro service can actually address another micro service. They can pass information back and forth. And you know what used to be maybe easy if you were just building a client server application because, you know, within the server tear all of your code was basically contained in the same runtime environment. That's no longer the case when every microservices actually running inside of its own container. So the question is, how can we improve program ability by making it easier for one micro service that's being used in an application environment, be to be able to access another another service and kind of all of that context. Um and so, you know, you want to be able to access the service is the the api endpoint, the containers, the ingress is everything, make everything work together as though it felt just as easy as as um you know, server application development. Um And so what this means as well is that you also oftentimes need to get all of these different containers running at the same time and that can actually be a challenge in the developer and test loop as well. So what project tie does is it improves the program ability and it actually allows you to just write a command like thai run so that you can actually in stan she ate all of these containers and get them up and running and basically deploy and run your application in that environment and ultimately make the dev testing or loop much faster >>than productivity gain. Right. They're making it simple to stand up. Great, great stuff. Let me ask you a question as we kind of wrap down here for the folks here at Dakar Con, are >>there any >>special things you'd like to talk about the development you think are important for the developers here within this space? It's very dynamic. A lot of change happening in a good way. Um, but >>sometimes it's hard to keep >>track of all the cool stuff happening. Could you take a minute to, to share your thoughts on what you think are the most important develops developments in this space? That that might be interesting to ducker con attendees. >>I think the most important things are to recognize that developer environments are moving to containerized uh, environments themselves so that they can be repeated, they can be shared, the work, configuring them can be amortized across many developers. That's important thing. Number one important thing. Number two is it doesn't matter as much what operating system you're running as your chrome, you know, desktop. What matters is ultimately the production environment that you're targeting. And so I think now we're in a world where all of those things can be mixed and matched together. Um and then I think the next thing is how can we actually improve microservices, uh programming development together um so that it's easier to be able to target multiple micro services that are working in aggregate uh to create a single service experience or a single application. And how do we improve the program ability for that? >>You know, you guys have been great supporters of DACA and the community and open source and software developers as they transform and become quite frankly the superheroes for the transformation, which is re factoring businesses. So this has been a big thing. I'd love to get your thoughts on how this is all coming together inside Microsoft, you've got your division, you get the developer division, you got GIT hub, got Azure. Um, and then just historically, and he put this up last year army of an ecosystem. People who have been contributing encoding with Microsoft and the partners for many, many decades. >>Yes. The >>heart Microsoft now, how's it all working? What's the news? I get Lincoln, Lincoln, but there's no yet developer model there yet, but probably is soon. >>Um Yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty broad question, but in some ways I think it's interesting to put it in the context of Microsoft's history. You know, I think when I think back to the beginning of my career, it was kind of a one stack shop, you know, we was all about dot net and you know, of course we want to dot net to be the best developer environment that it can possibly be. We still actually want that. We still want that need to be the most productive developer environment. It could we could possibly build. Um but at the same time, I think we have to recognize that not all developers or dot net developers and we want to make sure that Azure is the most productive cloud for developers and so to do that, we have to make sure that we're building fantastic tools and platforms to host java applications, javascript applications, no Js applications, python applications, all of those things, you know, all of these developers in the world, we want to make sure it can be productive on our tools and our platforms and so, you know, I think that's really kind of the key of you know what you're speaking of because you know, when I think about the partnership that I have with the GIT hub team or with the Azure team or with the Azure Machine learning team or the Lincoln team, um A lot of it actually comes down to helping empower developers, improving their productivity, helping them find new developers to collaborate with, um making sure that they can do that securely and confidently and they can basically respond to their customers as quickly as they possibly can. Um and when, when we think about partnering inside of Microsoft with folks like linkedin or office as an example, a lot of our partnership with them actually comes down to improving their colleagues efficiency. We build the developer tools that office and lengthen are built on top of and so every once in a while we will make an improvement that has, you know, 5% here, 3% there and it turns into an incredible amount of impact in terms of operations, costs for running these services. >>It's interesting. You mentioned earlier, I think there's a time now we're living in a time where you don't have to be dogmatic anymore, you can pick what you like and go with it. Also that you also mentioned just now this idea of distributed applications, distributed computing. You know, distributed applications and microservices go really well together. Especially with doctor. >>Can you share >>your thoughts on the framework that you guys released called Dapper? >>Yeah, yeah. We recently released Dapper. It's called D A P R. You can look it up on GIT hub and it's a programming model for common microservices pattern, two common microservices patterns that make it really easy and automatic to create those kinds of microservices. So you can choose to work with your favorite state stores or databases or pub sub components and get things like cloud events for free. You can choose either http or g R B C so that you can get mesh capabilities like service discovery and re tries and you can bring your own secret store and easily be able to call it from any environment variable. It's also like I was talking about earlier, multi lingual. Um so you don't need to embrace dot net, for example, as you're programming language to be able to benefit from Dapper, it actually supports many programming languages and Dapper itself is actually written and go. Um and so, you know, all developers can benefit from something like Dapper to make it easier to create microservices applications. >>I mean, always great to have you on great update. Take a minute to give an update on what's going on with your division. I know you had to build conference this week. V. S has got the new preview title. We just talked about what are the things you want to get to plug in for? Take a minute to get to plug in for what you're working on, your goals, your objectives hiring, give us the update. >>Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, we we built integrated container tools in visual studio uh and the Doctor extension and Visual Studio code and cli extensions. Uh and you know, even in this most recent release of our Visual Studio product, Visual Studio 16 10, we added some features to make it easier to use DR composed better. So one of the examples of this is that you can actually have uh Oftentimes you need to be able to use multiple doctor composed files together so that you can actually configure various different container environments for a single single application. But it's hard sometimes to create the right Yeah. My file so that you can actually invoke it and invoke the the container and the micro services that you need. And so what this allows you to do is to actually have just a menu of the different doctor composed files so that you can select the runtime and test environment that you need for the subset of the portion of the application that you're working on at the end of the day. This is always about developer productivity. You know, like I said, every keystroke matters. Um and we want to make sure that you as a developer can focus on the code that only you can Right. >>Amanda Silver, corporate vice president product development division of Microsoft. Always great to see you and chat with you remotely soon. We'll be back in in real life with real events soon as we come out of the pandemic and thanks for sharing your insight and congratulations on your success this year and and congratulations on your announcement here at Dakar Gone. >>Thank you so much for having me. >>Okay Cube coverage for Dunkirk on 2021. I'm John for your host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. And it's theCUBE Virtual and Uli Homann who's here, Corporate Vice President of Cloud & AI at Microsoft. Thanks for comin' on. I love this session. Obviously, Microsoft one of the big clouds. Awesome. You guys partnering with IBM here, at IBM Think. I remember during the client-server days in the '80s, late '80s to early '90s the open systems interconnect was a big part of opening up the computer industry. That was networking, intra-networking and really created more LANs and more connections for PCs et cetera, and the world just went on from there. Similar now with hybrid cloud, you're seeing that same kind of vibe, right? You're seeing that same kind of alignment with distributed computing architectures for businesses. Where now you have, it's not just networking and plumbing, and connecting, you know, LANs and PCs, and printers, it's connecting everything. It's kind of almost a whole 'nother world, but similar movie, if you will. So this is really going to be good for people who understand that market. IBM does, you guys do. Talk about the alignment between IBM and Microsoft in this new hybrid cloud space. It's really kind of now standardized, but yet it's just now coming. >> Yeah, so again, fantastic question. So the way I think about this is first of all, Microsoft and IBM are philosophically very much aligned. We're both investing in key open source initiatives like the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, CNCF, something that we both believe in. We're both partnering with the Red Hat organization so Red Hat forms a common bond, if you so want to, between Microsoft and IBM. And again, part of this is how can we establish a system of capabilities that every client has access to, and then build on top of that stack. And again, IBM does this very well with their Cloud Paks which are coming out now with data and AI, and others. So open source, open standards are key elements and then you mentioned something critical which I believe is not under, misunderstood, but certainly not appreciated enough is this is about connectivity between businesses and so part of the power of the IBM perspective together with Microsoft is bringing together key business applications for health care, for retail, for manufacturing and really make them work together so that our clients that are-- critical scenarios get the support they need from both IBM as well as Microsoft on top of this common foundation of the CNCF and other open standards. >> You know, it's interesting, I love that point. I'm going to double-down and amplify that and continue to bring it up. Connecting between businesses is one thread but now, people, because you have an edge that's also industrial, business, but also people. People are also participating in open source, people have wearables, people are connected so they can, and also they're connecting with collaboration. So this kind of brings a whole 'nother architecture which I want to get into the solutions with you on on how you see that playing out. But first, I know, you know, you're a veteran with Microsoft for many, many years, for decades. Microsoft's core competency has been ecosystems, developer ecosystems, customer ecosystems. Today, that the services motion is build around ecosystems. You guys have that playbook, IBM's well versed in it, as well. How does that impact your partnerships, your solutions, and how you deal with down this open marketplace? >> Well, let's start with the obvious. Obviously, Microsoft and IBM will work together in common ecosystems. Again, I'm going to reference the CNCF again as the foundation for a lot of these initiatives. But then we are also working together in the Red Hat ecosystem because Red Hat has built an ecosystem that Microsoft and IBM are players in that ecosystem. However, we also are looking higher level 'cause a lot of times when people think ecosystems, it's fairly low-level technology. But Microsoft and IBM are talking about partnerships that are focused on industry scenarios. Again, retail for example, or health care and others where we're building on top of these lower-level ecosystem capabilities and then bringing together the solution scenarios where the strength of IBM capabilities is coupled with Microsoft capabilities to drive this very famous one plus one equals three. And then the other piece that I think we both agree on is the open source ecosystem for software development and software development collaboration. And GitHub is a common anchor that we both believe can feed the world's economy with respect to the software solutions that are needed to really, yeah, bring the capabilities forward, help improve the world's economy and so forth by effectively bringing together brilliant minds across the ecosystem and again, just Microsoft and IBM bringing some people, but the rest of the world obviously participating in that, as well. So thinking again, open source, open standards, and then industry-specific collaboration and capabilities being a key part. You mentioned people. We certainly believe that people play a key role, software developers and the GitHub notion being a key one. But there are others where again, Microsoft with Microsoft 365 has a lot of capabilities in connecting people within the organization and across organizations. And while we're using Zoom, here, a lot of people are utilizing Teams 'cause Teams is on the one side of collaboration platform, but on the other side is also an application host. And so bringing together people collaboration supported and powered by applications from IBM, from Microsoft and others, is going to be, I think, a huge differentiation in terms of how people interact with software in the future. >> Yeah, and I think that whole joint development is a big part of this new people equation where it's not just partnering in market, it's also at the tech, and you've got open source, and it's a just phenomenal innovation formula, there. So let's ask what solutions, here. I want to get into some of the top solutions you're doing that Microsoft that maybe with IBM. But your title as the Corporate Vice President Cloud & AI, c'mon, could you get a better department? I mean, more relevant than that? I mean, it's exciting. You know, cloud scale is driving tons of innovation, AI is eating software or changing the software paradigm. We're going to see that playing out. I've done dozens of interviews just in this past month on how AI's a more, certainly with machine learning, and having a control plane with data, changing the game. So tell us, what are the hot solutions for hybrid cloud and why is this a different ballgame than say, public cloud? >> Well, so first of all, let's talk a little bit about the AI capabilities and data because I think they're two categories. You are seeing an evolution of AI capabilities that are coming out. And again, I just read IBM's announcement about integrating the Cloud Pak with IBM Satellite. I think that's a key capability that IBM is putting out there and we are partnering with IBM in two directions, there. IBM has done a fantastic job to build AI capabilities that are relevant for industries, health care being a very good example, again, retail being another one. And I believe Microsoft and IBM will work on both partnership on the technology side as well as the AI usage in specific verticals. Microsoft is doing similar things. Within our Dynamics product line, we're using AI for business applications, for planning, scheduling, optimizations, risk assessments, those kind of scenarios. And of course, we're using those in the Microsoft 365 environment, as well. I always joke that despite my 30 years at Microsoft, I still don't know how to really use PowerPoint and I can't do a PowerPoint slide for the life of me, but with a new designer, I can actually get help from the system to make beautiful PowerPoint happen. So bringing AI into real life usage I think is the key part. The hybrid scenario is critical here, as well, especially when you start to think about real life scenarios like safety, worker safety in a critical environment, freshness of product. We're seeing retailers deploying cameras and AI inside the retail stores to effectively make sure that the shelves are stocked, that the quality of the vegetables, for example, continues to be high and monitored. And previously, people would do this on an occasional basis running around in the store. Now the store is monitored 24/7 and people get notified when things need fixing. Another really cool scenario set is quality. We are working with a Finnish steel producer that effectively is looking at the stainless steel as it's being produced and they have cameras on this steel that look at specific marks. And if these marks show up then they know that the stainless steel will be bad. And I don't know if you have looked at a manufacturing process, but the earlier they can get failures detected, the better it is because they can most likely, or more often than not, return the product back into the beginning of the funnel and start over. And that's what they're using. So you can see molten steel, logically speaking, with a camera and AI. And previously, humans did this which is obviously A, less reliable and B, dangerous because this is very, very hot, this is very glowing steel. And so increasing safety while at the same time improving the quality is something that we see in hybrid scenarios. Again, autonomous driving, another great scenario where perception AI is going to be utilized. So there's a bunch of capabilities out there that really are hybrid in nature and will help us move forward with key scenarios, safety, quality, and autonomous behaviors like driving and so forth. >> Uli, great, great insight. Great product vision. Great alignment with IBM's hybrid cloud space what all customers are lookin' for, now. And certainly multicloud around the horizon. So great to have you on. Great agility, and congratulations for your continued success. You've got a great area, cloud and AI, and we'll be keeping in touch. I'd love to do a deep dive, sometime. Thanks for coming on. >> John, thank you very much for the invitation and great questions, great interview. Love it, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. Okay, theCUBE coverage here, at IBM Think 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music) ♪ Dah-De-Da ♪ ♪ Dah-De ♪

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella sees a different future for cloud computing over the coming decade. And as Microsoft Ignite keynote, he laid out the five attributes that will define the cloud in the next 10 years. His vision is a cloud platform that is decentralized, ubiquitous, intelligent, sensing, and trusted. One that actually tickles the senses and levels the playing field between consumers and creators by placing tools in the hands of more people around the world. Welcome to this week's wiki buns cube insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll review the highlights of Nadella's Ignite keynote share our thoughts on what it means for the future of cloud specifically, and the tech industry generally. We'll also give you a more tactical view of Microsoft and compare its performance within the ETR's dataset to its peers. Satya Nadella's forward-looking cloud attributes comprised five key vectors that he talked about. The first was ubiquitous and decentralized computing, Nadella made the statement that we've reached peak centralization today that we're witnessing radical changes in computing architecture from the materials used to semiconductors software, and that is going to serve a new frontier that's forming at the edge. Nadella envisions a world where there will be more sovereignty and decentralized control. We couldn't agree more. The cloud universe is expanding and the lines are blurring between what's being done on-prem, across public clouds and the cloud experience which is going to extend everywhere, including the edge. And of course, data is going to be flowing through this hyper decentralized system. Next was sovereign data and ambient intelligence. To us data sovereignty means that whatever the local laws are the system is going to have the intelligence to govern privacy, ensure data provenance, and adhere to corporate edicts. Ambient intelligence is a field of research that leverages pervasive sensor networks and AI to respond to and anticipate humans and machines. Nadella sees the future where a business logic will move from being code that is written to code that is actually learned from data, pretty interesting. He sees this autodidactic system if you will, as fundamental to tackling big problems like personalized medicine or even climate change. Third, he talked about empowered creators and communities everywhere. Nadella said, there'll be increasingly a balance between consumption and creation. His talking about an economic balance essentially he's predicting that creation will be democratized and his vision is to put tools in the hands of people to allow them to tip the scales toward knowledge workers, frontline employees, students, everyone, essentially creating content, applications, code, et cetera power to the people if you will. And underneath this vision is a new form of or emerging new forms of Silicon operating systems and entirely transformative digital experiences. Next was economic opportunity for the global workforce. So picking up on the accelerated themes of remote work that were catalyzed by COVID, Nadella emphasize that the future has to accommodate flexibility in how, when and where people work. He sees a new model of productivity emerging, not necessarily defined by corporate revenue per employee for example, but by the economic advantages that become accessible to everyone through better access to technology, collaboration tools, education, and healthy lifestyles, all enabled by this ubiquitous cloud. Finally, trust by design, Nadella said that ethical principles must govern the design, development and deployment of AI. The system he said must be secure by design with zero trust built in to protect business assets and personal privacy. So this was a big vision that Nadella put forth it, connects the dots between bits and atoms and sets up Microsoft to extend its reach well beyond office productivity tools and cloud infrastructure. He cited the Microsoft cloud as the underpinning of its future and specifically called out Teams, he mentioned 365, HoloLens 2 and the announcement of Microsoft Mesh, a new mixed reality platform. Nadella said Mesh will do for virtual reality what X-Box live did for gaming. Take the experience from single person to multi-person imagine holographic images with no screens, empowering advances in medicine, science, technology, and very importantly social interactions. Now, one of the things that we took away from his talk was this notion of Microsoft as a technology arm's dealer. No, we're not, Nadella avoided slamming the competition directly by name one statement that he made, stood out. He said, " No customer wants to be dependent on a provider that sells them technology on one end and competes with them on the other" And to us this was a direct shot at Amazon, Google and Apple. How so you ask? And what does it tell us? In his book "Seeing Digital" author David Moschella said, "that Silicon Valley broadly defined as a duel disruption agenda." What does that mean? Not only are large tech companies disrupting horizontal layers of the tech stack like compute, storage, networking, database, security, applications, and so forth. But they're also disrupting industries Amazon and media, grocery, logistics, for example. Google and Amazon on healthcare, Google and Apple on automobiles, all three in FinTech. And it's likely this is just the beginning but Nadella's posture suggests that Microsoft for now anyway, is content being mostly a horizontal technology provider, aka arms dealer. Now, there are some examples where you could argue that Microsoft sort of crosses the line maybe as a games developer or as a SAS competitor. Do you really want to, if you're a SAS player do you want to run your system on Azure and compete with Microsoft? Well, it depends if you're vertically oriented or maybe horizontal in their swim lanes, but anyway, these are more natural cohorts to technology than say for example, Amazon's retail business. So I thought that was something that was worth taking a look at. All right, let's take a quick look at how Microsoft compares to a couple of the great tech giants of the past several decades. Here's a financial snapshot of Microsoft compared to Oracle a highly profitable software company and IBM an industry legend. The first two things that jumped right out of Microsoft, size and it's growth rate. Microsoft is twice the revenue of IBM and nearly four extent of Oracle. And yet Microsoft is growing in the mid-teens compared to low single digits for Oracle and IBM continues to shrink so extensible you can grow. Microsoft's gross margin model has been pulled down by its hardware business but its operating margins are unbelievable. Meanwhile, the cash on its balance sheet is immense much larger than Oracles, which is very impressive. It's certainly dwarfs that of IBM, a company that had to take on a lot of debt to acquire Red Hat and has a balance sheet, that increasingly looks more like Dell's than it's historical self. And then on the last two rows Oracle and IBM, both owners of their own cloud have been lapped by Microsoft in terms of CapEx and research & development investment. Ironically, as we pointed out, IBM's R & D spend in 2007 the year after AWS launched the modern era of cloud was comparable to that of Microsoft. Let's now pivot it to some of the ETR survey data and see how Microsoft fares. We'll start by sharing a fundamental basis of the ETR methodology, that is the calculation of net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum and here's how it's derived. This chart shows the components of Microsoft's net score. It comprises five parts and represents the percentage of customers within the ETR survey with specific spending profiles. The lime green is new adoptions, the forest green is increased spend of 6% or more for 2021 relative to 2020, the gray is flat spend, the pinkish slice is spend declining by more than 6% or 6% or more relative to last year and the bright red is replacing the platform. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get net score. As you can see, Microsoft's net score is 53% which is very high for $150 billion Company. Now let's put that in context and expand the scope here a little bit. This chart shows how Microsoft fares relative to its peers, the vertical axis shows net score against spending velocity and the horizontal axis shows market share. Market share measures pervasiveness in the survey. In the table insert, you can see the vendors they're sorted by net score and the shared end column is there as well, which represents the number of shared accounts in the dataset. On both accounts bigger is better. Now note the red dotted line, that's the 40% watermark which is my personal indicator of an elevated net score anything above that in our view is really solid. Microsoft is as usual off the charts strong well to the right with it's market presence and then an overall net score of 53% as we showed earlier. And then there's Azure, separate from Microsoft overall. We wanted to plot that specifically which of course it doesn't have the presence of Microsoft overall, no surprise, but it's still prominent on the x-axis and it has a net score approaching 70%, which is quite amazing. AWS not surprisingly is highly elevated with a presence that's even larger than Azure. And you can see Zoom, Salesforce and Google Cloud all above the 40% line. Google as we've reported is well off the pace in the horizontal axis and even though its net score is elevated, we would like to see it even higher, given its smaller size relative to AWS and Azure. You know, SAP always stands out because it's a large company and it's got a net score that's hovering just under 30%. It's not above that 40% line, but it's solid. And you can see IBM and Oracle now we're showing here IBM and Oracle overall so it's the whole kitchen sink comparable to Microsoft that turquoise dot, if you will. So you can see why those two are valued much lower Microsoft. The large base of its business that's declining is much, much larger than the pieces of their business that are growing. Now Oracle has some momentum, the Back Aaron's article on February 19th, which declared Oracle a cloud giant and it declared its stock a buy combined with some earnings upgrades including one today from Ramo Lyncho of Barclays has catapulted the stock to all time highs and a valuation over $200 billion. IBM is a different story as we've discussed frequently Arvind has a lot of work to do to get this national treasure back to what's prominent itself. Okay, let now unpack Microsoft's vast portfolio a bit and see where it's doing well and where it's making moves and maybe where it's struggling, some. This graphic shows Microsoft's net score across its entire product portfolio within the ETR taxonomy. And you can see it's pretty much killing it across the board. Microsoft plays in almost every sector in the ETR taxonomy and you can see the 40% red line and how many of its offerings are above that line. The yellow bar being the most recent survey and while there's quite a bit of gray, i.e. flat spend relative to 2020, we're talking about some very tough compares from last year. And yet there's still a huge chunk of the portfolio in the green meaning spending momentum is actually up from last year and some of Microsoft's most important sectors like Cloud and Teams and Analytics. Look only Skype and Microsoft Dynamics are lagging, so really nice story there in our view. Now let's come back and take a look at Microsoft's cloud business specifically as compared to its peers. So Satya basically said that Microsoft's future will build on top of its cloud and looking at this picture it's pretty encouraging for the company. This chart, again, shows net score or spending momentum inside specifically Fortune 500 customers and it's a key bellwether in the ETR dataset, and you can see Azure and Azure functions well above the 40% red line and extremely well positioned relative to AWS and GCP. Importantly, the yellow bar tells us that compared to previous surveys Microsoft's cloud business is actually gaining momentum in this very important sector. Now, other notable call-outs on this chart VMware Cloud, which, it's on-prem hybrid cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS, which is reportedly doing well but off from the momentum of its highs last spring. You can see Oracle jumped up indicating cloud momentum, but still well below the performance of the largest cloud players. The IBM Cloud appears to be a non-factor in the survey and as we previously stated, we'd like to see IBM recalibrate the financials for its cloud business and come up with a reporting framework that better represents the prevailing mental model of cloud computing. We think a cleaner number would allow IBM to build on the Red Hat momentum. I'm not sure what to make of the HPE boost, it looks significant, but in digging into the data it's only 17 data points, but look 17 within the Fortune 500 companies is not terrible. And HPE net score in that sector is more than double its overall cloud net score so that's positive we think. Okay, let's wrap by looking at how customers are thinking about multi-cloud adoption and really this data that we're about to show you simply asking customers about clouds they're using versus any type of long-term vision. So it's a good representation of what's happening today and what CIO is are thinking about in the near future particularly over the next 12 months. The survey asks customers to describe their cloud provider usage and strategy. You can see that only 14% of the survey respondents have exclusively a mono-cloud strategy, but now add in another 22% who were predominantly single cloud and you now have more than a third of the customer base gravitating toward mono-cloud. Another 14% say they're concentrating cloud providers more narrowly. Now on the flip side, you've got a big group, 29% that are moving toward multi-cloud and if you add in the additional 16% who say they are and will continue to be evenly spread, 45% of the survey is solidly headed in that direction so it's a mixed picture. What's the takeaway? Well, we think Andy Jassy is right when he says that while many customers use more than one cloud, they tend to have a primary provider and have something like a 70,30 or even 80,20 split between primary and secondary clouds. Now we think, however that this will change, but only to the extent that the vendor community is adding value on top of the existing hyperscale clouds. What we're saying and have been saying is that there is a real opportunity to create value on top of the cloud infrastructure that's being built out by AWS, Google and Microsoft. Instead of fearing cloud, the vendor community should be embracing it creating a layer on top, abstracting away the underlying complexities associated with cloud native, exploiting cloud native, and then building on top of that. Snowflake's data cloud vision is right on in my view, we can envision virtually every layer of the stack following suit. Even within database there are opportunities to identify more granular segments across clouds. For example, despite Snowflakes early multi-cloud lead you're seeing competitive firms like Teradata begin to architect a system across clouds that can query data warehouses from distributed locations, including on-prem as part of what they refer to as a data fabric, sounds kind of like Snowflakes global data mesh, or maybe better Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh. Yeah, sure but Teradata has capabilities that Snowflake doesn't for example, the ability to do complex joins and we can see plenty of market for both companies to differentiate. And why shouldn't similar vision extend from on-prem, across clouds to the edge for data protection, security, governance, hybrid compute ,analytics, federated applications, its a huge market that the hyperscale providers are likely too busy worrying about their own walled gardens to start building across on top of their competitors clouds. So Dell, HPE, VMware, Cisco, Palo Alto Fortunate, Zscaler or Cohesity, Veeam and hundreds of other tech companies, including by the way IBM and Oracle should be saying thank you to AWS, Google and Microsoft for spending all that money to build out great infrastructure on which they can build value, tap for future growth. And many of you will say, Hey, we're already doing this. Okay, I'll be watching to see the ratio of real versus slideware because generally today, in my opinion the denominator is much larger than the numerator. So when that ratio hits 1X we'll know it started to become real. Okay, that's it for today remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen so please subscribe. I publish weekly on wikibun.com and siliconangle.com. Please comment on my LinkedIn post or you can tweet me @DVellante or feel free to email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey and data science action. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Be well, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (relaxing music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle. Okay, >>we're now going to explore the vision of the future of cloud computing From the perspective of one of the leaders in the field, J G >>Share >>a pure off is the vice president of As Your Data ai and Edge at Microsoft G. Welcome to the Cuban cloud. Thanks so much for participating. >>Well, thank you, Dave, and it's a real pleasure to be here with you. And I just wanna welcome the audience as well. >>Well, jg judging from your title, we have a lot of ground to cover, and our audience is definitely interested in all the topics that are implied there. So let's get right into it. You know, we've said many times in the Cube that the new innovation cocktail comprises machine intelligence or a I applied to troves of data. With the scale of the cloud. It's it's no longer, you know, we're driven by Moore's law. It's really those three factors, and those ingredients are gonna power the next wave of value creation and the economy. So, first, do you buy into that premise? >>Yes, absolutely. we do buy into it. And I think, you know, one of the reasons why we put Data Analytics and Ai together is because all of that really begins with the collection of data and managing it and governing it, unlocking analytics in it. And we tend to see things like AI, the value creation that comes from a I as being on that continues off, having started off with really things like analytics and proceeding toe. You know, machine learning and the use of data. Interesting breaks. Yes. >>I'd like to get some more thoughts around a data and how you see the future data and the role of cloud and maybe how >>Microsoft, you >>know, strategy fits in there. I mean, you, your portfolio, you got you got sequel server, Azure, Azure sequel. You got arc, which is kinda azure everywhere for people that aren't familiar with that. You've got synapse. Which course that's all the integration a data warehouse, and get things ready for B I and consumption by the business and and the whole data pipeline and a lot of other services as your data bricks you got You got cosmos in their, uh, Blockchain. You've got open source services like Post Dress and my sequel. So lots of choices there. And I'm wondering, you know, how do you think about the future of Of of Cloud data platforms? It looks like your strategies, right tool for the right job? Is that fair? >>It is fair, but it's also just to step back and look at it. It's fundamentally what we see in this market today is that customer was the Sikh really a comprehensive proposition? And when I say a comprehensive proposition, it is sometimes not just about saying that. Hey, listen way No, you're a sequel server company. We absolutely trust that you have the best Azure sequel database in the cloud, but tell us more. We've got data that's sitting in her group systems. We've got data that's sitting in Post Press in things like mongo DB, right? So that open source proposition today and data and data management and database management has become front and center, so are really sort of push. There is when it comes to migration management, modernization of data to present the broadest possible choice to our customers so we can meet them where they are. However, when it comes to analytics. One of the things they asked for is give us a lot more convergence use. You know it, really, it isn't about having 50 different services. It's really about having that one comprehensive service that is converged. That's where things like synapse Fitzer, where in just land any kind of data in the leg and then use any compute engine on top of it to drive insights from it. So, fundamentally, you know, it is that flexibility that we really sort of focus on to meet our customers where they are and really not pushing our dogma and our beliefs on it. But to meet our customers according to the way they have deployed stuff like this. >>So that's great. I want to stick on this for a minute because, you know, I know when when I have guests on like yourself, do you never want to talk about you know, the competition? But that's all we ever talk about. That's all your customers ever talk about, because because the counter to that right tool for the right job and that I would say, is really kind of Amazon's approach is is that you got the single unified data platform, the mega database that does it all. And that's kind of Oracle's approach. It sounds like you wanna have your cake and eat it, too, so you you got the right tool for the right job approach. But you've got an integration layer that allows you to have that converge database. I wonder if you could add color to that and you confirm or deny what I just said. >>No, that's a That's a very fair observation, but I I say there's a nuance in what I sort of describe when it comes to data management. When it comes to APS, we have them customers with the broadest choice. Even in that, even in that perspective, we also offer convergence. So, case in point, when you think about Cosmos TV under that one sort of service, you get multiple engines, but with the same properties, right global distribution, the five nines availability. It gives customers the ability to basically choose when they have to build that new cloud native AB toe, adopt cosmos Davey and adopted in a way that it's and choose an engine that is most flexible. Tow them, however you know when it comes to say, you know, writing a sequel server, for example from organizing it you know you want. Sometimes you just want to lift and shift it into things. Like I asked In other cases, you want to completely rewrite it, so you need to have the flexibility of choice there that is presented by a legacy off What's its on premises? When it moved into things like analytics, we absolutely believe in convergence, right? So we don't believe that look, you need to have a relation of data warehouse that is separate from a loop system that is separate from, say, a B I system. That is just, you know, it's a bolt on for us. We love the proposition off, really building things that are so integrated that once you land data, once you prep it inside the lake, you can use it for analytics. You can use it for being. You can use it for machine learning. So I think you know, are sort of differentiated. Approach speaks for itself there. Well, >>that's that's interesting, because essentially, again, you're not saying it's an either or, and you're seeing a lot of that in the marketplace. You got some companies say no, it's the Data Lake and others saying No, no put in the data warehouse and that causes confusion and complexity around the data pipeline and a lot of calls. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Ah, lot of customers struggled to get value out of data and and specifically data product builders of frustrated that it takes too long to go from. You know, this idea of Hey, I have an idea for a data service and it could drive monetization, but to get there, you gotta go through this complex data lifecycle on pipeline and beg people to add new data sources. And do you do you feel like we have to rethink the way that we approach data architectures? >>Look, I think we do in the cloud, and I think what's happening today and I think the place where I see the most amount of rethink the most amount of push from our customers to really rethink is the area of analytics in a I. It's almost as if what worked in the past will not work going forward. Right? So when you think about analytics on in the Enterprise today, you have relational systems, you have produced systems. You've got data marts. You've got data warehouses. You've got enterprise data warehouses. You know, those large honking databases that you use, uh, to close your books with right? But when you start to modernize it, what deep you are saying is that we don't want to simply take all of that complexity that we've built over say, you know, 34 decades and simply migrated on mass exactly as they are into the cloud. What they really want is a completely different way of looking at things. And I think this is where services like synapse completely provide a differentiated proposition to our customers. What we say there is land the data in any way you see shape or form inside the lake. Once you landed inside the lake, you can essentially use a synapse studio toe. Prep it in the way that you like, use any compute engine of your choice and and operate on this data in any way that you see fit. So, case in point, if you want to hydrate relation all data warehouse, you can do so if you want to do ad hoc analytics using something like spark. You can do so if you want to invoke power. Bi I on that data or b i on that data you can do so if you want to bring in a machine learning model on this breath data you can do so, so inherently. So when customers buy into this proposition, what it solves for them and what it gives them is complete simplicity, right? One way to land the data, multiple ways to use it. And it's all eso. >>Should we think of synapse as an abstraction layer that abstracts away the complexity of the underlying technology? Is that a fair way toe? Think about it. >>Yeah, you can think of it that way. It abstracts away, Dave a couple of things. It takes away the type of data, you know, sort of the complexities related to the type of data. It takes away the complexity related to the size of data. It takes away the complexity related to creating pipelines around all these different types of data and fundamentally puts it in a place where it can be now consumed by any sort of entity inside the actual proposition. And by that token, even data breaks. You know, you can, in fact, use data breaks in in sort off an integrated way with a synapse, Right, >>Well, so that leads me to this notion of and then wonder if you buy into it s Oh, my inference is that a data warehouse or a data lake >>could >>just be a node in inside of a global data >>mesh on. >>Then it's synapses sort of managing, uh, that technology on top. Do you buy into that that global data mesh concept >>we do. And we actually do see our customers using synapse and the value proposition that it brings together in that way. Now it's not where they start. Often times when a customer comes and says, Look, I've got an enterprise data warehouse, I want to migrate it or I have a group system. I want to migrate it. But from there, the evolution is absolutely interesting to see. I give you an example. You know, one of the customers that we're very proud off his FedEx And what FedEx is doing is it's completely reimagining its's logistics system that basically the system that delivers What is it? The three million packages a day on in doing so in this covert times, with the view of basically delivering our covert vaccines. One of the ways they're doing it is basically using synapse. Synapse is essentially that analytic hub where they can get complete view into their logistic processes. Way things are moving, understand things like delays and really put all that together in a way that they can essentially get our packages and these vaccines delivered as quickly as possible. Another example, you know, is one of my favorite, uh, we see once customers buy into it, they essentially can do other things with it. So an example of this is, uh is really my favorite story is Peace Parks Initiative. It is the premier Air White Rhino Conservancy in the world. They essentially are using data that has landed in azure images in particular. So, basically, you know, use drones over the vast area that they patrol and use machine learning on this data to really figure out where is an issue and where there isn't an issue so that this part with about 200 rangers can scramble surgically versus having to read range across the last area that they cover. So What do you see here is you know, the importance is really getting your data in order. Landed consistently. Whatever the kind of data ideas build the right pipelines and then the possibilities of transformation are just endless. >>Yeah, that's very nice how you worked in some of the customer examples. I appreciate that. I wanna ask you, though, that that some people might say that putting in that layer while it clearly adds simplification and e think a great thing that they're begins over time to be be a gap, if you will, between the ability of that layer to integrate all the primitives and all the peace parts on that, that you lose some of that fine grain control and it slows you down. What would you say to that? >>Look, I think that's what we excel at, and that's what we completely sort of buy into on. It's our job to basically provide that level off integration that granularity in the way that so it's an art, absolutely admit it's an art. There are areas where people create simplicity and not a lot of you know, sort of knobs and dials and things like that. But there are areas where customers want flexibility, right? So I think just to give you an example of both of them in landing the data inconsistency in building pipelines, they want simplicity. They don't want complexity. They don't want 50 different places to do this. Just 100 to do it. When it comes to computing and reducing this data analyzing this data, they want flexibility. This is one of the reasons why we say, Hey, listen, you want to use data breaks? If you're you're buying into that proposition and you're absolutely happy with them, you can plug plug it into it. You want to use B I and no, essentially do a small data mart. You can use B I If you say that. Look, I've landed in the lake. I really only want to use em melt, bringing your animal models and party on. So that's where the flexibility comes in. So that's sort of really sort of think about it. Well, >>I like the strategy because, you know, my one of our guest, Jim Octagon, e E. I think one of the foremost thinkers on this notion of off the data mesh and her premises that that that data builders, data product and service builders air frustrated because the the big data system is generic to context. There's no context in there. But by having context in the big data architecture and system, you could get products to market much, much, much faster. So but that seems to be your philosophy. But I'm gonna jump ahead to do my ecosystem question. You've mentioned data breaks a couple of times. There's another partner that you have, which is snowflake. They're kind of trying to build out their own, uh, data cloud, if you will, on global mesh in and the one hand, their partner. On the other hand, there are competitors. How do you sort of balance and square that circle? >>Look, when I see snowflake, I actually see a partner. You know that when we essentially you know, we are. When you think about as you know, this is where I sort of step back and look at Azure as a whole and in azure as a whole. Companies like snowflakes are vital in our ecosystem, right? I mean, there are places we compete, but you know, effectively by helping them build the best snowflake service on Asia. We essentially are able toe, you know, differentiate and offer a differentiated value proposition compared to, say, a Google or on AWS. In fact, that's being our approach with data breaks as well, where you know they are effectively on multiple club, and our opportunity with data breaks is toe essentially integrate them in a way where we offer the best experience. The best integrations on Azure Barna That's always been a focus. >>That's hard to argue with. Strategy. Our data with our data partner eat er, shows Microsoft is both pervasive and impressively having a lot of momentum spending velocity within the budget cycles. I wanna come back thio ai a little bit. It's obviously one of the fastest growing areas in our in our survey data. As I said, clearly, Microsoft is a leader in this space. What's your what's your vision of the future of machine intelligence and how Microsoft will will participate in that opportunity? >>Yeah, so fundamentally, you know, we've built on decades of research around, you know, around, you know, essentially, you know, vision, speech and language that's being the three core building blocks and for the for a really focused period of time we focused on essentially ensuring human parody. So if you ever wondered what the keys to the kingdom are it, czar, it's the most we built in ensuring that the research posture that we've taken there, what we then done is essentially a couple of things we focused on, essentially looking at the spectrum. That is a I both from saying that, Hollis and you know it's gotta work for data. Analysts were looking toe basically use machine learning techniques, toe developers who are essentially, you know, coding and building a machine learning models from scratch. So for that select proposition manifesto us, as you know, really a. I focused on all skill levels. The other court thing we've done is that we've also said, Look, it will only work as long as people trust their data and they can trust their AI models. So there's a tremendous body of work and research we do in things like responsibility. So if you ask me where we sort of push on is fundamentally to make sure that we never lose sight of the fact that the spectrum off a I, and you can sort of come together for any skill level, and we keep that responsibly. I proposition. Absolutely strong now against that canvas, Dave. I'll also tell you that you know, as edge devices get way more capable, right where they can input on the edge, see a camera or a mike or something like that, you will see us pushing a lot more of that capability onto the edge as well. But to me, that's sort of a modality. But the core really is all skill levels and that responsible denia. >>Yeah, So that that brings me to this notion of wanna bring an edge and and hybrid cloud Understand how you're thinking about hybrid cloud multi cloud. Obviously one of your competitors, Amazon won't even say the word multi cloud you guys have, Ah, you know, different approach there. But what's the strategy with regard? Toe, toe hybrid. You know, Do you see the cloud you bringing azure to the edge? Maybe you could talk about that and talk about how you're different from the competition. >>Yeah, I think in the edge from Annette, you know, I live in I'll be the first one to say that the word nge itself is conflated. Okay, It's, uh but I will tell you, just focusing on hybrid. This is one of the places where you know I would say the 2020 if I would have looked back from a corporate perspective. In particular, it has Bean the most informative because we absolutely saw customers digitizing moving to the cloud. And we really saw hybrid in action. 2020 was the year that hybrid sort of really became really from a cloud computing perspective and an example of this is we understood it's not all or nothing. So sometimes customers want azure consistency in their data centers. This is where things like Azure stack comes in. Sometimes they basically come to us and say, We want the flexibility of adopting flexible pattern, you know, platforms like, say, containers orchestra, Cuban Pettis, so that we can essentially deployed wherever you want. And so when we design things like art, it was built for that flexibility in mind. So here is the beauty of what's something like our can do for you. If you have a kubernetes endpoint anywhere we can deploy and as your service onto it, that is the promise, which means if for some reason, the customer says that. Hey, I've got this kubernetes endpoint in AWS and I love as your sequel. You will be able to run as your sequel inside AWS. There's nothing that stops you from doing it so inherently you remember. Our first principle is always to meet our customers where they are. So from that perspective, multi cloud is here to stay. You know, we're never going to be the people that says, I'm sorry, we will never see a But it is a reality for our customers. >>So I wonder if we could close. Thank you for that by looking, looking back and then and then ahead. And I wanna e wanna put forth. Maybe it's, Ah criticism, but maybe not. Maybe it's an art of Microsoft, but But first you know, you get Microsoft an incredible job of transitioning. It's business as your nominee president Azzawi said. Our data shows that so two part question First, Microsoft got there by investing in the cloud, really changing its mind set, I think, in leveraging its huge software state and customer base to put Azure at the center of its strategy, and many have said me included that you got there by creating products that air Good enough. You know, we do a 1.0, it's not that great. And the two Dato, and maybe not the best, but acceptable for your customers. And that's allowed you to grow very rapidly expanding market. >>How >>do you respond to that? Is that is that a fair comment? Ume or than good enough? I wonder if you could share your >>thoughts, gave you? You hurt my feelings with that question. I don't hate me, g getting >>it out there. >>So there was. First of all, thank you for asking me that. You know, I am absolutely the biggest cheerleader. You'll find a Microsoft. I absolutely believe you know that I represent the work off almost 9000 engineers and we wake up every day worrying about our customer and worrying about the customer condition and toe. Absolutely. Make sure we deliver the best in the first time that we do. So when you take the platter off products we've delivered in nausea, be it as your sequel, be it as your cosmos TV synapse as your data breaks, which we did in partnership with data breaks, a za machine learning and recently when we prevail, we sort off, you know, sort of offered the world's first comprehensive data government solution in azure purview. I would humbly submit to you that we're leading the way and we're essentially showing how the future off data ai and the actual work in the cloud. >>I'd be disappointed if you if you had If you didn't, if you capitulated in any way J g So so thank you for that. And the kind of last question is, is looking forward and how you're thinking about the future of cloud last decade. A lot about your cloud migration simplifying infrastructure management, deployment SAS if eyeing my enterprise, lot of simplification and cost savings. And, of course, the redeployment of resource is toward digital transformation. Other other other valuable activities. How >>do >>you think this coming decade will will be defined? Will it be sort of more of the same? Or is there Is there something else out there? >>I think I think that the coming decade will be one where customers start one law outside value out of this. You know what happened in the last decade when people leave the foundation and people essentially looked at the world and said, Look, we've got to make the move, you know, the largely hybrid, but we're going to start making steps to basically digitize and modernize our platforms. I would tell you that with the amount of data that people are moving to the cloud just as an example, you're going to see use of analytics ai for business outcomes explode. You're also going to see a huge sort of focus on things like governance. You know, people need to know where the data is, what the data catalog continues, how to govern it, how to trust this data and given all other privacy and compliance regulations out there. Essentially, they're complying this posture. So I think the unlocking of outcomes versus simply Hey, I've saved money Second, really putting this comprehensive sort off, you know, governance, regime in place. And then, finally, security and trust. It's going to be more paramount than ever before. Yeah, >>nobody's gonna use the data if they don't trust it. I'm glad you brought up your security. It's It's a topic that hits number one on the CEO list. J G. Great conversation. Obviously the strategy is working, and thanks so much for participating in Cuba on cloud. >>Thank you. Thank you, David. I appreciate it and thank you to. Everybody was tuning in today. >>All right? And keep it right there. I'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.