(rhythmic music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Miha Kralj. He is the cloud native architecture lead at Accenture and marathon runner I should say, too. >> That's true, yes. >> Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Miha. >> You're more than welcome. >> So I want to start the conversation by talking about the difference between cloud immigrant and cloud native. There's a big distinction. >> Yes, there is. Cloud became a new execution platform for a whole bunch of businesses and what we are going to see now is that lots of companies are using cloud in two different ways or two different forms. Even if you listen to analysts, they are talking about mode one, mode two so when we talk about cloud native we are mostly talking about both technologies and processes but also team organization that is very much inspired by cloud, that went through all of the transformations that we saw, for example, in companies like Netflix, like Uber, like very much how Amazon is organized internally, how Microsoft is organized internally so we are talking about very new approach. How to architect applications, how to actually have a process to develop publications and push them over into production, how to actually run the complete automation, a set of tools, but of course it's completely new enabling platform on top of that or underneath that that allows us to run those cloud native style of applications. >> An oversimplification I've heard is those born in the cloud companies will start out cloud native. The challenge you have for those that, the cloud immigrants, if you will, is there are so many different things that they need to change. Not just the way they architect things, the way that they run things. It's a real challenge and it's companies like yours I think, that help them do that immigration process, right? >> You are actually bringing up the really good point 'cause one thing is if you start from nothing. If you are in a green field and you build, you can say I'm going to take the best automation, I will buy the best people and I'm going to go full-on cloud native. That totally works. You can also be in the old world and you can say let me build cloud native like a separate IT organization and you hire some people in the old IT and some in the new IT and so on and so on and lots of our clients do that. We kind of create a bimodal type of IT organizations with two sets of technology stacks, two approaches. The thing that is really hard to do is to actually integrate those two into a very good hybrid cohesive schema so that you can have a system that one part of the system is traditional on-prem database that goes through its own rhythm of development and then you have systems that are cloud native, very rapidly developed, lots of the minimum viable products that are actually sourcing the data from the old world. So it goes from hard, harder, hardest. >> So do you have a schemata of how to make the decision? What strategy is right for which client or is it really just so dependent on the client's unique set of circumstances? I will try to reframe your question because it is not old or new 'cause it is always that dilemma. If you're looking every decade we go through the same rhythm of refreshing. We get a refreshed wave of architecture. If you remember 30 years ago when I was still young we had a traditional monolithic architecture which were refreshed into client server and into a service oriented architecture now into microservices and in the future we already know that we are going into reactive and driven architectures. Whenever we have a new architectural style we always get also new set of processes. Historically with the waterfall development then we refreshed into rational unified processes you'll remember that from ages ago and then the traditional right now we are doing agile and we are going towards lean development and so on so everything refreshes. So your question is very much asking when is the right time that you stop using the previous generation of architecture, process, tools and platform and jump to the next generation 'cause you can be too late. Obviously we are talking about companies that they need to modernize but you can also be too early 'cause lots of the companies are right now wondering should they go serverless which is also cloud native style but it's way ahead of typical containers, simple for natives. So when is it time to go from VM based traditional SOA into microservice containers versus reactive, event driven on let's say, azure functions. Those decisions are not easy to do but I can tell you most of my clients have kind of a spectrum of everything. They still have a mainframe, they have a client server, they have SOA architecture, they have microservices and they're already thinking about event driven serverless. >> Absolutely, and by the way, they can run that docker container on linux on the mainframe because everything in IT is always additive. So it's challenging. I've spent a lot of my career trying to help companies get out of their silos of infrastructure, of product group and in a multicloud world we feel like have we just created more silos? How are we making progress? What's good? How are you helping companies that maybe are stuck behind and are threatened of getting obsoleted from being able to move forward? What are some of the patterns and ways to get there? >> Our approach is very much trying to find what's really behind, what's the business reason behind? 'Cause until I realize why somebody wants to modernize it's very hard to give the answer to how do you modernize. Not to oversimplify but we typically see that value formula coming. We want to reduce specific detriments and we want to increase specific benefits and hat's why people need to go through those modernization waves. You can reduce cost and historically we were dramatically cutting costs just by automation, clonization, all of that. You can reduce risk. If you remember a few years ago everybody was talking that cloud is too risky, now everybody says oh, I'm reducing the risk and improving security by going to the cloud. You can increase speed and agility so you can suddenly do things much faster and enable more experiments. I personally find the number four most interesting which is you get better access to new software innovation. Here is the question. When is the last time that you remembered and a technology vendor would give you a DVD and say this is our latest software that you can use. >> Yeah, probably a Microsoft disc but you know, back in the day. >> Nobody is shipping software for on-premises anymore. Maybe, they do later in a cycle but all of the latest software innovation is cloud first or cloud only so it's only logical if we see the business that depends on business innovation, they need to start building their systems in a cloud native world 'cause they are going to source natural language processing, artificial intelligence recognition, all of the complex services, they have to source them from the could and therefore they want to build apps in the cloud native style. >> Yeah, it's an interesting challenge. Things are changing so fast. One of the things that I hear from certain companies is they, is that, well, I go and I make my strategy and then by the time I start implementing it I wonder if I made the wrong decision because some new tool is there. You mentioned Azure functions, wait, no, I was just getting on Kubernetes and getting comfortable with that as opposed to most companies, oh, I'm starting to look at that thing so these waves are coming faster and faster. >> You just exposed that you are an architect. Let me explain why. >> The technologist is charged, sorry. >> When I hire people into architecture roles, one of the common interviewing questions will be first, explain one of your previous solutions and then the question comes if you would start again today, what would you do different? Every single architect that I know are always dissatisfied with their previous choices and decisions because there were new wave of technologies that came in during the engagement. What you are expressing, whenever I get a person that says no, I did everything perfectly and I would not change anything, I might have a different role for these people. >> So I mentioned before that you are a marathon runner. I'm curious to hear how your job is similar to running a marathon because as Stu was just talking about, the pace of change, that is the one constant in this industry and to be a marathon runner, you got to keep a good pace. How do you sort of make sure that you are keeping your stamina up, keeping your eyes on the future to make sure you know what's coming ahead? >> That's a very interesting analogy and I was doing that comparison not that far back before. The first part isthat in order to have a good time at the end of the race you need to have good nutrition, you need to have a good preparation, you need to have all those things so the moment when I compared it back to my regular work, nutrition, we usually compare it with how do I keep my skills up which usually, at least in my case, it is between four to six hours every day either reading I usually say to people I try to make something, teach something and learn something every single day and you have to do that four to six hours every single day just like preparing for marathon and there is a whole bunch of those other activities that all need to be aligned then once you actually start running with the client, when you start doing engagement with the client, that even when you hit the wall, even when you get tired, first you know the reason why you are doing it, you know what the end goal means, what the finish line looks like and you know that you are prepared, that this is the best that you can get. Is it easy? No, it's not. We are kind of used in the IT industry to do that and reinvent ourselves every second year. >> When you look at the cloud navtive space what are some of the challenges and pitfalls? How do you manage that? What advice do you give at a high level? I understand there's a lot of diversity out there. >> Oh, where are the challenges and lessons learned? How much time do we have? So I would say the most obvious one would be jumping into that pool of cloud computing without preparation, without guidance, without help, without mentoring, tutoring or somebody to guide you. Get less than perfect experience and declare that is not for me therefore it's not for any of us ever. Right? I see lots of those generalizations where although it's clear that the whole industry is going in that consumerization direction and we are charging by consumption and all of that that we have clients that started it either early, they didn't have a fantastic experience, they got into specific roadblock and then for several years they don't want even to have a discussion anymore. The other problem is not enough upscaling so simply not enough thinking how different that knowledge is. A discussion with a CIO that says that IT's the same for last 30 years, you know, a machine is a machine is a machine. Coding is coding is coding. Nothing really changed ever. It is really hard to have a discussion to say the devil is in the details. Yes, technically we do the same thing for 30 years which is we make dreams come true in IT. We create something that was never done before but how we do that, and tools of the trade, an approach is dramatically different. Every decade brings a dramatically different result. Trying to explain that in supportive way is a challenge on its own. >> Miah, what about your team? How are you making sure that you have the right people in place to help execute these solutions? And this is they have the right skills, the right mindset, the right approach of the continual learning and the constant curiosity that you keep referencing? >> Well, you are asking a consultant how does consultant know that he's successful? When the client is happy. I'm serious, very simple here, right? How do we make sure that the client is happy which is very much corollary to your question. We really first need to make sure that we are educating our clients all the way through. The times of delivering something without a massive knowledge transfer, those times are over. The easiest way to explain that is that what we are telling is that every business needs to become software business. It doesn't matter is it bank, insurance, health provider, they need to learn to actually make critical competitive advantage solutions in-house. So how do we actually teach engineering to companies that historically were not engineering companies? All of my team are half coaches and half engineers or architects or whatever they are. Being a coach and being a mentor and kind of allowing our clients to do things independently instead of just depend on us is one of those major changes that we see how we actually ramp up and train and support people. >> Miha, we've seen and talked to Accenture at many cloud events. Accenture's got a very large presence. I've been watching the entire week. Activity in the booth, one of the four anchor booths here at the show. What's different about Microsoft, your view on Microsoft, what you're hearing from customers and also speak to how Accenture really lives in this Microsoft ecosystem. >> I think that I understand the question. Are you asking me about how Accenture and Microsoft cooperates together in that new world? >> Yeah, why does Accenture have such a large presence at a show like this? Accenture is at all the cloud events. >> So Accenture has specific targeted, strategic alliances with large technology vendors. The size of the alliance, the importance of the alliance is always directly reflected both from, of course, the size of the market but also our belief in how successful a long-term specific technology stack is going to be. We have a very strong, firm belief that with Microsoft we actually have an amazingly good alliance. Actually we call it alliance of three. We forgot to mention Avanade as well, right? Which is dedicated to creative entity to make sure that Microsoft solutions are built, designed and then ran correctly. We jointly invest obscene amount of money to make sure that right solutions are covered with right Microsoft technologies and developed in the right manner. >> Great, Miha, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> You're more than welcome, anytime. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. That wraps up our coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We will see you next time on theCUBE. (rhythmic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Michael Smith, he is the director of infrastructure at HKS, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey thanks for having me, excited to be here. >> So Mike, HKS, tell us, you're based in Dallas you're an architecture firm, tell us about some of the big projects that you have worked on. >> Sure, yeah, so I've been with the firm since April. Really excited to get on board and really kind of understand the rich history, we actually turn 80 this year so we'll have a really big celebration of the company. So yeah, HKS, we do a lot of sports entertainment so Dallas Cowboys, AT&T stadium, the Vikings home, L.A. Rams, so about 30% of our mix is sports entertainment so you may not know the company but you certainly know the buildings we design. >> Some well known buildings, exactly. >> Actually when you talk an 80 year old firm, and I think of those two buildings, well I'm a techie, I'm a geek, there's a lot of technology that goes into that. I'd love just a viewpoint as to how the company looks because 80 years ago I'm sure they didn't have the tech people in there, design is very much there, how does that you know the culture and inside the company a little bit? >> Sure, yeah so that's really the neat thing right, so everyone thinks that it's a company full of architects right and for the most part it is, but we have nurses on staff right, why? Because we build hospitals. We have people that understand how buildings work. So part of our five stakeholders, the community, is actually one of those stakeholders. So we're not just listening to the client who's asking us how to build it, we're seeing how that building is going to fit into the community, into its surroundings, and how it's really going to interoperate right cause these buildings are going to be around for what, you know 10, 15, 20 years until the next one gets built. >> So what are you doing here at this conference? What are the kinds of people you want to meet, the kind of connections you want to make? >> Sure, yeah, so first off I made some great connections. And that's one of the things I love about coming to things like Ignite. This is my first time here but I've loved it. I tell ya I really enjoy hearing people and hearing about the same challenges that I'm facing and then there's understanding how they're using the various pieces of technology to kind of piece that together. >> Alright so Mike, you're director of infrastructure, so we know infrastructure well, it is our first time at this show but we have been doing infrastructure shows for many years, maybe give us a little bit about your background and what's under your domain at HKS? >> Sure, yeah, so yeah I've worked for the last 20 years mainly for architectural engineering firms right, and so and there's a lot to be said for understanding the specific industry that you're working in right, so obviously it's not just about Word documents and Excel files, you're talking about very large CAD files and having to traverse from office to office right, and so you have to have a very robust infrastructure. So I've got basically the entire networking servers, WAN, LAN, Internet, VoIP, oh yeah and I've got cyber security under my profile as well. We run a small shop at HKS, but yeah so the company's doing really really well and we've got 24 offices globally, 19 here in the US and like I said we manage that really a 24/7 shop. >> Alright so you've got a number of locations, when we talked to infrastructure people the role of data and how do I manage it, how do I do things like disaster recovery and like usually are pretty important, how is it in your world? >> Yeah so obviously disaster recovery, to me that's the backbone of IT right, specifically of my group, and if we can't do that right, if we can't do a data protection correctly then to me we really shouldn't be working on any other project. And that's really where Cohesity comes into the equation right, so when I came on board we had a legacy solution, it was working right, it just and talking with the business really partnering and understanding what their expectations were, we realize that there were some gaps. And ended up talking to Cohesity through a vendor did an amazing whiteboarding session with just some folks that I really felt like cared about and understood our business and then yeah so we've been I guess since about mid-July, we've been implemented on our Cohesity solution for data protection globally, we're about 75% of the way there in what, just a month and a half? So from a speed of implementation standpoint right. But we've really made some leaps and bounds, gains and kind of those requirements that our customers are asking of us and kind of returning, you know basically returning them back to work. >> Yeah, can you paint a little picture of kind of the before and after for us? >> Sure yeah so we've always had a cloud strategy, so we've been partnered with Microsoft for several years, great Office 365, we've used Azure for backup, but I wouldn't say that it was really an optimized solution. And so if we had an actual outage, what we were talking about is you know a fairly long time to pull those resources back down to on-prem and so what we've implemented with our Cohesity solution is basically a system now where when our customers come in and 95% of the time they can get their files back on the phone with the first level technician. So before I was going to a third level sysadmin, basically requiring them to stop what they're doing, work on their restore right, and in some instances it may have been a day before we returned that customer back to work so if you can think about the ability to really just return them back into their normal work process, almost instantaneously, I mean the RTO is really incalculable when you start talking about soft dollars like that. >> Talk about, you mentioned how coming here you talked with lot of people in your industry or people maybe not even in your industry, but you realize you all share similar challenges, and you just talked about the disaster recovery and how that can really keep you up at night. Can you talk about a few of the other problems and challenges that you encounter and how Cohesity has helped you? >> Sure, yeah, so you know I think obviously in the forefront of everybody's mind is security right, and the fact that I have security within my group so understanding that in the topics of data in motion, data in rest right, topics of encryption so you know all of our data as it's pulled into Cohesity is encrypted and so obviously and then as that sits in Azure that's encrypted so that transaction is secure. You know I think the overall management of the infrastructure really having that single pane of glass that Cohesity can offer, that was huge challenge when I came onboard because the solution that we were using was really meant for file replication and so in order to find out if something worked we had to go to 81 disparate sources to see if that worked right. And so today I can come in in the morning, I got a guy that starts at 6 a.m. God bless him, and by the time I get in anything that happened overnight is completely remediated, I can look at one single pane of glass, I can see a bunch of green and honestly if there's red I can see it and I know that something failed and I can pinpoint exactly what we need to do to fix it. >> Mike you said you were about 75% of the way deployed. Walk us through where you're going with it, what you've been learning along the way, and any lessons learned along the way that you could share with your peers, as to how the experience has been, what they might want to do to optimize things. >> Sure, yeah, so I think we're about 75% of the way, we've got a lot of our international sites that are coming onboard now, we're learning a lot about our network. We're learning a lot about different things and so I would say before you do an implementation of this size, really make sure that you have a good handle on patching. Making sure that all of your resources are patched. The last thing you want to do is find out you have a resource problem with slow latency and it's due to a patch not being applied right. And then just understanding you know the time frames involved right? So we've targeted about 75 days to get fully onboard but we're talking almost a petabyte of data across one gigabit connectivity right, and so when you start talking about that there's lot of, we're doing a lot of mix and mashing, bandwidth throttling and all that kind of fun stuff in order to get up and running. >> Yeah so I'm kind of laughing a little bit over here because it's been a punchline in the Microsoft community, it's like oh well you know is it patch Tuesday yet or things like that. We've come so far yet there's still some things that hold us back, that leads me to my next question is you know what's exciting you in the industry in tech and your job, what's working great and what on the other hand are you asking your vendors, what would make your job and your group's job even better whether that be Cohesity, Microsoft, or others? >> Yeah so I think as a company that, we have a lot of data right, and at first as the role of the person responsible for that data, you know it was oh my gosh we have a lot of data. And it was actually a couple of months ago, something clicked in my head and I said, we have a lot of data. (hosts laughing) And guess what? We can do analytics on that data. And so you know I think machine learning is going to be huge right. I think being able to do a lot of those tasks that we count on, you know I have people that are doing things two to three times a week, maybe between eight and five. Well those are things that with machine learning we can have those algorithms basically running 24/7 and so we can start making leaps and bounds progress over what we're doing today. HKS is really big into understanding what the value add is in building a building right? It's not just about the architecture. There's value to that, and so what other value items can we provide to our customers that because you know to be honest technology is becoming a commodity right? How much longer before core services like your architecture and your engineering start to become commodities? And so that's really where I think analyzing that data. And so I was at VMworld a few weeks ago and I was talking to a Cohesity engineer and I really expected him, I said what's next on the road map from data analytics? And I expected to hear x, y, and z. And he looked at me and he goes, What do you want to see next? What do you want to do with your data? Let's partner with you and make that happen right. Now I'm smart enough to go, I don't know what that next thing is but we have really smart PhD-type people that do so we're really looking forward to that next phase. >> I'm interested in teams because you talked about the very diverse employee base at HKS. You said you've got nurses on the team, I'm imagining you have hospitality experts, you've got the PhD types, you've got the science people, and the architects. So how do you get all these people with very different functional expertise to work together and pull together and all be on the same page? >> That's actually a great question. So interestingly enough, I sit right next to a librarian and she's in IT right, and they work in our Global Knowledge Management group which does SharePoint so who better to understand how to start to classify and organize information than someone who's a trained librarian right? So I think what we're really excited about is our IT team has really been really rebuilt say over the last two years and it's been rebuilt with people who have a real passion for their industry but also kind of a broad understanding of how everything interconnects and so we're really kind of building a culture that says if there's information there, it's shareable. We're not holding anything close to the vest. If you want to understand, if I use too many acronyms when I talk, then ask me what they are right. And so I think that right there, that fosters a lot more involvement and people give more of themselves incrementally when they understand that hey there's skin in the game and yes I'm a librarian and I may not know the technological things that you do, but if I say well hey what if we do it this way, we're not just going to blow that idea off and we're going to actually incorporate that into the greater solution. >> Great, Mike we talk a lot about AI at the show and IoT and you're doing buildings, I'm curious how things like all the censors and everything impact what you're doing, how you partner with your clients on that. >> Sure, yeah, so we've got a great team that really focuses on that entire extended set of technologies so obviously drone technologies, sensor technologies, and so I think a lot of those, those are I won't even say that they are even forward looking anymore. Those are, especially sensor technology, so I mean I've worked in environments where we had 24 by seven cameras on a job site so general contractor probably hates it but a PM from anywhere in the world can look at his project, his or her project, and they can see their progress right? Well you know then at what point does that extend to, well I'm going to launch a drone here and I'm going to go look at a very specific piece and a very part of that technology. And so yeah I think it's one of those things if you ever start sitting on your laurels in IT, if your feet ever get off of the toes moving forward, you're already behind. So you know I think things like AI, machine learning, you know I've talked to some people that'll go, well we're two to three years away from that. And I said, in two to three years those will be things of the past right? You have to, you don't have to be bleeding edge, but you have to understand where you can leverage those technologies for your business. >> Give us a little candy here. Paint a picture of what the building of the future is, whether it's the stadium of the future, the hotel of the future, just get us excited here. What are some of the things >> Sure yeah. that you're looking at? >> So I actually talked to a gentleman a couple weeks back and they're building a hotel and this hotel has Bluetooth sensors in the room right, can't do any kind of cameras or anything like that but basically what it can do is based upon the signal saturation of the Bluetooth, it can tell you how many people are in that room cause it understands the dissipation of the signal through the normal human body right. So take that down to your typical occupancy sensor that so you leave the room, maybe you're sleeping late, well the room doesn't think anybody's in there so it turns the temperature up, turns the lights on, does whatever it does right. Well with this new technology it can't do that. So fast forward on and maybe it's a little bit more scary. So now you go from your room and you walk down to the lobby bar, you walk past the lobby bar. Well the wireless devices know the MAC address of your phone because you used that number when you checked in, so as you get close it pops you a hey, you want to 15% or how much do you want to free drink at the bar if you come in here? So I think understanding the connectiveness of everything and then really not being afraid of it. There is a Big Brother aspect to all of this, but just kind of understanding that you know, kind of in the Elon Musk vein is that we have to understand and we have to control where that technology is going but I think if you're afraid of it like that and you know, I'm not going to, I'm never going to stay at that hotel because of the things that they do, then I think you're missing out. >> Right, exactly. Well thank you so much Mike, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much >> A lot of fun talking to you. I appreciate the opportunity. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida coming up just after this. (light techno music)

>> That's sort of what I bring, is an ability to catalyze the conversation, and share that knowledge with others in the community. Our philosophy is everybody expert in something, everybody is passionate about something, and has real deep knowledge about that something. What we want to focus in on that area and extract that knowledge and share it with our communities. This is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE. (smooth music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting with Stu Miniman. We have two guests for this segment, we have Anna Chu, who is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft and Shona Chee, Product Marketing Manager Diversity and Tech Community Lead. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Happy to be here! >> So, you are dressed very similarly. (laughs) >> Yes, we are. >> Yes, so we're going to get into diversity, because I want to go there, but let me start with you, Anna. So, you are really in charge of the community within the vast ecosystem of Microsoft. That's a big job. So how do you go about it? What's your approach to the Microsoft Community? >> Gosh, well, it's a lot of work. I've been leading the community efforts at Microsoft Ignite for the past two and a half, three years. And ultimately, it's all about the people in the room. These are IT pros, these are developers; people who care about technology. It's also end users as well; people who are business-focused. So we really want to make sure that we're delivering content that is going to help them go back to their communities, go back to their offices and be able to share all that knowledge back into the workplace. >> And Shona, so then you are within a slice of that community. So focusing on diversity and tech. So, what is your, how do you operate? >> So we see diversity as really closely integrated with technology. So we are a community that lives on the tech community. So there's a direct link, AKA dot MS Life Diversity and Tech, but what we're pretty much doing is bringing people together. All the tech communities to talk about important topics of diversity inclusion. So, traditionally, it's always been very HR driven, a lot about talent and acquisition and recruitment, but for us its really about what about the people in career, how do we help them feel like they belong, and they're apart of this ecosystem. So that's where we see the symbiotic relationship. >> And I have to say that it's my first time to the show. I've watched it from afar, I knew lots of people that were Microsoft MVPs over the years, very impressed. Maybe give our audience a little bit about what goes on in the show. You got all the podcasts going, there's meet-ups, there, you know, lots of good flare you're giving out at the show, and everything else like that. So, what's everybody missing that didn't come to this community gathering? >> Gosh, I hope I didn't miss out on anything, really. I really hope that we were as inclusive as possible. But every year we try and make the event more community infused than ever before. In previous years, we just really focused on content that would be live on a stage, such as at a theater or a breakout, but we really want to add a little bit more of the networking side of things too this year. So we've invested in the meetups, which are more formalized ways for the community to find their people. But we've also invested in idea swaps, such as a brand new concept that we've landed here in Microsoft Ignite, where we have group idea swaps where people are putting together topics that they want to meet with others about. And we also want to facilitate more one on one networking because personal relationships are such a critical part to being professionally strong in your career. You can't be successful without other people. So we really want to enable Ignite to be that platform. We've got people from all around the world. Shona's got this amazing pin wall in the Diversity and Tech area that showcases where everyone is coming from. There are people coming from really remote areas, to people all parts of Western Europe and the US, and I think there's a lot to be gained from people being able to find each other through Ignite. >> And what we always tell attendees is everything is live-streamed or recorded in terms of sessions, so the biggest take away here is really people and communities, so we really encourage people to meet-up, build valuable connections, just talk about topics that might be uncomfortable so that we can learn from it. >> Such a great point there. It's funny it is one of those pro tips out there. First of all, when there's a really big convention center, and there's a lot of people, there's certain sessions that you want to be at. Maybe you want to talk to the speaker in due but, when you find time on the plane ride back or spend a little time in that suite, you can go re-watch some of it, the people is really what drives everybody to the event. >> Where else would you meet 25,000 people in one venue, right? So it's really exciting. >> Shona you said talk about topics that are a little uncomfortable, those are the hardest things to talk about, particularly with a group of strangers. So what has been your experience at this conference, what are people saying that might count as that? >> Right, so the recent inclusion has really come front and center in terms of topics that's hot in the IT industry in particular. So traditionally people think about diverse inclusion as gender, right? Men and women. But, we're seeing that it's a lot more multi faceted than that. We're talking really about intersectionality of identities, all of us hold multiple identities, I'm a woman in tech, I'm an IT professional, I'm a millennial. So there's multi areas that we deal with, but we need to address each and every one of them. So for example, this year we have a lot of sessions focused on LGBTQ, and we also have our partners talking about this topic as well, and just really getting people in a room to say help me learn more about this area that I'm not that familiar with, or let's talk about race and culture. What do people in your culture do? What is the norm, what is acceptable? And that's why we also partnered with Tech Women, it's a US department of state initiative where we invite women from developing countries to come share their experience being an IT pro in those countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon. So we really want to give them platform to interact with attendees, but also giving mostly North American and European customers a chance to hear from someone in a completely different cultural setting. >> And just talking about all the various identities that we all encapsulate. Is the workplace the right place to talk about those things? That is another question too, in the sense of we are bringing our full self to work and we are spending so many hours at work. But at the same time, what is the right balance, do you think? >> Yeah, I think that's a great point. On the Monday leadership panel, we actually talk about leadership and building inclusive work cultures. Like you said, we spend so much time in the office, sometimes our coworkers become our family almost, right? How do we create and environment where people feel like they belong, where they feel like they can be genuine and not feel like they have to hide something, because in-authenticity really shows, and we want to encourage people to just feel like they have a safe place to express themselves. >> So in terms of advocating for yourself at work, I know that's another big theme that is in the diversity and tech workshops, what is some advice that you have for women, for underrepresented minorities, for people of various sexual orientations to make sure that they are having there careers that they are capable of having, and not being and not coming up against other biases and challenges. >> So in the Tuesday session, Donna Secaur actually talked about this, which was a great point, she said, you can write your own story, you can't control what people say about you, but you can control what's out there in the media, you can control how you do your social media profiles, and I think it's really encouraging people to take a look at what's online. Brand yourself how you want people to see you, and be proud of it, I think that's one of the biggest points. >> I also think that Microsoft Ignite brings so many people together, but they all have a common mutual passion which is about technology, and if that manages to bridge build bridges between people who may not necessarily get to know each other, so people from different religions or from different ethnic backgrounds, who don't really have that opportunity to get to know each other, and then they find a common passion, or they also face the same challenge on how to govern teams or things like that then suddenly we're doing a lot to help, build bridges and just drive that human connection so we can get beyond some of those challenges that we're facing in 2018. >> One of the ideas that bridges both community and diversity is career paths. I know a lot of the shows they go is how're we taking somebody from a certain world that growth mindset that we hear Sasha talking about how're you looking to address that and how is that discussed in the communities? >> Gosh, we've just launch a completely new Microsoft learned platform as well, one of the things that is really important ab6out learning is actually learning through community too. And if we can enable people to find their own people by helping them share best practices and tips, and we've made huge in roads there. So one of the things we've run as part of Microsoft Ignite, are community socials. So community socials are a way for people to find their people. So we've hosted ones for Microsoft Exchange an6d Outlook and we can make an element of fun out of that too, so there seems to be a certain personality in that community called squeaky lobster, I don't know if you've heard of squeaky lobster. It's some sort of inside joke that even I don't understand, but apparently he's a personality, and he's here to unite the community together, and then people will come together, and they'll talk about Exchange 2019, and they'll talk about how that impacts other parts of Office 365 and Microsoft 365, and then they'll talk about all the different ways that they can connect with each other as well. So it's a very amorphous thing. From a learning perspective, we have a lot of things that we can do to create platforms for learning, which is really awesome, but at the end of the day we have to learn through community because it's just IT professionals and developers are having to learn at a crazy pace, faster than they've ever had before. So that's a really big part. >> And I like that you mentioned career paths, because we just partnered with the MVP community to launch a community mentors program, and that's where we partner with over 700 participants all around the world from 65 countries, and over 800 years of combined industry experience, to have mentors work with mentees from other countries, and do a lot of cross sharing, just sharing expertise and best practices. >> And you have your student ambassadors here too. >> So that's a new thing that we've also rolled out at Ignite this year, we've invited seven student ambassadors from three local colleges here, and we invited them to work with our community reporters to push out some exciting video content. So that helps them to get a flavor of what kind of roles are out there in tech. We want to debunk the myth that you have to learn coding to work in technology and that is not true. There are so many amazing IT pro roles out there that we really want to educate people on. >> So the technology industry at this point in time has a very bad reputation in terms of diversity, there's not enough women, there's not enough minorities, there's not enough sexual orientation diversity. Coupled with this real bro culture, what's your best advice for technology companies today to be more inclusive, that's one of Satya Nadella's real guiding principles is embracing diversity, different perspectives, and being inclusive. How do you do it? >> I would say the first thing is really, just take the first step. We're all on a journey, this is a really big hairy issue that we're all working to tackle, and we cannot do this alone, and that's something we've heard consistently with all our partners. We are working together to tackle this as an industry, and I can't speak for other companies, but at Microsoft we have a strong culture of empathy, and as you know from Sasha's key note we're all about empowering people to be the best that they can be, and that is why we've developed code of conduct, we make sure people know what's acceptable, what are the boundaries that we can talk with, but still push the limit and say, hey I want to learn more about your culture, I want to know more about the LGBTQ community, I want to know about inclusive design and accessibility, how do I build technology that is accessible for everybody. So I think it's not easy for sure, even for Microsoft, we are still trying a lot of things for the first time. We learn and we grow from it, and we just keep improving it every year, so we hope that in future Ignites it will be even better. >> And having community members, even individually own being a champion for diversity too, whether it be in their own organization, or in their own user groups that they run, we really want to make sure that they are feeling like I can be an ally for diversity, whether you are someone who is the the typical persona in the IT pro world, which is a white male, and I'm really glad to hear a lot of these stories of people saying you know what, I am going to be that person that's going to step in and say something when I don't think things are right. >> And there are topics that everybody can relate to as well like mental health and wellness, that's an issue that's really come in the spotlight with a lot of stress in the industry. So it doesn't matter whether you're male, female, your gender identity, all of us are human beings. We all feel the same pressures and stress, and we just had that lunch session where literally tears were shed because people felt like I now have space to say I'm struggling with this, can you help me? And I think that's a really powerful thing to even just get started. >> It does require a lot of bravery, I think. Because for me even, I like to be able to find other people that I can relate to, who also share some of the same challenges that I have, and so I think that's the first step really, basically opening the doors and letting people express themselves and then other people are also going to feel like they're included. I think that's really one of the first steps. >> And where better to do it than a community. Finding your people in this space so yeah. >> And I want to ask about the buttons you have on so, yours, Anna's says Ringleader, Shona, game changer. >> Networking ninja >> And Networking ninja! I love it. So can you explain what these mean? >> Yeah so this year we want to try to really interactive button wall and we want people to come, and feel like they can share what's there diversity super powers, so all of us play a really important role, we where many hats from a day to day basis, but we want to know, what do people feel like is there ultimate strength, whether you're a mentor, are you an enabler, are you a supporter, what is it? And these were just great conversation topics, so if I saw that Anna's a Ringleader, I might come up to her and be like, oh that's me too, can we talk and schedule and idea slot? So we just want to create a fun way for people to interact, but another important thing we've launched this year is the pronoun buttons, so we want everybody to feel like they can be comfortable telling people what is the pronoun that they prefer rather than what visually people think they are, so that is something that we've launched this year as well. >> Very cool, very cool. Well thank you both so much for coming on theCube, it was really fun talking to you. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (smooth music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE'S coverage of Microsoft Ignite 2018 here in Orlando. I'm Stu Miniman, and happy to welcome back to the program John Mracek who's the CEO of a Imanis Data. It's our first time at the show, but not your first time on theCube. Thanks so much for joining us and tell us we caught up with you in New York City talking about kind of the AI, analytics, all those things there. what what what brings a Imanis to Microsoft Ignite? >> So this has been a great show for us. And what I really see happening here is there's a vibrancy that probably didn't exist in Microsoft events, maybe four or five years ago. Because Microsoft really getting their act together on the whole how you migrate and bring people to the Azure. Right, because that's their agenda. And so where we fit in there is in our data management platform. We help customers migrate to a Azure. So whether it's moving your Hadoop workloads to Azure, or one of the products that's been featured here that we've gotten a lot of Microsoft support on is our migration tool to move from MongoDB to Cosmo DB. So we play really well into the migration story and it really leverages our platform. >> Yeah, one of the questions we talk about all the time is customers trying to figure out where things live and, well, it's like your cloud strategy. Things are changing over time. Customers have really multi-cloud environments, which really means they're doing a lot of different things and a lot of times they need to move them and sort those out. So what are the challenges you're seeing? How do you help those businesses make decisions today and be able to move things as needed in the future? >> Yeah, what we see and what we're playing into is really this evolution. You know, solutions really drive technologies. So in a large enterprise, you might have a division or a particular group that says, I need this BI or analytics tool and I need a big data platform to do it. So they build this. They build on top of some either NoSQL or Hadoop and then they've got this great solution. Well, that happens four or five times across the enterprise, and at some point in the enterprise, the CIO or somebody says, "you know, "we kind of got all these distributed data systems, "and like, who's managing them? "How is that data being moved "to your point about cloud migration? "Well, these are on-prem, these are in the cloud. "We want to put them all in the cloud, how do we do that?" And so that's where we're seeing as kind of the call for our product, which is, okay, I need a central way to manage and manipulate this data, as a fundamental problem. >> Yeah, so we all know that data is fundamental to a business. It's one of the most important things. We can use all the tropes of, it's the new oil or anything like that. But when you dig down, it's a lot of complexity into how, how do I get data? How do I manage data? How do I share data? We're sitting here in Cohesity, is the where we are in the booth. Can you help us understand, what are the solutions that you complement in the data space? What are the solutions that you replace? or a modern version or compete against in this space? >> So the way to look at us, we're at our most general, we're a platform for moving data from one platform to another. Okay, and that has many different use cases. But where we're getting a lot of customer uptake is on the backup recovery. It's like, I've got it here, I want to make a backup. We also see a lot in terms of migration, whether it's the Mongo to DB or I want to move from on-prem to cloud or cloud to cloud. And where we fit is if you look there's a legacy providers who don't traditionally go after the NoSQL and Hadoop space. And so where were a perfect complement to either those companies or folks like Cohesity. We have partnerships with Cohesity, Veem and others where they get in RFP or they're talking to a customer and the customer has a specific request for data management solution for NoSQL or Hadoop platforms. And that's where we come in. Because that's what we focused on exclusively from day one. >> Yeah, well, being at a Microsoft show, I mean, applications are central to so much and Microsoft does. Everything from Office, but on the data side, we spend a lot of time this week talking about SQL. Talking about Cosmos DB and cool new things they're doing. And of course, Microsoft's playing in a lot of the modern areas. We see them, big developers base here, even more of it at the Microsoft Build show, what do you see in the Microsoft space on the application modernization? Sounds like that would tie in quite a bit to what you're helping customers with. >> Yeah, so we have customers across all the cloud providers. But what we see in the Microsoft case is really people looking for maybe global easy deployment, customer facing as typical examples. So people who are really pushing the envelope, frankly. And there's almost like a bi-modal distribution. There's kind of some folks who are still trying to retrofit the old world and then others who are really embracing some of the new platforms. >> I'm not sure if you were at the keynote on Monday, Satya Nadella unveiled the Open Data Initiative. We've got Adobe and SAP and Microsoft there. I was talking to one analyst and reading some reports, and I'm like, well, it's not a coincidence that this was launched the week of Salesforce. Salesforce has a lot of data. Maybe that's a little bit of an attack there. But data across these big providers is important. I want to be able to share and leverage my data. You're in the data business. But what viewpoint you have of some of these really big providers of the application as they're going through their digital transformation, and making how do customers get the best value out of their data? >> So, my background, most recent background, I was in an ad tech company, where we're all big data. And the whole play there, is how do you manage your audiences, right? How do you have a unifying way to look at audiences? And so this is what's playing out on a more higher level, a more general level of how do I normalize and create a unified view of the customer and consistent data so that I can then manage it. And so that's an essential requirement to get the maximum value at out of that. Once you have that and you're in your data repositories, it's incredibly critical to protect them, to be able to orchestrate and move around. Where we fit in and how we see it is, these things are data, to reuse the term is the new oil and the new gold. And companies are realizing that it's really time to protect this data. I put all this investment into getting unified view of data. Wow, what are we doing about how do we back it up, restore it and move it? >> It's interesting, I've watched the space long enough. You go back kind of BI and DW days, go through big data. Now, we talk about a lot more of the analytics in the intelligence there. Help us as to, what are we actually realizing today that we were been talking about for years, and what what are still some of the stumbling blocks as to what we need to mature as an industry to really help unlock data. >> So, I mean, there's clearly the, what's driven a lot of the machine learning AI is the availability of data. It wasn't so much algorithms change dramatically, it was, we have a, so all the machine learning applications are really benefiting from this. But what we see as you know, some of the immediate things with our customers, is they're using big data as they create their front ends, engage with their customers. So how do they have the most up to date, real-time information to whether it's present an offer to a customer, provide customer service. So a lot of the use case we see is in that really bread and butter customer-level interactions and having an appropriate database to front end that process. >> Alright, so one of the biggest challenges of our time is really talking about distributed architecture. When I talk to companies scale comes on a lot, but it means very different things to different people. Can maybe talk about what you're hearing from customers, and how your solution helps customers for a variety of implementations. >> Yeah, so, we typically are targeting and working with customers in the 10s to 100s of terabytes. Up to, and our system handles up into into the petabytes. Typically, what we see is an evolution is, as I said earlier, somebody will develop a solution in a particular division, and then realize we've got this asset to protect. And then so IT starts to get involved and basically look at it holistically. So, we had one of our prospects, we went in and pitched at an SVP level and said, "what are the problems you're facing?" and it was basically this, I have all these silos of data. To get the maximum value out of them, and have a uniform look, whether it's look at our customers, the market, I need a uniform view to do my BI and AI. And so they brought us in and said, "Okay, paint a picture of how I can continue to have "these groups run autonomously and run their solutions, "yet at the same time, give me a unified view "and make me feel comfortable "that I've been able to protect the data, "move the data, massage the data." >> Great. Talk to me, when I look at this show, I see a lot of customers are still doing things, I'm trying to think how to say it nicely. Kind of the old way, it's like, if you look at them five years ago, is like, okay, Windows 2019's there great. I'll get there in five years, you play with a lot of more modern applications. What do you hear from customers? What, what is the profile of a customer that is, taking advantage and being competitive in the world? And what do you advise companies that maybe are a little bit behind the eight ball. >> So, you're right, and there's a really big spectrum of where people are in the adoption curve. And the way we look at it, if people were waiting for it, you know, when somebody goes, "Yeah, we're looking at setting up a big data system", it's like, okay, we'll talk to you in a year once you get the basics set up. But I see kind of two types of things. There's, say, the smaller, more aggressive companies, who are willing to move forward and say, "I just got to create a product, I don't care how I do it, "I don't have legacy issues." And they've moved ahead, and they're starting to get to the point where they're like, "Okay, we're mature enough where we actually need to spend on data management." The more typical case though is, as I said earlier. It's like these these new apps, that larger companies might have bleeding edge groups. So it's not being driven centrally. And so my, you asked about advice, right? So if you're sitting in the top of large enterprise and say, "Well, how do we get there. "There's kind of the tops down, "I need somebody to help me figure out." But there's also, let 1,000 flowers and let there be some kind of anarchy, if you will. Breaking the model, breaking the mold. Let people go build stuff and then over time start to figure out how to assimilate. So that'd be the biggest single biggest advice is, Yeah, you want to do the top down, but you really want to do the bottoms up. Because those people really know how to use the technology to provide a solution. >> Yeah, absolutely. Guy Kawasaki let 1,000 flowers bloom out there and everything. All right. Help bring this in. What kind of customer conversations are you having this week? We talked to the top about, there's real good energy to this show. Definitely, I felt that. What would you share with your peers that haven't been at the show? >> So the topics here are typically around the migration. Whether it's like to like, moving an existing workload into Azure, or the transformation. We also announced the show cooperation with Microsoft on moving any of your NoSQL workloads to Cosmos DB. So most of the conversations here have been related to migration. Either of, if you will, within the same Hadoop family, or, you know, like to unlike. Going from something to Cosmos DB. And that goes back to your earlier point about people trying to figure out what to do. They know there's this imperative to move to the cloud, and they're trying to figure out how they do it in bite-sized chunks. Right and protect their business at the same time. >> Yeah, so you mentioned Cosmos DB. We had an interview earlier this week about Cosmos DB. I definitely heard some good buzz at the show, What is it about that is drawing customers to it and what's that enable for them? >> Two things that I'm aware of, that I've seen is, again, the global nature and the ability to just kind of deploy anywhere. But also, I've seen a little bit around the dynamic schemas and the ability to map between them as a very quick way to ingest data. So you can get up and running quickly, instead of doing a lot of manual work to start using it. So those are things that are going to win developers 'cause it makes their life easier. >> Alright, John I want to give you the final word. What should we look to see from Imanis over the next six to 12 months. >> So we're going to continue to push forward with our platform around data management. You've seen in some recent announcements that, where leveraging machine learning in a very concrete way to do anomaly detection around ransomware. And also for administrators to be able to basically set rules or set goals and have the software do it. And that really steams from the fact that we're using a big data platform and machine learning to solve the problem of well, if you're running a big data platform, how do you manage the data? So the whole DNA of the company is built around that, and from a go-to-market standpoint, you know, partnering with folks like Cohesity and others where you've already got people in market selling a broad solution but they're missing a piece. So the other thing you'll see from us, is more partner announcements as we go forward. Alright, well, John Mracek really appreciate all the updates on a Imanis Data. Congrats on the progress so far. And look forward to catching with you up at future show. >> Great, thank you. >> Alright, we'll be back with more coverage here. Day three of three days live coverage. Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. And theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by David Willis, he is the corporate VP US One Commercial Partner at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thanks for inviting me today. >> So, congrats on a great show. This has been a lot of fun. We've been here three days. It's our first time here, it's been a great show. >> Yeah, yeah we're really excited about it. There's I mean a lot of energy from our customers and our partners. Talking a lot to partners and customers. Everybody's going through digital transformation right now. They're either being disrupted or they plan to disrupt. They know that, they know they have to get ahead of that. And so, digital transformation's a big theme we're hearing today. And then some of the technology's that we're really driving hard. Artificial Intelligence is a very hot topic this week and as I meet with partners I run the partner for the US, but actually meeting with a lot of customers here this week. And what we're seeing is a lot of our customers are actually looking to Microsoft to become partners, as they leverage the Cloud solutions to bring value to market. And that can be IT companies that are either delivering services and MSP or on premise that now with the Cloud they can go to the market with us. But sometimes it's a company that say makes equipment for manufacturers, and they see an opportunity to turn on an IoT device with that product. Deliver more value to the customer, and as a result we can go to market with that customer to those manufacturing companies. So there's some really interesting evolutions that we're seeing in the business. At this specific event, I've been meeting back to back with customers, talking about how we can partner together and go to market, it's really exciting. >> David I feel like you watched our intro talking about they keynote on day one. Because we said Microsoft itself is going through a digital transformation. And the question we had coming in is well, how does that transformation line up with your customers and partners. So you've been with the company almost 26 years now. >> That's right yeah. >> I want you to talk about digital transformation but before, questions we ask a lot of the Microsoft guests is, what's the same and what's different about the Satya Nadella Microsoft compared to what you've done in the past? >> Yeah we've gone through a lot of changes over the years since I joined in 1992 for sure and a lot of it's fun. I got to say, I'm more excited now then I ever have been. Part of it is just the momentum we have with our Cloud solutions and the opportunity that's available to us and our partners and quite frankly our customers as well. And Satya talks about our mission, empowering every person, every organization on the planet to achieve more. But loosely translated the way I see it it's all about customer success, and when Satya got up in front of our new hirers. We have this mock program which is kind of, new employees coming out of school. And he said, listen you don't join Microsoft to be cool, you join Microsoft to make others cool, which is our customers and so, that's a radical change in how we think and how just the culture is at Microsoft, and it's really exciting. But then add to that, the technology we're lining up. We got four key solution areas and not sure how familiar we're from a modern workplace around office, seeing some amazing take-up with teams right now and as I talk to partners, they're really excited about the momentum around teams. Dynamics as well. We're seeing some great take-up from customer experience right through to finance and operations scenarios. And of course Azure, I mean the growth and momentum we're seeing across apps and infrastructure data and AI is just fantastic. But at the end if they day again, it's all around using that technology and those solutions to enable digital transformation for our customers so that they can succeed. >> Azure is having tremendous momentum, talk to our viewers a little bit about what you're seeing. >> Yeah so Azure I think I guess the biggest differentiators we hear from our partners that I'm meeting and our customers quite frankly are many dimensions. One is around just how we're focused on developers to make them more productive, 'cause it's for them it's all about how can I be more agile, develop applications faster for my business or just to bring to market. So that's one key piece. The fact that we have a hybrid solution as well. We're consistent from on-premise to cloud, is very big for customers because very few customers are willing to go 100% into Cloud right away. They got a vision, they want to get there, but knowing they can balance that with a consistent management approach and security infrastructure as well. Intelligence is big too. So as I said, being able to as you have all this data and the accumulation of big data that's happening. Being able to apply machine learning. Apply cognitive services solutions like Chatbot and other agents. And of course A.I. is a big one. And then lastly trust, and that was a key, Satya talked a lot about that at our, at his keynote around trust, and really differentiating ourselves from that perspective in the sense that we got over 70 certifications to meet various compliance standards. And GDPR on privacy is a big focus for us, it's while it started in the EU it's actually pretty high in our North America customer list as well from a priority stand point, so that's helping. But quite frankly, when I meet with partners, what they love is this go-to-market approach. So we've got a large sales force, that our partners can plug into and take advantage of as we go to marker together. And obviously technology one key element, pricing is another key element. But knowing that they can work with us to go to market. We're not going to compete with them in any way. You know we're really clear on what our proposition is and how we go to market, it's a big value proposition as well. >> David we can throw down a bit on the partner ecosystem, because there are some partners that have been going through that digital transformation like with Microsoft. There's other that started out, Cloud-Native if you will. Cloud first and talk a little bit about the changes that at Amex that you see in the ecosystem. How many of them start out their businesses on Azure versus the other options. >> Sure, yeah I mean partners have always been a big part of our business model at Microsoft since day one. And in many ways it's been a large part of our success being able to scale and reach a broad audience. But I would say now with Cloud services partners are more important now than ever before. And as we focus on customer success, not just delivering technology, not just licensing technology, but actually focus on customer success. We need partner solutions. Like what Cohesity provides, to provide that last mile of functionality and capability that customer are looking for, and that's why this ecosystem is really growing at a rapid pace for us, which is really exciting. And then the other piece that we're putting a lot more emphasis on now particularly as many of our partners are becoming more focused with specialized I.P. and really, we're encouraging partners to just really be clear on what you do best. It's creating this opportunity for partners to partner with other partners. And so we're developing this whole ecosystem, which provides great opportunities for a partner like Cohesity to work with say one of our service delivery partners to go to market together, and achieve 1 plus 1 equals more than just two, which was really exciting. And then the value brought up to customers is that we can just provide that many more solutions, and then solutions that they can provide us. They make all about Microsoft and so the value prop there is super high. >> So I mean this is what we, it's been a continual theme of this conference and also here on theCUBE is the breadth and depth of this ecosystem. I mean, and you've just described how partners are partnering with others and I mean, what's sort of the end point? Is it just going to get, that ever vaster? I mean I don't even know if that the right word but-- >> I believe so, I mean we estimate that total digital transformation opportunity on a global level to be $4.5 trillion. You look at the size of Microsoft and our competitors we're nowhere close to that, so that's why I say this opportunity is just tremendous, and new solutions are being developed all the time that we hadn't even thought of or dreamt of before. And partners are just, I mean that's what I love about our partners. They're so innovative, and they bring these new solutions to market and so, hey as far as I'm concerned, it's infinite. I mean, there's just so much opportunity out there and some of the opportunity we don't even know about just yet. >> David one of the challenges is just the pace of change is just keeps increasing, it's the only this constant in our industry I think. Talk about how you work with your partners, how training is involved, is there any things you've done from certification towards levels, you usually hear the gold platinum and like that has changed in the last few years to enable this. >> Yeah I would say we're really focused on simplifying how to work with Microsoft, it's been a big focus for us, a year ago we went through a major field re-organization you may be aware of. Where we lined up our sales teams by industry as an example so they can really drive value to customers. And one thing we do with partners was we were highly fragmented. So we had enterprise partners in with our enterprise sales teams. We had SMB partners over with small medium business groups. We had ISVs kind of over here so, that's why we call the one commercial partner group in my title, in my org. As we pulled all that together into one organization so we could really simplify how to engage with Microsoft from a partner perspective. And then we clarified, we really have three primary functions that within my team the partners plug into. I build-with, I go to market, and I sell with. Pretty straight forward. Build with, was hey, you want to build an application or solution or develop a new practice area. I've got tactical resources and other resources that can help partners build that solution or practice. On the go to market side I've got a whole marketing team that can sit down with a partner who may not 'cause a lot of our partners actually don't have marketing expertise. They're great at technology, great solution, but they need help, and so I get marketing people who are assigned to help them build a marketing campaign and go-to-market. We got lots of great funded programs as well. And then I've got this, this sell-with team and they're actually aligned to out field sales teams and they plug partners into our field sales teams. So, you can imagine every now forecasting meeting that happens or pipeline review with our sales teams. I've got somebody sitting at that table representing partners and plugging partners into our Go-to-Market focus and so, partners are living that, and our one of the metrics we track is partner attached to pipeline. A year ago when we started on this journey, 25% was a partner attached to a pipeline. We're up to almost 90% now in terms of partner attached to a pipeline as a result of having that direct connection into our field team. So it's really, again that simplifying how you build with or be clear on how we do that, how we go to market together then how we co-sale together. >> Yeah, as I look for and I hear the places where Microsoft is leading towards the future, talk about A.I., talk about IoT, I mean I heard about Microsoft even creating products down to some of the Edge device. That's going to propose even more challenges to the broadening and deepening of the ecosystem. What should we look to see from Microsoft? How do you plan, for kind of that future of even more diversity? >> In terms of more partner and more capability yeah I mean we've got a major partner recruitment effort. But quite frankly a lot of our new solutions actually comes from our existing partners. So they're looking to round out, set-up new practice areas. So we're always willing and open to sit down with partners to help them map-out that future as well and then, we got a whole lot of partners out there including partners outside the U.S that want to come to the U.S to help partner with us so we try to be as welcoming as possible because there is so much opportunity, to your question earlier that we can all go after together. >> I want to ask about cultures. So, Satya Nadella up on the main stage and in various media reports and interviews. He talks about Microsoft's culture, the culture he wants to create and cultivate. Creativity, collaboration, inclusiveness, a real embracing of diverse perspectives. >> Right. >> So, that sounds great especially in an industry where the tech culture has pretty much a bad reputation as not being diverse, being relentless and competitive. What's it like to work there? I mean you've been there nearly three decades. >> Yeah, as I said it's, well actually it really starts in what we call the growth mind-set. I think Satya talked about that on Monday, we talk about it all the time so I can't remember when it's talked about or not but this approach is different. It's not that we know what we're doing, we're growing really well, stocks flying all this kind of stuff. It's not about kind of just getting excited about those accomplishments. It's all around, hey how can I learn more, and how can I do more and capture those learnings and just grow in the market. So it's really founded in this growth mind-set. But then the three key elements that sit on top of that, are around customer obsession, so I talked about that, putting the customer first. It's around one Microsoft, where we can't operate in silos we need to work together, and be selfless as possible, so that we can achieve greatness together. And then diversity and inclusion is a big focus for us. We put a lot of emphasis on that. And that includes, bringing in a diverse workforce. We got a really big focus on that. And there's good business reasons for that as well. Our customers are diverse. We want to make sure we're developing products and interacting with our customers from that perspective as well. But then inclusion's important as well. One of the ways we look at it and say, diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion actually feeling welcomed while you're at the party. And so, that's why this reinforcement of inclusion of not just race and gender and other things like that, but it's you're backgrounds, what's on your resumes or just how you think or how your personal style as well. And that's a big cultural change we've been going through the last few years I wouldn't have said was around as strong in the early part of my career at Microsoft. >> So how do you do it? How do you make sure I mean the hiring as you said the numbers are bearing out, then how do you make sure people do feel comfortable and that they have a seat at the table? >> Yeah I think, I mean in starts at the top. So we got the best cheerleader with Satya, I mean he reinforced this throughout and his leadership team and down and I lead a large organization as well. And it's a top priority for me. We review that regularly. And it's not even just within Microsoft as well. Um, so we're actually doing a lot with our channel. We believe our channel could be a lot more diverse as well. So, as an example we started up this Women in Cloud initiative within the U.S., and we've got, led by Gretchen O'Hara who runs my go-to-market marketing team. Doing a great job, literally up to hundreds now of women that are in our channel that are learning from each other, sharing from each other, supporting each other. But also people like myself and other males and others getting involved to help nurture that environment and make sure that everybody feels really comfortable that hey this diversity and inclusion thing it's really really good for all of us. It's not only, the right thing, it's also good for business. >> Right, exactly. Yeah, great. Well thank you so much David for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. Great conversation. >> Yeah my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's eco-system partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Mike Flasko. He is the Principal Group Product Manager here at Microsoft. Thanks so much for returning to theCUBE, you are a CUBE alumni. >> I am, yeah thanks for having me back. I appreciate it. >> So you oversee a portfolio of products. Can you let our viewers know what are you workin' on right now? >> Sure, yeah. I work in the area of data integration and governance at Microsoft, so everything around data integration, data acquisition, transformation and then pushing into the governance angles of, you know, once you acquire data and analyze it are you handling it properly as per industry guidelines or enterprise initiatives as you might have? >> You mentioned the magic word, transformation. I would love to have you define. It's become a real buzz word in this industry. How do you define digital transformation? >> Sure, I think it's a great discussion because we're talking about this all the time, but what does that really mean? And for us, the way I see it is starting to make more and more data driven decisions all the time. And so it's not like a light switch, where you weren't and then you were. Typically what happens is as we start working with customers they find new and interesting ways to use more data to help them make a more informed decision. And it starts from a big project or a small project and then just kind of takes off throughout the company. And so really, I think it boils down to using more data and having that guide a lot of the decisions you're making and typically that starts with tapping into a bunch of data that you may already have that just hasn't been part of your kind of traditional data warehousing or BI loop and thinking about how you can do that. >> Mike bring us inside the portfolio a little bit, you know, everybody knows Microsoft. We think about our daily usage of all the Microsoft product that my business data runs through, but when you talk about your products they're specific around the data. Help us walk through that a little bit. >> Sure, yeah. So we have a few kind of flagship products in the space, if you will. The first is something called Azure Data Factory and the purpose of that product is fairly simple. It's really for data professionals. They might be integrators or warehousing professionals et cetera and its to facilitate making it really easy to acquire data from wherever it is. Your business data on-prem from other clouds, SAS applications and allow a really easy experience to kind of bring data into your cloud, into our cloud for analytics and then build data processing pipelines that take that raw data and transform it into something useful, whatever your business domain requires. Whether that's training a machine learning model or populating your warehouse based on more data than you've had before. So first one, data factory all about data integration kind of a modern take on it. Built for the cloud, but fundamentally supports hybrid scenarios. And then other products we've got are things like Azure Data Catalog, which are more in the realm of aiding the discovery and governance of data. So once you start acquiring all this data and using it more productively, you start to have a lot and how do you connect those who want to consume data with the data professionals or data scientists that are producing these rich data sets. So how do you connect your information workers with your data scientists or your data engineers that are producing data sets? Data catalog's kind of the glue between the two. >> Mike wondering if you can help connect the dots to some of the waves we've been seeing. There was a traditonal kind of BI and data warehousing then we went through a kind of big data, the volumes of data and how can I, even if I'm not some multi-national or global company, take advantage of the data? Now there's machine intelligence. Machine learning, AI and all these pieces. What's the same and what's different about the trend and the products today? >> Sure, I think the first thing I've learnt through this process and being in our data space for a while and then working our big data projects is that, for a while we used to talk about them as different things. Like you do data warehousing and now that kind of has an old kind of connotation feeling to it. It's got an old feel to it, right? And then we talk about big data and you have a big data project and I think the realization that we've got is it's really those two things starting to come together and if you think about it, like everybody has been doing some form of analytics and warehousing for a while. And if we start to think about what the Brick Data Technologies has brought is a couple of things, in my opinion that kind of bring these two things together is with big data we started to be able to acquire data of significantly larger size and varying shape, right? But at the end of the day, the task is often acquire that data, shape that data into something useful and then connect it up to our business decision makers that need to leverage that data from a day to day basis. We've been doing that process in warehousing forever. It's really about how easily can we marry big data processing with the traditional data warehousing processes so that our warehouses, our decision making can kind of scale to large data and different shapes of data. And so probably what you'll see actually, at Ignite conference in a lot of our sessions, you'll hear our speakers talking about something called a modern data warehousing and like, it really doesn't matter what the label is associated with it. But it's really about how do you use big data technologies like Spark and Data Bricks naturally alongside warehousing technologies and integration technologies so they really form the modern data warehouse that does naturally handle big data, that does naturally bring in data of all shapes and sizes and provides kind of an experimentation ground as well, for data science. I think that's the last one that kind of comes in is once you've got big data and warehousing kind of working together to expand your analytics beyond kind of traditional approaches the next is opening up some of that data earlier in its life cycle for experimentation by data science. It's kind of the new angle and we think about this notion of kind of modern data warehousing as almost one thing supporting them all going forward. I think the challenge we've had is when we try to separate these into kind of net new deliverables, net new projects where we're starting to kind of bifurcate, if you will, the data platform to some degree. And things were getting a little too complex and so I think what we're seeing is that people are learning what these tools are good at and what they're not good at and now how to bring them together to really get back some of the productivity that we've had in the past. >> I want to ask you about those business decision makers that you referenced. I mean there's an assumption that every organization wants to become more data driven. And I think that most companies would probably say yes, but then there's another set of managers who really want to go by their gut. I mean have you found that being a conflict in terms of how you are positioning the products and services? >> Yeah absolutley. In a number of customer engagements we've had where you start to bring in more data, you start to evolve kind of the analytics practice. There is a lot of resistance at times that, you know, we've done it this way for 20 years, business is pretty good. What are we really fixing here? And so what we've found is the best path through this and in a lot of cases the required path has been show people the art of the possible, run experiments, show them side by side examples and typically with that comes a comfort level in what's possible sometimes it exposes new capabilities and options, sometimes it also shows that there's some other ways to arrive at decisions, but we've certainly seen that and almost like anything, you kind of have to start small, create a proving ground and be able to do it in a kind of side by side manner to show comparison as we go, but it's a conversation that I think is going to carry forward for the next little while especially as some of the work in AI and machine learning is starting to make it's way into business critical settings, right? Pricing your products. Product placement. All of this stuff that directly affects bottom lines you're starting to see these models do a really good job. And I think what we've found is it's all about experimentation. >> Mike when we listen to (mumbles) and to Dell and we talk about, you know, how things are developed inside of Microsoft, usually hear things like open and extensible, you got to have APIs in any of these modern pieces. It was highlighted in the Keynote on Monday, talking about the open data initiative got companies like Adobe and SAP out there, they have a lot of data, so the question is, of course, Microsoft has a lot of data that customers flow through, but there's also this very large eco-system we see at this show. What's the philosophy? Is it just, you know, oh, I've got some APIs and people plug into it? How does all the data get so that the customers can use it? >> Yeah it's a great question. That one I work a lot on and I think there's a couple of angles to it. One is, I think as big data's taken off, a lot of the integration technology that we've used in the past really wasn't made for this era. Where you've got data coming from everywhere. It's different shapes and it's different sizes and so at least within some of our products, we've been investing a lot into how do we make it really easy to acquire all the data you need because, you know, like you hear in all these cases, you can have the best model in the world if you don't have the best data sets it doesn't matter. Digital transformation starts with getting access to more data than you had before and so I think we've been really focused on this, we call it the ingestion of data. Being able to really easily connect and acquire all of the data and that's the starting point. The next thing that we've seen from companies have kind of gone down that journey with us is once you've acquired it all, you quickly have to understand it and you have to be able to kind of search over it and understand it through the lens of potentially business terms if you're a business user trying to understand what is all these data sets? What do they mean? And so I think this is where you're starting to see the rise of data cataloging initiatives not necessarily master data, et cetera, of the past, but this idea of, wow, I'm acquiring all of this data, how do I make sense of it? How do I catalog it? How does all of my workers or my employees easily find what they need and search for the data through the lens that makes sense to them. Data scientists are going to search through a very technical lens. Your business users through business glossary, business domain terms in that way and, so for me it all starts with the acquisition. I think it still far too hard and then becomes kind of a cataloging initiative and then the last step is how do we start to get some form of standards or agreement around the semantics of the data itself? Like this is a customer, this is a place. This is what, you know, a rating and I think with that you're going to start to see a whole eco-system of apps start to develop and one of the things that we're pretty excited about with the open data partnerships is how can we bring in data and to some degree auto-classify it into a set of terms that allow you to just get on with the business logic as opposed to spend all the time in the acquisition phase that most companies do today. >> You mentioned that AI is becoming increasingly important and mission critical or at least, bottom line critical in business models. What are some of the most exciting new uses of AI that you're seeing and that you hope expands into the larger industry? >> Sure. It really does cross a number of domains. We work with a retailer, ASOS. Every time we get to chat with them it's a very interesting use on how they have completely customized the shopping experience from how they layout the page based on your interest and preference through to how the search terms come back based on seasonality of what you're looking at based on what they've learnt about your purchase patterns over time, your sex, et cetera. And so I think this notion of like, intensely customized customer experiences is playing out everywhere. We've seen it on the other side in engine design and preventative maintenance. Where we've got certain customers now that are selling engine hours as opposed to engines themselves. And so if there's an engine hour that they can't provide that's a big deal and so they want to get ahead of any maintenance issue they can and they're using models to predict when a particular maintenance event is going to be required and getting ahead of that through to athletes and injury prevention. We're now seeing all the way down to connected clothing and athletic gear where all the way down, not just at the professional level, but it's starting to come down to the club level on athletes as they're playing, starting to realize that, oh, something's not quite right, I want to get ahead of this before I have a more serious injury. And so we've seen it in a number of domains almost every new customer I'm talking with. I'm excited by what they're doing in this area. >> Well, you bring up an interesting challenges. I've heard Microsoft is really I guess verticalizing around certain industries to put solutions together. One of the challenges we saw, you know, we saw surveys of big data. The number use case came back was always custom and it was like, oh, okay, well how do I templatize and allow hundreds of customers to do this not every single project is a massive engagement. What are you seeing that we're learning from the past and it feels like we're getting over that hump a little bit faster now than we were a few years ago. >> Yeah, so if I heard you correctly, it's a little bit loud so you're saying everything started at custom? And how do we get past that? And I think it actually goes back to what we're talking about earlier with this notion of a common understanding of data because what was happening is everybody felt they had bespoke data or we had data that was speaking about the same domains and terms, but we didn't agree on anything, so we spent a ton of time in the bespoke or custom arena of integrating, cleaning, transforming, before we could even get to model building or before we could get to any kind of innovation on the data itself and so I think one of the things is realizing that a lot of these domains we're trying to solve similar problems, we all have similar data. The more we can get to a common understanding of the data that we have, the more you can see higher level re-usable components being built, saying, "Ah, I know how to work on customer data" "I know how to work on sales data" "I know how to work on, you know, oil and gas data" whatever it might be, you'll probably start to see things come up in industry verticals as well. And I think it's that motion, like we had the same problem years ago when we talked about log files. Before there was logging standards, everything was a custom solution, right? Now we have very rich solutions for understanding IT infrastructure et cetera that usually became because we had a better base line for the understanding of the data we had. >> Great. Mike Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up just after this. (techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I am your host Rebecca Night, hosting, co-hosting along side Stu Miniman. We are joined today by Steven Rosenthal. He is the senior product specialist at QTS Data Centers. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> You're welcome, thank you. >> So let's start by finding out a little bit more about QTS, based in Kansas City. What do you do? What are you all about? >> Yeah, so QTS is based in Overland Park, Kansas. We have our operations based in, actually right outside of Atlanta in Suwanee, Georgia where actually I'm from. And we have 16 data centers across the United States, about six million square feet of data center floor. We cater to everybody from hyperscalers, the hyperscalers of the world that everybody, I think, knows about, to enterprises, to federal customers. We have product lines that cover, again, hyperscale, co-location, private cloud; which I think we'll talk about today and mannered services around that private cloud offering. >> I know Stu is dying to talk private cloud with you but-- (Stu Laughs) Can you just tell us a little bit about how you fit in precisely with the Microsoft Ecosystem? >> Yeah, so, we fit in because we will offer Azure Management, so for customers that will have work loads up on Azure, we can help manage that and we also have dedicated connections through our connectivity products that will get you to Azure from our data centers. So, that's how we kind of fit into this ecosystem. >> Alright, so, just to geek out on that one little bit, when I talk to a lot of service providers, things like AWS direct connect, and Azure Express Route are one of the things we're seeing just massive adoption on being able to take my own stuff and plug it in or use services from the public clouds. Do you offer all of those? >> So we have AWS Direct Connect in our Chicago data center that we can cross connect to you, to that via our other data centers. We're also utilizing the software to find networks as back-up fabric and megaport to get you to those direct routes into Azure and AWS. >> Okay, great. So you do have the way to, 'cause the discussion has been, for a few years it went from hosting to service providers and, oh wait, public cloud is the enemy. And now I think we've matured a lot. It's like, yes, of course there's competition there, but as SoftDel and Microsoft said, look we're going to compete against people, we're going to partner with a lot of people. And, of course, your customer's are using everything. >> Yeah, I don't think it's just a line. We definitely partner with the public cloud offerings. It's not if you can't beat them join them, there is a workload for public cloud, there's workloads for private clouds and we can get into that into detail, but there is absolutely a partnership that we can have there and not a competitive partnership. >> Yeah and I actually, let's bridge that discussion over to the private cloud discussion. You know, I will give you the one there is no answer for it, but how are customer's sorting this thing out? How are you dealing with it? What do they put where? How do you help them with that discussion? >> You know, what we're finding is customers are anywhere from all into public cloud, to I'm kind of just dabbling in it and maybe putting my toe into it. And we can go in and help them along their cloud journey. So, because of the integrative products that we have within QTS, we can help you from just being a co-location customer to kind of dipping your toe in a little bit with some public clouds. Getting you that direct access via AWS Direct Connect or via software to find networking, helping you manage that, but there is workloads out there that customers just want to know where their data is. Where is my data? When you go to a public cloud, I'm not saying it's not safe, it's not secure, but we all know there's issues that sometimes they go down and there's customers, for compliancy reasons, for whatever reason they have, they want to know my data is in Suwanee, Georgia and due to the private cloud, and we know it's always there, we can provide that to the customer. >> Do you think that customer anxiety of where is my data will always exist for certain clients or do you think we will actually get to a point in the cloud computing evolution where people feel really secure? >> You know, I think if you look over the last few years, people are a lot more secure today than they were three years ago, two years ago or even one year ago. So, if I had a crystal ball, I think people will get a little bit more comfortable, but I think customer's in finance-- >> Healthcare. >> Healthcare. They're all going to really be nervous about where that data is, so there's always going to be that need for that. Certain workloads, I want here. The rest of it, yeah, we can put up in public cloud, but I want to know that this data resides in this data center. >> Yeah. I mean, governance and compliance is obviously going to play into that. So, let's talk about the private cloud. In our research, we started a few years ago, we said, what customer's need is true private cloud. And we said that because cloud should really be an operating model and the public cloud really set the bar as to, how I consume, how I manage, how I don't have to get into some of the pieces, so, to do that, you really need to kind of modernize the platform. Maybe bring us through your journey as to how you've seen it versus just kind of, I had a bunch of servers in Iraq, versus how do you define what is private cloud for your environment today? >> Yeah, so at QTS, we define the entire stack is dedicated to a customer. That's everything from the Nutanix hardware that we use and we decide to use as our infrastructure base for this. All the way up to the Cisco 9K's that we support. Everything is dedicated to that customer. So, there's no multi-tendency at all within that. So, there's no noisy neighbors, there's nobody next to you that you may not know what they're doing. Our journey started about a year ago, maybe a little bit more. Where we saw that, as everyone probably did, the evolution of the customer going to that true hybrid model. That not everything is going to public. They, again, not to repeat myself, but there are some workloads that stay within the private cloud and they needed somewhere to put that. Customers also were looking for more of an optics model than a capics model. We can host that for them within our data centers, provide all the data center services that we provide to our COLO customer's around duplicate power and the security that we provide and allow them to host that within our data centers. So that's what we're seeing in our customers and that's what is really driving that. >> Alright. When Nutanix positions the enterprise, it really is about that simplicity that they can offer. Service providers often have different metrics as to how you determine. What lead you to the Nutanix solution? How does that fit in your over all operations? >> Yeah. Honestly, we did, for lack of better terms, a bake off. We looked at competitors out there but Nutanix, by far, they have a right to be in that Gartner Magic Quadrant because, one, their support is just excellent, that we have found from them everything that we needed from them. They were right there and helping us. Up until now and we don't think they're going anywhere either, right? Nutanix has been one of our best technology partners that we've brought on board. And we see the benefits of the hyper-converged environment, allowing us, you talked about people want that cloud experience >> Right. >> The loud experience is, I want to be able to swipe my credit card and have a server running in five minutes. That's not what dedicated private clouds are, but they might want it less than 30 days, less than 60 days. Having hyper-converged there, we can provide that to the customer, get them up and running in a matter of weeks, not a matter of months. You know with their traditional architecture. >> One of the things we're hearing a lot at this conference is the importance of having the right kinds of partners and making sure that there is a lot of trust embedded in the relationship. >> Right. >> You just described, choosing Nutanix, having this bake off, how else do you walk through the, can you walk our viewers through the process of how you choose the right people that you want to do business with, from sort of a business mindset stand point, but also, complimentary functionality? >> I think a couple things. One, we obviously look at the technology. Technology for us is, if not number one, it's up there as pretty close to number one. Does the technology meet the needs of our customers? Can we provide the service with the service level agreements that we have in place? Around our hosted private cloud, we have 100% SLA around that, so we want to make sure that we can meet that for the customer. So, the technology has to be there. Then, outside the technology, the support. This is technology, technology's going to have issues. If we can make sure we have the support to back that up, so if a customer or we have an issue with the infrastructure, we can bring that back online as quick as possible. Then we look at, how closely they can do, you know, co-market with us, especially Nutanix. We do a lot of things co-marketing with Nutanix. We put on panels within our data centers. We've been doing this for the past, almost a year now, with Nutanix, ourselves, maybe we'll have AWS sit on it, we'll have Cohesity sit on it, and bring in customers or prospects into our data centers and have different topics around there, so all of that kind of mixed together, provides a really good partnership for us. >> Great. >> Steve, we talked a little bit about how Azure on the public cloud fits in. How does Microsoft fit in on the private cloud discussion? >> So, most of our customers are running Windows. I mean that's really where it fits in. >> Of course. >> Currently, our hosted private cloud runs VMRS as a hypervisor-- >> Right. >> But most of the customers are running Windows as their operating system. >> Absolutely. Still, I mean, from the early days until today, the applications sits on top. Microsoft has all the business apps up there. Been a lot of announcements at the show. Windows Server 2019, talking a lot about the shift to SaaS. How are you seeing, is that still a big driver for your customers, the generational shifts of Windows and what about the changing workloads? I'm curious about how those impact you. >> Yeah, absolutely. The changing workloads definitely drives our business and as you pointed out, a lot of those are going to either Office 365, going up to Azure. We're getting a lot more customers asking us for Azure these days. I don't want to put AWS against Azure, but we are at the Microsoft show, obviously. We're getting a lot of customers who are driving their business up to Azure and to be able to support that within our community is really important to be able to support that customer, so we are definitely seeing that drive towards those types of workloads. >> You're an industry veteran. You've been in IT for 25 years. I wonder if you could talk about this point in time that we're at now. It feels like an inflection point, but maybe I'm wrong. Can you sort of paint this point in time, in the greater context of the cloud computing revolution. >> I think hybrid is the word. Right? I know it's a marketing word. I know a lot of people use it, but I think it really has hit today. Where you have companies that say, hey, we are all in on public cloud and I think that's a great marketing term, but if you really look at all of their workloads, they don't have everything up there, but even if they have 90%, 10% of their workloads are Legacy applications that they would have to re-write to be able to really work in the public cloud and these applications are running just fine where they are, they don't want to touch them. So, I think that hybrid model is where we are today and it's only going to grow. >> Steven, I'm curious, we watched for a while, public cloud polled on the data center apps, but now we have the Edge out there. You talk about IOT, you talk about what machine to machine type technology is going to push things back out, not going to be in some central location. Is that having an impact yet on your business, how would you play in some of these IOT environments? >> Yeah, we are constantly looking at the new technologies out there, especially the autonomous cars is something that we are looking at very heavily and they require, there's something like six terabytes of data that gets passed back and forth between that car and whatever service is running that car and that's got to be somewhere on the Edge, but I think if you look back at how people were defining private cloud a couple years ago, how are people are defining Edge is very different. And over the next year or two, we will get more common, how people are defining Edge Computing will become a lot more common. So, we're looking at how do we plan that market? Do we have to have data centers closer to the Edge, wherever that edge is, in cities that you typically don't see data centers. You're probably going to have a different type of data center within that city too. >> Oh, yeah. Absolutely. The edge is very different if you are a telecom provider versus an enterprise, what you said. That data center is going to be a pop, is it going to be something in a wireless tower-- >> Is it going to be in a closet somewhere that supports it? >> It's all going to be something that just fits on a wrist at some point in the future, right? (all laughing) >> Yeah. It's going to fit right there. >> Yeah, check on my data. So, getting back to the cities that you don't necessarily think of. I mean, you're a tech, a cutting edge tech company, based in Kansas City, the Heartland. >> Right. >> How do you find, is it difficult to recruit talent because frankly even the companies in Silicone Valley and Washington and Boston, they're having trouble recruiting talent. Where do you come down? >> I think it's not only recruiting the talent, it's keeping the talent; which QTS is very good about keeping the talent. I think if you look at our attrition rate, it's probably some of the lowest in the industry 'cause we have a culture that people want to stay in, but even though our headquarters are in Overland Park, Kansas, again, our, really our operations headquarters are outside of Atlanta, Georgia in Suwanne which is probably just about 30 miles north. So, we have Georgia Tech that we can pull from, you have Emory that you can pull from and, you know, the entire Georgia University system. I don't want to leave anybody out that we can pull from. And we have data centers around the country, even in Silicone Valley, we have Santa Clara, which we can pull from the Silicone Valley individuals. Dallas has a lot of tech companies, so we're not just pulling from one market, we're pulling from 16 different markets across the country, which helps us a lot not just to dry up a single market. >> You said that QTS has a culture that people want to stay and Microsoft is touting its culture as collaborative, inclusive. Describe QTS's culture. >> Our culture, a lot of people ask me that and it's like, you got to live it. It's very, very family-oriented. I know a lot of people say that, but we live it. We care about each other. Nobody walks around going, it's not my job. Everybody is there to support the customer. We are very customer-focused, you can see that in our NPS scores. Our NPS scores are very high in the industry, probably some of the highest out there. So, and that goes back to just how we take care of our customers. And we look, goes back to your question about, what do we look for in partners, Nutanix probably has a very high NPS score and we want to make sure that our partners are treating our customers as we want to treat our customers. >> Great. Well, Steven, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from Microsoft Ignite, coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, we are wrapping up day three of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. CUBE's live coverage, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman, my esteemed cohost for these past three days, it's been fun working with you, Stu. >> Rebecca, it's been a great show, real excited. Our first time at a Microsoft show and it's a big one. I mean, the crowds are phenomenal. Great energy at the show and yeah, it's been great breaking down this ecosystem with you. >> So, three days, what do we know, what did you learn, what is your big takeaway, what are you going to to go back to Boston with? >> You know, it's interesting, we've been all talking and people that I know that have been here a couple of years, I've talked to people that have been at this show for decades, this is a different show. There's actually a friend of mine said, he's like, "Well look, Windows pays the bills for a lot of companies." There's a lot of people that all the Windows components, that's their job. I mean, I think back through my career when I was on the vendor side, how many rollouts of Exchange and SharePoint and all these things we've done over the years. Office 365 been a massive wave that we watched. So Microsoft has a broad portfolio and they've got three anchor shows. I was talking with one of the partners here and he's like, "You know, there's not a lot of channel people "at this event, at VMworld there's a lot of channel people." I'm like, "Well yeah because there's a separate show "that Microsoft has for them." You and I were talking at an earlier analytics session with Patrick Moorhead and he said, "You know when I look at the buy versus build, "a lot of these people are buying and I don't "feel I have as many builders." Oh wait, what's that other show that they have in the Spring, it's called Microsoft Build. A lot of the developers have moved there so it's a big ecosystem, Microsoft has a lot of products. Everything from, my son's excited about a lot of the Xbox stuff that they have here. Heck, a bunch of our crew was pickin' up Xbox sweatshirts while they're here. But a lot has changed, as Tim Crawford said, this is a very, it feels like a different Microsoft, than it even was 12 or 24 months ago. They're innovating, so look at how fast Microsoft moves and some of these things. There's good energy, people are happy and it's still trying to, you know. It's interesting, I definitely learned a lot at this show even though it wasn't the most sparkly or shiny but that's not necessarily a bad thing. >> Right, I mean, I think as you made a great point about just how integral Microsoft is to all of our lives as consumers, as enterprise, the Xbox, the Windows, the data storage, there's just so much that Microsoft does that if we were to take away Microsoft, I can't even imagine what life would be like. What have been your favorite guests? I mean, we've had so many really, really interesting people. Customers, we've had partners, we're going to have a VC. What are some of the most exciting things you've heard? >> Yeah, it's interesting, we've had Jeffrey Snover on the program a couple of years ago and obviously a very smart person here. But at this show, in his ecosystem, I mean, he created PowerShell. And so many people is like, I built my career off of what he did and this product that he launched back in 2001. But we talked a little bit about PowerShell with him but then we were talking about Edge and the Edge Boxes and AI and all those things, it's like this is really awesome stuff. And help connecting the dots to where we hid. So obviously, big name guest star, always, and I always love talking to the customers. The thing I've been looking at the last couple of years is how all of these players fit into a multicloud world. And Microsoft, if you talk about digital transformation, and you talk about who will customers turn to to help them in this multicloud world. Well, I don't think there's any company that is closer to companies applications across the spectrum of options. Office 365 and other options in SaaS, all the private cloud things, you start with Windows Server, you've got Windows on the desktop, Windows on the server. Virtualization, they're starting to do hyperconversion everything, even deeper. As well as all the public cloud with Azure and developers. I talked to the Azure functions team while I was here. Such breadth and depth of offering that Microsoft is uniquely positioned to play in a lot of those areas even if, as I said, certain areas if the latest in data there might be some other company, Google, Amazon, well positioned there. We had a good discussion Bernard Golden, who's with Capital One, gave us some good commentary on where Alibaba fits in the global scheme. So, nice broad ecosystem, and I learned a lot and I know resonated with both of us, the "you want to be a learn it all, not a know it all." And I think people that are in that mindset, this was a great show for them. >> Well, you bring up the mindset, and that is something that Satya Nadella is really such a proponent of. He says that we need to have a growth mindset. This is off of the Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth research that talks about how important that is, how important continual learning is for success. And that is success in life and success on the job and organization success and I think that that is something that we are also really picked up on. This is the vibe of Microsoft, this is a company, Satya Nadella's leadership, talking to so many of the employees, and these are employees who've been there for decades, these are people who are really making their career, and they said, "Yeah, I been here 20 years, if I had my way, "I'll be here another 30." But the point is that people have really recommitted to Microsoft, I feel. And that's really something interesting to see, especially in the tech industry where people, millennials especially, stay a couple years and then move on to the next shiny, new thing. >> Yeah, there was one of our first guests on for Microsoft said that, "Been there 20 years and what is different about "the Satya Nadella Microsoft to the others is "we're closer and listening even more to our customers." We talk about co-creation, talk about how do we engage. Microsoft is focusing even deeper on industries. So that's really interesting. An area that I wanted to learn a little bit more about is we've been talking about Azure Stack for a number of years, we've been talking about how people are modernizing their data center. I actually had something click with me this week because when I look at Azure Stack, it reminds me of solutions I helped build with converged infrastructure and I was a big proponent of the hyper-converged infrastructure wave. And what you heard over and over again, especially from Microsoft people, is I shouldn't think of Azure Stack in that continuum. Really, Azure Stack is not from the modernization out but really from the cloud in. This is the operating model of Azure. And of course it's in the name, it's Azure, but when I looked at it and said, "Oh, well I've got partners like "Lenovo and Dell and HPE and Sysco." Building this isn't this just the next generation of platform there? But really, it's the Azure model, it's the Azure operating stack, and that is what it has. And it's more, WSSD is their solution for the converged and then what they're doing with Windows Server 2019 is the hyper-converged. Those the models that we just simplify what was happening in the data center and it's similar but a little bit different when we go to things like Azure and Azure Stack and leads to something that I wanted to get your feedback on. You talk business productivity because when we talk to companies like Nutanix, we talk to companies like Cohesity who we really appreciate their support bringing us here, giving us this great thing right in the center of it, they talk about giving people back their nights and weekends, giving them back time, because they're an easy button for a lot of things, they help make the infrastructure invisible and allow that. Microsoft says we're going to try to give you five to ten percent back of your business productivity, going to allow you to focus on things like AI and your data rather than all the kind of underlying spaghetti underneath. What's your take on the business productivity piece of things? >> I mean, I'm in favor of it; it is a laudable goal. If I can have five to ten percent of my day back of just sort of not doing the boring admin stuff, I would love that. Is it going to work, I don't know. I mean, the fact of the matter is I really applaud what Cohesity said and the customers and the fact that people are getting, yes, time back in their day to focus on the more creative projects, the more stimulating challenges that they face, but also just time back in their lives to spend with their children and their spouse and doing whatever they want to do. So those are really critical things, and those are critical things to employee satisfaction. We know, a vast body of research shows, how much work life balance is important to employees coming to their office or working remotely and doing their best work. They need time to recharge and rest and so if Microsoft can pull that off, wow, more power to them. >> And the other thing I'll add to that is if you, say, if you want that work life balance and you want to be fulfilled in your job, a lot of times what we're getting rid of is some of those underlying, those menial tasks the stuff that you didn't love doing in the first place. And what you're going to have more time to do, and every end user that we talked to says, "By the way, I'm not getting put out of a job, "I've got plenty of other tasks I could do." And those new tasks are really tying back to what the business needs. Because business and IT, they need to tie together, they need to work together, it is a partnership there. Because if IT can't deliver what the business needs, there's other alternatives, that's what Stealth IT was and the public cloud could be. And Microsoft really positions things as we're going to help you work through that transition and get there to work on these environments. >> I want to bring up another priority of Microsoft's and that is diversity. So that is another track here, there's a lot of participants who are learning about diversity in tech. It's not a good place right now, we know that. The tech industry is way too male, way too white. And Satya Nadella, along with a lot of other tech industry leaders, has said we need more underrepresented minorities, we need more women, not only as employees but also in leadership positions. Bev Crair, who was on here yesterday, she's from Lenovo. She said that things are starting to change because women are buying a lot of the tech and so that is going to force changes. What do you think, do you buy it? >> And I do, and here's where I'd say companies like Lenovo and Microsoft, when you talk about who makes decisions and how are decisions made, these are global companies. Big difference between a multi-national company or a company that's headquartered in Silicon Valley or Seattle or anything versus a global company. You look at both of those companies, they have, they are working not just to localize but have development around the world, have their teams that are listening to requirements, understand what is needed in those environments. Going back to what we talked about before, different industries, different geographies, and different cultures, we need to be able to fit and work and have products that work in those environments, everything. I think it was Bev that talked about, even when we think about what color lights. Well, you know, oh well default will use green and red. Well, in different cultures, those have different meanings. So yeah, it is, it's something that definitely I've heard the last five to ten years of my career that people understand that, it's not just, in the United States, it can't just be the US or Silicon Valley creating great technology and delivering that device all the way around the world. It needs to be something that is globally developed, that co-creation, and more, and hopefully we're making progress on the diversity front. We definitely try to do all we can to bring in diverse voices. I was glad we had a gentleman from Italy shouting back to his daughters that were watching it. We had a number of diverse guests from a geography, from a gender, from ethnicity, on the program and always trying to give those various viewpoints on theCUBE. >> I want to ask you about the show itself: the 30,000 people from 5,000 different organizations around the globe have convened here at the Orange County Convention Center, what do you think? >> Yeah, so it was impressive. We go to a lot of shows, I've been to bigger shows. Amazon Reinvent was almost 50,000 last year. I've been to Oracle OpenWorld, it's like takes over San Francisco, 60 or 70,000. This convention center is so sprawling, it's not my favorite convention center, but at least the humidity is to make sure I don't get dried out like Las Vegas. But logistics have run really well, the food has not been a complaint, it's been good, the show floor has been bustling and sessions are going well. I was talking to a guy at breakfast this morning that was like, "Oh yeah, I'm a speaker, "I'm doing a session 12 times." I'm like, "You're not speaking on the same thing 12 times?" He's like, "No, no it's a demo and hands on lab." I'm like, "Oh, of course." So they make sure that you have lots of different times to be able to do what you want. There is so much that people want to see. The good news is that they can go watch the replays of almost all of them online. Even the demos are usually something that they're cloud enabled and they get on live. And of course we help to bring a lot of this back to them to give them a taste of what's there. All of our stuff's always available on the website of thecube.net. This one, actually, this interview goes up on a podcast we call theCUBE Insights. So please, our audience, we ask you, whether it's iTunes or your favorite podcast reader, go to Spotify, theCUBE Insights. You can get a key analysis from every show that we do, we put that up there and that's kind of a tease to let you go to thecube.net and see the hundreds and thousands of interviews that we do across all of our shows. >> Great, and I want to give a final, second shout out to Cohesity, it's been so fun having them, being in the Cohesity booth, and having a lot of great Cohesity people around. >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean, so much I wish we could spend a little more time even. AI, if we go back to the keynote analysis then, but you can watch that, I can talk about the research we've done, and said how the end user information that Microsoft can get access to to help people when you talk about what they have, the TouchPoint to Microsoft Office. And even things like Xbox, down to the consumer side, to understand, have a position in the marketplace that really is unparalleled if you look at kind of the breadth and depth that Microsoft has. So yeah, big thanks to Cohesity, our other sponsors of the program that help allow us to bring this great content out to our community, and big shout out I have to give out to the community too. First time we've done this show, I reached out to all my connections and the community reached back, helped bring us a lot of great guests. I learned a lot: Cosmos DB, all the SQL stuff, all the Office and Microsoft 365, so much. My brain's full leaving this show and it's been a real pleasure. >> Great, I agree, Stu, and thank you so much to Microsoft, thank you to the crew, this has been a really fun time. We will have more coming up from the Orange County Civic Center, Microsoft Ignite. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will see you in just a little bit. (digital music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the Cube. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and the Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to the Cube's live coverage of the Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I'm your host Rebecca Night. Co-hosting today with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Calvin Roland. He is the SBP of Business Development at F5. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >> Lovely to be here. >> So set the scene for our viewers. What is F5? What are you about? You're based in Seattle. What do you do? >> Based in Seattle. Founded in 1996. Went public in 1999. We were known as the load balancer back then. We were the grandfathers that created that market space. We evolved it to an application centric focus, so now known as an application delivery control, or ADC, market and we're the leader in that space. >> You were $107 million in sales in 2001. Today $2 billion plus company. >> A little bit of growth. Been quite a ride. But we're not satisfied. We're looking to double that and more through the course of the next few years. >> So Calvin, like I said I've got a networking background, so obviously watch the ADC market. I might have been a little bit further down in the layer one through three stuff, but watched layers four through seven. I actually forgot that you guys are based in Seattle. There's been a little bit of activity over the last ten or fifteen years. Maybe you can explain how cloud's been impacting your space. (Inaudible) virtualized and all the Cloud guys are just going to eat your business alive? >> So I'm glad you asked that, actually. So a lot of people have said, gosh, the public cloud. Isn't that a problem for you? Is that going to be a head win at best for you guys? And the answer is well, if we don't continue to innovate the way we have since 1996, well, then yes, of course that's going to be a problem for us. But it's actually also a tremendous opportunity for us, and let me tell you why. So in the past, we were a physical product deployed in a data center. It had a floor. It had a roof. It had air conditioning. We put our product in a rack. And you had to buy all of the services in that box, if you will, and so then even as servers and data centers virtualized and we had virtual editions of our product, big IPEV, you still had to buy every feature that was in the product. But now with the advent of the cloud, we have an opportunity now to dis-aggregate those services and then re-aggregate them in any number of ways that are bespoke or specific for a given implementation construct, so the cloud puts us in a position to get in front of more application workloads, to get to more customers. Different personas like DevOps and ApDev, that we would not have been able to get in front of. So it puts us in a position to deliver on this vision we have, which is supplying applications and services for every application anywhere. >> Well Calvin, it's interesting. There's another Seattle-based company posting a 30,000 (inaudible). Microsoft has been going through their own digital transformation. >> Correct. >> We think about Windows on the PC, Windows on the server. Well, we've talked a lot about Windows 2019 and things like that, but Microsoft's gone through a digital transformation and it sounds like F5's going through a lot of those. Maybe help connect the dots as to the Microsoft ecosystem, how F5 plays into that. >> Okay, sure. Well, we have a long history of going to market together. It's a coincidence, but it doesn't hurt, that we're across Lake Washington from one another. F5 in Seattle, Microsoft in Redmond. But back in the early 2000s, Microsoft and F5 started working together saying hey, server constructs have moved to a three tier architecture being accessed through a web browser. There is a traffic management requirement to make sure that these applications, these servers, are always available, running fast, and then more secure than what it would otherwise be. We should be working with one another to make sure that we have best practice implementation guidance for our customers. And we focus on the enterprise, obviously. So it started there. And as the world started to evolve, server virtualization, data center virtualization, and now the cloud, we've continued to work hand in hand. And so now, regardless of whether or not you're deploying Azure Stack on prem, enabling a private cloud, and it's probably an and statement, it's not an or statement. deploying applications in Azure, you get the same experience as a result of that collaborative posture. >> So working hand in hand for digital transformation, you talked about the best practices. What have you learned? What emerged? What patterns? What behaviors that you have learned that you could also extend to other companies >> Okay, so beautiful thing about the cloud, about digital transformation, is there is now something that can satisfy that insatiable appetite in the marketplace for more and more applications. More complex architectures, as well. The good news: the technology is there. The economy makes sense. But that introduces complexity, right? That can actually be a gating factor for the enjoyment of that digital transformation. So, a best practice is implementing consistent methodologies for application and security services for the apps that you are standing up in this multi-cloud architecture. By having consistent methodologies you actually give yourself an opportunity to continue that pace of innovation. So the beauty is you're deploying more applications than ever before, more capability, more productivity. You're also increasing the opportunity for things to fail. You're also increasing your exposure footprint, if you will. 53% of cyber attacks are focused on the application, for example. Having consistent methodologies for ensuring that you have an appropriate security posture is something that obviously is a table stake. So F5 has been focusing on that as we go forward. >> Calvin, one of the things we look at is it's not just where things live but a lot of times, how do I take advantage of what the new platform can offer. You talked about in the cloud I can choose what features I'd need. As customers that are building new applications, whether that's micro services, containerized server (inaudible) or the like, what opportunities are there for F5 to get in there more. I don't know if it's new features or the like but, yeah. >> Sure, so the thing that we need to do is, speaking a little philosophically, is we need to meet customers where and when and how they want to be met and with what they want to be met with. I can flip it around and say the same thing for the applications. In this new application capital economy that we have, the application decides where it should be deployed, right? And so we need to do the technology and business model, they both go in hand in hand, innovation to ensure that we do just that. Meet the work load where and when and how it wants to be met and with the features and functionality that it needs to be met with. And so we have iterated our product roadmap portfolios, so we still have our physical big IP product, we still have the VE virtual edition of the product, we now have a cloud specific version, cloud edition. We are developing and will be available in our FY19 a DevOps CICD-focused version of the product. We have a SAS offering that is development being incubated as we speak. So we are looking to attack all of those vectors, so at the moment of ideation and instrumentation and orchestration we can be there to make sure that those personas know that they can take advantage of the application and security services that we provide. >> Calvin I want to have you take us one level deeper on securities. So obviously, critically important. Something we've been talking a lot about trust with Microsoft and how does security play into the product line from F5? >> It has for some time. We're just now shining a brighter light on it. >> Right. >> Because we were the indoor and outdoor for the majority of data centers, I'm dating myself by saying data center, for applications in the past our customers have said, hey, you're providing layer four through seven application services for us. This is an obvious place for you to supply security services like a web application firewall, access services, DDOS services, et cetera. And so we have done that and we've become a leader, for example, in the web application firewall, WAF, space. And so you'll continue to see us now focus on stand-alone security offerings that take advantage of that footprint that we've established in the marketplace, with this multi-cloud construct in mind. >> So you've painted this picture of a landscape. A multi-cloud world. Customers have so much choice. They're also struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation. I'm curious how you at F5 keep up with the pace of innovation and then also how you help customers do the same. >> No problem. It's easy. I'd like to say that we're better at it than everybody else, but we're in the pool swimming as fast as we can with everybody else. I used this phrase before. The market has this insatiable appetite for more and more applications. Now the good news is, well, the bad news is there is not commensurately more human capital to satisfy that insatiable appetite. No different for us. Luckily, technology and the economy for that technology has put us in a position to have a prayer, if you will. So CICD technology, obviously the agility that the cloud brings to us, the notion of being able to spread the tent that is DevOps to envelope the NetOps profession in a way that we now have coined this phrase SuperNetOps. So we've given the traditional NetOps profession the opportunity to partner more effectively with the DevOps persona that is driving a lot of this innovation to say, hey, as you're instrumenting these applications you need to make sure that you're thinking about these layer seven services, be they traffic management or security focused from day zero. And we can help you do so. So there's that on the implementation side and over on the development side, I mean we're just hiring like crazy and changing our methodologies like crazy, as well, just like everybody else. >> So I want to ask you about the hiring. At this point in time so many tech leaders really struggle with finding talent with the right kinds of skills and also the right kind of mindset because it is actually the people that drive the innovation. >> Right. >> So how do you recruit, and how do you retain the talent to make sure that they are there to make F5 the successful organization you want it to be? >> Are you going to make me put on my amateur Chief HR Officer hat? It's a challenge for us just like it is everybody else. Now we're lucky. We're in cloud city. We fell backwards to being in the most amazing spot on this rock that's hurtling through space. And so we benefit from the proximity to us being cloud central, if you will. And so almost through osmosis, we've picked up the ability to have that cloud shining on us to attract talent. But we have to diversify our R&D strategy as well. And so we're not just hiring in Seattle. We're not just hiring in San Jose. We're not just hiring in Spokane and Lowell, Tel Aviv. We have, like many others, we've stood up an F5 innovation center in India as well, for us to help us continue to drive that velocity of hiring for tech talent. We're going to continue to make investments in the R&D centers that we have stateside and in Israel and also in Warsaw, Poland, but for us to be able to continue to drive the R&D for the growth aspirations that we have we're hiring in India, as well. >> Calvin, this is actually the first time we've had the Cube at this event. We've done lots of industry events. The infrastructure side, the operating system side, the server side, the cloud and the like. You've had a large partnership with Microsoft for years, so, maybe help for people that haven't come, give them a little bit about what they're missing by not being at Microsoft Ignite. What kind of the vibe is that you get from customers at the show, meetings you're having, people you're talking to. >> Sure. Well I benefit from getting to be at a Ignite and InVision as well. The business focus sister event, if you will. But specifically to Ignite, all I could say is if you could turn the cameras around you would be able to see the energy that is taking place here. I actually feel like I'm shouting a little bit so hopefully I'm not bursting the ear drum of the listeners right now because it's loud in here. There's a lot of energy. There's a tremendous number of technology companies here, just like F5, that see an opportunity to be drivers of digital transformation. So people are curious about some of the challenges that we've talked about. And you're not here? Well then you've missed an opportunity. >> Anything that you would differentiate Microsoft and its ecosystem in this show? And the Invision, too. The business side compared to some of the other shows of the world? We go to- (crosstalk) >> It's breadth and depth. So either you get a very focused, very deep technology subject that you drill in on at an event like this. Or you get wide and shallow. And what I'd say about here is because of the decades, really, of enterprise focus and innovation and forward thinking of Microsoft, you get the breadth but you also get the depth as well. >> And actually you're the first guest we've actually had that mentioned the sister event. Maybe give us a little bit of color of what goes on there. >> So, I'll over-simplify it. The planners of the events are going to cringe. But I guess the simple differentiation is tech focus at Ignite. Business focus at Invision, if you will. So a lot of business leaders there that are being spoken to with the language that they need to be spoken to with. Helping them understand the breadth and depth of the technology that's happening here at Ignite but translating it into business transformation. So here we're focused a little bit more on technology innovation over at Invision, I don't even know if I'm pointing at the right direction, business model innovation. >> So if F5 were to have its own conference, its own Ignite-like event, what would you want to communicate about the vision and the strategy and the product services that F5 provides? >> So I've touched on it so I'll just reiterate it. We are excited about the phenomenon that is multi-cloud implementation constructs, digital transformation. We're excited about being a driver for that phenomenon. Enabling it to happen at a pace that it otherwise would not be able to happen in. And so the innovation that we're doing from a technology perspective, the product portfolio that I described, big IP, VE, cloud edition, Big IQ, our management and orchestration platform, our CICD-focused cloud specific implementation, our SAS, our managed service offering that is Silver Line. All of that technology and innovation we're tremendously excited about along with business model innovation. Licensing models like enterprise license agreements, subscription, et cetera. All of this puts us in a position within the Venn diagram that is digital transformation to actually achieve that nirvana which is providing application services for every application, anywhere. And so if you come to our event that's what you're going to learn about. >> But actually F5 Agility was in our backyard in Boston. >> Oh, man! >> You just missed it. You just missed it. Yes. >> Excellent, excellent. Well we'll be there next time. >> I'm counting on it. Don't say it if you don't mean it. >> Great. Well Calvin, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a real pleasure having you here. >> It was a pleasure being here. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Night for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in the Cube's live coverage in just a little bit.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Rawlinson Rivera. He is the Chief Technology Officer, global field, at Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Rawlinson. >> My pleasure, my pleasure. >> So, I want to hear from you what you're hearing from customers. This is obviously your first time at Microsoft Ignite. What are you hearing from them? What are they telling you? What are their challenges they're facing? Lay it on us. >> I mean the reception we've got here's been incredible. Everyone's kind of really looking into some of the things we're able to do with regards to disaster recovery, beyond some of the normal backup stuff that we're known for. But we got a chance to talk to a couple of executives, CIOs here where from different countries, different continents too where they've been actually very excited about some of the things that we can do, overcoming some of the challenges, in particular around disaster recovery and data mobility are some of the things we can actually do today very well. So, we're having, I've been having pretty good amount of conversations with respect to that and the reception's been incredible. >> So, we're talking about the recovery. What is a CIO, what keeps the CIO up at night in terms of that? What is he or she saying to you about that? >> For some time we've been talking about how we need to be able to leverage a public cloud and a cloud that kind of for use them as a form of disaster recovery, but it's always been a challenge to do that, moving data from one place to another from your private data center to a public data center and maintaining that sort of continuity and the ability to maintain business going after that happens. We're able to now produce a solution that can do that, where these guys can actually validated without having to actually have an actual distaster recovery to see if it really works. And when you have, when you can do that these sort of executives are like, okay I have a better way to sleep now. These are some of the things that I can now go to bed and safely know that if I have a failure, I have the solutions in place with enough of an ecosystem that allows me to come all the way across to my public cloud and kind of keep things going as it should be. >> Rawlinson, I think you bring up some really good points customers now have, they're living in a multi-cloud world, so they've got a lot of different tools out there. Making these choices aren't easy, it's like, well, they've got to choose to find their providers, they've got their existing data center, they're doing stuff as asked. We've seen Cohesity at a lot of these shows now and especially Microsoft plays across this broad spectrum so maybe give us a little bit more how important we know data is the lifeblood of companies, but how are things different from them today than where they might have been a couple of years ago to be able to take advantage of these new things? >> Well, Stu we've been at this for several years, sort of several different sort of companies since we've been around, but,when you think about the fact that there's so many different solutions, different silos, different. Those are probably the most, one of the biggest challenges, the biggest problems that exist in that world, when we have that many components in play, there's that much more risk to introduce into that sort of solution. What we're able to do now is basically consolidating, collapsing all these different silos and delivering a solution that can actually be natively integrated with the cloud, providing mobility, the necessary replication capabilities in order to move the data from one place to another. It eliminates sort of the risk, give you a risk adverse type of approach for DR, which is something that everyone needs in this particular case. When you are having a disaster recovery, risk is not something else you need to worry about when you want to come back up from a failure in that particular case and that's one of the things that we actually introduce and provide, were the particular solutions. >> Yeah, it's a conversation we've been having with Microsoft all week. Trust, Microsoft's a trusted brand out there. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> We've had them forever. Maybe give us a little insight on what you hear from the Microsoft customers, you and I, we've, certain other shows we're much more familiar with, this has a little bit of a different vibe than-- >> Absolutely. >> Some other shows. Maybe, what are you hearing? >> So here, obviously, being able to work within the Microsoft ecosystem, being able to utilize and provide a right solution for the right application of the use, sequel shared point of exchange, not only about protecting their information, their data, but now how can I move it from on-prem to my actual Azure cloud. Being able to have those capabilities seamlessly without having to worry about anything else is something that customers really worry about now. How can we actually take your on-prem data, regardless of what infrastructure, virtual infrastructure resides on and put it on my private or my public Azure cloud. By being able to do that successfully without ruining and changing the behavior and the security of these applications is key and that's some of the things we can actually do very well seamlessly without having to do any afterthought, not having to introduce multiple components to do that and keeping everything simple and safe, which is actually what every customer wants. >> As CTO, global field, your role is really about defining and communicating Cohesity's vision and strategy. Two questions, number one, has Microsoft done that effectively at Ignite for its own products and strategy? And number two, when it is the Cohesity Ignite conference or you'll have some other za-za name after it, what do you want participants and attendees to come away with? >> What we look for is basically I think Microsoft has done a very good job with us here. We've also been able to sort of come into their show for the first time and sort of showcase our capabilities and the reception has been incredible, right? I think our session here was packed. People were just coming around the booth looking at some of our capabilities. For in the future, whenever we come up with, when Mohit decides to have the Mohit show somewhere else, right? I think it will be, it should be similar. It should be about an ecosystem, our customers, all of the folks want to come and see how we can, how we grow. We are in the midst of developing and growing our own ecosystem and some of the things we're doing and bringing forward and you'll see that come about, right? That's the same sort of a strategy we want to kind of maintain and it'll be a great thing for everyone to see and sort of come and communicate and experience and not just our own stuff, right? Because it's not about us all the time. We provide a specific solution and specific capabilities, but when we turn into an ecosystem where everyone comes in and plays into it and we're having a very tight partnership with Microsoft, but we want to grow that and eventually get to more things than we actually do today. >> Yeah you bring up an interesting point, we know how important ecosystems are especially, it's a software world. I can't do it all myself even though, we, it's interesting we had one Microsoft guest on and he talked about for certain ad solutions, they're going to vertically integrate all the way down to that end device, Microsoft will do end to end, but then you have things like the open-data initiative. They know when you talk about data, of course Cohesity heavily involved in data needs to go a lot of places. The open-data initiative, when you get companies like Adobe and SAP and Microsoft standing up and saying I want to be able to take that data and leverage it across these various solutions. Curious, do you have any feedback on that initiative, that ecosystem, and how does Cohesity look at making sure that you're open and work across all the solutions that your customers need? >> Look, we know very well that it's not our world and everybody is, wants to live in it, right? So the whole point is about ecosystem is very important, I can tell you that within our engineered organization, Mohit himself we're looking into how do we provide the ability for our platform to be consumable, not just by us, but by everyone within our ecosystem within in the industry. If there's a particular application that you as a customer use, you may want to use it on our platform to leverage our capabilities for your information. So these kind of initiatives are already in play to be announced soon. So we, for us, it's what we need to do, right? It's actually, given the customer, not only are the capabilities of our platform, but choice, 'cause we're always not going to be able to deliver and do some of the things that other applications are dedicated to do more effectively. We might be able to do it to a certain degree, but we want to give the customers the ultimate experience, the ultimate accessibility, to their data, to their information, which is, at the end of the day, it is what we say today, it's the new oil, right? Which is, that needs to be actually properly mind leveraged and protected and utilized and accessed. Without it, you'll be in some sort of a limited sort of approach within your business. >> Sutton Nudella was up on the main stage talking about his company's culture and about the idea of being a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. How would you describe Cohesity's culture? >> Well I got to tell you, it's tough. Because we have a series of geniuses working in this company and we're small, but they guy at the helm is obviously the brainiac, I would say. But our culture is to basically, we're very receptive, we believe in really staying humble and letting everyone sort of have a place to play. Open minded as always. A lot of things that happened at Cohesity happened in a short period of time because the way in which we listen to customers, the way in which we listen to the actual engineers themselves, and we're very customer-focused. A customer could come in with the right amount, with the right demand, in the right amount of time, in the right place, and we will basically deliver that specifically for them very quickly. And that sort of culture, it's important not only for us, for the business, but also for within the teams within themselves because everyone seems they're collaborative, everyone seems to be part of something that's going on and they can contribute to the, to what we're doing, which is changing some of the things that are actually within the data center, we're really pushing the needle forward and changing some of the things there. >> How do you maintain the culture? Because you are growing so fast, you are hiring so many new people. How do you make sure everyone is on the same page and pulling together? >> I got to tell you, the people that we bring in, it's not about the skills, right? Skills is one thing and skills is many many and everyone has skills, everyone has something to offer, but one of the things that we look at when we're screening folks to work at Cohesity, is how do they going to work? How do they behave? What are their, you know, what are their passions? That's just as important as the skills that they're bringing. Because one of the things that they'll do is that they may not know the technology and the things we're working on specifically there, but they're willing to learn and when it's collaborative with the team, and kind of move that on and get better and better as we go, that's very very important to us. >> Alright, Rawlinson, we talk about the speed of things changing. Let's look out. We're back talking with Cohesity, Microsoft Ignite 2019. What are we talking about with Cohesity? >> Well, it will be much more than what we so far see now, right? So, obviously we have, we came into the industry with this particular process or approach of data protection. Obviously, it's beyond that. So some of the things that I see us in how the future will be is that secondary storage, secondary data and applications, to be honest, it will be much more interesting and a lot better, in a sense, than the traditional storage function it is. Storage is about feats and speeds, I want performance, this and that, but a part that we play is what to do with your information, where to put it, where to place it, where to access it, process, compliance, who can get to this point. We're looking at information in a way that, we're calling it private, public clouds, they would be, probably, a primary and a secondary private, public cloud, for different purposes, being able to not only provide access to information, but also providing compliance, reporting, out of, I mean, instantaneously. We can no longer manage information or data in the speed that it's growing from a human perspective. There's just no way we can keep track of that. The result of that is a lot of risks, data leakage, all the problems that you see in the world, we are out to actually fix that, overcome that, right? When we can provide a solution where things are now seamlessly happening within the environment, you don't have to worry about all these different things. Microsoft plays a big part of that. Microsoft Office 365, all the things, all of the information that's stored and honed within the Microsoft ecosystem and their applications, we are specifically looking to make sure that is as seamless as possible so that now we're dealing with access my information, process information, get information where I need to go, without humans probably having to touch it. The more human touches we have, the more the risk. We want to make things that are more automated, accessible, utilize some of this AI machine learning, so that some of these things that actually happen much more effectively with less risk. >> I want to hear about customers. We've actually talked with a lot of Cohesity customers this week. We've had Brown University on, we have HKS later today, Lynn Lucas mentioned some examples of at Penn and at Burke. What else, even if you don't name names, I want to hear about the kinds of, the kinds of results you're hearing and the kind of ROI that customers are getting from Cohesity products and services. >> I mean, I've talked to so many in different verticals, whether it be, finance, medical, even, there's so many of them and everyone is really excited about the fact that when it comes to RI, one of the things that we're, like, out of the box, when everyone thinks of Cohesity, they look at what we can do, it's just, from an operations perspective, what we can reduce enough in that action. Not only from a software, hardware perspective what they're doing, but when you think about operations, we simplify operations so that when it comes to operations and efficiencies, we want to mitigate the risk in that process and they see it immediately, which by the way, whenever you introduce any new solution to any infrastructure, to any business, the biggest challenge is not the technology, it is how am I going to take that into my operating procedures and consume it as one? Because, listen, we can double click and we'll have people do that for days without a problem, but how do we do that and come into your systems effectively so that you can consume me, the smaller piece, with the larger part of the infrastructure, which is not the main point yet. We're able to do that very effectively. We come in and we complement the rest of the infrastructure that you have and we come into your consumption model. It's not about my interface, it's not about my server's catalog, we come into your service catalog. Whenever you talk to these guys and you see that, whenever I bring that up front, it not only I talk to them, I show it to them, they're like that's what I'm looking for. And showing it to folks, it's a lot different than when you show a logical diagram and tell them, oh this is what we can do, no, no, no. This is what we can do, this is your world, when we're in in your operating procedures. >> Yeah, you bring up a definitely something we agree and talk about on theCUBE a lot, which is the technology piece oftentimes is the easy part and we know technology's hard, but it's how do I change that mindset and the pace of changes so fast something I we've talked about for a number of years and I have a slightly different take on it now is, like, well, geez, how can I keep up? And the answer for me and I'd love your viewpoint on, is like, look, nobody can keep up on everything. What you need to have is you have to have trusted partners, your channel partners are the ones that are going to say, oh hey, I understand in your environment, here are some of the things that can help you because nobody, even I've had the chance to interview some of the smartest people in our industry and they're like, I can't keep up with the pace of innovation inside, so what do you hear from customers as to how they keep up, how they learn about new technologies. Are they more willing to try new vendors and new ways of doing things? Or are they just going to incrementally, wither themselves away to death? >> It is tough. I mean our industry changes, it is sort of the results of our gain, right? So how do we make and help our customers evolve and let them sort of look at what they can keep, try and keep up with. There are some key points here and, actually, we play in a world that our specific plays around the data, right? So when it comes to that, no one wants to put their data at risk, no one wants to expose a new tool to sort of, maybe, expose some sort of a leakage or a problem. Our ecosystem, our partnerships, are what with trusted partners within the industry, Microsoft think people of this kind of caliber, where there's trusted, there's trusted advisors, there's several companies already, we come in and we compliment each other, but the point is that we're, we want to deliver something that is not going to expose anyone at risk, but it gives them the opportunity to sort of adapt the portion that they need. One example of that is that we have the ability today when it comes to application portability that I haven't seen before. We've seen a lot of things, for example, in the industry and a lot of solutions for that. Today, we have a very simplistic solution that allows anyone to take their workloads or their application from on-prem to Microsoft Azure seamlessly. One single task, one place. And those are the type of solutions that you would want and become trusted because they're not going to change anything, I can rely on this thing working and coming into a Microsoft Azure cloud and consume it any way I want to do it. >> Rawlinson Rivera, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> It was a pleasure having you here. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Patrick O'Reilly of O'Reilly Venture Partners based in San Francisco. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Patrick. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, you are a serial entrepreneur now working as a VC, what are you doing here? Tell us why you came to Ignite. >> Yeah, well selfishly on the VC side we have a few of our portfolio companies here that have booths, and I wanted to kind of hear what people are asking, you know, why they're interested in the companies and how we're framing, you know, those companies to the end users. I think these type of events are really good to unlock hidden potential, or things that people can tell you that you wouldn't actually have thought about, yeah. >> Yeah, so Patrick, you know, I've known you for a number of years. Usually see you at the opensource shows. Microsoft, you know, publicly very embracing opensource. You know, they love Linux, partnering with Red Hat, even you know, partnering is a lot of things that Microsoft does. They were working with VMware. What's your viewpoint as to how you see Microsoft and the opensource world, and how about this ecosystem? Is this a vibrant ecosystem that, you know, VCs are investing in, or is it just that there's companies of yours that, you know, this is part of the story. >> No, and I think historically we've had the, you know, build versus buy, you know, kind of way of looking at it, but when I typically think of Microsoft, it's more people building glue, you know, code to kind of connect things together, and you tend to have blinders on and not think about what opensource components you can use. You know, you look for like what company has a solution you can buy, or license or OEM, and I think that's changing, you know, over time. You know, Microsoft does an amazing job with developers of giving them very easy to understand languages and amazing tooling, and along with that the documentation and the training, so I kind of felt like you came into development one of two ways. You either were like on the Microsoft track and using the cookie cutter approach, you know, to doing things and getting certified on something, or you were opensource, you learned the scripting language and you just looked at what you can cobble together in the opensource world, and there wasn't a lot of crosspollination, but now I see that those walls kind of dissolving. People are willing to mix and match. >> Yeah, it's interesting, you know, some places I've seen Microsoft, a lot in the Kubernetes show, so you know, first got to know you you were at Kismetic, you know, really the first company around Kubernetes that we knew. You know, I know you're doing a lot of different things but we love your viewpoint on, you know, anything on Microsoft in that space, as well as just what you've seen, you know, as a watcher of the Kubernetes space these days. >> Yeah, I mean I've been... You know, if I step back from Kubernetes, you know, back to like the Apache Mesos and the Mesosphere days, you know, if you rewind all the way back there you kind of had to do a lot of education of like, "What do you mean 'containerization?' "I have VMs, why do I need containers?" And now that we've gotten past that and people actually understand the value of containers, like having an orchestration system in place that works and works with everything, you know, is obviously more important than ever, and it's... I really credit the CNCF and the Linux Foundation for what they've done to kind of bring standards around Kubernetes and shepherd the project, and I think that, you know, the fairly recent announcement from Google that they're fully trusting, you know, CNCF to be the shepherd of that is huge, and it gives a framework for people, like Gabe at Microsoft, to work with, you know, some of the staff at Google, and like, in a collaborative way and move it forward for everyone, and I think, you know, historically containers made a ton of sense on Linux, but now that we have Windows server, you know, supporting containers and theCUBE working, you know, on Windows, I think in the 111... Or sorry, 113 release we'll have full Windows server, you know, support in Kubernetes, like that'll be huge. And just a quick aside, like the reason I even kind of honed in on containers and thought it was interesting is the average server utilization is still so low, but we're not really trained as technologists to care about that, and you know, we're really good at building data centers and tucking them off in places where no one sees, but when the average server's taking like... It's like running a hairdryer on high, you know, for electricity and then they run so hot you have to cool it. Like, we're really not helping the environment, so I think if we can move towards containerization, move towards efficient utilization of our hardware, you know, it'll be better for everyone, not just this ecosystem, so... >> So, talk to, tell our viewers a little bit about your portfolios and your portfolio companies that are here, and how they fit into the ecosystem. >> Yeah, so the one I'm most excited about, or shouldn't probably say it that way, I'll reframe that-- >> Can't have favorites, they're all your babies. (laughs) >> Yeah, they're all my babies. (laughs) >> But Ziften Technologies is great. I think their integration with the Windows, the vendor ATP, you know, advanced threat protection, you know, tool is great. They focus on the Mac and the Linux components and give you that same kind of pane of glass on the Microsoft side to see those endpoints, and like their utilization of AI, like they have an upcoming release where they're using AI to do things, and traditionally in that space it's been like the AB vendors, you know, doing everything and you had kind of, "Here's our signatures, "we're going to scan against those signatures," and it's a creative use of AI now to, like, look for just anomaly detections. These are the things we haven't seen before. Not sure what it is but it looks abnormal, and those are the kind of like spin-outs of companies that I'm looking for, too. Like I want to see people doing more meaningful things, you know, with AI. I think if we look at Azure and what they're offering now, like I don't need to have a bunch of data scientists at my startup. I can implement computer vision just using what off-the-shelf components, you know, from Microsoft and you know, Azure. I can do video indexing, you know, using their services. Like, if I rewind just back three years I would've had to have a team of like four data scientists. They'd be reading whitepapers, they'd be implementing code that like sort of half works, and they would probably take half a year to train some models to get, like, moderate results, and now in a matter of minutes, you know, I can use this off-the-shelf stuff. >> Yeah, it's fascinating, I think back to, you know, we were pretty early at theCUBE at watching the whole big data trend, and back then it was like, "Okay, we're going to "take that two-year project and you know, "drive it down to six months," and now we talk in the AI space is, you know, how can we drive that down even more. In big data there was concern, everything seemed to be custom. In AI we're starting to get to more templatized solutions, rolling out for a lot of industries, and it feels like it's taking off a lot faster than that space is, and I know there's a lot of investment going on in the space, and a lot there, so... Anything in particular, you know, what excites you, what makes a good, you know, AI investment versus, you know, there's just so much happening out there. >> Well, you know, I... I struggle with the name AI a little bit. >> Yeah, no, no, I understand, yeah. >> I'm working on a talk, and you know, I kind of like don't, I don't enjoy the artificial aspect of it because it's really just intelligence, and you know, right now it's a buzzword people are throwing into everything when really they mean, "We use an algorithm." (laughs) You know, it's not truly AI, but when we get to cognition we get, you know, to, you know, someday if we have quantum supremacy we'll have, you know, systems that actually can maybe have a consciousness, you know, and decide things. That's where I'm interested, I'm looking... Like on the devops side I'm looking for people using AI to get away with repetitive tasks. Like I would love to see, you know, someone have a system where it's like, "Hey, we've noticed, you know, 90 times "this week this guy's done this exact "same thing, you know, 99% the same way." Like, let's automate that away. You know, we've been really good in the space to kind of treat infrastructure like code, you know, and be able to tear things up. Like I mean, I've been incredibly excited to see, like just in my career, how we went from, "Okay, you're going to do something meaningful on the web. "You need to build a data center. "You need to, you know, get a bunch of servers, racks," and then you pay all this equipment and oh, by the way, 18 months from now it's going to be obsolete and you're going to have to spend money again, to where now I can just, you know, get some credits to start up in the cloud, you know, try things out and do like really meaningful things. So, just looking for anyone on AI that's going to do something that moves the needle. >> Yeah, now that, yeah, just on the terminology piece, I've lived through the cloud wars and the argument over what was and what isn't, so it's just, you know, the shorthand for this wave that we have there, where AI or ML, or you know, IBM has some interesting terms that they want to call it. We understand that there's intelligence that I can do with software, a lot of machine-to-machine things that are going on, and it's not a lot of, you know, shouldn't be a lot of heavy lifting by people to go in there. Oh, wait, I can train something, I can learn what's happening, so... >> Well, I wanted to ask when... I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs ears are pricking up when they hear that you want to make these meaningful investments. What is it that you look for in a company, is it... In terms of the leadership team, in terms of any track record, what sort of makes your eyes light up? >> So, I try to go to as many conferences as I can, because I feel that's where, you know, the hallway track and I can meet people. I can see, you know, their talks, see what they're passionate about, so what I'm really looking for is investing more in the people than in the idea, because startups can always pivot, and you look at some of the greatest companies out there, they were pivots from, you know, a slightly different model and they realized that, "Oh, we should go chase down this other thing." So, to me, I'm looking for people that are doing something exciting where they are already, looking to make the leap. You know, for example, like you know, the Spinnaker team or people that do something, you know, like... You know, like if etcd wanted to move off and be a separate company, like things like that where they've done something, they've proven it, and now they want to go start a company around it, and I think right off the bat, like if you've built some interesting technology that people are starting to use you have a decent revenue stream just from support, you know, of that and helping those end users, and I think, you know, with O'Reilly we do something a little different than other people. Like I focus mostly on seed investment, very early stage. Our typical check size is around $500k, and I actually allow people to take us off the cap table and just pay us back. Like you know, I've done nine startups in my career, and it's... Fundraising is one of those things where you only get good at it once you don't need it anymore, (chuckles) and I felt the pain of being on that side of the desk and I want to be in the position where, you know, we can write the checks and not try to, like, have a lot of governance, not try to take a board seat, not give you down pressure, you know, on what you're doing but really be additive. I think moving forward I would love to be in the position where we can help incubate, you know, a lot of companies because we've found that, you know, you all kind of go through, every company goes through the same process like, "Now, we need a real CFO because "we need financial projections." Like, being able to, like, provide those services for portfolio companies where they don't have to go spend their resources chasing that down. >> I'm curious how much some of the big players, or just the gravity of what's happening in the space that you're looking at, so obviously we're here at the Microsoft show, but Google, Amazon, a lot of activity going on and we can call it AI or what you will, VMware even, Oracle, SalesForce, how much of the big players defining and you have to build around them, versus you know, we look at Kubernetes is supposed to make things independent, to be able to be opensource and be able to build solutions, you know, regardless of what platform they're on. >> Yeah, I mean, I think we're living in a world where people have a lot of choice, you know, and we look at even, like we take the example of cloud providers. Like, as long as I don't get vendor lock in and use, you know, their specific features, like I can move around to different cloud providers, I can now say I want to negotiate a better price here and migrate over, and I think just with any of the technologies, like trying to work in ways where companies can work together and be additive, I think that's where we actually move, you know, move down the field. I don't know what analogy's appropriate to use, but you know, I feel like there's a lot of really interesting stuff that we should be doing, and making... Every company doing a slightly different version of the same thing I don't think, you know, makes sense. Like, you know, even silly things like as we mature. Like, you know, back in the day everyone used to have broadcast television. We built all these antennas, we got all this range, you know, and then we moved to digital and we didn't need those antennas, we didn't need that range, so they started decommissioning them, but then companies came along and they're like, "Well, wait, now we have this "unlicensed spectrum we can use." So, now they're using it for internet. You know, you can get 20 megabit connectivity out to a rural farm where now they can put some cheap IoT sensors, and like, do really meaningful things with low cost technologies, like those are the things I'm interesting in. You know, so kids that want to cobble together, you know, IoT sensors and come up with a way to use, you know, what they have in rural areas, and like, and have technology actually help people in a meaningful way, and I think those are a lot of very viable startups, you know, in that space. I do think we live in a world where every company's going to end up graduating into one of the camps, be it, you know, SalesForce, Google, you know, Microsoft, but in that innovation spike, like when they're first starting improving out the companies I think they have a ton of choice, you know. >> You described a very beneficent approach to how you think about VC. Do you think, how would you describe the VC landscape right now? You said you want to be able to just incubate great ideas and help these young companies when they are not good at fundraising and they don't have the smooth, slick deck that will really impress the bigger VC firms. I mean, how, what's wrong with the VC landscape today and what else are you doing to make it better? >> Well, I think the incentives are a little off. You know, I can speak for myself, like when I was... You know, when I was looking to raise VC money and my previous companies, like you know, you get these great offers from people, but then you talk to other entrepreneurs and you're like, you know, I'm not going to call anyone out by name, but you're like, "Well, how is this VC's firm served you," and you start hearing of ways that it was additive, but also kind of put undue pressure on them, or they say things like, "Well, we really didn't "need to raise that round then. "We could've done bridge financing "or we could've figured out how to get a MVP product "out there and brought in some revenue." So, I just think it's the ultrahigh returns that VCs are looking for, and the promises that those VCs are making to their LPs, (chuckles) you know, in their funds to outperform everyone else, and you know, everyone talks to everyone, right? So, if anything's meaningful out there looking for investment kind of the back channel is very vibrant and it's dog-eat-dog, and some of it, I kind of reckon it to, you know, your alma mater, like where you went to school. Like, you know, if you're an MIT person, like MIT's the best place in the world. You know, if you're, you know, some other school, they're the best place in the world, and the VCs tend to kind of, like, fall in those camps, and what I'm looking to do-- >> And those are real biases that impact women and underrepresented minorities, to their detriment. >> Yeah, and you know, and that's the thing I've struggled with, too, when you look at the... Like, let's take Andreessen, you know, for example and you look at the portfolio companies, like you know, you kind of become locked into that ecosystem. Like if you want to go, you know, if I'm on Mesosphere and I want to go partner with someone that's not under that, or they have a company in that portfolio that does similar things, you're going to be pressured into working with the portfolio company over going off and maybe choosing the better, you know, choice for the industry, so I'd like to see, you know, those things change. >> Right, and so, Patrick, we talked a little bit about Ziften, security endpoint, you know, really hot space. I want to give the opportunity, other companies you have here that we should check out. >> Yeah, so we work closely with the team at Turbonomic. I think, you know, what they've done over time, you know, is amazing. I love products where you can just bolt it in and within a short period of time you're getting value. Like, you know, stepping back and just saying one thing about Ziften, like I think it's amazing, because I come from a software development, you know, background, and one thing as a software developer I've always found fascinating is like when you come in wearing the developer hat they give you the keys to the kingdom. They're like, "Oh, here's root access to the servers, "here's where all of our data is, "here's how you do a snapshot of production "to, you know, test it, you know, in staging," and I've always thought that it was a tremendous amount of risk, and you know, on average a company can be hacked for up to 100 days before they even realize that they've had a breach, and like, any kind of company, you know, be it Ziften or anyone in that space, that can showcase that to you. Like, you know, raise up things that you weren't aware of, you know, is really interesting, and then, you know, to the, like, Nico and Turbonomics and the things that they're doing there. Like, to actually get the most out of what you already have, like that's huge to me, because one of the, you know, one of the things I see in cloud computing that we didn't necessarily have, you know, directly owned physical infrastructure is it's almost too easy to spin things up. You know, you've got the guy clicking through the UIs like, "Oh, this instance looks great. "Oh, and it says it's only be $140 this month," and then they end up spinning up 1,000 of those, you know? (laughs) You get that first sticker shock of, like, here's that $250,000 bill that month, (chuckles) you know, for cloud, and companies like Turbonomics can, like, avoid you, you know, making those mistakes. >> Great, Patrick, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really fun talking. >> Yeah. >> We could talk to you for hours. >> Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (techy music)

>> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Tim Crawford he is CIO, Strategic Advisor, out of AVOA. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Rebecca. >> So, what are your thoughts and impressions of Microsoft Ignite, you come to lot of these conferences, I'm curious to hear what's interesting you? >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting because when you think about all the different conferences, all the different companies that are trying to get their message out there. Whether it's from product, whether it's how they engage with customers, whether it's their partner ecosystem; it's really hard to separate, kind of the wheat from the chaff or the signal from the noise, right? One of the things that I find really interesting about Microsoft, specifically, is not just the breadth in which they are engaging with customers, both at a technological level, but also with their partner ecosystem, and also in the engineering groups, but then also the depth in which they're going into this. So this is not about just a show to demonstrate the latest technology, yes that is out there, but it's also to talk about Microsoft as the company and how Microsoft is really engaging with customers and to me, that's really different. >> I want to talk about how Microsoft is engaging with customers, 'cause that's really interesting. You talk to a lot of CIOs in your job, what are you hearing? What is the real differentiating factor, in terms of how Microsoft approaches its clients? >> You know, this is something that I just learned at this show that is really interesting. Microsoft is starting to move away from these interesting sales motions around product categories or particular aspects of the technology, and starting to think about industries, and this is really important for a couple of reasons. One is it gets them deeper into understanding how these technologies really apply to each of those industries, but it also starts to develop a deeper relationship with their customers and also their partners. So they can start to carve out different spaces that they can go deep into, that is pretty unique and differentiated. >> Well, actually, I'm interested, in that I want to hear both, you're both analysts here, does that create more silos? I mean, that's sort of my first impression, that it, you wouldn't then be able to see the best practices that are emerging in manufacturing versus retail and have everyone talking together. What is your take? >> I don't know. First when I think about I'm not an AI expert, but one of the challenges we had in big data was that everything seemed to be custom, and usually when you talk about data, there're so many specific things that I need to worry about in the industry, that sometimes I need to bake that solution all the way down into the product. Now, of course, it doesn't mean that you create a silo, it means that you will share amongst your group. So there's plenty of ways internally that you can build solutions, but learn from those, repeat them, change them and iterate them, but it could be interesting. I haven't heard of a company driving it down. I was Product Manager, once in my day, and you thought about certain industries, but it was more, okay, someone had wrote a white paper to position how it did or, you know, who implemented it, to make an adjustment. But yeah, that was my take. >> But even with something like AI, we all know that for AI to be successful it's the amount of data you can really gather, it's about learning, and the only way that you're going to learn is to get in depth and understand the applicability of this to that particular industry. And the only way you're goin to do that is if you start focusing on a particular industry. One of the things that I do see, is that they're not taking on 100 different industries here, they're focused on the top six or eight industries to start out with and that's grown just in the last 18 months alone, but within each of those industries, figuring out how do you take each of these technologies and do meaningful work? How do you solve meaningful problems? And back to your questions, Rebecca, what are the CIOs looking for? They're looking for companies that are actually talking about and can deliver solving business problems. It's no longer enough to say, hey, I've got this great technology, it's really earth shattering, it's differentiated, that's not enough anymore. You really have to connect with the customer and help them understand how you're going to solve a business problem. >> So, Tim, I want to get your view point as to how CIOs perceive Microsoft today. When you talk about, you know, there's the industries, as well, Microsoft is a bit rejuvenated. Satya Nadella, there's more coming, there's great energy here at the show. I mean the numbers prove out that are here but Microsoft has that strength, they're in business productivity. Everybody uses Microsoft solutions, but there's a lot of change happening in the industry. What is the relationship that companies have with Microsoft, how do they perceive Microsoft in innovation, what do you hear? >> Yeah, and that very question has changed just over the last 12 to 24 months too. Microsoft is one of the few companies that has relationships with pretty much every enterprise on the planet, or just like you said, the productivity apps, even getting into the server and data center environment, Microsoft has a place there. The problem has been historically, it hasn't innovated as quickly as some of its competitors in those spaces. Not in the data, in the productivity area, but when you look at the data center, historically, it hasn't evolved as quickly. Fast forward to the last 12 to 24 months, and we've seen a huge shift. 12 months ago we saw Microsoft actually taking the lead in some of these emerging areas, like cloud, where it was producing products and actually bringing them to market before some of its competition. That's a huge shift, from just 12 months prior. If you look at what people are trying to solve for today, and bringing these technologies to bear, some of this stuff is really complicated, really complicated, and that level of expertise just does not exist within the enterprise IT organization, so what do you do? And that's where I think Microsoft has a strength, because it understands the enterprise, it can talk at an enterprise level. That's a unique attribute that is something that Microsoft has in it's bailiwick that it can pull out, and just in the way that the zen, starting at the CIO and kind of working its way in to empathize with the customer, and kind of delve into those specifics of how these technologies are going to make a difference is a huge, huge step up for them. >> I want to really get into that, because I'm curious of both your perspectives on that. Talking about the perceptions of Microsoft, and you talked about it as being a little bit slower to innovate, now it's starting to change, I'm also curious, we're living in this time when so many technology companies are under fire for being so careless with user data and being so susceptible to other influences of lack of privacy for their customers. Is Microsoft trying to be sort of a moral, ethical leader, in this space in the sense that we take this stuff seriously, we do believe in customer privacy and data security. I mean, what's your take on that? Do you think that that is also something that Microsoft is trying to put out there? >> Yeah, so I'll start off. Stu feel free to chime in. I think you have to go back to the keynote yesterday, look at Satya their CEO, and I had a chance to spend some time with him after the keynote. If you look at how he speaks, and that permeates into the organization. This is not about a company that's just looking to sell product, this is a company that's looking at humanity, looking at the bigger purpose that they serve in the world that we all share. The same thing holds true when it comes to the technology aspect of that, and when you look at cyber security, when you look at artificial intelligence, there's a lot of conversation happening right now within the organization around what should we be doing from an ethics standpoint with some of this technology? Artificial intelligence is great but it can be scary too, and there can be some bad actors that come in and take advantage of that. So with the size of a company and the expertise of a company like Microsoft, how do we start to leverage that strength to do good? And so that comes in a couple different factors. We have to think about governance within the enterprise, we have to think about policy, so the legal aspect and framework, how do we start to get those to catch up? Another conversation that was just taking place recently was around how you balance between moving quickly and letting laws catch up, and it's almost to the point where we need to start slowing down, because we are kind of running with scissors, I like to say. We need to take a step back, take a breath, figure out how to kind of button some of these things up and then go for the next step. >> Rebecca, I go back to something that we talked about in our opening analysis talking about the keynote. Microsoft is going through its own digital transformation and as part of that they're actually really well-positioned to help customers through their own digital transformation. Things like the open data initiative, you know three great companies, Adobe, SAP, and Microsoft all at the center of that transformation. Patrick Borez this morning said, well, you know Oracle and Salesforce, if they were part of this, and they can join it, I'm sure the invitation's out there would be the ones that are at the center of data if we talk about it, three courses going on this week. We've got a team there. Microsoft is there, obviously, security, trust, at the core of everything they do, Tim I want to ask you about something else that's often talked about, do customers have to choose between the build and the buy? Microsoft has taught us how to buy shrink wrap software back in the day, the economics of another disc or CD, everybody knows Microsoft. They help customers move to the SaaS model off 365, Push, I want to buy from SaaS but when I look around most of it is in the buy. It doesn't mean that they don't have great platforms and the ability to build, there's a great section in the show floor for developers that I walked through, talked to the server-less team. There's a lot of pieces there but when I look at the buy versus build, well I look at the other big clouds, I seem to see a little bit more builder mentality, while here it feels a little bit more buy well I'm curious if you have the same reaction. >> Exactly the same perspective. If you look at the different contingents of traditional buyers, right, the startup in Web scale, they're looking for tools, they want to be able to take components off the shelf and be able to put it together themselves. They're looking at a level of specialization that is unique to their service or unique to their product, but when you look at the enterprise it's a totally different world. And going back to earlier, what the CIO is looking for, they need to be able to up-level the conversation in their organization. Right, left, and center when I'm talking to CIOs, when I'm talking to IT organizations, they're looking for ways to build less and buy more. When they do build, they're focused on those aspects that are core to their IP, so things that are strategic and differentiated for their company. I mean, if you look back at the anthropology of IT, and I know Stu, you and I have had a lot of conversations about this, on theCUBE and off theCUBE, if you look back within the anthropology of IT, within the enterprise IT org, we had to build everything ourselves. We had no choice, there were not mature solutions that we could turn to, like cloud and be able to say, you know what? I don't want to run email myself. Who do I turn to? Now, fast forward to today, there are mature solutions for many of these non-differentiated services. How do we start to leverage those from the enterprise perspective and focus our developer attention into those aspects that are differentiated. That's where it really makes a difference, and that's the conversation that's happening with the IT rank and file, as well as at the executive levels. >> So what's your advice to a Microsoft, or to some of its other big partner players in terms of what you see from CIOs, what their pain points are, and what they could do to really make their customers happy? >> Yeah, you know, it's a great question and it's not an easy answer, but if I were to kind of boil it down a bit, we have to stop thinking about technology as technology in a silo. We have to think about how this gets used. You know, it's one thing to say, great, this is a bright, shiny object. Let's take it off the shelf. Let's put it to use. It's another thing when you can take it off the shelf, put it to use, and really make a big difference for your company. When you do that, things happen, and that's a big difference for the marketing message, the PR messaging, that's a difference in the sales motion, it's different in terms of the partner ecosystem. How the customer thinks about how they engage with a company like Microsoft. All of those factors are in play. All of those are up for grabs. >> Alright, so mister Evoa Consultancy, I've heard Microsoft's doing a bunch of interesting things. How should I look at Microsoft? What things did you learn at Microsoft that can help my business do more, move faster, you know, stay relevant? >> Yeah, I think the first thing to understand, there is a bevy of different products and solutions out there, not just for Microsoft, but from other companies too. It's important to understand which ecosystems really fit your business best, and who is really spending the time to understand what your challenges are today, and where you're going, because let's face it. When you make an investment from an enterprise perspective, it's not just for today or tomorrow, it's for the next six months. It's for the next two years, five years. And you need to know that whoever you're working with is going to have those same, aligned goals and objectives, and so I think that's where, again, coming back to Microsoft, Microsoft has a lot of those components. Are they for everyone? Absolutely not, but it's important to understand which components make sense for you to use within your organization. >> Great, well Tim, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you here. I know you two go way back. So this was fun. >> Right, thanks for having me. >> Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Minnimin, we will have much more tomorrow from the Orange County Civic Center here in Orlando, Florida, at Microsoft Ignite. See you next time. (electronic jingle)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Sameer Nori, he is the director of product marketing at Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Sameer. >> Thanks Rebecca, and thanks Stu, and thanks for having me on theCUBE. I'm exciting to be here. >> So you are a tech veteran you've been in this industry for a long time, you've worked at a lot of kinds of companies, what drew you to Cohesity? >> That's a great question, so when I was at MAPR, and as you are familiar, MAPR sits at the intersection of big data and storage, and what I saw very interesting and fascinating about Cohesity was a similar hypothesis in terms of, having built its own file system but then really applying it to a different realm of the market, in terms of secondary data and applications starting with backup as the foundation. And as you are aware, analytics is a part of our road map and a solution that we enabled. But you know, some starter things there, but that's kind of actually what really drove me and the opportunity to really try and be part of another hybrid company and apply my experience from prior industries into different segments. >> So you lead outbound marketing for Cohesity's Cloud Solutions, tell our viewers a little about what you do, and what your day is like? >> Sure, so my day oscillates and changes between developing value prop and messaging for our solutions, working with customers to understand their pain points and challenges, being able to translate that into tangible benefits for customers to parley off of, and then really enabling and working with our sales teams closely to help them, arm them with the necessary things they need to go succeed in the market. >> Sameer you've got an interesting space, questions I think we all get in the industry is, things are changing a lot, what do I do with my applications? If you look at the enterprise, most enterprises have hundreds, if not thousands of applications, and it's not a trivial thing to say, oh well, yeah we'll just put everything in the cloud, that'll be real easy, right? You've got SaaS, Microsoft opened the door of the flood gates really pushing everybody to Office 365 to SaaS-ify a lot of what you are doing. Public cloud is a big growth and then private cloud really modernizing the environment, what are you seeing and hearing from customers as to how they deal with the portfolio of their applications mobility of what they're doing? Where does Cohesity play and advise and help with those solutions? >> Sure, that's a great question too. So I think really what we see from customers is a combination of a couple of things. As you said, they've got thousands or probably hundreds of applications, they are not going to take a big chunk of those and just move them to the cloud as is, right? You got to select the right workloads and the right data and do the assessment and the viability fit, in terms of what makes sense. I think where our sweet spot really is is kind of back to what I said earlier. Really sort of using back up as the foundation for what customers can do and our core hypothesis has always been that backup should not be just an insurance policy. You can do a whole lot more with it. So what we see customers doing is taking their backups on premises, which are often times just idle with alternative solutions, reusing them in the cloud for test dev purposes, where it makes sense. So the easy way to convert formats, so if you are in VMDK format to the VHD format in Azure. Spin it up, run your test of processes. At the end when you're done, you can move those things back on premises and really use it in that context. So for us really I think it's a combination of assessing the right use case and the right application of the workload. And then making that, helping customers with understanding that and making that shift in that case. >> So talk a little bit about the biggest customer pain points and how you develop the right solution for them in this customized and tailored way. >> Sure, so I think for us, from our perspective, what we are seeing with challenges, customers their back up data is sitting idle. It's shocking actually sometimes to hear that, if we're talking to IT and storage teams, and the application test and development teams with their peers, they often have to wait weeks, or sometimes even months, to get a copy of data that they need. I think in today's world that shouldn't be the case, right? Our value prop really there is to help eliminate those expensive copies of data that are getting made. And because our platform is so purpose built and agile with the effect of reusing that backup data for test dev, that's actually where we really see the sweet spot coming together. Customers have even asked us, for example in our UI, can you actually provision test dev data and make it more self-service in nature right from that view point. I think that is something we are looking into. Into what makes sense there from a capability. But that's kind of really actually where we see the challenge and how we are enabling customers into solving that. >> Yeah Sameer, I want to go back to something you said at the beginning about the premise of, I've got all my applications, and I'm going to have intelligence, usually called machine learning and the like. How are these going to come together? We hear Microsoft really talking about that's the future. Satya Nadella is well-known, you know AI, AI, AI, is one of the main things that he talks about. How is that similar with the Cohesity division? >> Yeah, so I think when we think about the application world and how we are taking advantage of things, like AI and machine learning. Our recently announced capability and product are on Helios, which is from our perspective the global management piece to manage all your secondary apps. We've injected machine learning and AI capabilities there to help customers with smart assistant type of mode and capability to help them predict their, how much, when they need more capacity. Smart alerts to tell them what's happening in their system. And that's kind of both on premises and in the cloud. For us really, I think where we see specifically AI and machine learning coming together. I think as customers are injecting those in the applications they are using. I think definitely the data side of it and how that effects the underlying data landscape will make a difference, in terms of how we accommodate that. But I think from a core ML and AI perspective, Helios is our focal point in terms of what we are doing to bring those capabilities to bear. >> So what has the customer response been to them? It sounds very cool. Are customers using it? Are they finding that it is being very, that it is helping them a lot, in terms of, as you said, notifying if they need more capacity. >> Yeah, so I think it's early days for us when it comes to Helios, right? It's a pretty new product, but we're working with customers actively, especially our existing base, to get them really on board with a product and really the service. Be able to collect and assimilate all of their data, and help them with the usage of it. I think the more data we collect, as you know with machine learning and AI, the more data you collect the richer sample set you have. You can do a whole lot more with it. I think when it comes to the application side of it, the discussion we had earlier on application mobility and making that. I think the University of Pennsylvania is an interesting example of a customer we have where they have about forty different websites internally and externally. They had a planned power, building shutdown for like a day. They had a problem where they couldn't get to recreate those sites easily from their prior infrastructure. So our CloudSpin capability, which is what really helps customers take their on premises VMs and reuse them in the cloud, really came to their rescue with helping them very easily make these websites quickly operational. For them it's been a few simple clicks, and then when they are done with that, when the disaster, in this case, a planned disaster was done, they both go back to their operational on premises. So that's I think a great example of our capabilities coming to light, and really shining in the app mobility arena. But also actually spill over in a sort of disaster recovery. >> Sameer, I'm curious. One of the other things in the application space is a lot of the new appplications, call them cloud native apps if you will, what are you hearing from customers, and does Cohesity, is there something different about new type of architectures and how that ties into Cohesity's solutions? >> Yeah, absolutely so I think what we are seeing from customers is when it comes to everything that's our applications born in the cloud. Often times I think what we see as backup is kind of actually a rear guard, it's not even thought of in the context of cloud native. I think we see that being a challenge because customers, I think what they've with backup in the cloud today, they've got either a combination of manual scripts, they've got some, you know, processes they're running there. There is a lack of automation. So we have actually integrated with the snapshot API of Azure, for instance, and Azure disks. We bring through a combination of what we do on the platform side and that integration we're actually able to bring enterprise class backup capabilities to that cloud native app. The backup they can experience there. So that's kind of I think where we are looking actually to do more, in terms of that. I think we are starting to see more demand, in terms of more cloud native backup as it relates to applications that are more born in the cloud. I think with us the beauty is it's a single platform that's going to work on premises and in the cloud. And not have a separate solution that's quote unquote, just for the cloud versus one that's for on premises. >> One of the biggest challenges that so many companies have regardless of their industry is getting employees to adopt new technologies. I'm wondering how closely you work with your customers to make sure that there is a wide spread adoption and a real embrace of the Cohesity solutions. >> Sure, I think to me what's fascinating is a big value prop and message for our customers with us is the simplicity. That ranges all the way from the way they can do their upgrades with us. The way actually our interface presents itself. So in most cases, actually I think what we've heard from customers is with little to minimal training they're able to actually get up and going with Cohesity. That actually speaks volumes, to the fact, in terms of how the product and the UI and everything else was designed. We definitely have a support and services team that is, as we are starting to grow more enterprise and work with larger customers, it's starting to have those programs in place to enable customers to get up to speed quickly. But actually, in often times, more often than not, it's more the case of, I could just set it up get it up and going and I'm off to the races. >> Sameer, it's our first time here at Microsoft Ignite, over 30,000 people are here, 5,000 organizations, what takeaways do you have for people that haven't been able to attend this show? What have you seen so far? >> Sure, no, I think what I've seen is that from our viewpoint, we've seen lot of customers. We've had some great sessions with customers. We've got a couple more coming up. I think the hybrid cloud message is definitely mainstream, right? I think for customers who are not taking advantage of the services that A, Microsoft has to offer, and then B, others ISVs like us plug into that ecosystem very closely. I think customers definitely should be embracing that in full steam and moving forward with their hybrid cloud initiatives. >> Great, well Sameer, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it was great having you. >> Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks, Stu, I appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

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

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Joachim Hammer, he is the Principal Product Manager at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Sure, you're welcome. Happy to be here. >> So there's been a lot of news and announcements with Azure SQL, can you sort of walk our viewers through a little bit about what's happened here at Ignite this week? >> Oh sure thing, so first of all I think it's a great time to be a customer of Azure SQL Database. We have a lot of innovations, and the latest one that we're really proud of, and we're just announced GA is SQL Managed Instance. So our family of database offers had so far a single database and then a pool of databases where you could do resource sharing. What was missing was this one ability for enterprise customers to migrate their workloads into Azure and take advantage of Azure without having to do any rewriting or refactoring and Managed Instance does exactly this. It's a way for enterprise customers to take their workloads, migrate them, it has all the features that they are used to from sequel server on-prem including all the security, which is of course as you can imagine always a concern in the cloud where you need to have the same or better security that customers are used to from on-prem, and with Managed Instance we have the security isolation, we have private IPV nets, we have all the intelligent protection that we have in Azure so it's a real package. And so this is a big deal for us, and the general purpose went GA yesterday actually, so I heard. >> Security's really interesting 'cause of course database is at the core of so many customer's businesses. You've been in this industry for a while, what do you see from customers as to the drivers and the differences of going to public cloud deployments versus really owning their database in-house and are security meeting the needs of what customers need now? >> Yeah sure, so, you're right, security is probably the most important topic or one of the most important topics that comes up when you discuss the cloud. And what customers want is they want a trust, they want this trust relationship that we do the right thing and doing the right thing means we have all the compliances, we adhere to all the privacy standards, but then we also offer them state of the art security so that they can rely on Microsoft on Azure for the next however many years they want to use the cloud to develop customer leading-edge security. And we do this for example with our encryption technology with Always Encrypted. This is one of those technologies that helps you protect your database against attacks by encrypting sensitive data and the data remains encrypted even though we process queries against it. So we protect against third-party attacks on the database, so Always Encrypted is one of those technologies that may not be for everybody today but customers get the sense that yes, Microsoft is thinking ahead, they're developing this security offering, and I can trust them that they continue to do this, keep my data safe and secure. >> Trust is so fundamental to this whole entire enterprise. How do you build trust with your customers, I mean you have the reputation, but how do you really go about getting your customers to say "Okay, I'm going to board your train?" >> That's a good question, Rebecca. I think as I said it starts with the portfolio of compliance requirements that we have and that we provide for Azure's SQL Database and all the other Azure services as well. But it also goes beyond that, it goes, for example, we have this right to audit capability in Azure where a company can come to us and says we want to look behind the scenes, we want to see what auditors see so that we can really believe that you are doing all the things you're saying. You're updating your virus protection, you're patching and you have all the right administrative workflows. So this is one way for us to say our doors are open if you want to come and see what we do, then you can come and peek behind the scenes so to speak. And then the other, the third part is by developing features like we do that help customers, first of all make it easy to secure the database, and help them understand vulnerabilities, and help them understand the configurations of their database and then implement the security strategy that they feel comfortable with and then letting them move that strategy into the cloud and implement it, and I think that's what we do in Azure, and that's why we've had so much success so far. >> Earlier this week we interviewed one of your peers, talked about Cosmos DB. >> Okay. >> There's a certain type of scale we talk about there. Scale means different things to different sized customers. What does scale mean in your space? >> Yeah so you're right, scale can mean a lot of different things, and actually thank you for bringing this up so we have another announcement that we made on namely Hyper-Scale architecture. So far in Azure SQL DB, we were pretty much constrained in terms of space by the underlying hardware, how much storage comes on these VMs, and thanks to our re-architectured hardware, sorry software, we now have the ability to scale way beyond four terabytes which is the current scale of Azure SQL DB. So we can go to 64 terabytes, 100 terabytes. And we can, not only does that free up, free us from the limitations, but it also keeps it simple for customers. So customers don't have to go and build a complicated scale out architecture to take advantage of this. They can just turn a knob in a portal, and then we give them as much horsepower as they need to include in the storage. And in order for this to happen, we had to do a lot of work. So it doesn't just mean, we didn't just re-architect storage but we also have to make fail-over's faster. We have to continue to invest in online operations like online index rebuild and create to make those resumable, pause and resumable, so that with bigger and bigger databases, you can actually do all those activities that you used to do ya know, without getting in the way of your workloads. So lot of work, but we have Hyper-Scale now in Azure SQL DB and so I think this is another sort of something that customers will be really excited about. >> Sounds like that could have been a real pain point for a lot of DBA's out there, and I'm wondering, I'm sure, as a PM, you get lots of feedback from customers. What are the biggest challenges they're facing? What are some of the things they're excited about that Microsoft's helping them with these days? >> So you're right, this was a big pain point, because if you go to a big enterprise customer and say, hey bring your workload to Azure, and then they say oh yeah great, we've got this big telemetry database, what's your size limit? And you have to say four terabytes, that doesn't go too well. So that's one thing, we've removed that blocker thankfully. Other pain points I think we have by and large, I think the large pain points are we've removed, I think we have small ones where we're still working on making our deployments less painful for some customers. There's customers who are really, really sensitive to disconnects or latent variations in latency. And sometimes when we do deployments, worldwide deployments, we are impacting somebody's customer, so this is a pain point that we're currently working on. Security, as you said, is always a pain point, so this is something that will stay with us, and we just have to make sure that we're keeping up with the security demands from customers. And then, another pain point, or has been a pain point for customers, especially customers sequel server on-prem is the performance tuning. When you have to be a really, really good DBA to tune your workloads well, and so this is something that we are working on in Azure SQL DB with our intelligence performance tuning. This is a paint point that we are removing. We've removed a lot of it already. There's still, occasionally, there's still customers who complaining about performance and that's understood. And this is something that we're also trying to help them with, make it easier, give 'em insights into what their workload is doing, where are the weights, where are the slow queries, and then help them diffuse that. >> So thinking about these announcements and the changes that you've made to improve functionality and increase, not have size limits be such a road block, when you're thinking ahead to making the database more intelligent, what are some of the things you're most excited about that are still in progress right now, still in development, that we'll be talking about at next year's Ignite? >> Yeah, so personally for me on the security side, what's really exciting to me is the, so security's a very complicated topic, and not all of our customers are fully comfortable figuring out what is my security strategy and how do I implement it, and is my data really secure. So understanding threats, understanding all this technology, so I think one of the visions that gets me excited about the potential of the cloud, is that we can make security in the future hopefully as easy as we were able to make query processing with the invention of the relational model, where we made this leap from having to write code to access your data to basically a declarative SQL type language where you say this is what I want and I don't care how to database system returns it to me. If you translate that to security, what would be ideal the sort of the North Star, is to tell it to have customers in some sort of declarative policy based manner, say I have some data that I don't trust to the cloud please find the sensitive information here, and then protect it so that I'm meeting ISO or I'm meeting HIPPA requirements or that I'm meeting my internal ya know, every company has internal policies about how data needs to be secured and handled. And so if you could translate that into a declarative policy and then upload that to us, and we figure out behind the scenes these are the things we need, you need to turn on auditing, these are where the audit events have to go, and this is where the data has to be protected. But before all that, we actually identify all the sensitive data for you, we'll tag it and so forth. That to me has been a tremendous, sort of untapped potential of the cloud. That's where I think this intelligence could go potentially. >> Yeah, great. >> Who knows, maybe. >> (laughs) Well, we shall see at next year's Ignite. >> We are making handholds there. We have a classification engine that helps customers find sensitive data. We have a vulnerability assessment, a rules engine that allows you to basically test the configuration of your database against potential vulnerabilities, and we have threat detection. So we have a lot of the pieces, and I think the next step for us is to put these all together into something that can then be much more automated so that a customer doesn't have to think technology anymore. They can they business. They can think about the kinds of compliances they have to meet. They can think about, based on these compliances, this data can go this month, this data can go maybe next year, or ya know, in that kind of terms. So I think, that to me is exciting. >> Well Joachim, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you here. >> It was my pleasure too. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we'll have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

(digital music) >> Live, from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Bev Crair. She is the vice president data center group product development and quality at Lenovo. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Rebecca, thanks Stu. >> So, Lenovo is a longstanding partner of Microsoft. Why don't you just sent the scene for our viewers, and talk a little bit about the history of the partnership and where you are today. >> So, Lenovo and Microsoft have had a partnership of about 25 years, which is a long time in this industry. And we work really closely together on both innovation, but also making sure that anything that Microsoft is building runs best on Lenovo. >> Great, and what about, here at this conference, what are you hearing, what are you seeing in terms of this partnership? >> We have actually six things that we're really talking about here at the conference, which is a lot if you think about it. But the first is the announcement of our ThinkAgile MX, which is that integrated WSSD system. It's pre-certified, you just buy it as itself. There's four or five different sizes of it, if you will. The second one is our Azure Stack, but also our Azure services. So we're now doing both on prem Azure Stack and Azure services, which is really about customer choice. Because a lot of data center customers are really struggling with how do I build a hybrid cloud infrastructure, and what do I do with that. The third thing that we're doing, oh my gosh, I'm not going to remember them all. The third thing that we're doing is our SQL Server performance. We continue to be the best in performance for all of our SQL Server efforts. Our two-socket systems are best performing. Our four-socket systems are best performing, and so are eight-socket systems are best performing. In addition to that, we have, when we're proud to work with Microsoft on the launch of Windows Server 2019. Again, that's part of that 25 year partnership. It's just something you got to do. And we're really proud of that. The other thing that we've announced here is what we're calling the buy back program. And a lot of companies have buy back programs where you can actually buy back equipment, and you buy back your competitors equipment in order to build your stuff up, but the one thing that's kind of different about what Lenovo's doing is something I call Zillow for systems. So, you actually can go online and put in the systems that you have or the equipment that you have and we give you an automatic, instant quote back. Nobody else is actually doing that. So, it's kind of a Zillowish system where you can see what's my stuff really worth. >> I want to click in a little bit. So, I know the partnership for a long time. I think about PCs, you think about servers, obviously. Lenovo has the gear, Microsoft has the OS and various pieces that go on there. When I look at solutions like WSSD and Azure Stack, Microsoft has a number of partners, maybe help us understand what that partnership means, how Lenovo differentiates from some of the other players out there. >> So, that is one of the things I forgot. One of the things that we've announced today, and that we showed today, and actually Jeff Wosley talked about it in his talk earlier today, is an integration of Microsoft's Windows Admin Center for WSSD, and Lenovo's Xclarity system management system. So, via a single pane of glass from your Windows Admin Center, you can actually not just look at Windows Admin in the Window's infrastructure, but you can actually dig down and really understand what's actually happening with the hardware itself that WSSD is running on. And that's part of that really close partnership and relationship that we have. >> Can you talk a little bit about the approach to the partnership just because we had a Microsoft Executive on here earlier today, and he said that "our partnerships, we have this, we're able to have "a collaborative and collegial partnership "with our competitors." So, it's sort of part of their DNA." How does Lenovo think about when it partners and how it partners with a competitor? >> Well, but Microsoft isn't actually a competitor of ours. Right? And this is the thing I think that Lenovo, as a company, really is focusing on offering to our customers is choice. Right? We have a co-located lab up in Seattle with Microsoft. We have had for years. We do innovation summits with them, we look at where the technology is going and what is it that we can do together in order to make that more effective for our shared customers and how they deliver in the long run. And so it really is a very strong collaboration. We don't build operating systems. We don't build all of the SQL Server. We don't build the Azure Stack, and the Cloud, and all the rest of that. So, the partnership with Lenovo, Microsoft gets to take advantage of all of our supply chain goodness, all of our services goodness, as well as all the platform stuff that we do as well. >> Now, if you look, HCI is one of the things that we've been talking a little bit more about here. Obviously, it makes sense for Lenovo to partner here, but Lenovo also has a number of other solutions. How do you look at it? What are you hearing from customers when it comes to that kind of solution and how Microsoft-- >> It really is about choice. Right, it really is about choice. Customers have different kinds of problems in their environments, and they're seeking partners to help them solve those problems in their environments. And that, and those choices are actually really critical for them. So, when you're working with somebody like Lenovo, where we also offer Vmware, we also offer some of the other solutions that are out there in the market, that, you work with a partner like Lenovo, where we have all of the services and the infrastructure to back that up, plus the long standing relationships that we have with our partners, enables us to offer that kind of choice that allows our end customers to solve their customer's problems. And that's really the core piece that we're looking at. >> Yeah, Microsoft, of course, partners with a lot of companies. I heard in some of the technical key notes, I heard that get mentioned quite a bit. Of course, Rebecca and I were with your team at Lenovo Transform in New York City recently. And maybe for our viewers that might not have caught that show, give us the update, what you're hearing from people about the big partnership -- >> So, we announced a partnership with network compliance, NetApp, at our Transform show last week, I guess it must have been. We've been working on it for awhile, so, just the fact that the announcement happened was really cool. And it's kind of a three-part partnership. The first part is that Lenovo will be branding NetApp's a couple of the sets of systems that NetApp has. And it allows us to fill out our storage infrastructure. Last year, when we launched our largest portfolio of servers, we launched eight all in a single day, and the rest of the Purley platforms followed from my team in the next quarter. This year, with NetApp, we actually launched the largest storage portfolio in the market. And so, this partnership actually allows us to do that very, very collaboratively. Then the second part of the relationship is joint venture that we're starting with NetApp in China. Given the depth of work that Lenovo does in China, it allows NetApp to actually build their market, and their infrastructure. And I think, some of the customers in China are actually really looking for the kinds of solutions that NetApp has available. And then the third is moving forward to build innovative solutions together. Taking the innovation and the 25 years worth of innovation that my team has done over the years, and all of the work we do in performance, all the number one on client satisfaction, all the number one on reliability for the fifth year in a row, and bringing that into our NetApp alliance. >> One of the themes at this conference, and also frankly at Lenovo Transform, is about company culture and about this idea of the importance of collaboration and creativity and teamwork, and inclusivity. Can you describe a little bit for us how you think the Lenovo culture is similar to the Microsoft one that Satya Nadella is a proponent of and also how it's different? >> How is is similar and how is it different? That's a really interesting question. The thing that I have found about the Lenovo culture that I think surprised me the most, one year in, is how committed Lenovo is to really understanding how people think and bringing that in to how we build effective solutions together. It is by far the most diverse organization that I've worked in. In lots of lots of ways, but if you look at the senior leadership level, right? You would expect it, given that the company is actually headquartered in Beijing and the United States, and we're on the Hong Kong stock exchange, you would expect it to be Chinese. But it's not. The leadership team is actually incredibly diverse. Way more diverse than I expected. But even on my team, and further down in the organization, a lot of our engineers have spent multiple years overseas. They've raised their kids overseas. They've gone to school overseas. And so the have a very inclusive perspective on how do we solve problems. And they also understand that the way in which we solve problems, isn't necessarily the best way. So, in our conversations with Microsoft and the culture that we create with them together, it becomes very collaborative. 'Cause we go back to what's the customer problem we're really trying to solve. How are we actually helping our customers in their intelligent transformation? How do we become their trusted partner? And how do we actually help solve humanity's greatest challenges? And that's a together statement, right? With Microsoft and just kind of peeling back the onion on what are the real problems that we need to get to to solve together. >> You mentioned how diverse a company Lenovo is, and that's actually at a time where the technology industry is not known for its diversity. In fact, it's really known for its bro culture. It's the dearth of female leaders. I'm wondering if you could just give me your thoughts on how technology, sort of the state of affairs today is it as bad as the newspaper headlines make it out to be? And (Rebecca and Bev laugh) what we need to do to move forward. >> So, I think in part, there's two answers to that. One of them is that the participants in technology are changing. So, if you look around the room and you watch who's here, what you're seeing is that there's a whole generation of new people coming in who've always had technology at their fingertips. And so they think differently and assume differently about what that technology is supposed to do for them. And so just age diversity starts to come into play. But also the people that buy our stuff, right? 65 to 75% of commercial electronics are bought by women. That's a stunning figure when you really think about it 'cause it's very different from the people that actually create or have in the past created that technology. So when you start to see who's buying and why they're buying, you actually have to start to understand that they're buying for very different reasons than perhaps you were creating the technology for. So, an example of this is the new Hub 500 or the Hub 700. Have you seen this? So, it's a link connected system that sits on the table and you push a button and you're automatically connected with everybody that's going to be in your Lync meeting or everybody that's going to be in your Skype meeting. And we had to do a fair amount of work to really understand how people were going to interact with the system or not interact with the system. And even colors like red and green, and the fact that they mean different things in different cultures, and how are we going to display those colors, right? But that's where the diversity of participation in solving a problem really comes into play. >> Great. Well Bev, it was a pleasure having you on the show. It was really fun talking to you. >> Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat digital music)