>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Good afternoon everyone and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite 26,000 people here at this conference at the orange County convention center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Seth Juarez. He is the cloud developer advocate at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >>Glad to be here. You have such a lovely sad and you're lovely people. We just met up. You don't know any better? No. Well maybe after after the end of the 15 minutes we'll have another discussion. >>You're starting off on the right foot, so tell us a little bit about what you do. You're also a host on channel nine tell us about your role as a, as a cloud developer. >>So a cloud advocate's job is primarily to help developers be successful on Azure. My particular expertise lies in AI and machine learning and so my job is to help developers be successful with AI in the cloud, whether it be developers, data scientists, machine learning engineers or whatever it is that people call it nowadays. Because you know how the titles change a lot, but my job is to help them be successful and sometimes what's interesting is that sometimes our customers can't find success in the cloud. That's actually a win for me too because then I have a deep integration with the product group and my job is to help them understand from a customer perspective what it is they need and why. So I'm like the ombudsman so to speak because the product groups are the product groups. I don't report up to them. So I usually go in there and I'm like, Hey, I don't report to any of you, but this is what the customers are saying. >>We are very keen on being customer centered and that's why I do what I do. >> Seth, I have to imagine when you're dealing with customers, some of that skills gap and learning is something that they need to deal with. You know, we've been hearing for a long time, you know, there's not enough data scientists, you know, we need to learn these environments. Satya Nadella spent a lot of time talking about the citizen developers out there. So you know H bring us inside the customers you're talking to, you know, kind of, where do you usually start and you know, how do they pull the right people in there or are they bringing in outside people a little bit? Great organization, great question. It turns out that for us at Microsoft we have our product groups and then right outside we have our advocates that are very closely aligned to the product groups. >>And so anytime we do have an interaction with a customer, it's for the benefit of all the other customers. And so I meet with a lot of customers and I don't, I'm to get to talk about them too much. But the thing is I go in there, I see what they're doing. For example, one time I went to the touring Institute in the UK. I went in there and because I'm not there to sell, I'm there to figure out like what are you trying to do and does this actually match up? It's a very different kind of conversation and they'd tell me about what they're working on. I tell them about how we can help them and then they tell me where the gaps are or where they're very excited and I take both of those pieces of feedback to the, to the product group and they, they just love being able to have someone on the ground to talk to people because sometimes you know, when work on stuff you get a little siloed and it's good to have an ombudsman so to speak, to make sure that we're doing the right thing for our customers. >>As somebody that works on AI. You must've been geeking out working, working with the Turing Institute though. Oh yeah. Those people are absolutely wonderful and it was like as I was walking in, a little giddy, but the problems that they're facing in AI are very similar. The problems that people at the other people doing and that are in big organizations, other organizations are trying to onboard to AI and try to figure out, everyone says I need to be using this hammer and they're trying to hammer some screws in with the hammer. So it's good to figure out when it's appropriate to use AI and when it isn't. And I also have customers with that >>and I'm sure the answer is it depends in terms of when it's appropriate, but do you have any sort of broad brush advice for helping an organization determine is is this a job for AI? Absolutely. >>That's uh, it's a question I get often and developers, we have this thing called the smell that tells us if a code smell, we have a code smell tells us, maybe we should refactor, maybe we should. For me, there's this AI smell where if you can't precisely figure out the series of steps to execute an algorithm and you're having a hard time writing code, or for example, if every week you need to change your if L statements or if you're changing numbers from 0.5 to 0.7 and now it works, that's the smell that you should think about using AI or machine learning, right? There's also a set of a class of algorithms that, for example, AI, it's not that we've solved, solved them, but they're pretty much solved. Like for example, detecting what's in an image, understanding sentiment and text, right? Those kinds of problems we have solutions for that are just done. >>But if you have a code smell where you have a lot of data and you don't want to write an algorithm to solve that problem, machine learning and AI might be the solution. Alright, a lot of announcements this week. Uh, any of the highlights for from your area. We last year, AI was mentioned specifically many times now with you know, autonomous systems and you know it feels like AI is in there not necessarily just you know, rubbing AI on everything. >> I think it's because we have such a good solution for people building custom machine learning that now it's time to talk about the things you can do with it. So we're talking about autonomous systems. It's because it's based upon the foundation of the AI that we've already built. We released something called Azure machine learning, a set of tools called in a studio where you can do end and machine learning. >>Because what what's happening is most data scientists nowadays, and I'm guilty of this myself, we put stuff in things called Jupiter notebooks. We release models, we email them to each other, we're emailing Python files and that's kinda like how programming was in 1995 and now we're doing is we're building a set of tools to allow machine learning developers to go end to end, be able to see how data scientists are working and et cetera. For example, let's just say you're a data scientist. Bill. Did an awesome job, but then he goes somewhere else and Sally who was absolutely amazing, comes in and now she's the data scientist. Usually Sally starts from zero and all of the stuff that bill did is lost with Azure machine learning. You're able to see all of your experiments, see what bill tried, see what he learned and Sally can pick right up and go on. And that's just doing the experiments. Now if you want to get machine learning models into production, we also have the ability to take these models, version them, put them into a CIC, D similar process with Azure dev ops and machine learning. So you can go from data all the way to machine learning in production very easily, very quickly and in a team environment, you know? And that's what I'm excited about mostly. >>So at a time when AI and big and technology companies in general are under fire and not, Oh considered to not always have their users best interests at heart. I'd like you to talk about the Microsoft approach to ethical AI and responsible AI. >>Yeah, I was a part of the keynote. Scott Hanselman is a very famous dab and he did a keynote and I got to form part of it and one of the things that we're very careful even on a dumb demo or where he was like doing rock paper, scissors. I said, and Scott, we were watching you with your permission to see like what sequence of throws you were doing. We believe that through and through all the way we will never use our customers' data to enhance any of our models. In fact, there was a time when we were doing like a machine learning model for NLP and I saw the email thread and it's like we don't have language food. I don't remember what it was. We don't have enough language food. Let's pay some people to ethically source this particular language data. We will never use any of our customer's data and I've had this question asked a lot. >>Like for example, our cognitive services which have built in AI, we will never use any of our customer's data to build that neither. For example, if we have, for example, we have a custom vision where you upload your own pictures, those are your pictures. We're never going to use them for anything. And anything that we do, there's always consent and we want to make sure that everyone understands that AI is a powerful tool, but it also needs to be used ethically. And that's just on how we use data for people that are our customers. We also have tools inside of Azure machine learning to get them to use AI. Ethically. We have tools to explain models. So for example, if you very gender does the model changes prediction or if you've very class or race, is your model being a little iffy? We allow, we have those tools and Azure machine learning, so our customers can also be ethical with the AI they build on our platform. So we have ethics built into how we build our models and we have ethics build into how our customers can build their models too, which is to me very. >>And is that a selling point? Are customers gravitating? I mean we've talked a lot about it on the show. About the, the trust that customers have in Microsoft and the image that Microsoft has in the industry right now. But the idea that it is also trying to perpetuate this idea of making everyone else more ethical. Do you think that that is one of the reasons customers are gravitate? >>I hope so. And as far as a selling point, I absolutely think it's a selling point, but we've just released it and so I'm going to go out there and evangelize the fact that not only are we as tickle with what we do in AI, but we want our customers to be ethical as well. Because you know, trust pays, as Satya said in his keynote, tra trust the enhancer in the exponent that allows tech intensity to actually be tech intensity. And we believe that through and through not only do believe it for ourselves, but we want our customers to also believe it and see the benefits of having trust with our customers. One of the things we, we talked to Scott Hanselman a little bit yesterday about that demo is the Microsoft of today isn't just use all the Microsoft products, right? To allow you to use, you know, any tool, any platform, you know, your own environment, uh, to tell us how that, that, that plays into your world. >>It's, you know, like in my opinion, and I don't know if it's the official opinion, but we are in the business of renting computer cycles. We don't care how you use them, just come into our house and use them. You wanna use Java. We've recently announced a tons of things with spraying. We're become an open JDK contributor. You know, one of my colleagues, we're very hard on that. I work primarily in Python because it's machine learning. I have a friend might call a friend and colleague, David Smith who works in our, I have other colleagues that work in a number of different languages. We don't care. What we are doing is we're trying to empower every organization and every person on the planet to achieve more where they are, how they are, and hopefully bring a little bit of of it to our cloud. >>What are you doing that, that's really exciting to you right now? I know you're doing a new.net library. Any other projects that are sparking your end? >>Yeah, so next week I'm going to France and this is before anyone's going to see this and there is a, there is a company, I think it's called surf, I'll have to look it up and we'll put it in the notes, but they are basically trying to use AI to be more environmentally conscious and they're taking pictures of trash and rivers and they're using AI to figure out where it's coming from so they can clean up environment. I get to go over there and see what they're doing, see how I can help them improvement and promote this kind of ethical way of doing AI. We also do stuff with snow leopards. I was watching some Netflix thing with my kids and we were watching snow leopards and there was like two of them. Like this is impressive because as I'm watching this with my kids, I'm like, Hey we are at Microsoft, we're helping this population, you know, perpetuate with AI. >>And so those are the things it's actually a had had I've seen on TV is, you know, rather than spending thousands of hours of people out there, the AI can identify the shape, um, you know, through the cameras. So they're on a, I love that powerful story to explain some of those pieces as opposed to it. It's tough to get the nuance of what's happening here. Absolutely. With this technology, these models are incredibly easy to build on our platform. And, and I and I st fairly easy to build with what you have. We love people use TensorFlow, use TensorFlow, people use pie torch. That's great cafe on it. Whatever you want to use. We are happy to let you use a rent out our computer cycles because we want you to be successful. Maybe speak a little bit of that when you talk about, you know, the, the cloud, one of the things is to democratize, uh, availability of this. >>There's usually free tiers out there, especially in the emerging areas. Uh, you know, how, how is Microsoft helping to get that, that compute and that world technology to people that might not have had it in the past? I was in, I was in Peru a number of years ago and I and I had a discussion with someone on the channel nine show and it was absolutely imp. Like I under suddenly understood the value of this. He said, Seth, if I wanted to do a startup here in Peru, right, and it was a capital Peru, like a very industrialized city, I would have to buy a server. It would come from California on a boat. It would take a couple of months to get here and then it would be in a warehouse for another month as it goes through customs. And then I would have to put it into a building that has a C and then I could start now sat with a click of a button. >>I can provision an entire cluster of machines on Azure and start right now. That's what, that's what the cloud is doing in places like Peru and places that maybe don't have a lot of infrastructure. Now infrastructure is for everyone and maybe someone even in the United States, you know, in a rural area that doesn't, they can start up their own business right now anywhere. And it's not just because it's Peru, it's not just because it's some other place that's becoming industrialized. It's everywhere. Because any kid with a dream can spin up an app service and have a website done in like five minutes. >>So what does this mean? I mean, as you said, any, any kid, any person or rural area, any developing country, what does this mean in five or 10 years from now in terms of the future of commerce and work and business? >>Honestly, some people feel like computers are art, stealing, you know, human engineering. I think they are really augmenting it. Like for example, I don't have to, if I want to know something for her. Back when, when I was a kid, I had to, if I want to know something, sometimes I had to go without knowing where like I guess we'll never know. Right? And then five years later we're like, okay, we found out it was that a character on that show, you know? And now we just look at our phone. It's like, Oh, you were wrong. And I like not knowing that I'm wrong for a lot longer, you know what I'm saying? But nowadays with our, with our phones and with other devices, we have information readily available so that we can make appropriate response, appropriate answers to questions that we have. AI is going to help us with that by augmenting human ingenuity, by looking at the underlying structure. >>We can't, for example, if you look at, if you look at an Excel spreadsheet, if it's like five rows and maybe five columns, you and I as humans can look at and see a trend. But what if it's 10 million rows and 5,000 columns? Our ingenuity has been stretched too far, but with computers now we can aggregate, we can do some machine learning models, and then we can see the patterns that the computer found aggregated, and now we can make the decisions we could make with five columns, five rows, but it's not taking our jobs. It's augmenting our capacity to do the right thing. >>Excellent. We'll assess that. Thank you so much for coming on the Cuba. Really fun conversation. >>Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. >>Alright, I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu minimun. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite.

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone. We are wrapping up three at days of wall to wall coverage of Microsoft ignite. It is a game day atmosphere on the show floor at the orange County civic center. Thank you so much to Cohesity for hosting the cube for this fantastic three days. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co host Stu Miniman. Still this is awesome. We talk about the buzz on the floor and the energy on the show and definitely guy here Cohesity always bright and activity >>in the booth and it's been a lot of fun hanging out here for the week with you Rebecca and our hosts and all, all of the guests. Yes, absolutely. So this is day three. We are starting our series of interviews, but I want to hear because you are so in this community you have a lot of connections, a lot of buddies, a lot of colleagues, former colleagues, current colleagues. What has impressed you about the show and what is missing? Let's start with the positives and it's interesting because this is only my second year coming. One of those, you know, my background networking, I've interacted with Microsoft for most of my career. I would not say I am deep in the community, but I know enough of the MVPs, have friends here and really have learned a lot in these two years. So first of all, the breadth of this show is just so impressive. >>One of the things that you and I've been talking about the last two years, years, what is the show? It started out as a windows admin show. Lot of discussion about office migration to windows 10 was the big thing last year. We haven't heard as much about this this year. Yesterday was a big developer day. Of course Azure sits at the center of everything. Lots of big announcements here. Felt like a kind of on par with what we hear at AWS. It shows with just so many announcements across the board. But really when you talk about the applications of business productivity, people come to this show. When I talk to people in the booth, I'm looking for solutions and how do I put those together? It's not some of the tech shows where you just, you're constantly down in the speeds and feeds and what they're doing and some of the competitive dynamics. >>I have a problem, my business needs something in, this is what I'm looking to solve. And Microsoft has a broad and diverse ecosystem and the word we kept coming back to the word of the week I think is of course trust. >> Absolutely. I couldn't agree more with what you've just said. That is what we hear. And the other thing about Microsoft is that at a time when big tech is really under a lot of fire, there's a lot of suspicion policymakers, regulators are bearing down on a lot of the tech CEOs. Microsoft really stands above. And when you think about antitrust, there's major presidential candidates talking about breaking up big Chuck, big tech. Microsoft is really riding above that fray. There's sort of a feeling of deja VU for Microsoft, I'm sure. But that they're really been there, done that. They're not. Yeah, I mean it was Satya Nadella to, you know, really put a pointed attack. >>He did not say it, but we all know it's Google. You know the company that was do no evil at the start. Now everybody's concerned because Google's model is primarily selling ads and while Google will say what they're doing in the enterprise, they just acquired Fitbit and said, you're not going to get ads on your Fitbit. We're not going to leverage that way, but there's not that trust built up. And then the number one competitor out there is AWS. And if you talk about the ecosystem, the concern that every AWS show is, Oh my gosh, what announcements are Amazon going to make and are they going to steal my lunch money if you were or put me out of business for the years worth of work on doing. Microsoft doesn't feel that way. They, you know, if you talk about the ecosystem I was talking, they made announcements that do compete against number the products, RPA, or was announced as part of the power platform out there. >>There's a number of RPA companies here. I talked to them there. Microsoft's a strong partner. We've been doing breakouts, we're talking with them. Yes, they are just like SAP getting into this market, but it's a Microsoft shop and it's not, you know, it is new. It's not the best of breed. They're on it. They are not concerned that they can still live in this environment. And I'd say both AWS and Azure very much about choice and ecosystem and building them out. >> So you're talking about the marketplace here. So in terms of the marketplace, what is Microsoft doing to drive business and is it effective? Well actually I'm glad you, so specifically we talk about the marketplace. So there's the ecosystem and then there's actually the marketplace. So AWS has what we really consider, it's the enterprise app store. If I want to go buy software, you know there's Salesforce and all of their connectors and everyone that uses Salesforce knows that. >>But AWS really has driven a robust ecosystem just like on amazon.com most of the products that are sold are from third parties. The AWS marketplace is mostly how I can procure and buy software. And they drive a lot of it. So a lot of the AWS adoption is through the marketplace and the ecosystem makes lots of dollars. Reminds me, we used to talk about VMware for years is for every dollar of VMware you bought you would buy, you know, 10 $20 worth of third party ecosystem. But we were talking about things like storage and like for AWS it's on procuring software and underneath on leveraging the AWS services. While Microsoft Azure has a marketplace, it is not as mature. They don't really push as many people through it. So while I've talked to a number of the partners that are, yes we're part of the marketplace, but people buy lots of different ways as opposed to AWS is trying to get everybody from a customer and an ecosystem through it. >>And part of that is to simplify the environment, how I purchase it. But it's that balance of trust and you know, ease of use out there. So when I look forward, what do I like to see from Azure is how will they mature there. I was actually something John furrier had had us digging into here and the marketplace at Azure definitely is, I would say years behind where AWS is, is there, but you know, Azure great growth, doing really well, a strong trusted ecosystem. Just some areas for improvement that I would look for going forward. >>But maybe that's part of their, their approach and their strategy is we'll work with you, we, we collaborate, we can do this together. Whereas AWS there is that, that feeling sometimes when you're at reinvent, as you said, roll out the beer, CURT's early please. My business is over. So, so, so comparing the two show, the three, the various cloud shows, and this is not just a cloud show, of course we're going to get into that more. But when you think about re-invent and you think about VM world, how does the, the feel and the energy here differ? >>Yeah. So the thing that always strikes me when I go to an AWS show, and I have been to many of them from the regional shows through the big one and reinvent, which is more than twice the size of this 26,000 person show. The customers there are always trying new things. They are open and looking for the environment that they can do new things. Here what we're talking about here feels like it's like a tweener. We had a lot of conversations about building bridges to where customers are while AWS is starting to talk hybrid more and meet you in your data center and doing outpost Microsoft, they have their windows install base, they have their own three 65 pieces. So there's a broad spectrum of from the latest and greatest autonomous systems. You want to talk about it. Microsoft has that through, you know, I'm a, you know, 20 year CIS admin and I, you know, I'm going to hold on to, you know, my servers, you know, as long as I can, they're there for you. >>So Microsoft does bam, that gamut and VMware is more, once again making that transition as we go to the cloud. So Microsoft right in the middle of that transition, we talked a bunch about digital transformation with the customers on here. So it really, it has all a lot for a lot of different people. You know is one of the things I've heard is they really ramped up some of the developer activity at this show. They just bought get hub, get hub, has their own show, get hub universe next week, which will stay very focused on that environment. But Microsoft also has a conference build and there's been some rumblings that maybe build an ignite get wrapped together. We saw that with IBM. IBM had lots of different shows and they put all the wood behind think and made that a massive show. There's pros and cons of that, seeing lots of companies that have taken a big show and put it into a 40 show around the globe. >>Now someone like Amazon has reinvented, but then they have of second tier and third tier regional shows to push that out. So lots of different ways to, to get to customers. Um, and it is interesting, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about Azure Ark. I'll be at the cube con cloud-native clown show in just two weeks and San Diego and expect that to be talked. And really it is in preview mode. So when I look at it at the end of the day is, you know, you've got red hat open shift, you have Google, you have what AWS is doing with outpost and welcome to the party. Microsoft, they have got a strong hybrid solution already because they played at both ends. But really as your arc is unifying and pulling those together so that it's not just my data center and Azure, but even AWS, they're saying, we'll see how this all plays out. >>Microsoft definitely has a strong data focus and a strong application focus. And so it be interesting to see where that adoption happens. I've been saying for a couple of weeks. Really Kubernetes just get baked in everywhere and you know, customers aren't going to have to think about it in a most Microsoft definitely strong partner focus. Just to reinforce something I've said a couple times this week, they still have a partnership with red hat. They still have a partnership with VMware. The Azure arc is not the only way to get the Kubernetes story in play into your Microsoft environment. And Microsoft's done well with that. We all know from the early days of Microsoft living on tops of lots of hardware. Now Microsoft software will live a lot of places. Yes, their cloud is large growing one of the top two choices out there. But they truly embrace that it will be multi-cloud and be able to live in lots of environments. >>So I want to talk about something that's more in my wheel, hasn't met his productivity. So we have heard a little bit about teams. I mean there was a lot of announcements. It's not exactly where we focused a lot here on the cube this week, but there were some really interesting announcements about the ways in which Microsoft is thinking about human productivity, both at individual productivity and team collaboration, the way teams interact and communicate. There are a lot of interesting new uh, characteristics and elements to what they're doing in terms of Cortana re read me my emails. Uh, I'm going to send this email but I'm actually gonna wait, it's good. It's going to be a scheduled send. It's going to send when the, when the, the person I'm sending it to is, is actually at his or her desk. Um, and so those are just some interesting things to me that really speak volumes about how Microsoft views the future of work and views the, the future of our, of our lives. And, and, and understanding how much technology has encroached in our lives because they're saying, read me my emails while I take my dog for a walk while I am actually doing, while I'm on a run first thing in the morning. I, you know, make me more productive but also give me my time back. And so I think those are some really, really interesting ways in which Microsoft, as I said, understands the technology has taken over and they're trying to give you a bit of your time back. >>It's interesting cause you know when I look back, Microsoft has a bit of a checkered history when it comes to some of those environments. We all know the office suite teams is now part of O three 65 and I hear very strong. The people that use it really do like it. But those of us look back and we said, Oh I used to like using Skype and then Microsoft got ahold of it and Oh my gosh, what a horrendous mess. Skype was for a long time when it taught to a collaborative environment. Google really jumped Microsoft with the G suite and many smaller companies were like, Oh, it's relatively easy to use and I can collaborate there. Well teams really has gone through and understand that and we talk about a collaborative environment, you know, Microsoft teams, best of breeds. I attended an enterprise connect earlier this year and I couldn't hear enough about how much that was going on. >>And you know, strong ecosystem of companies that Microsoft worked with. So it's very strong, but it's kind of, if you're a Microsoft shop, you're doing it. But they did lose many companies too free or less expensive or lighter weight options out there. And then everything from Slack ate into it. But you know, Microsoft has a good product. Absolutely. It just, some of it is the perception and some of it is the pricing. You know, they do a good job of making sure that when you get get to college, you, you want to use some of these environments. Oh yeah, the pricing is graded free. But then when you get in the real world, hopefully you'll like it. So Microsoft does a little bit about now something we focused a lot on but did hear really good things about it. And it does get lost a little bit in some of the general discussion about all the other pieces, you know, autonomous systems, AI and the leaders. This stuff of Azure take a little bit of precedent over the, some of the things that are a little bit more on just as you said, business productivity or even on the consumer side of the house for Microsoft. >>So we are, we're, we're wrapping up here but I want to hear just final thoughts, final predictions for 2020 and you've really gotten, you've, we've, we've covered a lot of ground here, this wording, but I'm interested to hear what you think is on tap for Microsoft in 2020 I'll bring >>back to something we kicked off with the jet ideal coming in here really has that that whole process of winning that bid was a fortune function from Microsoft to rapidly mature some of their environment. You talk about security and trust, you know the government is not going to give that environment if it to Microsoft, if they could not trust them. Back when AWS won a CIA deal, it was like, Oh wait, if the security is good enough for the CIA, it's probably good enough for me to consider it. So the government agencies, which historically is not who you think about when you talk about innovation in driving change today. Public sector is really interesting. Even when we were talking to some of the people about, Hey, how can we haven't heard as much about Azure stack over the years? Well, it's been a lot of service providers and government agencies that have been deploying this and therefore we'll do it. So Microsoft still has a lot of work to do contracts. They still have to get some more security clearances. They need to make sure their performance and reliability is up to snuff on because they just can't have outages. If I, if this becomes a greater and greater piece of my overall how I run my business, I can't say, oops, wait, you know the Internet's down. This is now 2019 going into 2020 and in 2020 we'll all have perfect. >>Oh, of course. Oh yes indeed. Sue, I'm looking forward to another great day of coverage with you, and thank you again to Cohesity for hosting us in this really cool booth. Uh, so please stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite coming up in just a little bit.

>> Commentator: Live from Orlando, Florida It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite 2019. We are theCUBE, we are here at the Cohesity booth in the middle of the show floor at the Orange County Convention Center. 26,000 people from around the globe here. It's a very exciting show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Francesca Lazzeri. She is a Ph.D Machine Learning Scientist and Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here. >> Rebecca: Direct from Cambridge, so we're an all Boston table here. >> Exactly. >> I love it. I love it. >> We are in the most technology cluster, I think, in the world probably. >> So two words we're hearing a lot of here at the show, machine learning, deep learning, can you describe, define them for us here, and tell us the difference between machine learning and deep learning. >> Yeah, this is a great question and I have to say a lot of my customers ask me this question very, very often. Because I think right now there are many different terms such as deep learning as you said, machine learning, AI, that have been used more or less in the same way, but they are not really the same thing. So machine learning is portfolio, I would say, of algorithms, and when you say algorithms I mean really statistical models, that you can use to run some data analysis. So you can use these algorithms on your data, and these are going to produce what we call an output. Output are the results. So deep learning is just a type of machine learning, that has a different structure. We call it deep learning because there are many different layers, in a neural network, which is again a type of machine learning algorithm. And it's very interesting because it doesn't look at the linear relation within the different variables, but it looks at different ways to train itself, and learn something. So you have to think just about deep learning as a type of machine learning and then we have AI. AI is just on top of everything, AI is a way of building application on top of machine learning models and they run on top of machine learning algorithms. So it's a way, AI, of consuming intelligent models. >> Yeah, so Francesca, I know we're going to be talking to Jeffrey Stover tomorrow about a topic, responsible AI. Can you talk a little bit about how Microsoft is making sure that unintentional biases or challenges with data, leave the machine learning to do things, or have biases that we wouldn't want to otherwise. >> Yes, I think that Microsoft is actually investing a lot in responsible AI. Because I have to say, as a data scientist, as a machine learning scientist, I think that it's very important to understand what the model is doing and why it's give me analysis of a specific result. So, in my team, we have a tool kit, which is called, interpretability toolkit, and it's really a way to unpack machine learning models, so it's a way of opening machine learning models and understand what are the different relations between the different viables, the different data points, so it's an easy way through different type of this relation, that you can understand why your model is giving you specific results. So that you get that visibility, as a data scientist, but also as a final consumer, final users of these AI application. And I think that visibility is the most important thing to prevent unbias, sorry, bias application, and to make sure that our results are fair, for everybody. So there are some technical tools that we can use for sure. I can tell you, as a data scientist, that bias and unfairness starts with the data. You have to make sure that the data is representative enough of the population that you are targeting with your AI applications. But this sometimes is not possible. That's why it's important to create some services, some toolkits, that are going to allow you, again, as a data scientist, as a user, to understand what the AI application, or the machine learning model is doing. >> So what's the solution? If the problem, if the root of the problem is the data in the first place, how do we fix this? Because this is such an important issue in technology today. >> Yes, and so there are a few ways that you can use... So first of all I want to say that it's not a issue that you can really fix. I would say that, again, as a data scientist, there are a few things that you can do, in order to check that your AI application is doing a good job, in terms of fairness, again. And so these few steps are, as you said, the data. So most of the time, people, or customers, they just use their own data. Something that is very helpful is also looking at external type of data, and also make sure that, again, as I said, the pure data is representative enough of the entire population. So for example, if you are collecting data from a specific category of people, of a specific age, from a specific geography, you have to make sure that you understand that their results are not general results, are results that the machine learning algorithm learn from that target population. And so it's important again, to look at different type of data, different type of data sets, and use, if you can, also external data. And then, of course, this is just the first step. There's a second step, that you can always make sure that you check your model with a business expert, with data expert. So sometimes we have data scientists that work in siloes, they do not really communicate what they're doing. And I think that this is something that you need to change within your company, within your organization, you have to, always to make sure, that data scientists, machine learning scientists are working closely with data experts, business experts, and everybody's talking. Again, to make sure that we understand what we are doing. >> Okay, there were so many things announced at the show this week. In your space, what are some of the highlights of the things that people should be taking away from Microsoft Ignite. >> So I think that as your machine learning platform has been announcing a lot of updates, I love the product because I think it's a very dynamic product. There is, what we now call, the designer, which is a new version of the old Azure Machine Learning Studio. It's a drag and drop tool so it's a tool that is great for people who do not want to, code to match, or who are just getting started with machine learning. And you can really create end-to-end machine learning pipelines with these tools, in just a matter of a few minutes. The nice thing is that you can also deploy your machine learning models and this is going to create an API for you, and this API can be used by you, or by other developers in your company, to just call the model that you deployed. As I mentioned before, this is really the part where AI is arriving, and it's the part where you create application on top of your models. So this is a great announcement and we also created a algorithm cheat sheet, that is a really nice map that you can use to understand, based on your question, based on your data, what's the best machine learning algorithm, what's the best designer module that you can use to be build your end-to-end machine learning solution. So this, I would say, is my highlight. And then of course, in terms of Azure Machine Learning, there are other updates. We have the Azure Machine Learning python SDK, which is more for pro data scientists, who wants to create customized models, so models that they have to build from scratch. And for them it's very easy, because it's a python-based environment, where they can just build their models, train it, test it, deploy it. So when I say it's a very dynamic and flexible tool because it's really a tool on the pla- on the Cloud, that is targeting more business people, data analysts, but also pro data scientists and AI developers, so this is great to see and I'm very, very excited for that. >> So in addition to your work as a Cloud advocate at Microsoft, you are also a mentor to research and post-doc students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, so tell us a little more about that work in terms of what kind of mentorship do you provide and what your impressions are of this young generation, a young generation of scientists that's now coming up. >> Yes. So that's another wonderful question because one of the main goal of my team is actually working with a academic type of audience, and we started this about a year ago. So we are, again, a team of Cloud advocates, developers, data scientists, and we do not want to work only with big enterprises, but we want to work with academic type of institutions. So when I say academics, of course I mean, some of the best universities, like I've been working a lot with MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and also now I've been working with the Columbia University, in New York. And with all of them, I work with both the PhD and post-doc students, and most of the time, what I try to help them with is changing their mindset. Because these are all brilliant students, that need just to understand how they can translate what they have learned doing their years of study, and also their technical skillset, in to the real world. And when I say the real world, I mean more like, building applications. So there is this sort of skill transfer that needs to be done and again, working with these brilliant people, I have to say, something that is easy to do, because sometimes they just need to work on a specific project that I create for them, so I give data to them and then we work together in a sort of lab environment, and we build end-to-end solutions. But from a knowledge perspective, from a, I would say, technical perspective, these are all excellent students, so it's really, I find myself in a position in which I'm mentoring them, I prepare them for their industry, because most of them, they want to become data scientist, machine learning scientist, but I have to say that I also learn a lot from them, because at the end of the day, when we build these solutions, it's really a way to build something, a project, an app together, and then we also see, the beauty of this is also that we also see how other people are using that to build something even better. So it's an amazing experience, and I feel very lucky that I'm in Cambridge, where, as you know, we have the best schools. >> Francesca, you've dug in some really interesting things, I'd love to get just a little bit, if you can share, about how machine learning is helping drive competitiveness and innovation in companies today, and any tips you have for companies, and how they can get involved even more. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think that everything really start with the business problem because I think that, as we started this conversation, we were mentioning words such as deep learning, machine learning, AI, so it's, a lot of companies, they just want to do this because they think that they're missing something. So my first suggestion for them is really trying to understand what's the business question that they have, if there is a business problem that they can solve, if there is an operation that they can improve, so these are all interesting questions that they can ask themselves their themes. And then as soon as they have this question in mind, the second step is understand that, if they have the data, the right data, that are needed to support this process, that is going to help them with the business question. So after that, you understand that the data, I mean, if you understand, if you have the right data, they are the steppings, of course you have to understand if you have also external data, and if you have enough data, as we were saying, because this is very, very important as a first step, in your machine learning journey. And you know, it's important also, to be able to translate the business question in to a machine learning question. Like, for example, in the supervised learning, which is an area of machine learning, we have what is called the regression. Regression is a great type of model, that is great for, to answer questions such as, how many, how much? So if you are a retailer and you wanted to predict how much, how many sales of a specific product you're going to have in the next two weeks, so for example, the regression model, is going to be a good first find, first step for you to start your machine learning journey. So the translation of the business problem into a machine learning question, so it's a consequence in to a machine learning algorithm, is also very important. And then finally, I would say that you always have to make sure that you are able to deploy this machine learning model so that your environment is ready for the deployment and what we call the operizational part. Because this is really the moment in which we are going to allow the other people, meaning internal stake holders, other things in your company, to consume the machine learning model. That's the moment really in which you are going to add business value to your machine learning solution. So yeah, my suggestion for companies who want to start this journey is really to make sure that they have cleared these steps, because I think that if they have cleared these steps, then their team, their developers, their data scientists, are going to work together to build these end-to-end solutions. >> Francesca Lenzetti, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it was a pleasure having you. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)

>>Lai from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Good afternoon, cube viewers. We are here at Microsoft ignite at the orange County convention center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Edward Thompson. He is the product manager at get hub. Thank you so much for coming on the queue. So the get hub acquisition closed this time last year, uh, for our viewers who are maybe unfamiliar with get hub, explain what get hub is and then also tell us a little bit how it's going since the, >>yeah, I'd be happy to. So yeah, get hub is like the home for software development. If you're a, if you're a software developer, uh, you know, get hub rehost, you know, most of the open source repositories in the world. Um, you know, just to give you some stats. So at this time, last year, about the time the acquisition happened, um, we announced ad get hub universe, which is our annual developer conference, uh, that we had 30 million developers on GitHub and a hundred million repositories. So that's, that's a huge number of developers. I haven't seen the latest numbers. We'll announce the newest, uh, at get hub university this year, which is coming up next week. Uh, but the last number I saw was 40 million developers. So that's a growth of, you know, 10 million developers in just a year. Unbelievable. And that, that also means the 25% of our developers on get hub have joined within the last year. So that's just absolutely incredible. Um, and so yeah, I get hope. Is, is, is that, is that place for development? >>Yeah, it's really interesting when I look at some acquisitions that Microsoft has made back in 2016, they spent $26 billion for LinkedIn, which is most people's resume. And if you look last year it was seven and a half billion dollars for my friends in the software world. Get hub is their resume. That's right. Oh, when you talk about how you do things online, so you've got an interesting perspective on this because you've worked for Microsoft and get hub a couple of times. So give us a little bit about, you know, the relationship when you joined Microsoft 10 years ago, you know, open source developers, developers, developers weren't exactly on everyone's lips. So it gives a little bit of viewpoint through the various incarnations. >>So as you said, I joined Microsoft about 10 years ago. I came in through a little acquisition. Uh, we were just a very small software company, but we were building enterprise cross platform developer tools and we were about five engineers. And when you're building for, you know, Mac OS, Linux, Sonos, all these different platforms you use with so many people with so few rather, so few developers, you really need to take as much off the shelf as possible. You can't build all that yourself, you know. So if, if you needed a logging library, we would just go and use some open source products. We're not going to spend our time working on that when we could be building customer value in step. So when Microsoft acquired that company, they looked at, you know, they did their due diligence, they looked at the source code and they saw all this open source and they, I mean it was almost a deal breaker. >>They really lost their mind. Um, they were not geared up to deal with open source, to use open source, certainly not to contribute to open source. Uh, and so that's the Microsoft that I first saw. And, and to get from there to here is, is incredible. You know, over time. Um, we worked closely with some open source tools. We worked closely with get hub at Microsoft and that was really one of the early sort of unions between Microsoft and get hub was starting to work together on, on some open source software. And so we kind of started to know each other. We started to understand each other's companies and each other's cultures. And we started to, I don't know, I dare say like each other. Like I still count some of those early get hub employees that I met, uh, as some of my closest friends. Uh, and so at some point, uh, they became such close friends that I went to go work with them and get hub and then of course the Microsoft acquisition and so on. But I really think that that, you know, the, the transformation in Microsoft between, uh, the 10 years ago, Microsoft that really didn't get open source and today is, is just incredible. >>Well, let me just sit in that, in that culture and maybe culture clash a little bit the first time around because Microsoft developers have their own culture and their own uniform and their own way of interacting with each other. The, the, the hours that they work, which is very different from Microsoft, which is a pretty middle-aged Volvo driving kind of organization. So how, how does that work and, and what is, what has it been like the second time around the Microsoft as a middle aged Volvo driver? I think you can, you can >>wear a hoodie in and drive a Volvo. Um, no, I think it's been, I think it's been really great. The interesting thing about Microsoft is that it's not, you know, with so many people, it's not just like a homogenous big company. Um, we do have, you know, the developer tools division is a little bit different than offices, a little bit different than windows. And so they all have their own sort of unique cultures and, and now get hub slots in as its own unique culture. And we can, you know, we can talk to each other and we can understand each other, but we don't necessarily have to be all the same, you know, we can get hub team does kind of work some, some of us do work kind of weird hours. And, and I think that somehow that that works, especially with, you know, new tools coming to, um, coming to the marketplace, uh, you know, chat applications, we can be a lot less synchronous. We can be a lot more online and leave a message for each other. You know, we get out, we use get hub issues and pull requests to collaborate on almost everything, whether it's legal, uh, or, you know, our, our PR department. And it's not just developers. So we're trying to take these, these tools and, and sort of apply them to allow us to have the culture that we want at get hub. And I think Microsoft's doing the same thing as well. >>So speaking of new tools and you're, you're speaking here at ignite, you're about to announce the new repository with lots of new capabilities, enabling users to deploy at to any cloud. So tell us a little bit about, about the, this new tool. >>Yeah, so, uh, we announced, we call it get hub actions. We announced it last year at, at get hub universe. Our, uh, again, our, our annual developer conference. And our goal with GitHub actions was to allow people to take, you know, we've got 100 million repositories on get hub. We wanted our users to, to take those repositories and automate common tasks. Let me, let me give you a concrete example. Um, a lot of times somebody will open an issue on a, on a good hub repository, you know, uh, Hey, this doesn't work. I've got a bug report, you know, and they'll fill out an issue. And often either they didn't understand things or, um, the issue resolved itself, you know, who knows. We call that, uh, an issue that goes stale. And so you can build a workflow around that repository that will look for these stale issues and it will, uh, you know, just close them automatically. >>That gets rid of the mental tacks for somebody who, for a, for a developer who owns this repository to allow this, you know, this workload to just do it automatically. And so that's an example of a, a get hub actions workflow. Um, some people, uh, don't like swearing in their repository and you know, so if somebody were to open a bug report, you know, they might be angry. And so you could actually have a get hub workflow that looks for certain words and then replies and says, Hey, that's, here's our code of conduct. That's not the way we roll here. And actually a lot of people find that that feedback coming from a robot, uh, is a lot easier to take than a feedback coming from a human cause. They might want to meet with a person, can't argue with a robot. Well, not successfully. >>I think I have argued with the chat bot in my day. But anyway, >>yeah. So that's what we did a year ago and we opened it up into the beta program and we really quickly got feedback that, that people liked it and people were doing some really innovative things. But the one thing that people really wanted to automate was their bills. They wanted it to be able to build their code and deploy it. And we were just not set up for that. We, we, we didn't build, get hub actions as that platform in 2018 so we kind of had to pause our beta program. You know, I, they, they, they say that no, uh, no good plan survives first contact with the customer. So we had to, we had to hit pause on that. Uh, and we retooled. Um, we, we just sort of, I don't know, iterated on it, I guess. Uh, and we basically built a new platform that supported all of that repository automation capability that we had planned for in the first place. But also allowed for continuous integration build and deployments. So, um, we brought Macko S we brought Linux and windows runners, uh, that we host, uh, in our cloud, um, that people can use to build their software and then deploy it. And again, yeah, we want to be absolutely a tool agnostic. So any, any operating system, any, uh, language and cloud agnostic, we want to let anybody deploy anywhere, whether it's to a public cloud or on premises. >>Yeah. Uh, so, and with this, the second year we've done our program at this show and we really feel it's gone through a transformation. You know, this is a multi decade in a windows office. Uh, the business applications, uh, you know, cloud seeped in, developers are all over the place here. The day two keynote was all about app dev. Um, I'd love to get a little compare and contrast as to, you know, what you see here at Microsoft ignite versus, and I guess what I would call a pure dev show next week. Get hub universe happening in San Francisco. >>It's true. Get up universe is pretty much a pure dev show. Um, we, we have fewer booths, we have smaller booths. Uh, but, uh, and, and honestly, we have fewer sort of, um, I don't know, enterprise sorta. It, it pro crowd is what we used to call them. Um, but we do of course have a lot of dev ops. So, you know, we get up university has a lot of developers, but, uh, we're seeing a lot of dev ops, so there's a lot of meeting in the middle because, you know, I started out my career as assistant man actually. So I remember just, you know, doing everything manually. Um, but that's not the way we do things anymore. We automate all of our, uh, automate, uh, deployments. We automate all of our builds. You know, I don't want to sit there and type something into a console cause I'm going to get it wrong. Um, you know, I've accidentally deleted config files on production servers and that's, that's no good. So I think that they're, uh, get up universe is very different. A to ignite, it's much smaller, it's more intimate, but at the same time, there's a lot of, uh, overlap, especially around dev ops. >>Yeah. Uh, Satya Nadella yesterday in the keynote talked about the citizen developer as a big push for Microsoft. He said 61% of job openings for developers are outside the tech sector. Um, w what do you see in that space? Uh, the different developer roles these days? >>Uh, I think it's, it's absolutely fascinating. When I, uh, when I started my career, you know, you were, you were a developer and you, and you wrote code probably at a development company. Um, but now like everybody is automating tools, everybody's adopting machine learning. Um, when I look around at some of my friends in finance, uh, it's not about, it's not about anything but tech anymore. That's th they're, they're putting technology into absolutely everything that they do to succeed. Uh, and I think that, I think that it's amazing. Um, uh, like I said earlier, uh, 25% of developers on get hub have joined within the last year. So it's clear that it's just exploding. Um, everybody is doing, uh, software now. Yeah. >>There's something for the citizen developer on get hub though. Or is it too high level? I think >>I don't think it's too high level. I think that, uh, I think that that's a great challenge that we need to really step up to. Yeah. So Edward, >>the other big themes we heard here is talking about trust. So, you know, we talked about how Microsoft is different today than it wasn't in past, but I'm curious what good hub seen because you know, in social media when the acquisition first happened, it was, wait, I love GoodHub hub, I love all those people, but Hey, get lab. Hey, some of these other things I'm, you know, I'm fleeing for the woods. And every time I've seen an open source company get bought by a public company, there's always that online backlash. What are you seeing? How has the community reacted over the last year? >>I understand that skepticism. Uh, you know, I would be skeptical of any, uh, sort of change really. I, you know, the, the whole notion of who moved my cheese. But I think that the only way that we can, we can counter that is just to prove ourselves. And I think that we have, I think that Microsoft has allowed get hub to operate independently. And I think that, you know, I think a lot of people expect it to all of a sudden everything to change. And I don't think everything did change. I think that, uh, get hub now has more resources than it used to to be able to tackle bigger and more challenging problems. I think that get hub, uh, now can hire more and, and, and deploy to more places. And so I really just think that we're just going to keep doing exactly what we've been doing just better. So I think it's great. >>So universe happening next week teed up a little bit for us. What are some of the most exciting things that you're looking forward to? What kinds of conversations that will you be having? Presentations? >>So the big one for me is, is actions. I've, I, I've been just completely heads down working on, on get hub actions. So I'm really excited to be able to put that out there and, and you know, finally give it to everybody. Cause you know, we've been in beta now. Uh, like I said, we've been in beta for a year, which sounds like a ridiculous amount of time. Uh, but you know, it, it did involve a lot of retooling and rethinking and, and iteration with our, our beta testers. Um, and so the biggest thing for me is, is talking to people about actions and showing what they can do with actions. I'm super excited about that, but we've got a lot of other interesting stuff. You know, we've done a lot in the last year since our last universe. We've done a lot in the security space. Um, we've done, uh, we've both built tools and we've acquired some. Um, and so we'll be talking about those, uh, get hood package registry, which goes along really well with get hub actions. Uh, I'm super excited about that too. But yeah, I mean my, my calendar is, is, is just booked. Um, it's great. So many people like want to want to sit down and talk that I'm, I'm super excited about it. >>Excellent. Well great note to end on Edgar Thompson. Thank you so much for coming on the queue. We appreciate it. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. First two minutes, stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage from Microsoft ignite.

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Hello everyone and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite 2019 here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Stu minimun. We are joined by Chris Weiberg. He is the vice president of product marketing at Cohesity. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for providing us with this great space, this prime real estate. We really appreciate it. >>Spot on the show floor and I hope this is working out for you guys here with uh, with all of us branding and so on behind >>it has been terrific as as we 26,000 people from around the world here at the orange County convention center. We'll talk about how the conference has been for you here at Cohesity. >>I think it's gone really, really well. I mean, apart from the loverly brute booth property we have right here, um, some of the keynote messages around the importance of hybrid cloud moving forward with what Microsoft's doing with arc and things like that, um, really resonate with how we see the market. So a couple of the announces we've made have been around support for Azure stack and for the AVS, the Azure VMware solution. And, uh, we, that's just what we see with our customers across the board. And I think Theresa actually mentioned this yesterday, that if you look forward at most organizations cloud journey, they end up somewhere in that hybrid range, right? They may not all be there today and maybe just a little bit of sass, Ooh, three 65 to start off with, for example. But, you know, looking ahead, unless you're natively born in the cloud, and that's typically small organizations. Most mid to large enterprises are hybrid cloud, >>yours that are not as familiar with Cohesity, which is a company that has growing from strength to strength. Tell us a little bit about what >>yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So, uh, we are very much a software defined data management platform. And typically when I say that to people, I get blank stares to begin with, right? But let me, let me tell you really what we've thought about. And, and this goes back to, um, the heritage of our founder. He, uh, before he cofounded Newtanics, he was the lead engineer on the Google file system. And the, the philosophy has for Cohesity and the direction that we're going is very much based upon his experiences there. If you build a shared nothing distributed file system and you do that right, you establish a great platform to build upon, right? And so if you think about what Google did, they did that, um, with the file system that today runs many things, right? Uh, Gmail, YouTube, all the G suite apps. Um, but the first thing is, is they built that file system and then they figured out how to manage that in a distributed fashion, right? >>Because of their points of presence are all over the, the globe these days. Uh, and then on that they started delivering applications. But if you think back, the very first application Google delivered was what the search, right? That's, that's how that became known as, as, as a company, as Google search. And, and so for us, we're taking that same mindset towards dealing with enterprise data. So if Google does a great job with data and the consumer world for the, that they own and operate, organizations don't have that luxury of having Google come in and crawl and managing index all their data, right? We can help do that. So the journey begins with the genius behind our distributed file system that we call span Fs. And that's what a lot of the intellectual property has gone into is building that file system of that truly is, um, that's shared nothing architecture scales from a on-prem in your data center, core to the edge to the cloud. >>And then being able to produce a manageability layer on top of that, something we call Helio's that manages all the data across various sites you may have managed by Cohesity. And then our first app, if you will, on top of that platform really is data protection, right? So people may know as first and foremost as a backup and recovery company. And absolutely that's, that's something we're really, really good at. I would put us head to head against anybody else on the show floor here in, in that regard. And, and candidly, many large enterprise customers have done that with us and, and chosen us as their solution. Um, but I think from there the question is once you amass the data, uh, what can you do with it and, and how can you get more out of it? So if you look at backup and recovery, I think traditionally that's been largely viewed by it. >>Operators as an insurance policy, it's, there is something goes wrong. Uh, but we believe you can do more than that. You can not only have that insurance policy to help with things like disaster recovery and coming back from ransomware attacks and so on, but how can you do things like, uh, put analytics on top of it to get more out of it, get better insights out of it. Um, how can you have another customer? That store is all their customer care phone calls. It's a voice object, right? Kind of opaque, but they want to transcribe that. Why don't you do this transcription services on top of the data that you already have from that backup and recovery solution. And so, you know, get the data through backup, get the data through files and objects. I think David and I talked about that with you earlier. >>Uh, and that's a great way to start to aggregate and consolidate not only the data in your enterprise, but also all the infrastructure silos that are out there. And so that's problem one that we solve. And then we go from there. >> So Chris, when I think about all the various customers here, one thing they're dealing with, there's a lot of change. They've got their business challenges, whether it's adopting the cloud, looking at edge, right? Adopting containerization. Yeah. It's always defined by the change that's going on in their environment. Traditional backup and recovery was please don't change everything. I had my backup window, my administrator, I had the program that I'd used for 15 or 20 years that I trust. And I know, and I please don't sneeze on it because I've got it the way that I like it over the last like five years. >>Companies are because of that change. They're, they're looking at new solutions, they're looking at other environments. Tell us how Cohesity's riding that wave to move, you know, not like the enterprise is moving. Enterprises are moving fast. Right? But they're at least looking and that if they don't make some move, uh, you know, everybody else has, has moved along, so they need to at least be a little bit more agile and fast. >> Yeah. Well, I think, uh, you know, first of all, thank you for realizing that oftentimes our number one competitors that do nothing option, right? It's, I've done this forever, this way. Why change? Um, but, but to your comment about, you know, the backup window, well, there's no such thing anymore for most companies. It's seven by 24 by three 65. And so that alone I think is causing people to step back. And say, Hey, is the way that I used to do things still the right answer or is there a better way? >>And, and so that's often the beginning of a conversation we'll have where, you know, maybe, uh, their, their current, uh, contract with an existing provider is coming to a point where, uh, there's a window for renewal and they, and they want to look at something different. Um, but, but I do think, you know, and we had a customer panel earlier today at the show were a couple of law firms are talking about this. They just don't have the luxury of time they used to to deal with this. And so that, that sort of causes change whether you like it or not. And so that's often how we begin that conversation. Even though, to your point, these folks sometimes aren't the most, um, uh, risk embracing crowd in it, right? They're not on the bleeding edge all the time because if you're in the insurance policy, guys, you don't want to mess that up, right? >>Uh, but, but that's what we find is, is the disruption we're bringing in the market creates an opportunity to look at how you do things differently. Uh, w we had a, another customer panel back at VMworld in San Francisco this year where one of the customers had actually three different providers. One that was doing backup software, uh, one that was target storage and another that was the media gateways to handle some of their information. He was happy with all of those. But when he looked at that and he said, wait a second, instead of dealing with three companies that can do all the one and I can per data center eliminate about a half a rack of gear, he said that, that for me was it, that was a no brainer that led me to you guys. And so that's what we're saying. >>So we as a former it practitioner yourself, I'm curious to know how your background helps you get inside the brains of these people who are making decisions for, you said the do nothing option is compelling because? Because it's easy and yet it is the wrong way to go because in this ever changing world that that's risky in and of it. >>well it's, it's, it's always a risk reward balance. Right? And, and so I think whenever you're introduced to something new to the market and new concept, um, you ha, you feel the pain as, as a, as an organization. Cause you're having to educate people about there is a better way, right? I mean, I mean, think about, um, let's use Mohit form a company. Nutanix is an example of that. I remember the battles early on. People are scratching their heads, what is this HCI thing? I cause I do stories this way and I do, uh, compute this way and I do networking this way and I have my existing vendors, they put it all together and it took them awhile to get going. But when they did it that you really took off and, and I can think of multiple examples. I mean, Apple and the iPhone, what have you. >>Right. Um, and so I, we're sort of at that stage as a company where people are just starting to get their head around the opportunity we're putting on the table by disrupting the way things run and actually making their lives better. Um, and, and so it's, it's a, it's not just, you know, having an understanding of that from my background. Um, it's then being able to articulate the benefits, not just to the organizations looking to save money and do things more efficiently, but actually to the, the it operators themselves. Right? I mean, you talked to Theresa about this a bit yesterday. It burnout is a thing. And anything you can do to make manageability and automation easier, uh, the better off the folks actually doing the work are. And so that's something we care about deeply as well. It's not just, you know, saving money. >>It's, it's giving you a better way to do it. And, and ideally, uh, making, taking the complexity out of the puzzle you're managing today and, and making it easier. Simplifying it. So Chris, one of the challenges is as you were talking about, you can replace multiple solutions out there, but it means that there are multiple constituencies that you need to talk to and position your product. So, you know, with your marketing hat, how do you look at the roles and the message that we're going that you need to get to? Super, we're going to question. So my team will appreciate that you asked that. So one of the first things I did when I came onboard a few months back, let's say, Hey guys, we really need to sit down and think through the different personas, right? Classic marketing approach that we're talking to and really understand, um, what's in their heads, not only today but formerly and then what are they looking at going forward? Cause if you're going to cross that chasm, you need to understand that whole life cycle and what are the things that you can grab onto that draw their attention into the solutions we provide. And so we're going through an exercise right now to refresh those personas and be able to arm our field and our partners to have those conversations cause it does touch on different people in the data center. Absolutely true. >>So what, I wanted to return our conversation and come full circle with the very beginning of what is resonating with you here at this show. There've been so many new product announcements, started talking about Azure Ark as as sort of something that is catching your interest. What are you going to take back with you when the show's over? Chatting >>with some of our PM team, uh, earlier this week, um, we have our own management solution and we've done a lot to simplify it and make it easy to use. But as is the case for many providers, we are a building block in a bigger data center strategy. And, and so importantly, uh, while I love our console, a lot of people may not want to use it. We, we may not be the center of the management universe. And so something like arc and you saw this in, in what they demo now just being able to manage an Azure environment, but reaching across the aisle to AWS and so on. You know, we, we need to be able to fit into that management framework. And by the way, they're just one provider that does that. You know, the Atmos guys are out there and others. Um, and, and so the good news from a Cohesity standpoint is the products and built ground up with an API first approach. >>And what that means is, uh, you can take those declarative statements that you have in let's pretend someday as your Ark and use that to orchestrate deployment and management of Cohesity as well. And that, that is candidly one of the beauties of being a software defined solution. We thought about that from the ground up. And so I think we're not only ready for today, but also for the future. Alright. Uh, Chris, want to give you any other kind of customer aha moments or things that are brought through a final takeaways, uh, from, from Cohesity at the show? Yeah, I, I think, you know, uh, customers are still discovering us is, is an aha for me. The, the big change that I've seen in, in the booth behind us, uh, year over year as they think in the past, uh, we've only been an operations really selling for three years. >>It was who are you guys and what's up with all the green, right? This year the conversation has shifted to, Hey Cohesity, I know you guys are, I'm looking at changing things up in my software defined data center. I think you might be a part of that. So tell me why you're different. And so I'm really happy to be here and get the opportunity to have that discussion this year versus where we were last year. And again, I think, um, the types of questions that we're getting are much more focused on use case. How can you help me solve this pain point, this problem? Uh, you know, ransomware has been a constant conversation in the booth and, and the ability that we have because of what we've done, again, back down the file system to do what we call an instant mass restore. That's an interesting feature on a data sheet, but I'll tell you what, when you've been subject to a ransomware attack and you're, you're just lights out, that ability to bring back to the whole environment very quickly at once really is a differentiator for us. And so it's those sorts of conversations we're having this year, which is, which is a nice step forward. And so hopefully, you know, we'll come back next year and things are on that upward path even more. So. Thank you so much Chris. Wiborg pleasure having you on the show. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks guys. >>I'm Rebecca Knight for Sue minimun. Stay tuned for more of the cube.

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here at the Orange County Convention Center in the middle of the show floor, one of Microsoft's biggest shows, 26,000 people from around the globe. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman, and we're joined by a third cohost, but he is also the Principal CTO Advisor, Keith Townsend. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> It's a pleasure to have you. So, you come to a lot of these shows, I'm interested in your thoughts and impressions of Microsoft Ignite 2019. >> So, I'm part of the V community, which is a pretty close knit community, very focused on one part of the whole IT pitch, which is infrastructure. It is amazing coming to a show like Microsoft Ignite where the breadth of content is so wide, and the conversation, so wide and, surprisingly, deep. This is been one of my, I think, favorite shows of the year so far. >> Talk about the content, you're absolutely right, we had so many product announcements, it felt like an Amazon Show, we were saying, because of the number of products that were being announced and demoed here. 87 pages from the Comms Team, so, does this feel like a different era for the company itself? >> You know what, Microsoft announced, I think UiPath has some crazy over billion dollar evaluation. Microsoft wildly announced that they're entering RPA, Robotic Process Automation, they're challenging SAP when it comes to data warehousing and data analytics. And then, they just happen to announce that, oh, yeah, by the way, we're making Kubernetes easier. Then, there's still the Teams announcements. The amount of content and the areas that Microsoft is going in, just to highlight it, Azure Arc replicates data, one of the jobs is replicate data, and they said they'll replicate data to AWS Cloud. Microsoft, great position. >> Keith, as you're alluding to, Microsoft has a large portfolio of applications. If you think business productivity, you're probably using Microsoft. Everything from Teams, that we're hearing a bunch about, to, of course, O365 is the solution that gave everybody the green light to go SaaS-ify as many of your applications as you will, and Arc, very much from what I've seen so far, takes that application specific view of Kubernetes, we know Kubernetes is supposed to help be that platform to build on top of, but, I've tended to hear a very infrastructure view of here's what you'll build in your data center and the compute network and storage that you need to think about, here's the IAS that it might live on. But, when you talk about Arc, they're talking about it's about SQL and databases and how those pieces go together. And this is a view for Microsoft, but, if you want to go do open shift, if you want to do spring with a Pivotal VMware or Tanzu with there, Microsoft, of course, is saying that that's your option but would love your view point so far as your Arc and where Microsoft sits in this broader ecosystem today. >> So, I'm coming off fresh a conversation with David Armor, the PM for Microsoft Arc for Azure stack, and their attention to detail is amazing. You know, I'm not the world's biggest Kubernetes fan, for some of the very reasons that you mentioned. It's too much attention to the details in order to provide a Kubernetes experience that developers will accept. Microsoft, a big developer focused company, so when you look at Arc and what it does for Kubernetes on Azure stack, it makes the provisioning, the storage networking, et cetera, invisible so that you can take Microsoft's cognitive services, deploy them on Azure stack, and just consume those services. Microsoft, again, when you look at it from a different angle, when you're not taking the infrastructure angle added and you're doing the whiz bang features of making sure that Kubernetes can do X, Y, and Z, more importantly, can I use it to build applications is Microsoft's approach, and you can see it in the Arc and how they approach it in the Azure stack. >> Absolutely, and you're talking, right now, about this app development for everyone. We had Satya Nadella, yesterday, talking about democratizing computing, anyone can do it, AI for all, too. What are the most exciting new tools that you're seeing, and what are the kinds of conversations that you're having with developers around these new tools? >> So, I just talked to a professional services architect, or an architect for professional services, one of the global big four's, and he was telling me that they've deployed RPA to the entire organization of over 100,000 consultants and end users, so that they can build robots to power the next phase of productivity increases within their organization. No rules, no constraints, just here's the tool, go out and do. Microsoft talked about 2.5 million non-technology focused developers, it is, I think, a key theory of the CTO advisors that their future of enterprise IT is that companies, like Microsoft, then, will push AI, machine learning, these robotic automation processes down to the end users so that they're creating the content. There's just not enough of Keiths and Stus in the world to do this by hand. So, great vision. >> And Keith, you brought up the SIs, and you've worked for some of the big SIs in the past. How is Microsoft doing out there? We've seen with Cloud and AI, the biggest guys, rolling out armies of people to help integrate this, to help customers adopt this. Cloud and AI, Cloud, specifically, was supposed to be cheap and easy and we know it's neither of those two things. So, if you look at Cloud and AI, how is Microsoft to be a partner with and I would love a little compare and contrast to the Vmwares and AWSs of the world. >> So, if you look, let's take a look at VMware, I'm a big VMware fan, but one of the things that if you're a VMware VAR, or you're in VMware period, if you go outside of your lane, that infrastructure lane, you go to have conversations, the technology is there. You can use VMware, vRealize, automation suites, the CloudHealth, the Heptio, they have the individual components, technology components, but they absolutely need the Pivotals of the world to go in and add credence to their talking points around these products because they don't have that reputation to come in and have the conversation with the CMOs or the application developers. Microsoft on the other hand, developers, developers, developers. And then, they also have Microsoft Dynamics, we ran into a customer, who was desperately just searching out, she came to the conference expecting to see Dynamic experts, and I'm sure she found them. Microsoft has the ecosystem to support their vision. >> One of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE this week, at Ignite, is that it seems like a different kind of Microsoft, it seems like one that is, not only embracing customers who choose Microsoft in addition to other companies, but championing them and supporting them and saying, "whatever you want, "we're meeting you where you are." Have you found that, and is that striking to you, based on the Microsoft of Yore, which was more proprietary about where it's customers went for it's technology. >> So, we mainly cover enterprise tech, but, I think today or tomorrow, the Surface Pro X gets released, which is an arm based device, that runs full version of Windows. I was in one of the Lightning talks, Microsoft Lightning talk, on a completely different topic, and at the bottom, they had a logo for UiPath, Automate Anywhere and Blue Prism, three of the, I think, leaders in a space of RPA. And they were talking about the integrations that Microsoft has gone on with these companies, and their own power automate was not even mentioned as part of that session. So, Microsoft is meeting customers where they're at. I think the AWS, the example for Arc, replicating to AWS, customers have AWS, they're the biggest Cloud provider, Microsoft isn't closing their eyes to it. >> Yeah, well, we noticed the biggest thing repeated over and over again in the key note yesterday was trust. And while the Microsoft of old days was you're going to buy my OS, and my apps, and everything Microsoft on top of it, and we're going to maximize our licensing, the Microsoft today is those choices. We talked to UiPath yesterday, they're not worried about their relationship with Microsoft. When I talked to the ecosystem of partners here, they trust that they can work with Microsoft. Compare that to some others out there in the industry, and the big Hyperscalers, there might not be as much trust. What I'm curious about, from you Keith, is do customers see that? Do they understand that today is a different Microsoft than the one that we grew up with? >> So, some of the conversation on Twitter, just remotely, people not here, this is the best Ignite I've ever seen. People who are not even here, this is from the keynote yesterday. I think customers are starting to embrace Microsoft and trust Microsoft. I think there's still some hold out, some people who remember this sting of forced to use Microsoft management suites on products that probably didn't integrate well with those suites. But, as that sting starts to subside, you have to look at it objectively and say, "Microsoft is a different company." This is not a show I think I would have enjoyed three years ago. >> What's driving it though? This is something we're seeing in the technology industry at large, this understanding of customers needing different things and wanting best in breed. But are there other elements that we're not privy to, would you say? >> I think it's the democratization of technology via Cloud. I talked to a just regular, small business owner. She runs a trucking business, she uses her computer as a tool, it was a five year old device, she really didn't care, did the job that she needed to do. We talked a business challenge that she was having, and I described Cloud in general and she never even considered Cloud as a thing. She just said, "you know what, "I want this solution and if it's Microsoft AWS or Google that provides it, or even VM Works." She didn't care, she wanted to buy it. And that relationship wasn't a traditional ISV, MSP, these are, I think, business owners and business leaders are being approached with, whether it's ISVs or consultants and business advisors, and they're being advised to adopt these technologies, regardless of the source. There's no loyalty anymore to just Microsoft. Remember when you bled blue? Whether it was IBM blue or Microsoft blue. I read an unfortunate article on one of the big ERP providers had a 100 million dollar failure, and the company just decided, you know what, we're not going to go with just one provider anymore, we're just going to go with best of breed across these business processes. >> So what does that mean for the competitive landscape? I mean, we talked a lot about this. Does Microsoft really have a shot at taking on AWS or will it always be number two. Well, Microsoft won a 10 billion dollar JEDI contract from the US. I wrote about this in my newsletter last week, is that one billion dollars over 10 years will make Microsoft Azure better. You can't help but to have that type of discipline that comes from a contract like that impact Azure. Will they catch up with Microsoft, I mean, with AWS? AWS is still a very, very small fraction of the overall IT landscape. That business owner I talked to never heard of AWS. 50,000 person conference in a month, she only knew Amazon as a book seller. So, to say that Microsoft won't catch up with AWS is a very, very short view of the landscape. >> We're just scratching the surface when it comes to Cloud. >> Keith, what other thing have you seen at the show jumping out at you? You said you might not have enjoyed the show three years ago so what are some of things that make this show enjoyable? I know for me, it is a different community than the V community out there, there are a lot of overlaps, a lot of friendly faces that I know here, but community, diversity, inclusion, super strong here, would love your comment on that and any other takeaways. >> So, someone pointed out to me that I didn't notice and I'm happy I didn't notice it, was that there is a lot of women at this show, and I looked up and I'm like wow, the lines for men's bathroom aren't as long. And that's a nice thing because I don't think it's just facilities. It is a massively diverse show, not just from a ethnicity and gender perspective, but from career levels and age groups. There's Millennials all the way up to Boomers, and the conversations, the conversations that I've had, I'm really surprised with. Straight on business conversations, to deep and dirty, you know what these are the Cloud providers Azure provides for Kubernetes. That's super geeky, and that conversation's all around best. Infrastructure, application, business, and then even social, I had that social conversation about diversity, and for a change, I wasn't the one that brought up the conversation. >> You know, that's a really good point, and even just even here, I mean, I know you made the schedule, which I salute you, because we are having many more women, many more people of color on our stage, which is reflective of who's here. >> And it's easier at this show than it is at most, as opposed to please find me some more underrepresented or diversity there. And luckily, there is a lot of options at a show like this. >> Yeah, the pool just hasn't, and other shows, the pool just isn't very big. Normally, I can usually say at a show, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and hey, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and this show is not that case. >> No, there's more, there's more, exactly. >> Well, Keith Townsend, thank you so much for coming on, a pleasure having you. >> Thank you, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman and Keith Townsend, you are watching theCUBE. (techno music)

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

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

>>live from Orlando, Florida It's the cue covering Microsoft Ignite Brought to you by Cohee City. Welcome >>back, everyone to the cubes Live coverage of Microsoft IC night here at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host Stew Minutemen were joined by Parham Cologne. He is the chief product officer at you. I path. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. >>Thank you so much for >>coming back on the cute. >>Thank you. >>So I I was just a u IE path with you in Vegas a couple of weeks ago and the U AI Path tagline is a robot for every employee Microsoft tagline is employing empowering every employee to be a technologist, empowering citizen developers. Does it strike you that do the two missions are are similar in their way? >>That's that's absolutely right. I think we have so much in common their companies together on I think we're working very closely together and not just our technology, but also in what we're trying to achieve, which is to make people achieve more in amplifying human achievement is a core mission of our company and very excited that Microsoft so shares the same emission. >>Yeah, it really does connect with Mace onto this morning. Talked about that 61% of job openings for developers air outside the tech sector. And of course, you AI path is really trying to help. But this is productivity overall, with everything you're doing, >>absolutely, and productivity's where we focus our technology primarily on. In fact, a lot of focus is around. How do we actually get people to do more with less time so they can have more time to do the things that they could do with the creative parts of their time, as opposed to doing a Monday in part? So, yeah, productivity's is really important to us. The company. That's what we think about every day. >>Could you bring us inside the relationship with Microsoft and you? I passed? >>Yeah, so we're deeply partner that Microsoft's and today one we've most of our technology is built on Microsoft's stack on dot net miran. Our databases all run on sequel server or cloud service runs on Microsoft Azure. So we are very deeply partner to be health Microsoft Bill. A lot of a I service is around document extraction. The forms recognize her with one of the first customers that we work together with Microsoft and Chevron on so very deep partnership with Microsoft. Okay, >>so let me ask you a question. Actually, as a customer of Microsoft, you know what? Why, why everything built on Microsoft from, you know, the dot net through the infrastructure of the service. What, what? Why did you bypass choose Microsoft? >>I think it made a lot of sense. Microsoft's focus on productivity Microsoft's focus on enabling developers do stuff quickly on it also helped a lot of the founders, myself included, came through with Microsoft to be a lot of experience with Microsoft's. I think part of that helped as well. >>Does it help or hurt when you are then pitching your service? Is that that it is that it is a much more Microsoft focused company, >>So I think we've grown over the years to actually have a much broader ecosystem, so we have more than 500 partners now we work with Google. Google is a customer, it's an investor. It's also very deep partner. A lot of very I service is we're welding on it with Google were be partnered with AWS as well. So I think we're working with all the way our customers are today. But I think we're still have a very close relationship with Microsoft, given our agitated given where we started. >>Yeah, I actually I I went to the passport event last year and had not realized how deep that connection was with Microsoft. I see you. I path across all the clouds. So there's a little mention of our p A. That this morning in the keynote theme, the power automate solution coming out from Microsoft. Of course, everyone seems tohave an R p A. Out there, you know all the big software houses out there. Tell us what this means in the marketplace. >>Yes, Listen, our P a is a very fast growing market. Is the fastest growing enterprise category today, And when you grow so fast, it's good for the business but also attracts attention, I think getting somebody like Microsoft to sort of say that we're in it as well. Only help sort of solidify the foundation, solidify the category and brings a lot more, you know, credibility to this category. So I think we're excited to have Microsoft here as well. >>And in terms of a CZ, you were saying to companies that are very much focused on workplace productivity, employee collaboration, and being able to be more creative with the time that you have. How much is that cultural alignment? How much does that help your partnership? >>I think it helps a partnership a lot. So you know, when we, for example, of when you meet with the office team, they think deeply about helping people do more with last time. You know, we think about the same things as well. So if you notice some of the newer products that we've launched our very deeply integrated into office, in fact to do a lot of inspiration from products like Excel to be able to say business people that are able to, you know, do some very sophisticated, complex business models and excel should be able to do similar stuff with their products as well. So we continue to work with Microsoft and across collaboration across the steams, anything in general, our message. We have a close relationship with Microsoft, So when Microsoft bring this into opportunities and it closes, it actually retired Dakota for Microsoft Sellers as well. So I think all of that alignment really helps. >>I would love to hear you know what? What? Joint customers. You know what brings customers to you? I path at a show here. What? What are some of the key drivers for their discussions that you're having this week? >>Yeah. I mean, we've got you know, through through the years, we've got over 5000 customers that work with us large enterprises in a very large banks to companies like Chevron. Chevron in particular, is one of those customers. You know, that's a very, very deep customer of Microsoft, but also a very strong customer of ours and a specific use case at my at Chevron. Chevron wanted to extract data from their oil field service reports. They were getting more than 1000 oil. Regular reports coming in every day with about 300 pages for average. For report on. Somebody had to manly go in and physically read those reports. Put him into that s a P system so that you could predict if there was a pretty prevent amendments appear that was acquired, you know, working together with Microsoft, we were able to take service that Microsoft was building an A. I called forums recognize ER and take it to pre bid on Alfa with customers so that Chevron is now able to have all of those reports read by you. I path robots and automatically punch it into, you know, the SNP preventive maintenance applications so that you can actually ship the engineer on side before you know that something happened to the old Greg. So I think that's a pretty cool a scenario. >>Another's another similarity between AI Path and you, AI Path and Microsoft is this customer obsession. And this is something that you talked a lot about at your path forward. This spending time with customers, learning how they would use our p A and then also thinking, thinking ahead of them and in terms of how they could use our p A. How do you work with customers and Microsoft together in partnership in terms of how do you find out exactly what their needs are and the joint solutions you could provide? >>Yeah, and then that's a really good question. Microsoft has been very obsessed with, you know, driving customer obsession and all parts of the organization we culturally have a really deep obsession about working closely with customers. And I think so that Microsoft has empty sea, meet the customer sessions around around the world on We were close living Microsoft to make sure that our technology can be showcased by Microsoft people in those empty see sessions so that when customers come in, they able to not only see Microsoft technology, but also our technology. And if they're interested, then our sales teams work elaborately together to make sure we can, you know, have a joint session than planning and working with customers. >>So I had a chat earlier this year with your CMO Bobbi Patrick talking about how a I and r p a go together. You on the product? So will I. I be able to allow our p A to get into more complex configuration, give us where we are and you know what? What's what's new in that space? >>Yeah, No, absolutely. So like the first wave of our p A was all about taking sort of structured processes, you know, deluding data from excel sheets, reading data for maybe eyes and be able to process it in different systems now in the humans don't always work with that. 10% of what >>we do >>on a daily basis, a structure, data right, spreadsheets and stuff, 90% of what we d'oh reading spread shades, extracting information from papers responding Thio. You know Chad conversations. All of that unstructured information can now be processed by AI algorithms to be able to extract the intent off the chat conversation to be to extract the data. That's in that unstructured document that we just received to be able to use computer vision to detect what is on the computer screen so that you're able to detect that control, whether rendered the browser or renders in a window start to application of that. So I brings the possibility to automate a lot more complex processes within the organization, you know, mimicking sort of MME. Or human like behavior. So the robots are not just doing the numbers and structured data but be able to process unstructured information. It's >>well, well, the way I help it all, trying to understand, what can I automate? >>Absolutely. And that's the other piece off being able to use process, understanding capability. So what we've done is we've built capability that's able to follow human activity logs and how people are using systems, but also how the databases air getting updated by different applications and be able to mind that information to understand how work is getting done and the enterprise and be able to understand what are the scenarios and possibilities for automating mawr business processes that's hold onto the key benefits of how a I and process mining can be can be applied to the context of the R P. A. >>There's so many product announcements today. On the main stage is an 87 page book that we that we were sent from the Microsoft calms team. What is it? What's the most exciting things you've seen here today? >>I think I'm really excited about some of the innovation that Microsoft is doing in the analytic stock to be able to report on the, you know, the data warehouse, but also big data together and one stack. I think that's really powerful. That is something that our customers have have be very interested in, because robots process structure log, but also in structure logs. I'm also excited about some of the eye investments that Microsoft is making, I think some of the eye capabilities and are really coming to practical use. A lot of companies tuck Brody I For a long time. We've applied a I practically in our technology, but I think a lot more technology is now available for us to be used in our products. >>Okay, parm. There's a recent acquisition process. Gold was. The company could tell us a little bit about that. What what? What are the plans for that >>absolutely process Goal is a company that's basically all in Germany and nine home and in bed. Ireland. On this is the company that was focused on process, understanding of process. Mining's essentially, what they had was that connectors a different line of business applications and be able to sit and study logs of how work was getting done over long periods of time. So what happened is if you went to a line of business owner and he asked them, What is your process for procure to pay look like, in order to cash look like chances out, they'll draw you a straight line. That's a haze with the processes, However, when you look at how work is getting done, it's typically not a straight line. And depending on how many variations you're looking at, you can get up to, like, you know, 15 or 20 different variations, the same process being done. So what process gold does is identifies. What are the different ways in which processes air getting done? Identify where the bottlenecks exist in the process, right? How long is the step one? How long is the time? But we step two and step three, right? Is that taking 25% of what the total time is? And is there a way to optimize that process by eliminating that bottleneck? And once you've optimized the process, it also gives you the ability to go automate that optimized process right? You don't want to automate a process that is sub optimal. You want to go understand the process, see how work is getting done, optimized the bottlenecks and eliminate the bottlenecks, optimize the process and then go out of made that and process go. It really helps us sort of cater to that need, which is go automate. You know, the best possible way to optimize the process >>in terms of Microsoft's use of things like a I and ML And now we have not really talked a lot about ML here. I mean, it was mentioned on the main stage, but not a lot. How? What? What do you think the future holds in terms of Microsoft in the next 5 to 10 years? >>Yeah. I mean, I think I see Microsoft investing a lot in data and really being able Thio get all kinds of data because ML is useful only after it's able to reason over tons of data. And Microsoft is in a rightfully investing and the data repositories in stores so that it has the ability to store that data to process that data. And once that's got the data on the data assets over it, then it's able to go Korea the algorithms that can reason over data on and create that stuff. And I think that's really exciting because Microsoft has a lot of the horsepower to be able to not only store that data process that data efficiently said can be used in machine learning. And I >>hope our um thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It was a pleasure talking to you. >>Thank you. Pleasure to have you here. Thank you very much. >>I'm Rebecca Knight. First to minimum. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of Microsoft ignite.

>>live from Orlando, Florida It's the cue covering Microsoft Ignite Brought to you by Cohee City. >>Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes Live coverage of Microsoft IC night here at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting along side of stew. Minutemen >>were joined by Patrick Moorehead. He is the founder and principal principal analyst. Atmore Insights and strategy Thank you so much for returning to the Cube. You're a good friend of the queue. >>Thanks for having me on. I mean, it's a great show, and I literally look for the Cube everywhere. >>Very nice. You >>do about 40 events year, and I'm pretty sure you're in >>about exactly, exactly. >>We've got a few more for you to cut. Come Thio. Yeah, in the other place. Year is >>not over. So so many announcements. Today, an 87 page book from From the Microsoft comes team. One of the things that is getting a lot of attention is azure arc. Satya Nadella himself said, I am so excited about this. This marks the beginning of hybrid computing. What are your first impressions of it, and are you able to see the immediate of differences between Stack and an arc >>S o. I think I would say completely expected. Uh, we're out of this drunken sailor mode where everything's going to the public cloud. Oh, my gosh. And everybody is toast. Who's not doing this? Okay, And now we're in this somewhat sober right where 80% of the workloads are still on Prem. And 20 of those have gone on to either SAS or I as or pass, but it's expected now. Microsoft already had a full stack i e azure stack, but this takes it up a notch because you been deployed arc anywhere on anybody's cloud. They even showed a demo of doing backups to eight of us. So whether it's on Prem, and I'm sure they're gonna show it running on GC, Pia's well >>so Patrick, For for a number years we've been saying, When you line up the big hyper scale er's and say who's doing well, a hybrid. Microsoft's been at the top of the list there because they have a strong footprint in my data center. Microsoft gave everyone the green light to go. Do sass is much you can because they're pushing everybody toe. 03 65. And, of course, Azure is growing in, You know, one of the leaders in Public Cloud. The announcements this week were compelling, but it may be kind of rethink is that I think you laid it out well and said, But we've been talking about hybrid cloud your number years, but we're not really there. So you are. It's a first piece. It's only in tech preview. I think you're saying for a singular application, which is databases. That's right. When you look out there and you see you know the VM wear on AWS Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, you look a AWS with outposts and those things. How is Microsoft doing today at delivering for what customers need, you know today and moving forward on their cloud journey? >>So Microsoft was first out of the gate with azure stack, right? They were doing hybrid before it was cool. It was interesting for about two years when they were rolling in outer building it they weren't talking about it. So I was thinking, Wait a second, is it not catching on, or do they want to put more on the big cloud azure? But in fact they have been diligently working behind the scenes. And while they had to show Wall Street this Hayward, the public cloud, they were actively building out their hybrid opportunities. And I do believe that when it comes to the slice of hybrid they are leading right now. Now it depends on where you start. I guess where I do is their leading if you have a major public cloud. Okay, eight of us, obviously there were the outposts, and everybody in the audience were all in the audience. We gasped when Andy Jassy brought that out. We kind of knew something was being worked on and focus a CZ well. And I think to be a credible player you have tohave both implementations, going one way and going the other, being able to work with other people's clouds but also noticed everybody has their single pane of glass strategy. If you want to go all in on Microsoft, you have arc on dhe. That's really the classic Microsoft embrace and extend. >>Yeah, Patrick, you said, all in on Microsoft. And if I if I look at the enterprise, you've obviously got some Microsoft. There's probably some things you're doing. An azure right, You're you're running. 03 65. You know, there's lots of pieces in the more Microsoft portfolio, but most people aren't all in on anything today. That's right, The same thing. I looked at Antos and said in Google Cloud or in my data center shore. But anthros on AWS And >>no Veum no, no virtualized applications on Antos either. >>So the same question for Microsoft is if I'm in a W s, you know, have a big footprint of AWS. Is this gonna fly or you know what? What? What's your what's your take >>s? So it's funny where I've wound up after 30 years of doing this stuff is there's always gonna be a lock in. You just have to pick the lock and that you want. Some people are comfortable with an A p. I lock in. Some are comfortable with a hardware lock. In some people are comfortable with a development environment, and you're gonna pick one. Just what is it gonna be? The reality is in a Fortune 500. You're gonna have multiple panes of glass using to determine which two or which three are you comfortable with? Maybe all the panic last for deployment. Maybe we'll have a panic glass for ops. The interesting thing that I'm really looking for, though, is where this heads with multi cloud. Because I believe at least to my definition, multi cloud is kind of fiction if you talk about actually managing it because Dev ops are cool. But you know, when you got a multi cloud, you break Dev and you break ups. So this is a way Arc is a way to keep. If you buy into their Dev and the Rapps and their security, you would go all in on our. >>So I'm actually interested in what you were talking about with Microsoft going sort of working behind the scenes to Wall Street, presenting this one thing but really working behind the scenes and then talking about being at the conference in everyone, gasping at Andy Jassy how much our company's really paying attention to every birth of these companies in terms of their competition with each other to to be number one. >>Oh, they'll all say that they don't track the competition, but they all say they all have these massive competitive teams that are operating in a real time and I guarantee you all of Microsoft's competitors Aire watching all these are are here on doing that. Now I think the best companies are looking forward trying to change the game if they have to change the game. Trench vendors are really have been playing catch up mode, right? If you were 100% on Prem and you were talking about the public cloud, you're gonna be in trouble. I think, actually, oracles a great example of they're in trouble, particularly with I s I c databases of service. But it's like too little, too late. And I think they're paying the price right >>now. Patrick A Thanks for teeing up the Oracle piece because one of one of the topics that saga repeatedly talked about in the keynote was trust. It's actually the exponential t to the environment. If you talk about the ecosystem. Microsoft. If you look at the hyper scale, er's is probably more trust in others. We talk about people wanting to break up cos well, you know, we tried to break up Microsoft back years ago way know what happened there, and Oracle was up on stage it Oracle openworld saying you want to run or go on the cloud. Here's Azure. There are partner. We actually think that was a keep east of the jet ideal eyes enabling that environment. So the question I have for you is first, Do you agree that the ecosystem believes that Microsoft is more trusted? But what about customers? I think you actually made a tweet about it, right? Because I wonder, you know, historically speaking, Microsoft was not the most trusted. It was the one that, you know, I was right behind Oracle esta who I spent the most. Licensing money to Microsoft has changed. Are they trusted partner for companies building their strategy? >>I have to say, based on the last, we'll call it five years level of Microsoft Trust has raised. And there are other players who make Microsoft look like the super trust zone. Okay, I mean, in what they're maybe what they're doing in a breaking consumer privacy, Let's say, 95% of your businesses advertising right. >>Let's just say what you imagine this right? >>Having commercial offerings that are SAS offerings out there. I think you do have to ask the question, but But listen, I think, um, nobody's mother Theresa here. Okay, Everybody's trying to get business, but I do believe particularly Cincinnati has been here. Level has trust has has gone up, and I hear it from clients that I that I meet with all the time other people are on the naughty list for sure. Even those 95% advertising companies who haven't, let's say, done something. That's horrible. But it's just the notion that something could go wrong. I mean, enterprises, they're slow to adopt their very conservative and makes great fun. >>Exactly So. Well, one of the other big announcement is power platform, not water. What are you What are your impressions of this? I mean, is it is it just semantics? I mean, is this just really the umbrella of a lot of things we've seen before? Or is it something new and different? >>So we wait, did see some brand changes of name changes, but we did did see Cem Cem riel movement here. I like to put even though they're different. I like to put a B I dynamics 3 65 and power kind of in the same region because it's Hey, I'm teeing up. Um, hr at for you or C R Ram, But then you're gonna build APS on top of that. And that's what where power comes into play, I think the r p a portion was relatively new and what they brought out. But I wouldn't say this was the big news rollout for, uh, for power. I do think, interestingly enough, is it is it is their largest growth area. If you think about what? Let's a sales force tracking up. What s a P is doing out there? Even a work day? That is, if I look at the cubic dollars that are available, that is their first or second business driver. So I was expecting a little bit more news here. How about you? >>Well, I mean, I I'm I'm just the host here. You're the analyst. You know what you're talking about? I think that how I mean, what do you think? Do? >>Yeah. No, Patrick, you know, from people I've been talking to, there's a mixture of some of it was pulling everything together, but there is a rapid movement. You know, when I talked to the r p. A vendor's out there, it's not right. It's not like they're all quaking in their boots. They're still partner with Microsoft shirt. We see IBM in S A p. Everybody's going after that environment. Come on. Our P a is the gateway drug to a I ITT. It's Rebecca was at exactly show recently talking about that so back to that trust. Their Microsoft is not usually making announcements that you walk across the booth and there's a few people you know saying, Can we roll out the beer early? Because we think our business is ruined. That's where some of that trust isn't Microsoft. But that being said, you know, it was curious to me that they didn't have any big partnerships announcement last year. McDermott was up on stage on Dhe. You know he's changed companies since then, but there was a couple of small open source announcements, but not any large partnership announcement. So ecosystem majorly important. Any commentary from you how Microsoft is doing in that grand battle for you? >>So if I look the past couple of years when some of the biggest players CEOs were on stage right, it was about OD I Hey, let's share our data s a P, probably one of the bigger one even though they're doing with Salesforce's. Well, and I think that was a giant giant leap for folks and second of all way, working to see Larry on stage. Because by the way, that I agree with you on Jen. I That was a huge deal to me. Was Oracle outsourcing? I asked Asher, right, That would have been newsworthy. Okay, if I look at what could have been up here, not that there aren't more strategic deals that could be done. I think they're I think people are busy executing at this point. But if you look at who's gonna share the data without the eye that was the biggest. Working with different clouds. Well, we're not gonna get eight of us to get up on stage here, right? We're not gonna get G c. P here on stage, although, although we could have gotten WebEx up stage because apparently WebEx at a Cisco and teams are becoming friends. And maybe we'll see that on a slightly smaller stage >>enterprise connect kind of launch than it is a Microsoft show. >>Exactly. But I was surprised, you know, and I think it's a testament to how powerful teams actually is on. It's funny when, um um teams, which everybody thought was dead after Slack was announced and hang out with Google has actually ended up being the darling off the enterprise. And not just because it comes free with your M one subscription, right? It's really it's a good product. It's a shockingly good product. You don't have to do any of the any security. If you have any security challenges of anything in Microsoft, you'll avenues you here. But that's not the case. It all uses the back and of Microsoft for security and and regulatory. So anyways, I know I'm veering off here. But there was one partner announcement that I saw. It was Cisco WebEx being friends with teams. >>Can't we all just get along? I mean, there we go. When there's money, everybody exactly every continually we can't. It's too >>expensive to go out on your own. >>Patrick always so much fun to have you and I should having you. I'm Rebecca Knight. For Sue Mittleman, >>stay tuned For more of the cubes, live coverage of Microsoft ignite

>>Live from Orlando, Florida It's the cue covering Microsoft Ignite Brought to you by Cohee City. >>Hello, everyone. And welcome to the Cubes live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We're kicking off three days of live coverage here at the Orange County Civic Center Convention Center. Sorry, I'm your host. Rebecca Knight coasting along side of stew Minutemen. Do we have so much to cover? So many new products? So many new strategies. New Emphasis Head knew new buzzwords, tech intensity and democratization. Uh, you were here. You were in the hub. You heard Satya Nadella live on the main stage. I'd like to just get your initial impressions and initial thoughts of of his keynote, and we're gonna dig into all of >>them. Rebecca, it's great to be here second year doing it with you here. Your background, really on business. Productivity. Really enjoyed doing this one within you. Chew said Walter Wall. Three days of covered The place is just buzzing with activity. 26,000 in attendance for a show that's been called soft night for I think it's been about six years. It was tech head back in the day we talked about last year, you know, this was originally, you know, the windows and office. You know, administrators show and has really matured over time. Trust was a big topic of conversation. And you know what? With my general thing, they rearrange some of the logistics of it. I actually, you know, usually I'm sitting with the press and the analyst upfront. Actually, you know, when in the shoes of the attending here, which meant I stood in our for almost two hours waiting to be one of the 3000 out of 26,000 to go get a seat and communication was a little bit weird and we kind of move in. But I did get a nice seat. Such intel was up on front. I thought they covered a lot of ground and it ran well, logistically. For those of us that were watching from the main stage, I heard remotely, you know, as sometimes happens, you know, Internet or things that there could be some calendars. It is with all of these cloud shows that we go to you just get this barrage of so many different things, everything from you know, really interesting as your arc, which we're gonna spend a bunch of time talking about through all of the latest. Aye. Aye. And the power things that they're going on all the way down through dynamics and teams and devices and EJ and on DDE down to the browser and the search engine. So so many different things. You know, Microsoft, Of course. You know, one of the store words in technology, but clearly laying out Ah, lot of announcements, books worth of you work of all of the announcement that go out there. And you know, general, take that I get for most people is they definitely are impressed so far. And they're gonna spend all week digging in tow, learn more, >>So we're gonna We're gonna dig in right now. But But I also just want to say that setting the scene doll, this is October 25th. Microsoft was given the jet, announced it was announced it was given the jet I contract. This was a big surprise. And this is Microsoft, which is a distant number two to AWS. Did Sathya seem on a high from that still or what is your impression? >>Unless I missed it, I didn't catch anything about it. Absolutely. I've talked to some people around the show, Talk to somebody appears in the media and analyst community. That air talking about it absolutely was a big surprise. Anybody that's interested in this go check out John. For years written down on this, David Lantz has done a lot of analysis. We've been looking at this quite a bit. Amazon really had one this deal, and it went through courts and Oracle, you know, pushed against really hard to try to make for the Amazon, did it. General Mattis writes about it in his book that I think you came out recently, You know, from the president down to make sure that Amazon did not get this politics entry. The high level is it's $10 billion over 10 years, but when you look into it, number one is the minimum purchase. In the first years only like a 1,000,000. It's expected to be more like 202 150 million in the 1st 2 years, but it is a big deal. Microsoft really spent a lot of time the last couple of years going deeper into public sector, making sure they've got the governance and the compliance sergeant is Kino talked about the 54 azure regions and what they're doing. They're still work that Microsoft needs to do. They don't have the Level six security yet which Amazon does that They've been given less than a year to get that, to make sure that they can fulfill this. But a lot of pieces and there will be lots of other government contracts, but lots of intrigue there. I think it goes back to thing we mentioned trust. Can the government trust that Microsoft will allow them to do all they need to do? There's a lot of office 3 65 in the government. And, of course, Microsoft does. This other thing. There's a bunch of in the government is they use Oracle. We know that Oracle and Amazon are still butting heads. You don't expect to see Oracle on Amazon, you know, shaking hands on stage any time soon. At Oracle OpenWorld This year you saw Oracle allowing their solution to run on Azure in friendly licensing terms because you can run Oracle on AWS. But oracles gonna do everything you can to make sure that the licensing terms her onerous in that environment, they want you to do it on their infrastructure or on their environment and really opening up to Azure. Now, the government contrast that they can run it there. And for me, that trust resident. When I talk to the partner ecosystem, there definitely is some concern about Amazon's power in the marketplace and what they will do. Amazon, to their credit, has a big ecosystem there. Marketplace is phenomenal and they are open and give customers choice. But obviously, just like if you serve on amazon dot com, if it's a Amazon Basics or Amazon provider solution, they're probably going toe move that them in that way. Every company does this for, you know, Google makes sure that they optimize for their ads and everything like that. Microsoft in the past was known for optimizing their licensing revenue. Today they're more trusted. They're more open. I think Santa leaves that on the from the top. But you know so many things that they need to dig into. So Jet I not something I'd expect to spend a lot of time on this week, But thank you for bringing it up happily undertone. Because what the moral of the stories today cloud is AWS and Azure are the clear leaders. Yes, AWS still has a sizable lead. A measure is slowly eating into that lead. But as a as a user, as an enterprise, as any company out there, you can't be wrong by choosing either of those solutions. And one of Microsoft's embracing is that multi cloud environment going back to art will talk about how do I live in that multi cloud world? Eight of us still leads with their hybrid solution and use eight of us don't use other clouds. Azure is more embracing of a multi cloud world. >>So so let's talk about that now. But I just in terms of the trust at a time where there is such deep and tremendous skepticism, a big tech in government right now, the trust really is a crucial element. We're gonna We're gonna talk about that today with a lot of our guests two developments that you're most interested in. And I really want to dig into here as your ark. We're gonna start azure Arkin Power platform. But as your brand new today, uh, your thoughts, your impressions? >>Yes. So, as your ark, I can automate update with my policies across any environment, not just azure. So where I look at this and say, OK, do I manage azure with this? Absolutely. It's got kubernetes in it, so I should be able to move things around if need be. My my data center. In what? I'm putting their all of the azure stack and EJ hub all of these azure pieces in my data center. Can I manage that with us? Of course. The question is, what about if I'm using Google? Service is if I'm using A W S service is in the demo that they ran. They showed 80 was and said, Oh, we can manage that I said, That's great that they can. But will customers actually do that? There's a certain skill set. There's no way a program for it. And of course, AWS has its tooling that everybody uses their. So we've been trying to get that single pane of glass of, you know, for more than my entire career. And the techies I talked to is that pane of glass is nothing but P a. I n is the joke we always make. So it is great that they've done this by the way it's on Lee in Tech preview right now, so it's great that they have this. We've been saying for years that Microsoft, if you talk about hybrid, has the lead when you talk about thought, leadership and solutions. But really, that hybrid solution is azure and data center, and I've got my APs that live everywhere. So 03 65 or in my data center in there. What we're really hearing here is a comprehensive reimagining of hybrid, as we've been talking about it more recently is I really blur the lines between my data center, the public cloud and even the edge. So it's great to see Microsoft do this. I got a lot of friends that are at the V M World Europe Show in Barcelona this week. We've been talking about this in the V M where environment for last couple of years of the VM, where on AWS via where on Azure V M wear on Google, Oracle, IBM and more. So it's great that Microsoft has stepped up here. In some ways. It makes me really think how I thought about Microsoft because Microsoft has been, in my mind a leader and hybrid and realizing that they need to really, really make a significant change to the portfolio. To really deliver on the promise of hybrid and multi My definition of when we will have a true multi con solution is when the value that extract from the system is greater than the sum of the parts. And absolutely that's not where we are today. Microsoft has a lot of pieces. Absolutely. They have a right to be one of the leaders pulling those pieces together. And really, it is a place where you see Microsoft and IBM, where partnering, but also all going to be that leader in the management of my cloud native environment. And we're gonna spend a lot of time this week talking to the developers because that's another area that sought to spend a lot of time. Those two point 6,000,000 citizen developers, as he calls them. I'm sure you must have really loved Rebecca. 61% of job openings for developers are outside of the tech sector. >>Well, exactly, and that is that is such a huge point and that's what Sathya said. That's always been our sweet spot wear for the citizen developers and we want to democratize computing. We want to make sure that you can bring your best self to work and be your most productive self to work in. So many of the tools that they have introduced today are all about creativity, collaboration, time management, productivity, individual time productivity as well as team productivity. So there's a lot of exciting developments today. Let's talk about power platform. Speaking of the parts and pieces What what does it do? What most interests you and excites you about power platform >>boy. So you know, first, the last thing. The citizen developers. It's funny when most people do, you know, where do I start? And I started to excel. And of course, Microsoft is probably the company that most people I'm old enough now that I remember, you know, using the spreadsheets before Excel was the leader that it was there. But the power platform, The thing I've been looking at is way were here a year ago. There was no power platform. Did we talk a lot about a I Absolutely. We talk about data warehousing and business intelligence and all of these things. So I'm trying to understand how much of This is just the new umbrella. Platt, the new umbrella messaging around it and how much there's new products. I talked to a couple people that dig in straight here. I talked to a couple of Microsoft Mbps. Which way? There are lots of them here. I haven't mentioned it, Rebecca already. But the community at the show is excellent. It is welcoming. It is engaging. Diversity is front and center at this show and Microsoft Great kudos for that because it ties into that citizen developers. But when you talk about the power platform, it's about enabling the citizen developers. So a few announcements in their power automate is really there are p a solution. We've got power virtual agents, which is understanding natural language and conversations. Such actually did a cute little thing. He went toe like universal and fought the demi Gorgon from stranger things. Stranger things, fan. I thought it was really cute and everything. But, he explained, he's like, Okay, here's you know it's understanding my name and saying, Get back to me. It's understanding the movements that I'm doing and turning that into what what's happening so way. Understand that we're still relatively early into gaining the full benefits out of a I hear. But there's a lot of tooling, and from what the people I've talked to is the power platform absolutely is much more than just a rebranding. There are acquisitions that have come in. There are software launches and you know, Microsoft in the agile, continuously shipping code mode that everybody is in these days, you know, is going through a lot of veneration. So I believe that you know that the platform was announced back in the spring, and something that I've seen with Microsoft and many companies like Cisco, that air going heavily of software, a platform of software, actually could be a unifying factor forcing function between all of these groups. So rather than saying, Oh my gosh, Microsoft, you've got, you know, 1000 different software packages that I would by no, no, that's not the way you think about it. You know, they don't come on a CD or disk anymore. Instead, it's there's something that I plug into on it, cloud enabled. It's able to be, you know, purchase interruptible model. So we've got number of guests that that power platform absolutely is. You know, hearing good things in the ecosystem and absolutely, you know, you know, it is a strength of Microsoft when you talk about the leverage and use of data in a business environment, on is their legacy. >>And this is a company that is going from strength to strength right now, really firing on all four senators cylinders, azure office, 3 65 windows. We haven't talked about fortnight and the other gaming elements here, but in terms of, um, usage issues, I know there were There were a couple of hiccups last week. >>Yeah, so you know, outages or something. People are definitely worried about the cloud. There was reported last week that there was some availability and performance issues. They were throttling things back. They were saying you couldn't scale and we're like, Wait, you know, infinite compute, infinite storage on demand. That's what we need. And from some of the things I heard from the community, the gaming platforms actually were impacting this and actually gaming that run across both AWS and azure. So it definitely is a little bit of a red flag. You know, your azure, your your your microsoft, and you want to talk about that you are a leader in the face. You can trust them. We're gonna keep you going. Well, you know, cos have spent decades making sure that their data centers have the up time and reliability that we need. You know, when I talk to the big cloud providers, they have some of the same conversation we were having back in the infrastructure world, You know, 15 years ago about data availability and data loss, You know? D u D E l date on availability and data loss. It was a four letter word. You can't have it. You would have war rooms and make for the things you know. Don't go down so little bit of a red flag especially, you know, will there be any contesting of the government deal? You don't want something sitting there saying Oh, hey, wait. I have a critical you know d o d operation. That needs to happen. Wait, We can't speak out when we need it. You know that. That's a no No. >>Right. Exactly. Well, this is these air, all the topics we're going to get into and then some over the next three days, it's gonna be an action packed show. I'm looking forward to it. A lot of great guests to thanks >>so much. I can't wait. I >>hope you'll stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of Microsoft IC night coming up in just a little bit.

(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, 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 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)

(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)

>> 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 have two guests for this segment, we have Ross Smith, the Principle Program Manager at Microsoft, and Greg Taylor, who is the Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft. Thank you so much for joining us! >> Thanks for having us. >> So, I want to start off by talking about messaging. You are both legends in the Microsoft messaging world, sorry to be obsequious here. >> That just means we're old. >> You've been around a while, it's not your first rodeo. >> No, no. >> So, talk a little bit about what's new, what the enhancements you're doing for Enterprise, it is the most used app. >> Yeah. >> So we're launching Exchange Server 2019 this year. It's another version of on-premises exchange, it's incredible. We had 2000 people registered for the session, we had 1000 in the room. There's still some love for on-prem exchange, no doubt, so that's been a big thing we're talking about at Ignite this year. For those customers, and I'll be honest it's very much a release aimed at large Enterprise customers who want to keep some exchange on-prem. We strongly believe that small-medium business should be in the cloud, so we've focused on the kind of features that really large Enterprises really want to get from Exchange. >> Yeah, and then from a app perspective, we've been heavily invested with ALUP, Fry, WES and Android to bring a unique and valuable experience for both consumers and commercial users using both Office 365 and Exchange on-premises. So we now have a hundred million users using Outlook Mobile today, and it's been a great experience and we continue to evolve the app on a weekly basis, now. >> Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of the app and what kinds of features and enhancements you're using for both the consumers and Enterprise? >> Right, yeah. So the app originally began as a consumer acquisition, which we've now targeted and rebranded it as Outlook, and we've been heavily focused on bringing Enterprise features that our users know and love. Office 365 Groups is a great example of an experience that we built into the app that no other native mail client or third-party mail client can deliver today. We've delivered other Enterprise security-specific features like Azure Active Directory conditional access so customers can lock down what mobile apps can access the service and prevent any other client from doing so. And then, of course, there's in-tune app protection policies which allow us to, and customers to, ensure only the corporate data is protected and exclude the personal data, so that we can ensure there's no data leakage scenarios going. >> I wonder if we can step back for a second. I think about messaging, it's very diverse. I remember back in the '90s, I was helping companies get access to this whole "internet thing" and LANs and setting up and oh, we're going to go from faxes and memos to emails, show how old I am in this business, too. But today, our mobile devices, a lot of what we're doing companies, whether they have their own data-centers or doing their cloud, there's usually lots of different ways we communicate. My joke is, the best way to communicate with someone is probably the one they prefer to and hopefully aren't buried in. >> Yes. Because we all have the Slacks and all those other things out there. How do you view the word's game, how does the Exchange and Outlook and those fit into the overall portfolio and interact with everything else. >> From the Exchange side, email is dead. I've heard email is dead for I don't know how many years and well, email is still one of the primary communication methods we all use and rely upon. And so Exchange was one of the applications that kind of coined the mission-critical application moniker, right? 22 years ago, 20 years ago, Exchange was one of the mission-critical apps. But we actually kind of think of Exchange now as almost a service, a commodity, like the power. And most people, it's kind of interesting, we have the front and the back end of things, right? I'm thinking about the messaging infrastructure of the back, and Ross is now working on the client side. Most people see the client features and think of them as Outlook and client features, but a lot of them are Exchange features which are servicing the client. It's been a real kind of evolution. We've got to a point where nobody really cares about the back end, unless it's not there, then that's a problem, but most of the things servicing the client. >> And so what we see is that the transition from typical on-premises infrastructure to the cloud service usually, generally begins with email into the Office 365 stack, and that starts lighting up additional features. And then from a mobility perspective, we're seeing that that begins the on-ramp into mobile. Because, like Greg mentioned, we've had email capability on mobile devices integrated into Exchange for 17 years now, so it's a very ubiquitous thing to have on a mobile device, so it's just a natural progression just to use email on a mobile device. And then that begins lighting up as customers begin to move to Office 365, they start lighting up additional features like teams integration or Skype for business or any of the other Office apps. And then they just light up naturally. And then through all of our protection mechanisms we're able to ensure that that entire experience is secure from a IT business, and protecting it. >> Just speaking of the evolution of messaging in and of itself, what do you see, people who've been in the industry a long time, what do you see as next, I mean, where do we go from here? Email, they say, is dead, we know it's not dead, but what are the next kinds of generation of features and enhancements that you see customers really needing, and that you're working on at Microsoft? >> Alright, I think that Exchange was really interesting from an Office 365 perspective, as Exchange isn't really just a messaging engine anymore, it's a data store that we are, through things like Graph and all the other applications, is giving businesses a whole new way of looking at the data, and so we're pulling data from all the different places. Exchange is becoming almost a plumbing kind of infrastructure piece, but it's a key data source and I think the data is still there, the communication is still there, but I think much of the future development is in the client-side apps and how people interact with the data, and the back-end just becomes the infrastructure, right? >> Actually you bring up a great point. A premise that my Head of Research at Wikibon had is talking about Microsoft's position in AI today, and Office 365 and the messaging that you have, there's so much data there if you wanted it. What are people worrying about? How can a company understand that? How can Microsoft help businesses in general? There's a touchpoint that even an infrastructure as a service-provider wouldn't have, but you really get to the end-point and the end users in productivity, and that's a huge opportunity for Microsoft in the future as long as you're not messing with our data, you're not as heavy into, you know some of the other messaging people out there, that you're like, wait, why am I getting ads for that stuff, or, I think I talked about that stuff. >> And that's a great point, Stu, because going back to Outlook Mobile as an example, right? We're heavily invested in AI-driven capabilities into that app, zero-touch search, as an instance. You can go right in the app, tap one button and you see your favorite contacts, you get your Discover information from the Office Graph your next itinerary and travel information, and we're lighting up that functionality across the board throughout the app. Location-rich data, using Cortana time-to-leave services, so that you can get to a meeting at the right time, as opposed to a typical oh, it reminded me at 15 minutes and I got to hop 45 minutes down the other end of, where are we, West? In the West building, right? So we're building all that functionality into clients like Outlook Mobile and the rest of the stack to help drive that type of capabilities. >> And all of that data's in the back end, right? You said email is this repository of incredible business information, and so the question is how you leverage that, how do you take what's in there and surface it in a way that makes sense to the users? It's a fascinating time at the moment, where the data's there, we just got to know how to use it in the right way. And I agree, using it in the right way and not using it to sell stuff, that's absolutely our approach to it, so, super important. >> And do you work closely with clients to come up with this new kind of functionality? One of the biggest challenges that so many technology companies face is staying on the cutting edge of these ideas and innovation, so how closely are you working with customers to dream up new functionality? >> Yeah, we're working with customers all the time. We do it through a variety of different channels. We have UserVoice, which allows customers and end users to directly interface and provide their ideas. We have private preview programs, where we target customers about specific new feature sets. TAP programs, like we're doing with Exchange 2019, as well as future releases within Office 365 that enable that type of experience. >> Exchange, I think, historically, has always been very customer focused, very community focused. We have a great bunch of MVPs, the TAP program, the Technology Adoption Program, is a bunch of customers that deploy our pre-production code in production for us, so we've got some real big customers who, they're running versions of Exchange that the world hasn't seen. >> One of the themes we heard in Satya's keynote yesterday is business productivity, and we know one of the biggest challenges out there is, you get this new stuff, and you're like, well, I'm going to pretty much just try to use it the way I always have been doing it, and some of us have been using emails for decades and decades and I look at my own usage and wow, I'm probably a bit out of date. If I could just wipe my brain and say 'okay, here's this cool new tool' that could do all this stuff, we wouldn't even call it email, we'd call it something different. I know you guys do things like the Channel 9 broadcast, I'm sure there's lots of things on the website, how do you help customers learn to use the new stuff and get rid of some of the things, the old habits that they had in using these technologies. And can you get everybody to stop 'reply to all' in the big group, that would be super helpful. >> Work on that please. >> That's interesting, we're building it into the apps, to be honest. We're doing a lot of work whenever we release new features to light up an experience within the app that guide the user on how to use that new functionality to help them understand what they can do with the app, as well as simplifying the overall app structure. You look at some of our apps, they become very bloated in terms of all the widgets you have available and knobs to control it and we're trying to simplify that stack. We're refreshing with Outlook 2019 and Office Pro Plus. We're refreshing the user interface on desktop, we're doing the same in Mac. We've done it in Outlook for iOS, we're redoing OA, as well, and Office 365, all to enhance and simplify the experience, and, as well, provide a consistent experience across all the endpoints, which will help. >> If the question is here, how do we wean people off email, how do we get them off email. >> Just their old habits and patterns. >> And you know, it's kind of funny, but it still works. I remember having a conversation with somebody once who, it was a presentation we did once, and it was a team who did more of a social kind of thing, and their view was, they put a picture of the Queen of England up on a slide and said 'Email is old, like the Queen of England.' And my response was, well so are fire and the wheel, but they seem to be hanging around pretty well, so far. So I think there are certain things for which email is still king, but it's evolving and changing. I think we're still waiting for the real killer app that replaces email. >> It's not Yammer. >> It's not what? (laughter) >> It's not Yammer. >> I'm not going on camera saying that. The way I prefer to think of it is, I don't really matter what the client is or how you all interact with it, if we can all use an app that suits our own style of working, right? My inbox is zero inbox. I'm a zero inbox kind of guy, right? If I can work like that and interact with people who want to work on a different client, I'm happy. >> Not to go on the Yammer piece, but you made me think a little bit about acquisitions. Big acquisitions, like LinkedIn and Github, messaging ties into both of those quite a bit. Any visibility you can give? I know there's some integrations there, but how does that look? >> So we're launching LinkedIn integration with Outlook for iOS and Android as we speak. That's something we'll be rolling out shortly, and it enables, within the people or contact card, you can quickly see information from their LinkedIn data set, as well as the ability for us to push data from Office 365 into LinkedIn, so that LinkedIn users can also see relevant information about who that person's interacting with from a calendar type of perspective. So we're definitely taking that availability and providing that through our mutual customers. >> Great. Well, Ross and Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show, it was >> Thanks for having us. really a pleasure having you. >> Yeah, it was great. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCube's live coverage from the Orange County Civic Center Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Brian Cox, he is the director of product marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Well thanks for having me, Rebecca, and Stu, it's good to see you again, so-- >> Yes, you're a CUBE alum, an esteemed CUBE alum. >> I've been here before and it's a great experience. >> Great, well, before the cameras were rolling we were talking about how Nutanix really pioneered hyper-converged infrastructure. But, the vision is bigger, Nutanix is about more than hyper-converged. >> Yeah, and we're very, actually, glad to see here at Microsoft Ignite that Microsoft, in the next version of Windows, is touting the whole hyper-converged concept. So, we are seeing validation from one of the most established computing companies in the world. The thing is, when Nutanix got started, we didn't even know what to call it. We never used the term hyper-converged infrastructure. It was one of your colleagues in the analyst community, they coined that term. We were really thinking of something, I think, bigger and beyond, which is, how can we simplify IT, because at the end of the day, all the business cares about are the services that IT delivers. Those get delivered through applications. Everything below that, frankly, the business doesn't care, right? If you're a donut company, you want to make donuts. If you're a shipping company, you want to have trucks and all that logistics to be optimal. IT, and finance, and marketing, and HR, they're all just means to an end. And so, when we looked at this we said, What can we do to just deliver those services and apps, and simplify everything else? Anything that we can do to save time, that we can save money, we get to return that back to the business to help be a better trucking company or a better donut company, right? So with that in mind, we said we need to simplify. >> Brian, great point, I mean, your background, my background, we're on the infrastructure side of things. You know, I got reminded many times in my career, Look, the whole goal of infrastructure is to make those apps run. You know, it's my data and my applications, those are the important things of the business. That doesn't mean that we've, you know, made y'know, IT is not yet a utility, it's not completely commoditized, there's differentiation, so, maybe help explain a little bit, Nutanix in the Microsoft ecosystem and how that fits in the overall view of Nutanix's value in the marketplace. >> Sure, so, the larger vision that Nutanix had is just, Let's simplify everything below the app layer. We did start at one place, which is just to fundamentally clean up and simplify the physical infrastructure, so you have storage arrays over here, servers over here, a sand-fabric in-between, virtualization layered on top of that, all coming from different vendors, not necessarily all tested together. I know because I used to work at the vendors, right? All different management consoles. It's really hard to become a mastermind of all of that, to have it optimized, and not to have points of failure. So we said, The first thing we need to do is eliminate that complexity. So we brought that down into like a single building block appliance, which ultimately got termed hyper-converged infrastructure, but that wasn't our destination. That was just, we needed common building blocks like LEGO pieces, right, that can snap together without any fuss and allow the companies to build that up. Then, from there, we can then raise the level of simplification all the way between the physical infrastructure to the app. So, one of the things that we get an immediate benefit from, when we consolidate storage and servers, the virtualization, is that we improve performance for things like Microsoft SQL or Exchange. So, no longer do you have that long hop from the compute with the servers all the way out to the external storage arrays. It all collapses, performance gets better, we eliminate points of failure, and, in fact, even when you have multiple of these LEGO blocks, this cluster, we try to always associate the data and the compute onto the same node, so there's very little latency at all. So, Microsoft SQL, Exchange performance goes up, the up-time goes up, and then to manage it, is also simpler. >> Alright, so Microsoft business productivity apps live on the Nutanix infrastructure-- >> Yeah, they benefit immediately by going to the simpler infrastructure versus this complex distributed architecture, where there's different pieces from different vendors. >> Alright, so, we hear from Microsoft, and we know customers hear, it's a multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud world, so, how does the Microsoft pieces of that fit in with the Nutanix Story? >> Well, we realize that customers want to have choice. So, if you look at really the three pillars, that come from our founding, is we want to be able to make it simple, we want to make it scalable, and we do want to give you choice. So, when we look at that last one, we're going to give you a choice of, let's say, whatever hyper-visor you wish to use. It could be Hyper-V, it could be DSXI, it could be the Nutanix AHV, it could be XenServer from Citrix. All of those are supported, we support this on multiple different hardware platforms. So, you have Adelium C, Lenovo, IBM, Fujitsu in Europe, we just added Hitachi last week as a partner, we run on Cisco, we run on HPE servers, and that list continues to grow. So, whatever is your standard, we'll go ahead and work with that. We'll give you choices, different clouds, as well. So, the software to manage and optimize is not only just for your on-prem environment, you can use this if you're in a distributed environment, whether it's Robo or Edge sites, like oil rigs and other IOT, we can give the same interface, and then the same interface out to the public cloud as well. So we give you the choice of different clouds, different platforms, different hyper-visors, and then different operating systems. We support everything from a Windows server environment to Linux and even IBM's AIS. All are supported on the platform, so you get to have it fit the way you want to work, versus the other way around. >> How closely do you work with customers in making theses decisions? Because, as you said, your goal is simplification, making it easy for them to choose and deploy, so how do you walk them through the process, and is it ever analysis paralysis, because there are simply so many options? >> Well for some customers who are struggling with that choice, we do offer our own branded appliance. So, it's very simple, you have the computing framework, the Nutanix software's there, it's one single support line to call, and that's a very simple model. Other customers, though, have chosen who their platform of choice is, whether that's on-prem, like a physical server, or it's a public cloud. That choice, oftentimes, has already been made, right? We're just working with that, so, for those who already have an opinion in the customers sight, we'll work with that. If for some reason they don't have an opinion, or they want it even simpler, they can go with the Nutanix branded offering, but we'll work either way. >> Great, Brian, you go to a number of different shows. Tell us, what are you hearing from customers, what are some of the challenges, what are they looking for, and maybe what's different about the customers who are here at the Microsoft show, versus some of the others we might hear. >> Well, it depends on who you're talking to right? So, if you're talking to C-suite, at the end of the day, these are the guys or gals running the donut company, they're running the trucking company, and they view IT just like they view HR, or finance, or whatever. It's like, yes, that's absolutely critical, we need that function, but the goal is to make it more efficient, more effective so I can deliver more shipments, make more donuts, right? So, for the C-suite, they want to see, On my capital that I'm investing, what is the return on this, and do I have to over-commit capital now, because I can only buy it in big chunks?. So we address that by having what we call fractional consumption. Basically, you're buying one LEGO block at a time, so you're not consuming capital that could elsewhere be used in the business. So, C-suite, they have a different, y'know, one set of needs. Then you look at the sys admins, and they are overwhelmed with all of this complexity of infrastructure, it burns all of their time. They're spending all their nights, all their weekends, they're not very happy, they make mistakes. If we can give them back hours in their day, they're going to be more productive. They can actually do higher level tasks. And even for the folks on the dev team, if we can simplify the infrastructure and spin up new instances, whether it's containers, or VMs, and they can even do it through self-service, that makes them more productive. So, we try to address the needs of all those audiences. >> The customers you are referring to, they are different groups of customers, but they're all essentially the same company, so, are they talking to each other? I mean, are the tech people talking to the business people in terms of what are over-arching goals here. >> Yeah, they do talk to each other. Granted, probably the audience we talk to them most frequently are the sys admins, y'know, because we're very operationally tied, and we'll then arm them with arguments to talk to the C-suite, right? So I was just presenting yesterday here, told them, You're going to get your nights and weekends back., but when you got to go talk to the CFO, here are the things that that person's going to care about, right? When you go talk to the dev team, here's the things that you need to share with them. So, we do arm the sys admins, but we do have a growing presence, at the C-suite, for example. We've also started attending a number of developer conferences, saying, Hey, this actually makes sense to you, to get your job done, it's not just the sys admins, it's you as a developer, it's you as a leader of the company. This is transforming the power of IT to help fulfill the organization's mission. >> I'm curious about your perceptions of Microsoft. Right now we have Satya Nadella, who really portrays this company as a company that is open, inclusive, with a growth mindset, Don't be a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all. I mean, is that your... Do you feel that as someone who works closely with Microsoft, who rubs up against its colleagues-- >> I think it's an embrace, like what you can't exact in regards to, the reality is customers want choice, and it's not one size fits all, not one cookie-cutter approach. So Satya is saying, Hey, what can we do to integrate with Linux? That never would've been heard, maybe, under the previous regimes, right? What can you do to work more closely in the app development environments that the app developers want to work in? So, there's a lot of affinity, I think, between Nutanix and where Satya's going, and in providing that choice, providing best-in-class wherever you can then let the customer choose, but provide them the pros and cons, so they make an informed decision. >> Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Well, thank you Rebecca, and thank you Stu, it's always great to be here. >> We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)