(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is the Cube Conversation. >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, excited to talk to the CEO of Styra, Bill Mann today. Bill, welcome to the Cube. >> Hi Lisa, how are you doing? >> I'm doing well. I should say welcome back. You've been on the Cube at a previous company, but we're excited to talk to you today about Styra, what's going on? So let's go ahead and start informing our audience who Styra is and what you do? >> Sure, so who Styra is and what do we do? So Styra is a company that's focused on reinventing policy and authorization in the cloud native stack. We're the company that created an open source project called Open Policy Agent, it's part of CNCF. And on top of Open Policy Agent, we built a control flame, a management plane to help organizations really put OPA into production and operationalized OPA. >> An OPA is Open Policy Agent. That's what the company actually developed with CNCF, correct? >> So, we actually founded Open Policy Agent and then we contributed Open Policy Agent to CNCF. And the real goal of contributing the Open Policy Agent to CNCF was we believe that we want to get authorization defacto in the market, right? And the only way to get something out there that everybody uses is to put it into the open source and having an entity like the CNCF supporting the project. So, really it's about getting everybody, all enterprises and vendors to use Open Policy Agent as a way of solving authorization for the cloud native environment. >> So you say Styra is reinventing policy and authorization for cloud native applications, your target audience, security folks, developer folks, what changes has cloud native brought to security and development teams? >> Sure, so what changes has cloud native brought to security and development teams? So fundamentally there've been three changes in the marketplace. One, as you know we're shifting from this monolithic architecture of building applications to now this new distributed architectures of kubernetes, microservices and Deep-coupled architecture. So fundamentally the way we build applications is fundamentally changed because everybody wants to have scale up and scale down and so forth. Second, the way we actually developed software, we've moved now to a DevOps model where we're doing more things earlier on in the cycle so we can innovate faster and we're producing code on an hourly basis versus when I joined the industry which was probably three releases a year. And then thirdly which is kind of a major topic that all of us kind of understand is our focus on privacy and security is higher than it's been before. And if these applications are going to be way more complex and more distributed and we're going to innovate faster than the way we focus on security and privacy has to be done differently as well. And if we don't do it differently, then we're going to have to all the breaches that we had in the previous generation of the app stack. >> And we don't want that, but you're right privacy and security are increasing concerns in any environment. How do you help address those and also with the thought of privacy and security are going to be concerned for quite a long time? >> Yeah, so let me take a step back. So how do we address privacy and security? So, at a fundamental level, authorization is a foundational part of security and authorization has never really been solved or re-imagined ever for the last 50 years or so. Every application developer or security vendor has built authorization into their own stack and done it in a very proprietary way. And it's been locked away within these applications and these stacks and so forth. So what happens now when you've got a highly distributed environment is that you've got so many moving parts, you still need to apply authorization. So, the way we've tackled it is by building Open Policy Agent. And there's three fundamental kind of tenants around Open Policy Agent that make it really ideal for this cloud native environment. Number one, it's policy as code and everything in the market now, everything is as code. You buy infrastructure as code. So this is now policy as code. So you can describe in a declarative model, how you want the policy for a system to be developed and you can use the language called Rego to do that. Second is the fact that all the cloud native projects out there which are all developed based upon open source technologies, kubernetes, microservices, envoy, SDO, cafco, all these kinds of buzzwords you hear in the marketplace, they all integrate with Open Policy Agent already. And then thirdly the architecture of Open Policy Agent is that it's distributed, which means that it's ideally suited for this distributed architecture for cloud native. And those are the three kind of characteristics of Open Policy Agent leading to developers loving it. And when I say they love it, we've got hundreds and thousands of users of Open Policy Agent. When you go to the CNCF shows co op con earlier this year and there's two more coming this year. There's many, many talks on it. You've got cloud vendors like Google and Microsoft adopting Open Policy Agent, got a lot of enterprises adopting Open Policy Agent. So, that's really fundamentally what we've built is we've built an authorization architecture for this new world to really address the security and privacy concerns, which have always existed and I'm going to be more exponential in this new world. >> And I think you've also built a community around OPA. Can you share a little bit of information about that and how they help with the co-development and even some of the other things that you're commercializing? >> Sure, yeah. So, now what have we done in from a community point of view with Open Policy Agents? So yeah, the community is a integral part of any open source project and we're lucky to have a great community. We've got a great community of enterprise users of Open Policy Agents and vendors as well, vendors like Microsoft and Google who are now contributing to OPA and building it up. And for me, the most important part of a community is that you learn how enterprises are using your software and they share ideas and they share use cases and you're able to innovate really, really fast. And what we've learned from that is the use cases that they use Open Policy Agent for, for instance, one of the major use cases for Open Policy Agent is for kubernetes Admission Control. So, essentially we can test the configuration of an application which is described in a file called Yammer before it goes into production. So, think of it as pre-production tests, but companies are using it for microservices and applications and data and so forth. So, it helps us understand what they're using it for, but also we use it to help us develop our commercial product, which is the management control plane for OPA. So, we learn about what they're missing in the open source project that we can use to build our commercial product which is ready for enterprise use. >> So you've had a lot of success with OPA. Talk to me about Styra DAS and why the need for that? >> Sure, so why do we need Styra DAS recognizing that OPA is very, very successful. So, the fundamental difference is OPA is a very focused on developers and it's very focused on an environment for an individual node or cluster, but it doesn't have all the enterprise features necessary for a real enterprise to go into production. So what we notice is companies use OPA for pre-production, but when they want to go into production, they need a user interface. They need a way to author policies, distribute policies, monitor policies, do impact analysis and a whole bunch of other features and capabilities that are needed for enterprise deployments and so forth. So that's a fundamental difference between OPA and the commercial product. The commercial product is really operationalizing in OPA for an enterprise deployment. >> So the relationship between Styra and OPA seems very collaborative to me that what you just described with the commercial product of Styra DAS is really one that was developed based on what the OPA community and Styra have learned together? >> Correct, Yes. So, OPA was created by the CTO, the founders of the company when the team was actually part of Nicira and they left Nicira which got acquired by VMware and so on early on several years ago, the need for distributed architectures and the need for unified policy so they left and created OPA. And from day one they wanted to get over into everybody's hands. That's why they contributed it to open source as part of CNCF. And then the next kind of strategy is to focus on the control apps aspects, the enterprise aspect. So yes, the same team that created OPA is the same team that's creating the Styra DAS commercial offering as well. >> So from the enterprise perspective, talk to me about some of the companies that you're talking to. I imagine any organization that's focused on cloud native, but any industry in particular that you see is really kind of leading edge right now? >> Yeah, so which industries are we talking to in terms of using Styra DAS and OPA? What we've actually found it's across the board. And we've seen in the early days that financial services and high tech were using OPA, but now it's really across the board. So it's all verticals really. And what we've noticed is any organization which is going through a cloud transformation project where they're either building new applications based upon cloud native app stacks like kubernetes and microservices and so forth or shift to the cloud are the companies that are also adopting OPA and the Styra DAS product, right? Because it's all part of the same solution set. And what we're noticing now and this is a fundamental difference is platform architects and developers are kind of prime to use these technologies. They learn about these technologies by going to the conferences and unlike the past which was very much top down selling from the sea level down, this is very much bottomed up. So developers learn about OPA from going to the conferences. They use it within their own environment and then they tell their management that, "Look, we're using OPA already. "We're missing these capabilities," or they come to us and we educate them about the Styra DAS product and so forth. So it's a very different sales model as well and that's why it's very important for ourselves and any open source company to really keep developers happy and provide a solution, that's meeting their requirements. >> On that side with so many of us and developers included working from home for the past nearly four months. We now are doing things like this virtual conversations, virtual events, how is Styra helping to continue to feed and educate those developers so that they can understand how you can impact their job functions and how they can then elevate you guys up the stack. >> Sure, so what's changed over the last three months or so in the market as a consequence of COVID-19 and from an educational point of view. So, what we've seen is fundamentally in the early days of COVID-19 everybody was kind of get the head around how to work from home and so forth, but what we've seen across the all verticals is developers have now really focused on educating themselves and just as a data point and the audience that we get to the OPA website is as high as it's ever been for the last three months. And what we're doing as a company is a lot of training sessions, video content, write-ups, blogs and so forth, right? And really helping the community learn about OPA and how to solve these kind of fundamental problems around policy and authorization within the environment. We've also been helped by the community as well. So there's been talks about a number of companies, Microsoft, Google, Palo Alto had a talk and many many companies are talking about OPA now and I love it because ultimately being an open source company and building a project which we want to become defacto, we want to raise the bar for security across the world, right? And if we can do that then it's going to be an achievement for us and it's very gratifying knowing that we're really fixing security problems for organizations because ultimately we always want to be able to use an application or a banking service and not worry about privacy and security concerns and that's ultimately what we're all after. But this is such a fundamental component that once we want to have developers learn this now because if they can incorporate this into the DevOps app stack then in future years when these applications are built and they're exposed there'll be more secure. >> And so it sounds like maybe there's even more engagement now during COVID when everybody is at home. Tell me about some of the things that are coming down the pipe for Styra in light of all of this exciting collaboration with the community. >> Sure, yeah. There's definitely been way more collaboration as a consequence of COVID-19. People are at home and they're focusing and they're going through learning sessions and browsing the website going through the video content and so forth. So what we're engaging as much as we have ever been, in fact I would argue that we're engaging even more so now, because it's just a different environment to work in. And what we're focused on now is really adding more features to the Styra DAS product, just to step back for a second, Open Policy Agent works across the cloud native stack and Styra DAS has been focused first on the kubernetes use case and now it also supports microservices as well. And then what we're continuing to do is add more of those enterprise features into Styra DAS and move up and up across the stack. But it is all driven by developers that we're talking to on a daily basis and that's leading to where the project is moving forward and the development for the roadmap and so forth. >> And Styra DAS was only launched in 2019, is that correct? >> 2019 yes, that's correct. That's correct. Yes, time flies, right? So, yes. >> A lot of change and a lot of development in a short period of time. >> That's right and 2019 was a big year for us, right? We started last 2019 with a soft launch at the RSA conference and we finished 2019 with series a funding led by Xcel. And yeah, it's great to see how the commercial product has been gaining traction in the marketplace as well as OPA as well and I think it's a combination of events. One, the fact that cloud native is now really well understood. Second, the fact that kubernetes at the beginning of 2019, it was still, "What does kubernetes mean, "is it going into production?" Now kubernetes is absolutely going into production and there's such a desire for organizations to make sure that security and policy and compliance are resolved before applications go into production otherwise we're going to have the same kind of challenges we had with previous app stacks. >> Well, the momentum is certainly with you. I can definitely hear that in your voice bell. Thank you so much for joining me talking about Styra, how you're reinventing policy and authorization for cloud native applications. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> For my guest Bill Mann, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube Conversation. Thanks for your time. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. We are in day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, all things Microsoft. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Stu, a minimum. We are joined by Martina grom. She is the CEO at work of at work in Vienna and a Microsoft MVP. >>Thank you so much for coming on the show. My tags for the invitation. I'm glad to be here. So tell us a little bit about at work, what do you do? So, so what we are doing, we are an ISV located in Australia and in Germany we are around 25 people and we do software development on the one side. And on the other side we support customers in going into the cloud to develop a deployment strategy to use Microsoft technology and yeah, governance, deployment, migration. And recently we also started with adoption and change management because it's a huge topic for many customers. So who >>are your customers? What, what kinds of industries are they in? >>Yeah. So, um, we actually do not focus on a specific industry. We are more focusing on enterprise customers. So every, every customer was a large customer. So one friend once told me, you like the complicated cases. So I like to work with enterprises and learn what they are doing from a security perspective and how they do that. And we have customers in the financial sector as well as in retail business. So all over that and mainly in Europe we have some customers in the U S as well. >>So, so Martina, I know from a Microsoft MVP standpoint, you focus on Oh three 65 is, is that the primary engagement that you have with customers or is it a span of product? >>Yes. Yeah. The interesting part is I started with Microsoft three 65 in 2008 when Microsoft started going into the cloud business. So that time back, my first product I looked at was exchange hosted services, which was the antivirus, anti-spam solution. Microsoft provided. And then, um, every single partner first told us, Matina you will never earn money with cloud technologies because no customer will do that. Everyone was still on premises. And in 2011 I got the MVP award because I was one of the first to focus so heavily on office three 65. And the benefit I have out of that is that I know all products services quite well. And currently I'm more focusing on the security and compliance side. >>Yeah, it's interesting because today when I talked to Microsoft customers in on premises to the exception and it's usually, Oh, I'm a government agency and I need to be completely cut off from certain environments, so therefore I can't do it. Um, you know, I, I've said for the last few years, Microsoft actually gave customers not only the green light, but the push to go sass with what they're doing. So tell, tell, give us a little bit of, you know, the landscape today is, is that, is that the exception rather than the rule and are most people kind of okay with O three 65 in the cloud? >>Yeah, I, I think cloud services, it's a matter of trust. So as I am located in Europe, we um, and especially in the German speaking countries like Austria, Germany, Switzerland, many people just didn't trust it from the beginning because they said it's a American company. We don't know where all our data is. Antawn at Microsoft is very open and um, and what the did, they are very transparent what they are doing. So you get tons of material around how to trust the cloud, how it works and so on. And the current state is more for an on premises customer. He is safer to go into a cloud service then stay on premises. And this is one of the things I really like about that because it's, it doesn't depend on the customer side. Even a small customer can have the same security features a large enterprise customer has. >>Okay. If you could just expand on that a little bit because you know, for the longest time security was the blocker to do there. And for many now looking at the cloud, it at least it lets me restart and rethink what I'm doing as opposed to, you know, often security was something that got pushed to the back burner in my data center. So is it that Microsoft has, you know, all of the security taking care of, is it a combination of getting to restart and rethink of it? How do you look at that? >>Um, I think the main point is traditionally when you are on premises, you think your data center is secure because you own it, you hosted, you organize it, you operate it and everything is there. And we are very an and those customers are very focused on endpoint security. So everything comes from the outside. Uh, might be dangerous. But with cloud technologies, it's not only your, your own network you need to just to have a safe place for, you also need to secure the cloud services. And that means if you broaden that experience and going into a SAS service, you have much more security there. In terms of the talking at the very beginning where you said, I liked the complicated cases, so we know you like a challenge. And then you also said you're getting into more adoption and change management. Talk about some of the challenges that you're seeing in terms of your clients embracing this, this, this technology. >>Yeah, so from my perspective, one of the biggest challenges customers currently have is Microsoft is moving very fast and people need to change and get comfortable with an evergreen service, which might change today and might change next week again. And this is something people need to adopt and, and use put a lot of pressure on that because they say, Oh, there are the nice, fancy tools, the new tools, it's teams, it's everything else. And we need that to do, to work properly and to be in a modern workplace. And this is quite the challenge for every it operations team because they need to build a secure environment. It needs governance and it also needs change and adoption. Okay. >>Martina, you mentioned the modern workplace. So another area you work on is enterprise social. So, you know, I worked for a large enterprise, you know, a vendor in this ecosystem back when that, you know, social wave was hitting, you know, use jive, uses Yammer when it first launched long before Microsoft had uh, brought it, um, you know, we don't talk about the wave anymore. Bring us, you know, what's happening in that space these days. >>Yeah. So enterprise, social and I love being there as well because I, I try to get people, so what, what I saw what, what I saw when Microsoft acquired Yama, it brought a lot of change into Microsoft itself because um, there was currently a graph technology in a, in, in Yammer as a product which brings up more relevant content to the users and people really liked that. And then you saw all the collaboration, which is mainly document based on SharePoint, SharePoint, online and so on. And currently those, um, services come together and then after a couple of years you got Microsoft teams and people that again got confused and that, so this is the next tool helped me what tools I use when, and that's one of the biggest question many customers have currently because they probably don't understand it from the beginning, but if they start adopting that, the use cases become pretty clear for them. >>That to say we work in teams in our project environment, but we, if we want to reach the whole organization, we go into Yammer or in an enterprise social tool. >> So talk about, there's been a lot of new changes to teams that have been announced this week here at ignite. What as an acre slapped MPP? What is most sparking your interest? Um, I'm not a Microsoft employee, but a VP, sorry. Yeah. Um, so what I like about that is that teams brings kind of a good user experience to use as they have one client. They have the outlook client, they have the teams client and they can work within the team. In Microsoft teams, they can use it for video calls, for conferences, anything. So it's, it's a one stop shop defined in teams and with the extension which is brought now in, in with the new Yammer experience, they also have the broad experience of the enterprise social network integrated into their teams client. And this will bring a fundamental change because then a project team which is working together can also look out of one client. What is going on in my organization. Are there any questions? Can I share that? And Tom, >>Martina, I want to go back to a word that you brought up. When you talk about the cloud, it's trust. It's something that we heard over and over. And again, the keynote is Sacha positioning Microsoft as a trusted partner. A, they've got, what? What's it 47, sorry, 54 different Azure regions worldwide. So, uh, you know, are they local enough? Are they engaged enough? Is Microsoft earning the trust of you as a partner and as your customers, do they, they seem Microsoft as a trusted partner? >>Yeah. So from my experience, Microsoft is a trust verse it company. Because what, what I learned from them during their whole cloud journey, they got a lot of push backs. In the beginning they said it's, it's just in the European union, we don't like that. We want our data centers, which are closer to us because it feels more secure if I have a data center region in South Africa, in France, in Switzerland or wherever I am. And Microsoft invests a lot in building that trust and it's completely transparent what they are doing. So you can go to the websites and can say, okay, I'm located in Switzerland. Um, I want my data in there, so what services to get there. So it's really, um, a good opportunities for customers. And also what I learned from customers is if you see a service running and you do not use it, you can't build up on trust because you just don't know. >>It's like swimming in the air without any water. So, and this is many customers just saw and they, um, they discovered, okay, it works, it doesn't fail. We can trust on the solution. And this is really important. You said that you mainly work with European customers, a few in the U S what do you think are the biggest differences between the two groups? Our European customers naturally a little more skeptical, particularly when it comes to data. It's um, in Europe we are very specific in data privacy and the thing that might be a difference between the U S and and Europe, especially in German, that people really look at privacy issues and could that happen on, and then we have GDPR, which was brought up by the European union, which would bring additional trust and security into our customers and on every single website we are surfing on. So I think that's one of the biggest differences from an enterprise side. The, the fears are quite the same. It's, it's like we are going to the cloud and we need to use a service and how can we work through that? I do not see that many differences. So >>Martina, you were proven right? You bet early on a technology adoption has been there. As you're looking forward, what are the things that, that we are early on today that are exciting you or that you think we're going to be talking about 2020 and beyond? >>Yeah. What I think what will come to us is more intelligence and more AI stuff because this is something which will really help us. And you see the, the little small things in PowerPoint that you get your beautiful designed PowerPoint slides automatically that your auto client says, Hey, you have an appointment, you have a really recording in five minutes, you need 10 minutes to go. Should I send an email that you are running late? So we will see much more intelligence in there. And also the new projects which, which are brought, they are, so knowledge sharing will be fundamental in the future that we find the resources we need and they're relevant what we need in, in, in the, in the time we need it. So what does this mean for the future? I mean you're just describing a, a world in which we all can be more productive. >>We are communicating more seamlessly. What does this mean for how teams communicate and collaborate? Yeah. Um, so what does think every positive side also might have a negative side? We go into an always on scenario, so we will be connected everywhere at home during cooking, doing, bringing kids to school and so on. So what I think what we as humans need to learn is how we can separate us from that and how we can just quiet down and get some space left out of the full amount of information which is around us because we can't get every single information and to see that very often when I talk with customers, have around Yammer, they said it's just too much. I have to read so much information because you feel you are losing control and you are losing information and this is what we need to learn as humans. >>Any, you know, what, what guidance do you give to people? The, the world of streams, right? I remember social media, they were like, Oh my gosh, I didn't look at it for the weekend. How do I, you know, look at all of that stuff that I missed. And usually I just frame, I'm like, you ignore everything that you missed and you start where it is today. But it's different in a work environment. >>Yeah. In a work environment. So my advice for customers is everything that I tell you at Tecton is interesting for you. If you're not tech, it's probably not for you. So this is the main curse. It's like unread emails or it's like the little notification bar. You got a message, a personal message to one-to-one message, then you should react on that. That's it. And not read everything because it's probably not relevant for you at. That's great advice. Words to live by. Thank you so much for Martina. Yeah. Pleasure having again, I'm Rebecca Knight for two minimums. 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 cube nation and welcome to back to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are closing down the second day of the three days of coverage. This is day two >>wall to wall to wall coverage. Joining us is Thomas LA rock, best job title ever, head geek at solar winds or speaker data expert and SQL rockstar and Microsoft MVP and Microsoft MVP and yes importantly and you saved me. You didn't have me on yesterday. You waited to the second day, the end of the second day. Thomas, we wanted to make sure that by the time you came on that you had got some time to really absorb some of those announcements and be ready to give us a different perspective on some of the items. All right. Precisely. So this is your 10th Microsoft ignite. It is my first go back to tech ed 2010 so yeah, my 10th consecutive between tech ed and McKnight. Thoughts, impressions of 2019, how is it different? How is the show evolving? What does the show all about? So your perspective, you know, I do a lot of events and shows and what my impression right now just over these two days is that this is one of the only shows this year I've been to where I feel the from year over year, the expo hall is say bigger. >>I mean I know it's the same size the last year. I think there's actually more vendors here this year. There are, and there's more people here. This year in the expo hall. Our traffic at the booth yesterday was amazing and continued through today. Uh, other events I've been to, I feel it's kind of shrinking a little bit. So to me the partners and the ecosystem for Microsoft in general is grow or I should just say Azure because that's what I think this show really is. Now I think the old tech ed you had mentioned was more like a windows type a show. But now this is th these shows between AWS and this, you're talking about the two biggest providers of infrastructure. This is an Azure show. Yeah. Well and Thomas, if you come follow us along, I'll be at CubeCon in two weeks and I'll be at AWS re invent. >>Yup. Right after Thanksgiving. Both of those shows are growing. The ecosystem are growing there too. So the cloud is definitely one of those. The raising tide is moving all boats. I want to poke you say Azure. Azure is definitely one of the main pieces, but you know, the applications that data are so important to your last year. AI front and center. Um, it was, it was more, you know, they didn't use the term AI as much here. You know, Satya, I was talking about, you know, tech intensity and all of the things we can do with data. So this, while a cloud is a major piece, I wouldn't call this just a cloud show because I think that would limit what we're actually talking about here. Cause there's so many of the apps and so many of the things. When I talked to some of the ecosystem providers, you know, they're looking for that solution that fits it and therefore they're go into the ecosystem and talking about all of those pieces. >>So for an infrastructure guy like me, cloud's a big piece of it, but it's way more than that. And that's one of the challenges is there's, you know, everything from, you know, the latest Azure arc all the way through big edge and mobile devices and, uh, you know, heck, there's even, you know, in the store they've got people playing Xbox. Uh, so it's, there's a lot in your Microsoft community here. So. Absolutely. So I, I didn't say cloud though. I said it's an Azure show. And then as your show is to me is almost synonymous with Microsoft and all that stuff. You see, uh, over there, that entire hall, you're right. They have all those other things. They have the, all the power apps, they have those applications, they have everything for developers that you need. But still to me, uh, so what was that stat you just gave me? >>We were debating, it's roughly eight upwards of 80% of workloads are still earth on premises, right? It's still there. So with Azure Ark now they have the ability to take an Azure surface and put it in your data center wherever you want it. So when I say it's an Azure show, it's not even that. It's just cloud. The cloud is coming to you and we see it with VMware, we see it with AWS and outposts that they have decided that 80% is a huge market and they're coming for it. Right? So, so Thomas, if you'd asked me two years ago, uh, which of the hyperscale providers as best as hybrid, my answer would have been Microsoft because they're in both places. The hybrid discussion at this show is way different. There was a lot of retooling. We talked about what was going on. Azure stacks has been there, but arc kind of is a new big push and everybody is trying to look at that and say, wait, is this a management tool? >>Is this just the latest Kubernetes flavor? In your viewpoint, how does arc fit in the Microsoft story? And you know, what should we be comparing it to from the other Amazon, VMware, you know, red hat type of pliers out there? Well Brian, >> I think it's the same thing is that, I was just saying is that arc to me, we can talk about the plumbing. So yeah, they put a fancy name on whether it's Kubernetes, Coobernetti's and all that stuff, but no arc to me is a way for Microsoft to get their hands on as many data estates as possible. Right? I know data state, right? I have a data state and it's next to my data Lake and I work at the data factory and everything's stored in the data warehouse and I shop at the data Mark. We can go on forever with this stuff, but that is the reality of the world. >>And the thing is all those things exist and they're, as your arc is, it's the ability to extend into there because what is Azure and AWS, they're nothing more than an electric company. Their utility and the utility, you're going to offer similar services and that's what they have. And of course VM Ware's in the mix as well. And it's just the ability for all those companies to have their hands on your data, wherever it is, whether it's in your data center or with them, they don't care. They just want the ability to have a piece of that data as it's in transit or at rest. >>And so what's the end there? I mean, you're making that sound like there's some sort of nefarious, uh, end game here. >>It's, I wouldn't say so. Farias I would just say it's market share. What's the end is to survive, to have the market share, to continue to build new cool things. Right. Um, I, I think the end is some consolidation. I don't think the end is, I don't know. Let's say there's five major players. I don't think those five will always exist. I think the are gonna see it shrink over time, but it really, that depends on how well they partner with each other too. Um, I think there's room for everybody, but it's just depends on where they want to say, um, if they want the co-exist or not. Right. So for some of them like VMware, that's really just kind of software, right? They're partnering with clouds. But the clouds are the infrastructure hose. And so how long does VMware really have? Now they've done the nice pivot and I think they're going to last a little bit longer. >>But had they not taken that pivot in the last year or two? I think their timeline with a much shorter, yeah, it's interesting cause we've been looking at, you talk about that cloud adoption, some of the traditional vendors out there, um, many of which are, you know, ecosystem providers that have show here it has to react and deal with the cloud. You know, everybody's jumped on the Kubernetes fly and bandwagon. Everybody's partnering especially with Azure but also AWS and the like. Um, you know, Thomas, you and your company deal with a lot of end users out there. What are they looking for when it comes to being a trusted provider? You know, who, what, what, what's there and how does Microsoft stack up? When we talk about that Satya talked about trust a lot and you know, just curious to how you see them being perceived out there and you know, when customer want to lead partner, what do they want? >>Well, uh, for us, we have, uh, I believe over 300,000 customers at this point and, uh, I think roughly 53% of them are Azure base and that's a higher percentage than what we have for AWS, for our customer base. So we have taken steps to be that trusted partner. So when these companies are going to take that 80% workload that isn't there yet, uh, just in the booth discussions this week where they come to us and they say, Hey, we're going to owe three 65, how can you help us? We're going here at small steps at the time, so that workload that will chip away at it, but we're a company that can help with that transition as people move their workloads and their systems into a place like Azure. Uh, I think what you're gonna also see is our ability to, um, help people understand wherever they want their for structure. >>So for example, last week we announced how we have 15 of our products are now, um, deployed to the Azure marketplace. So you're talking two clicks and everything's deployed for you and you're up and running. And then if you want, if you want to, you know, manage the nodes that are still in your data center, you can just point everything to go up to Azure and Azure, handle a lot of those infrastructure needs for you. So that to me is the trust where you partner with a company like Microsoft and you say, what will it take for us to get in the marketplace? What will it take for us to help help us help, help us help you get that data into your data, into your cloud, right? I think our customers really want to know that when it comes to, Hey, I got to go to Azure. Are you somebody who could help us get there and stay there and manage and monitor the stuff for us? >>I want to talk productivity because I think you have a pretty different take from Satya Nadella. So he had a, he on the, on the main stage yesterday, he said the human act, human attention to inattention is at the root of all productivity. He's, he laid out a stat when you multitask it takes 25 minutes. I'm sorry I got distracted. So it was a 25 minutes. Yes, 25 minutes and you lose 40% of your productivity with that 25 minute lapse. So I w I felt that compelling and that rang true to me. But absolutely >>it's true. So right after he got done with that, Microsoft told us the answer was they were going to take Yammer and shove it inside teams on a shoving inside outlook. I don't think we need more productivity tools. I don't think we need more ways of distracting us. They say they say, Hey, it's great. We'll put tasks from outlook right inside teams. I'm like maybe I'm in teams cause I shut down outlook because I'm distracted by email and other things right now maybe I don't need that. Is it a nice to have and it's a possible thing I guess, but at the end of the day, I don't need you shoving all these extra things into all the things. You're just making the problem worse. We need fewer productivity tools. At what point do we hit peak productivity? I guess? I think we're there. I think I have all the tools that enable me to do my job already. I don't need them all tightly integrated. I need to shut more things off. Right. In order to get stuff done. >>That's a, that's an excellent point because when I want to get work done, I go to a place where I can't get online. Right. Because that's, that's the biggest, >>that's why, uh, I work remote from home one that one of my advantages is I don't have people just walking by my desk and, and distracting me with all sorts of things. That's a huge advantage. I try to take advantage of what, cause I work remote, but for people in an office, bells, whistles, lists that and the other, you know, uh, I just, I get a cup of coffee. You know, it's, it's difficult and I'm not sure that these companies, not just Microsoft, I just don't think companies are really thinking through if they're making things better or not. Every one of them Slack, all of them, they all think that they're the one that's all you need. It's not true and it's not making things better. Yeah, it's a true, we've had good feedback about teams overall here. Especially you've talked to a number of people that are remote workers and they feel that that does help them get connected with teams and, uh, you know, in the remote areas and by itself, but, you know, create point, uh, on the productivity stuff too. >>Do you use teams to use teams? Uh, kind of reluctant at first, like, do I need the another tool? But now that, uh, we've all kind of started switching to it and my company went O three 65 as well. Some teams comes with it and, uh, I do find that very useful, um, uh, much more so than I have any of the other tools in the past. I think teams took a lot of good things from a lot of different tools and they rolled out of them to the one they, and it works for me. It doesn't work for everybody though. Right? >>Exactly. Exactly. So what, so what else are you taking away from the, from your 10th ever ignite, you go back to the office, but is your home on Monday? What kinds of conversations are you going to have most stayed with you, have most resonated you? Okay. >>For me, uh, I, I focus a lot on the data platform and uh, I think the thing that's going to resonate the most with me, it really is Azure arc and what that, what the, what that really means and getting a little more involved with, uh, understanding where they're headed with it. Like just the idea they're going to give me that one management console that can control everything. Earth and cloud. Uh, that's an interesting thing. I see. Come at me. I work for a tools vendor, so as a tools vendor, I'm sitting there going, so Microsoft's building something that gives visibility into both. Now, what does that mean for me and where we might, we want to think about pivoting to make sure that we stay ahead and keep offering value where Microsoft might have a gap. Um, so I think those are the things I'll probably be thinking about. >>My role as head geek is to, you know, help our users and the people who write the code and, you know, connect, share and learn and figure out where things are going. And also involves partnering and having conversations with folks at Microsoft, uh, to help our company, you know, continue to have that edge. So I think that's all I'll be thinking about on Monday, probably now on the plane ride home on Friday, but who knows, right. Uh, Thomas, any other final words about the community here? Uh, you know, you're a Microsoft MVP is we set up in front, uh, you know, Microsoft should get great kudos for, they put the unity in community and they talk about diversity and inclusion, something they highlight something that, at least from the viewpoint we've had, uh, they seem to be doing a good job in moving the needle here. >>But, uh, you know, as an insider to the Microsoft community, uh, anything particular that you'd call out? Well, certainly the changes and the emphasis I've seen on diversity inclusion over the years. You're absolutely right. I think, I know this, you were having some interviews earlier to have those specific discussions and, uh, it's an important conversation to have, uh, uh, as somebody who organizes events, it becomes, you know, what's the diversity, how diverse should the event be? At what point are we diverse enough? Right? And what does that really mean? And so I look at it and I say, if I'm going to run an event that caters to say an it community, well, what's the makeup of the it community? Then the speakers should represent the community that they're trying to speak to. So what I've seen over these 11 years is a lot more focus for events, especially like ones I help organize where it's like, no, what I'm going to go out and recruit the speakers that I need to represent the people that I want them to be presenting to. >>Uh, I don't think I will recall that I'm old. I don't recall a lot of things, but you know, 11 years ago when I was, when I joined to became an MVP, I, I don't think that the diversity was there and I don't think the efforts were being done. I think those efforts have come just in the past few years, four or five years maybe society as a whole, but specifically inside Microsoft and, and their programs. And I think it's fabulous. Uh, I, I think you could never be diverse enough. I guess. I don't know how to say that. I think he could always do more to, uh, include, I always say inclusion is better than the exclusion any day. You can never do enough for that. And I think Microsoft's made great efforts. I'm, I'm really proud to call myself a Microsoft MVP. Uh, I, I think it's a great program. I'm glad that I questioned, you know, their selection method maybe because they keep inviting me back, but they do and, but I love it. I, it's been a great ride, >>a great note to end on. Thomas law crock head geek. Great. Great to have you on the show. Great. Great. Thanks for having me back. I really appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu minimums. Come back tomorrow for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite.

(mellow music) >> Voiceover: Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE, here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Dr. WandaJean Jones. She is the Digital Learning Evangelist at GE Healthcare. Thank you so much for coming on the show! >> Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. >> Well we're excited to have you. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you do as the Digital Learning Evangelist, which is a very cool title. >> As Digital Learning Evangelist, the main part of my job is to manage our digital learning ecosystem. So, we have a learning management system, we use Adobe Captivate Prime. And then the other part of my job is to teach people how to use digital tools that will help make their lives a little bit easier. Save time, automate processes, and, you know, all the way around, create efficiencies. >> And how (chuckles). Are the employees willing to go there? Or are they naturally skeptical? I mean, what would you say? I mean, introducing a new technology to employees is famously a hard thing to do. How do you find it? >> Well, I'm a teacher at heart, so what I like to do is take what they already know and build off of that. So typically, if an employee comes to me and says, "WandaJean, we really want to learn "how to manage all of these Excel spreadsheets, "there's lots of data." I tell them, you know, "Come to the meeting with your Excel spreadsheets," and then I want them to tell me the story about their process, and then I go through and match them, kind of play matchmaker, and match them to that technology that already fits within their current behavior. There's some things that they'll have to change just a little bit, but we don't want to do it so much that they find it overwhelming, and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm never going to get this." So, I want to make sure they're comfortable and, you know, listening to them talk and seeing the sophistication in their current process, I'll know how far I can go. >> Now are these kind of next-gen productivity tools that you're getting them onto? Or are these kind of new collaboration tools that the company's taken on? What are some of the things you're transitioning them off of and putting them onto? >> I think one of the things is, the best part is, most of the work that's coming to me to transform, if you will, it's very manual. So, it's knowing where the tools are, and I make sure that I am very tool promiscuous. I like to go and look at all of these tools, and I like to understand which tools do what. And then I want to understand the role of the person and what they do for the business. And how those two can come together. So it's a matchmaker. The tools are, most of the time, digital collaborative tools. So we have a full suite of all sorts of tools at GE Healthcare. So we're definitely no short of tools. But sometimes people just haven't taken that digital leap to figure out, "How do I get my process "a little more digitized and save myself some time?" >> So what kinds of things are the people on your team working through, in terms of the kinds of processes you're helping them automate, the kinds of things you're helping them do manually, and how is Smartsheet coming into play here? >> Okay. So, I like to look at things from the triple constraints: Cost, quality, and speed. So, when you think about cost, quality, and speed, you want to take cost out of the process. You want to improve the quality by, you know, creating some sort of a standardization that everybody's going to do. And then you want to speed up the process that people can bring that, whatever it is, to market. And when I look at those three levers, this is exactly what my end users want to do anyway. So Smartsheet is able to answer all of those in such a remarkable way. That's usually the top of the list, when it comes to, you know, how are we going to implement this new digital process, Smartsheet is up there. It's the all-in-wonder. I call it the all-in-wonder tool at work, and people say, "Okay, here she comes. "She's going to talk about Smartsheet." That's because, I always say, "Smartsheet does a thousand things." That's why I really want to listen to what is necessary. I don't want to tell you about a thousand things. I only want to tell you about the things that, you know, you're looking at in this process. When the person starts using the new Smartsheet process, almost always they come back to me and say, "Look what else I found." So as they go on that journey, they start finding other things as well. And then we get excited together, and I say, "But did you see this?" And so, this whole, you know, Santa Claus is comin' to town (all laugh) That's kind of what it feels like. >> So, how has the collaboration culture changed over time? A lot of the conversations here around Smartsheet is that, A, you know, you can bring in people from an external organization, not to mention you can bring in external people from your organization within the big company. Have you seen a big change in you know, kind of how the teams form, and what's kind of the collaborative workgroup as these collaboration tools have suddenly become available? >> I think the biggest part with collaboration is now people know the upstream process and the downstream process. So, what information is going into this process, what do I need to do with it, and then what is the way that it needs to be ready for that next handoff, from a process perspective? So I like that. The @mentions are beyond wonderful. When I think about those @mentions, we have the place, especially in Smartsheet, to create comments. And you create the comment, but I'm too busy. I'm not going to go back to row 87 and see what you said. But, if you do this @mention, I've noticed that people, when they're using the app, you know, the @mention comes through. Even if they're not directly at their email, they'll go and see, "Oh, somebody's talking to me here." And so their app is helping them respond in real time. So, another part of the collaboration piece is cutting out collaboration. So, a lot of meetings, "'Kay, give me the status, what's the status." Well we can certainly just automate those reports, and make it exactly what, you know, the executive or the leader wanted to know, from a high-level perspective. And so, we don't have to have as many meetings. >> I love it though. That collaboration means cutting out collaboration. >> Mm-hmm. >> That is so important. One of the things that you said that was really striking is, understanding the upstream and the downstream. Because we heard on the main stage, and we are hearing a lot today, about how it's providing much more visibility. And leaders are able to see the big picture, and understand where things are working and where things are not working. But it actually, it's also helpful for the everyday employees, for the people who are several notches below, to understand and have that full picture. Can you talk about how having the full information has changed the way your company gets work done? >> Absolutely. So, inside of the process that I own, I'm in a learning and development team, and there are several trainers. There are several people who own curriculum and, you know, we are serving about 4,000 employees. We want to make sure these employees are getting the right learning that they need, and preparing them to do their job. So I certainly want to empower those trainers and curriculum owners to do their thing. I'm not going to go to class with you. I probably don't even know your content. But when I looked at Smartsheet dashboards, I started, you know, reporting is great. But when you flip it around, it's now a portal. And this is a information portal that everybody can be connected to. So, if we have a release in our system, if there's new materials that they can share, these can be happening right there at that portal. So I like it that I can empower people to not need me. And sometimes that can be scary. You think, "Oh, automation, it's coming, "and a robot's going to take over my job!" It's not that it's going to do, I have lots to do. But having this portal view allows people to go in and really be empowered. The other thing I have is sort of a ticketing system. So there's one of me, and 4,000 of them, and everybody might want something from WandaJean. So, I have a intake form that could easily take that work in and talk to me, and I get to know, you know, they put timeframes around when they need this. So I get to bubble up which ones are the most important ones, and which ones I can put off for a little bit. But at the end of the year, my leader might want to come back to me and say, "You know, what have you done for me lately?" And so, all of this input that has come through in this really standardized way could create a dashboard about what I've been doing, and I get to celebrate and understand, wow, I've had 50% more learning requests, and this many people wanted to learn about a tool, and, so I would have those metrics to even celebrate my own work and what I do as an individual. >> That's really interesting, right? 'Cause then you go from, the classic paradigm is there's data, right, which then becomes information, which then hopefully becomes some insight that you can actually take action. So it sounds like you're pulling that just on your straight-up inbound form, to actually get a whole lot of information on what's going on in that community, and where you can prioritize your time, your activities. >> Yes, well we create job requisitions and we hire people for roles. You know, you get this job description, you will do this and you will do that. It will be interesting at the end of the year to look back at this intake and see everything that you've actually done, versus what you signed up to do when you took the job. So, sometimes it looks really different, like, "Wait a minute, I think I need some more money." (Rebecca laughs) "'Cause I didn't get hired for this." >> Right, right, right, I've done so much more. >> Yes. >> Talk a little bit about the silos within the organization, and the ways in which the Smartsheet is helping break down those silos. >> Okay. So I talked to you guys a little earlier and told you that I believe that silo is an acronym for Secrets in the Learning Organization. And when you have those secrets, and you have no idea what this team or this team is doing, it could really cost the company cost, quality, speed. It's going to slow us down. We're going to both duplicate processes. And the quality of our product, instead of having process excellence, we'll have pockets of excellence. And we want to make everybody into these rockstars for the company. So, putting it together and making it more of, you know, a transparent ecosystem is awesome. The one thing that I really like is, when you map out a process and you pull in the right people and get those people involved, you'll get to understand, you know, resource management, any constraints, and you know, "Why is it, Bob, that you haven't done anything with this?" Where, I don't do that. And, you know, it starts a conversation. We can see, number one, what's wrong. And then we could have a conversation with the person about what's wrong. And it gives another action item for us to make it right. So without these sorts of, you know, without Smartsheet really helping us technologically bring those things together, it would be hard for me to even know where Bob is. It's a very big company. GE Healthcare is about 60,000 people. So, I don't know. I don't even know where Bob is right now. Bob, where are you? (laughter) But if Bob gets pulled into that Smartsheet, it shrinks the world, and it makes our big giant company just that much smaller, and people start knowing who you are and what you're supposed to be doing. And you get the right traffic of work. And then anything else that doesn't belong to you, it can get rerouted. >> Love to get your take on re-skilling, which isn't directly part of what you're doing, but you're currently doing re-skilling in terms of tools to execute different, you're training people to probably be more collaborative by using these tools and that different types of process. So important that re-skilling happens in the future, as all the jobs change. Just, you know, are people up for this? Are they excited to learn a new tool? Do they see that there're different ways to get work done than maybe our tradition? Or you still got the old codgers in the back, saying, you know, "That's not the way we did it 20 years ago!" >> Exactly, you do have that, you do have that. But, you know, this whole fake it until you make it, it's not going to work anymore. There's so many opportunities, especially within our company. We are sharing with our people leaders how to have collaboration across teams. Really don't think that your whole world is just right here inside of your job. Think broadly about what you do. And I like to say that, you know, I act locally but I think globally. So that just means, if I see that there is a process that I'm a part of, this is a mindset that we're sharing with our employees. If you see there's a process that you're a part of, and you see that it's broken and you fix it, fix it in such a way that it scales, and that it's applicable. You know, if we're all process managers, you probably have this problem too. So, create the fix, and then celebrate that socially, and show someone else, you can do it too. >> Rebecca: You can replicate this. >> You can replicate this. It's the classic before and after. You know, if we want to lose weight, we don't want to see the skinny person and telling, you know, how we got skinny. We want to see when you were larger, you know? You want to see the before and the after, and make sure that, you know, and when people see that, like, "It's possible? "I don't have to be, like, this superstar coder?" When they see how easy it is and they grab that process, I've seen them just do wonderful things. It's amazing, what our employees do. >> So, as a Digital Learning Evangelist, I mean, I don't know, how many are there of you in the world? And is it lonely? Do you come to these conferences to sort of have some community and some commiseration and understanding? I mean, what is it like, and how do you share your best practices with other people who do what you do in other companies? >> Well, in other companies, of course, our social networks, LinkedIn and those professional communities that I'm a part of, Smartsheet has a user group community, we can share there. Internally, there are people who are very interested in process. We use Yammer, so Microsoft Yammer. And we have a Smartsheet Yammer channel. This is one of the most healthiest channels in our business. We can see the stats on how many people are asking questions. And you have people coming there and saying, "Has anybody ever done this?" When I see that sort of curiosity, when I see someone in Europe jumping to help somebody in Mexico, it really is energizing, and it lets us know that everybody's trying to help everybody win. But how do I collaborate and get with other people? I do. I collaborate with other companies that, you know, I found out that Starbucks actually used Smartsheet during a disaster where there was a hurricane and they sent a Smartsheet forum out to their baristas, "Are you okay? "Can you make some coffee?" And, you know-- (laughter) >> Can you make the coffee. >> "And, oh by the way, take good pictures of the damage, "so we can submit it to our insurance." So, that's something that our company can use. And I'll take that back to our team, and say, "Guess what Starbucks did with this?" And, "Guess what PayPal did with this?" I sent PayPal's Smartsheet movie around to our executive team. They were very impressed. Now, it's not just that they were impressed. It's that, over the next two months, I heard that very same executive say, "We're going to create an integrated marketing calendar, "and we're going to use Smartsheet." That just made me feel so rewarded, that, you know, somebody is listening. You're not just talking! (Rebecca laughs) There are some converts! >> Great. Well, WandaJean, a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Please come back again. >> Yes, I will! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Jeff Fricks, stay tuned of more of theCUBE's live coverage of ENGAGE 2019. (minimal techno tone) (mellow 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)