from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation you know for years marketers marketers have been pushing for more digital especially with their big conferences I heard forward-thinking CMO say the war will be won in digital but the sales teams love the belly-to-belly interaction so every year once or even sometimes more often big corporations have hosted gatherings of thousands or even tens of thousands of attendees these events were like rock concerts they had DJs in the hallway thumping music giant screens beautiful pitches highly produced videos thing a technical breakouts Food lines private dinners etc all come on it culminating in a customer appreciation event with a big-name band physical events are expensive but they generate tons of leads for the host companies and their partner ecosystems well then BOOM coronavirus hits and the marketing teams got what they wished for right overnight virtual events became a mandate if you don't have a solution you were in big trouble because your leads from these large events just dried up hello everyone this is Dave Allen day and welcome to this week's cube insights powered by ETR ETR is entering its quiet period and I won't be able to share any new data for a couple of weeks so rather than look back at the April survey in this breaking analysis we thought we'd take a pause and really talk about the virtual event landscape and just a few of the things that we've learned in the past 120 days now this isn't meant to be an exhaustive list but we do want to call out a few important items that we see is critical in this new digital world in the isolation economy every company scrambled they took one of three paths first companies either postpone their events to buy some time think like Dell technology world Google cloud next cube convey my MIT CBO event etc or to some companies flat-out canceled their events for the year until next year like snowflake and uipath forth number three they scrambled to deploy a virtual event and they went forward IBM think did this HPE discover Susac on AWS summits docker convey Monde a peggle world Vertica big data conference octane sa P sapphire and hundreds of others pushed forward so when this braking analysis I want to share some data from the cube what we've learned not only in the last hundred and twenty days but in ten years of doing events mostly physical and we want to share the new rules of events and event marketing and beyond so let's get right into it everyone knows events events have gone virtual and there are tons of people who could give you advice on approving your digital events including us and and I will in this segment but the first thing that everyone found out is they're going to attract far more people online with a free virtual event than they do with a paid physical event so removing time timing in the expensive travel dramatically increases the participation Tam the total available market here's a tweet from docker CEO Scott Johnson he says that he's looking forward to welcoming 50,000 people to his event this is based on registration data somewhere around 30,000 people logged into the live event so docker got 60% of the pre event registrants to actually log in which is outstanding but there's a lot more to this story I'll share some other stats that are worth mentioning by the way I got permission from docker to to share these numbers not surprising because the event was it was a huge success for such a small company in the end they got nearly 83,000 registrations and they continue to come in weeks after the event which was held in late May now marketers generally will cite 2 to 3 minutes as a respect-- respectable time on site for a web property docker logged in users averaged almost four and a half minutes on site that's the average the bell curve sauce superfans like this guy who was binge watching so this brings me to rule number one it's actually really easy to get people to sign up for free online events but it's not so easy to keep them there now I could talk all day about what docker did right and I'm gonna bring some examples in during this except this segment but the one thing docker did was they did a call for papers or a call for sessions and that's a lot of work but if you look at the docket on speaker list the content is all community driven not all but mostly community driven talker had to break some eggs and reject some folks but it also had a sponsor track so it gave folks another avenue to participate so big success for docker they definitely did it right which brings us to new rule number two attention is precious you got to create high-quality content and realize that you have much less time with participants than if they were in person now unfortunately the doctor docker example is a bit of an outlier it hasn't always been this pretty remember that scene in the social network the movie when a duardo pulled the funding on the servers just to get marks attention remember how Jesse Eisenberg the actor who played Zuckerberg reacted everybody else we don't crash ever if the server's are down for even a day our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed the whole point well some of the big tech companies crashed their servers and they say there's no such thing as bad press but look at look what happened to s AP and s AP apologized publicly and its CEO told people that they made a mistake in outsourcing their event platform so this brings us to new rule number three don't crash now I come back to Dhaka Khan for a second here's a tweet from a developer who shared the network traffic profile of his network before and during docker con you can see no glitches I mean I don't mean to pick on sa P they they owned the problem and look s AP had a huge attention attendance at its digital event more than 200,000 people and over a million views so Wow you'll kill me with that problem but it underscores the importance of scaling and s AP you have to say was not alone there have been lots of fails from much smaller events here's an example that was really frustrating you try to log in at 7:59 but the event doesn't start until 8:00 sharp really come on back in 60 seconds and in another example there was a slide failure I mean many of these virtual events are glorified webinars so if you're going to rely on slide where make sure the slides will render its scale you maybe embed them into the video you know but at least this company had a back-up plan here's another example and I've redacted the email because I'm not here to throw anyone under the bus well you know kind of but but no reason to name names you know who they are but in this case an old legacy webinar platform failed and they had to move to WebEx and again at least there was a back-up plan so you know it's been tough in a lot of these cases here's a tweet from Jason Reed it kind of summed sums it up now what does he mean by vendors are not getting the job done not enough creativity well not only were platforms failing they weren't performing adequately but the virtual experience is leaving many users unenthused they're they're just one alt-tab away from something better if the virtual event fails to engage them so new rule number four is virtual events that look like webinars actually our webinar webinars I mean in fairness you know the industry had to pivot with no notice but this is why I always tell people start with the outcome that you want and work backwards that'll inform you as to the content strategy the new roles you need to assign and make no mistakes there are new rules you know there's no site inspection virtual and then you got to figure out what you want to use your experience to be there's a whole lot to figure out and this next next one is a bit of a throwaway because yeah it's so obvious and everyone talks about it but I want to bring it up because it's important because I'm amazed at how many virtual event speakers really haven't thought through their setup you can look good you know or at least less bad get those things called books and raise up the laptop figure out some better audio your better yet get a good kit send it to their home with a nice camera and a solid mic maybe you know a clearer IFB comms for the ear spend some money to look good just as you might go and buy a nice outfit even if you're a developer put on a clean t-shirt so rule number five don't cheap out on production value get your guests a good set up and coach them up it doesn't have to be over the top no just a bit thought out okay one of the biggest mistakes I've seen is event organisers they become enamored with a platform and the features of that platform that really don't support their objectives kind of feature creep or they have so many competing objectives and masters that they're serving that they lose sight of the user experience and then the event becomes a buffet of unused features rather than a buffet of engaging content now many have told me that Dave these virtual events are too long there's too much content now I don't necessarily agree I really think if you have something to say you should say it as long as you do it right and you keep people engaged so I want to talk a little bit about a to of the meteor events that we attended one was octane twenty20 hosted by octo the identity management security player and then IBM think 2020 they called it the the think digital event experience and they both had multi day events with lots of content they both organized sessions by topic and made it pretty easy to find stuff and all assessing sessions had a reasonably consistent look and feel to them which kind of helped the production value IBM had content organized and categorized which made things easy to find and they both had good search and with IBM you could go directly from the list of topics right into the videos which I really liked very easy and intuitive and as you can see here in this octane video they had a nice and very ambitious agenda that was really quite well organized and things were pretty easy to find as you can see with this crisp filtering on the left hand side and in really nice search but one of the things that has been frustrating with most of the events that I've watched is you can't get to the sessions directly from the agenda you got to go back out for some linear path and find the content and it's somewhat confusing so I want to come back to the docker count example because I think there were two things that I found interesting and useful with docker con you know this got George nailed it when he said this is how you display a virtual conference what's relevant about this picture is you have multiple simultaneous sessions running live and concurrently and you can pop in and out of them you can easily see the sessions and this tile and there's a red line this linear clock that's running in real time to show you where you are in the event agenda versus in a time of day so I felt like with docker that as a user user you're really connected to the event you come to the site and there's a hero video very easy to find the content and in fact you can't miss it it's not a sales pitch to get to the content and then I really liked what what George change was talking about in terms of the agenda and the tile layout you can see they ran simultaneous sessions and at one point up to seven at once and they gave their sponsors a track on the agenda which is very easy to navigate but what I really like as well is when you click on a tile it takes you directly to the session video and you can see the chat which docker preserved in the PO event mode and you have this easy-to-follow agenda and again you can go directly to the session video and in the chat from the agenda so many paths to find the content I mean something so simple is navigating directly from the agenda to the session most events haven't done that they make you back out and then what I call this linear manner and then go forward and find the sessions that you want and then dive in now maybe they're trying to simulate walking to a session in a Las Vegas Convention Center because it takes about that long to figure out where most of these events in these sessions live so rule number six is make it easy to discover and consume content sounds so simple why is it not happening in most events okay I'm running out of time so I want to encapsulate a number of items in one idea that we talk about all the time at the cube I ran a little survey of the day and someone asked does it really make sense to cram educational content product content partner content customer content rally content and leadership content into the constrain confines of an arbitrary one or two-day window I thought that was an interesting comment now it doesn't necessarily mean shorten up the virtual event which a lot of people think should happen people complain that these things are too long well let me leave you with this it's actually not just about events what do I mean by that well you know how everyone says that all companies are software companies or every company is a SAS company well guess what we believe that every company is a media company in 2004 at the low point of its reputation Microsoft launched channel 9 it was named after the United Airlines channel 9 that lets you listen in to the pilots and their unfiltered conversations kind of cool Microsoft understood that having an authentic voice with which to communicate to developers and serve its community was a smart thing to do and that is the key point channel 9 is about community it's not about audience metrics or lead generation both important things but Microsoft they launched this site understanding the leverage it gets out of its community of developers and instead of treating them like leads they created a site to help developers learn so rule number seven is get your best media mojo on one of the biggest failures I see with physical events and it's clearly carrying over to digital is the failure to optimize the post-event opportunity and experience so just like physical events when the event is over I see companies and their employees they're so burnt out after a virtual event because they feel like they've just given birth and what do they do now after the event they take some time off they got to recharge and when they come back they're swamped and so they're on to the next project it might be another event it might be a webinar series or some regional summits or whatever now it's interesting it feels like all tech companies talk about these days is breaking down silos but most of these parent and child events are disconnected silos sure maybe the data around the events is consolidated into a marketing cloud maybe so that you can nurture leads okay that's fine but what about the community kovat has given us a great opportunity to reimagine how we serve communities and one thing I'm certain about is that physical events they're going to come back at some point in some form but when they do there's gonna be a stronger digital component attached to them hybrids will emerge and some will serve communities better than others and in our opinion the ones that do the best job in digital and serving their communities are gonna win the marketing Wars so ask yourself how are you serving your community are you serving the best way that you can is a lead conversion your number one metric that's okay there's nothing wrong with that but how are your content consumption metrics looking what are you measuring what does your Arc of content look like what's your content and an organic media strategy what does your media stack look like media stack you ask what do you mean Dave well you nailed physical and then you were forced to do virtual overnight eventually there's going to be a hybrid that emerges so there's physical at the bottom and then there's a virtual layer and then you get this hybrid layer at some point on top of that at the very top of the stack you got apps social media you got corporate content you got TV like channel 9 you have video library's website you have tools for agile media you got media production and distribution tooling remember customers will be entering from any one of these layers of that stack and they'll be looking to you for guidance inspiration learning vision product knowledge how to's etc and you'd be delivering that primarily through content so your media stack should be designed to serve your community events software yeah sure but it's much more than that we believe that this stack will emerge not as a monolithic beast but rather as a set of scalable cloud services and api's think of paths for media that you can skin yes of course but also one that you can control add value to integrate with other platforms and fit your business as your community demands and remember new roles are emerging as a result of this pandemic and the pivot to digital the things are different really mostly from from most physical events is that it's very important to think about these roles and one of the important roles is this designer or UX developer that can actually do some coding and API integration think of it as a DevOps for digital organizations that's emerging organizations like yours will want self-service and sometimes out-of-the-box functionality and features for sure no question but we believe that as a media producer you will want to customize your media experience for your community and this work will require new skills that you haven't really prioritized in the past what what do you think what's your vision as to how this will all play out and unfold do you buy that all companies must become media companies or at least media savvy not in the sense of Corp comms but really as an organic media producer tweet me at devonté or email me at David Galante at Silicon angle comm or comment on my LinkedIn post who would react next week with some data from et our survey sphere thanks for watching this wiki bond cube insights powered by ETR this is Dave Volante we'll see you next time [Music]

>> Announcer: 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. 26,000 people from around the world have descended onto the Orlando, here in Orlando, for Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Christina Warren. She is the senior cloud advocate at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about your work as a senior cloud advocate. And you are responsible for a lot of the video strategy of Channel 9. >> Yeah, I am. So we have a cloud advocacy scene within developer relations, and most of our advocates are focused on either kind of a specific technology area or a specific audience. I'm a little bit different in that I am kind of of a, I call myself, I'm kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. So I go across a lot of different technology areas, but I look at our video content and our video strategies that we have at Channel 9 and our YouTube channel, Microsoft Developer, and some of our other channels, and I think about what are they types of stories we want to tell, what's content do we want to create for our audience, and how can we bring new developers into our ecosystem, as well. >> So what are those stories? I mean, what do you, what are you hearing from customers and what are you hearing also from colleagues at Microsoft that say, "Here's something that we need to tell the world about"? >> Yeah, so I think it's really interesting. I think there are a lot of things. One, there, we were talking a little bit before the show. There's kind of an insatiable, I think, need for a lot of people how to get started, whether it's getting started coding, if you're wanting to learn Python or learn JavaScript or something else, or even if you're just wanting to, you're starting to get into infrastructure, and you're wanting to learn, okay, how do I, you know, spin things up on the cloud. How do I set things up? And having some of that base fundamentals content is really important, but I also think sometimes it's about troubleshooting, and it's about figuring out what are the new services. What can this do for me? And I think a lot of times, when I think about the stories we want to tell, it's not, oh look at how great our service or our product is but it's this is designed to ease my pain points and make my life as a developer or an ops person easier. >> Christina, in the early days, everybody thought that, you know, the promise of cloud was it, it was supposed to be simple and inexpensive, and unfortunately, we learned it is neither of those things by default, so, you know, how do we help people to go from, you know, it's only 20% of applications today are in the cloud. You know, really simplicity is something we need to attack, and education is one of those areas that we need, you know. Give us some examples of some of the things that your team's doing to try to help us get to the majority of environments and work loads. >> Yeah, so a great example is, you know, .NET Core 3.0 launched a couple of months ago, and there's been a big push there with cloud-native apps and cloud-native applications, and so we have like a new video series, The Cloud Native Show, that my colleague Shane Boyer heads up, where they go through kind of all the steps of cloud-native development. And what's great about this is that you have existing .NET developers who have not, to your point, you know, 80% of applications are still not on the cloud, so they're going from that older environment. And then this is saying, you can take the skills you already have, but this is how you think about these things in this new environment. And for a lot of things when it comes to tech, if you're, the way I can always think about things is the next generation of developers, they don't know a non-cloud world. They're literally cloud-first, and I think that's an important thing for all of us to consider is that the next generation developers, the kids who are in high school now, the kids who are in college, they don't know, you know, the pain of having to provision and deal with their own, you know, servers or data centers. They've only known the cloud. And so, but that's an interesting opportunity both to create cloud-first content for them, but for the people who have been using things to say, okay, what you've already been doing, there are changes, but you're not starting from zero, and you can take some of the things you already know and just move that into, into the new world. >> Yeah, well, one of the interesting things we've found this week is that when we talk about engaging with Microsoft, it's not just .NET, it's not just Windows, or Azure. We talked yesterday with Donovan Brown and Scott Hanselman, and it's you know, any app, any language, your tools, pulling those off together. That's really challenging from, you know, creating content out there, because, you know, you're not going to recreate the entire internet there. So how do you tie in what you're doing with other resources and have that, you know, communication, collaboration out there in the industry? >> So a lot of it I think from what I do and what a lot of us do, I look, I used to be a journalist, so I look at what's interesting to me and what stories I would want to tell and what things I would want to know more about. And so, you know, Visual Studio Online, which was announced this week, massive announcement. I'm super excited about that. I am super excited about what that means, and I know that the audience is going to be excited about that. So I look at an announcement like that, and I'm like okay, what kind of content can we work with with those product teams to do? What sort of tutorials would I like to build? What things would I want to know more about if, if I were, you know, really experienced or just getting started? And I think some other areas are, for instance, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, WSL 2 will be coming out in the future. That's a great opportunity for people who are both familiar with Linux and might not be familiar with Linux to kind of get started and using Windows as their development platform. And so when I see trends like that happening or things around, you know, containers, you know, Kubernetes, you know, containerize all the things, start thinking about, okay, what are the opportunities? What are cool examples? What would I want to see as somebody who, who's tuning in? That's what I always try to think about is what would. I just try to think about it like a journalist. You know, what would an interesting story be to tell from my perspective? What would I want to know more about? And then we can go from there and work with the product groups and work with some of the other teams to make sure that we can tell those stories. >> So, I'm curious. As a former journalist, you spent a decade as a digital editor and reporter and commentator. What made you want to make the leap to big tech? >> You know, okay, so media is not a great place right now. So that's number one. Number two, you know, I was very technical as a journalist, and it was interesting because when I made that transition, I then had to really actually shore up my tech skills. And I said, okay, I have some of the basics, but I really need to like double down and invest in myself and invest in learning more. But I always, even when I was a journalist, I loved telling developer stories, and I loved advocating for developers. Even when I was, I was working at really mainstream places like Mashable, where, you know, they would send me to developer conferences, and I wouldn't just go to the press things. I would want to go to the sessions and talk to the developers and find out, okay, what are you excited about? What are the opportunities you see to build things? What's coming around that has you excited? I've always loved that. And so when the opportunity presented itself for me to be able to do that at Microsoft, I was like, oh, you know, I'd never considered that before, but that's really interesting, and that would be a interesting way of maybe seeing if I can do something else. >> One of the skills that you, that you, is common between what you do now and as work as a journalist is breaking down this technical language and making it accessible for a wider audience, particularly at more mainstream publications. What is your advice for people in terms of how to do that? Because on this show, we have a lot of technically-minded people who can really go deep into technology. But how do you then make it accessible? What is, what is your advice? >> I always try to think of who is your muse as someone who might not know what's, all the intricacies that are going on but is an intelligent person that can understand. So for me, I always use my mom. Now this was easier when I was a tech journalist than it is what I do now because she understands even less what I do now, but I try to think about, okay, how would I explain this to her? She doesn't need to know all of the intricacies, the nitty-gritty. But how could I explain something to her that would be technically accurate but would get the basic idea? And I think a lot of times when it comes to breaking down content, it's just getting to the essence of what problem is this solving, what is this doing that's better or worse, and how does it do it and in starting from there. And it, a lot of times it just takes a lot of work, and you figure out as you go along what getting feedback from users, frankly, based on they might be asking more clarifying questions, or maybe they'll want to know more about something or less about something else. This is confusing for me. And just modulating that as you go along. >> Yeah, Christina, it makes me laugh, actually. When I started blogging, my mother was one of the people that would read, and she would say, "Oh, yes, I heard about this cloud thing before. "I watched it on NPR." It's a nuanced and complicated message. I actually, I roll my eyes a little bit back at the old Microsoft to the cloud videos there, because it was like it didn't resonate. It's the stories that you're telling these days. How do you balance there's the outcomes is, yes, we want to, you know, solve, you know, some of the great challenges and help healthcare, but, you know, underneath, there's some nitty-gritty developer and infrastructure things that get solved. How do you make sure there's the connections between, you know, what the products do and the outcomes? >> Yeah, that's really interesting. You're right, it is a challenge. I think the, the important thing here is not every message has to have all of those components. So you can tell different stories. You could tell one story that's just more focused on the outcome and is just more focused on the opportunity and what's happening in healthcare, and you could have another story that might be about this is what's going on underneath that is allowing those things to happen. >> Yeah, do you, do you have any favorite, you know, outcome stories from Microsoft? >> Gosh, you know, yesterday, during Scott Hanselman's developer keynote, he was, he was, I didn't even know about the Chipotle case study. That was so interesting to me and seeing what they're doing with the different technology. That's, that was a really, that's just the first one that comes to mind I thought was really cool. I'm really excited about the opportunities we have in Quantum, and I'm really excited about opportunities in healthcare because, you know, I think we've all been to the doctor, and we've seen how much IT and how much tech infrastructure could help not just the process of diagnosing and helping things but just, even just the minutia of data entry and record delivery and keeping track of everything. So there, a lot of the things we've done there have been really interesting. >> One of the things you said is you love telling developer stories, and I'm a journalist, too. And I cover entrepreneurs, and I feel the same way about telling entrepreneur stories. Talk about some of the common characteristics you've seen. I mean, we can't obviously generalize an entire population of people, but talk about what you have seen as sort of the common elements of their personalities and their approach to solving problems. >> Right, so I think it's interesting. When I think about any developers, which are a little bit different than enterprise devs, although there are some similarities, you know, you start with, and I know for me when I start first started coding and when I first started building websites and then other things, like, for me, I wanted to either solve a problem, or I wanted to create something that other people could, could see. And so a lot of times that probably one of the more commonalities is, you know, developers, they're in many ways wanting to scratch their own itch. I wanted to do something, I couldn't figure out how to do it, so I built this myself, found out other people were using it, too, and I added features to it. I mean, I think that's what's so great about open-source is that people have the opportunity to collaborate either contributing code or even, you know, doing bug reports and or sharing ideas. And so I, one of the more common elements is I wanted to do something, or I had a really interesting idea, and I didn't see anyone else doing it, and so I just decided to build it myself. It's not that different from entrepreneurs, right. Like it's I see, I see a business opportunity, I see a business I want to do, so I'm going to build it. And that's, wanting to build things is probably the most common thing I see. >> Yeah, Christina, any common conversations or things that are coming up that, you know, people that aren't at this show, you'd like to share? >> Oh, gosh, I mean, I think there's been so much good stuff. I mentioned Visual Studio Online, which I think is really exciting because I'm really excited about being able to like be on my iPad and also code. Like, that's going to be really great. Also, I think the Arc stuff, the Azure Arc stuff is really interesting, the idea of being able to not just be focused on, you know, one platform, but being able to control all of your infrastructure no matter where it is is really, really, that's a really compelling story. That's something that makes me really excited because I love to just automate and simplify things, so anything that can make, you know, the life easier, I think is great. >> As a former journalist, I'd love your thoughts on the state of news today. I know you said you got out of it because it's not a great career path, but the overreach of social media, the spread of fake news, the real and perceived media biases. I'm interested in your thoughts about where we are today, particularly as it relates to coverage of technology. >> It's interesting. I think in some ways technology. For a really long time, most technology coverage was almost cheerleaderish. You could even look back even 20 years when the dot-com crash happened, and I was in high school then, but I was following all of that avidly. The after flow of that, the business press was maybe a little bit burned, but the technology press was still very much gung ho and was still very much cheerleading. That's changed a little bit as we've started to have to grapple with some of the consequences, good and bad, that happened with tech and with the internet. Right now, I almost feel like maybe we've gone a little bit over the edge a little bit more, and some of the critiques are fair, and some of them maybe are just, you know, it's popular to kind of be more negative. So that's been an interesting change, I think to see. You're right, though, when it comes to the spreading of kind of misinformation or people just reading things in headlines, it's really difficult I think, for people to find authoritative voices and things they can trust. Weirdly, though, I do actually think this is an opportunity for the big tech companies to help. This is things that AI could really play a big role in. These are things that could really kind of help, you know, recognize patterns of scan bots and of other things that aren't there and filter that out. But I think even when, I still feel good about journalism as a medium. I still think that the press is one of the most important assets we have, and even when we are going through shakier times, there are opportunities. I think that we will, it'll find it's way. And honestly, I really do think that technology is one of those things that will help get the real things, the important stories out there. >> All right, so, Christina, I guess final word is how should people think of Microsoft in 2019? >> We're here to help. You know, I think that we are, we are a technology company that is, that is creating the tools so that you can build and solve the problems that you need to solve. >> All right, that's a, that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Christina. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Good afternoon everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, one of Microsoft's biggest shows of the year 26,000 people here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Phoummala Schmitt. She is the Senior Cloud Advocate, Microsoft Azure Engineering. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Well thank you for having me. >> Rebecca: For coming back on the show. >> Yeah, last year we were here-- Well, actually, we were what, a month earlier last year? It's November. >> Rebecca: We were indeed, we were indeed. >> Hoping the weather was better, but still warm. >> Well we're not getting much fresh air, but, we're going to talk today about cloud governance. So this is something that companies that are moving to the cloud, often as an experiment and then suddenly it's live. How do you make sure that your governance is in order and how do you help companies wrap their brains around getting things buttoned up? >> Part of it is enabling developers, operations. See, governance, typically is a negative, right? Oh my gosh, governance! It's a road blocker. We have to stop thinking in that way and think of it as an enabler and instead of governance, they're guardrails. We put those guardrails in place in the beginning, enable our developers. Now you've got control and speed, because everything is about speed right now, because if you are not, you know, developing at speed you're not at velocity. You're not meeting business and then developers are off doing their own thing and then, often times, when you're off doing things really, really fast, you forget about the little things. Like leaving a port open, or you're doing a POC and you're like oh we'll come back and fix all that stuff later, let's just get this out the door. And then next thing you know it, you're like, oh, wait! What happened here? >> Phoummala, it reminds me of just a lot of things when you talk about when you rollout DevOps. I need to think about things like security, governance and compliances. Part of what I'm doing and if I'm going to be releasing code constantly, it's not something that I can go back to later, 'cause you're never going to catch up, you're always going to be, you know, N minus X behind what you're doing. So, organizationally, what do companies need to do to make sure that governance is taken care of just as part of the ongoing day-to-day activity and development? >> Well, building is checks and balances, right? So we put those guardrails in place. Let's start with infrastructure guardrails. Your ports, do those audits, just making sure that what you have on premises is the same in the cloud. Once you do that, that's like one checkbox you've done. And then there's the app development portion of it. That's where we're going to get developers thinking let's build security into our application. It's going to make life a lot easier, like you said, than going back and trying to build and trying to put, you now, new code in. And then when you're doing DevOps and that's just like a combination of everything, keeping governance in mind helps the flow of all those different transactions. Personally, I think DevOps is probably the hardest, in terms of just maintaining governance, because you do have different teams working together. You know, it's these different principles all coming together, but it comes down to doing things right. You know, doing what's right, ultimately, because at the end of the day if there's something that's missing and then next you know it you're on the front of the page. Nobody wants to be on the front page. And it's those little things. Like, checking permissions, just making sure that we have the right identity access management. And it's just throwing in some audit, just making sure our ports are closed, multifactor, you can audit and check you know, your root accounts, your administrative accounts. Little things like that just making sure that we have like the proper authentication, multifactor all that good stuff and then you just start building upon that once you have a little bit of governance in play. >> Well, Phoummala, I think, you know, identity management's one of the real strengths that Microsoft has, you know? So, maybe give us a little viewpoint as to how that's gone from, you know, identity just about Outlook or Office 365 to, you know, today's environment where, my users can be anywhere, my applications are everywhere and I still need to make sure that, you now, those corporate guidelines and identity go with me wherever I am and whatever I'm doing? >> So from an Azure standpoint identity management we have Azure AD, we've got all that component, but when you're coming into Azure, we like to emphasize using our back, role-based access control. Let's just make sure that the people that we're giving access to, have access to what they really need to. Building those roles out and people can have multiple roles. I mean, it's as simple as that, right? We started off just defining what's your job? Right, Stu, you've got a job, what are your roles? Let's just make sure we give you those roles and then we build upon that. If you need a little bit more, okay. And then you can give external users access, as well and you can give them roles, but just giving anybody full access to everything... Do you really need it? And it's the same thing with, you know Office and E-mail and SharePoint. So we're just taking those concepts from those applications and putting it into access into the Azure infrastructure. And then developers can actually build that into their applications, as well. >> One of the things that we keep talking a lot about, because Satya Nadella was talking a lot about it is trust and that is really the bedrock of good governance and making sure that people have confidence in your systems and that things are going to be done right, as you say. How much does that play into your work with customers and clients in terms of there's just an inherent trust right now that Microsoft is worthy of this and it is sort of the grown up in the room when it comes to big technology? >> Trust is huge. If you have trust in us as a customer that's, you know, that's amazing. We're going to give you the tools, we're going to give you the features, so that you and your customers have trust. You know, Azure policies. I mean that's just one component of governance and it's-- Policies isn't about completely control, but it's about auditing. Just checking, right? Checks and balances, 'cause that's really what governance is. Those checks and balances make sure that your operations is meeting your business needs. So if we can just do those little checks, simple trust like check marks, it goes a long way. And then, then we've got Azure blueprints which is our governance at scale. So we've taken everything that we've learned about governance in general, those different tools that we had and now you're just going to stamp it. Every time you build a new subscription you're just going to rollout governance and it's just-- I don't want to say as easy as a button, but it sort of is, right? You can do it through the portal. And everything that you've built as a team, those roles that you've created, the policies you've been submitted from your audit checks to controlling who creates what, where they can create that from, because, you know, GDPR that's huge. Because we can actually help you control where you resources are being deployed from. I mean that's going to be huge for most organizations right now. So, knowing that we have the right tools in place for you to run your business, that's trust. >> Phoummala, give us a little bit of a walk-around the show in your shoes. You're speaking at the show, you're hosting people on channel 9, you're behind the scenes helping a lot of people. Give us what you're most looking forward to, what you're most looking to share at the event this week. >> Most looking forward to just meeting all my friends that I've made throughout the years, but meeting new friends and, of course, there's puppies with therapy dogs, as well. Thursday I'm doing several channel 9 live interviews and I've got two sessions-- Well diversity sessions, which, typically, I do technical sessions, but diversity sessions I feel are very, very important. We talk about stuff nobody really wants to talk about all the time, right? We actually have a parenting and tech session tomorrow. How do we handle being a parent and working full time? And then I'm talking about the career journey and those two actually kind of go together, in some way, I mean, I'm-- And everyone's been asking me how I'm doing, my son just went off to bootcamp and so as a parent, I felt it was really important to be part of that session and talk about how, how do I handle it? Where I wasn't here yesterday, the first day, I was off sending my son, starting off his life, his new career and my career, you know, has gone on for several years, but it's a new change now for me and balancing that, that FOMO right? Fear of missing out, like everyone's at work and I have to be here with my son. There is an adjustment and a lot of parents have actually reached out to me and said how do you handle that? So there's several of us speaking tomorrow that, we're going to talk to the attendees and then here are some tips to how we do it. Especially with our traveling schedule. >> Well, I'm interested to hear, because we had another guest who was talking about stress, I mean, I think it was your best friend, Teresa Miller. >> Yes! >> Talking about stress as endemic to this high, stressed, fast-paced industry. Where, as you said, there's a lot of demands on your time, a lot of demands on your travel schedule and really a push for excellence add-all time. How is it to be a hard driving professional and also want to make time for your family, because your kids matter, of course? >> It is-- There's a balance. So the tech career includes that balance. We always want more in that career, right? We all do, but sometimes we have to step back. We've got to play the game a little bit, you know? You can't always have everything all at once and I've learned that. So tomorrow's session's about sharing what I've gone through, you know, as a parent, as a woman in tech. It's been a tough journey, but it's been fulfilling. So I work for Microsoft now and here's what I've done. I've made some bad mistakes, I've made some, you know, some good choices, but overall, there's been a balance. There's been a give-and-take I've had to do and I feel like the journey I've been through could be helpful for others. I've had a lot of people ask me, especially about career journeys now with the cloud, it's very, very scary. And a lot of people are worried, will I still have a job? My job transitions, what do I do? And I'm like, let's talk about this. I went through the same thing, I mean, exchange got us, exchange servers. Most people don't deploy exchange anymore. It's Office 365. So I went through that several years ago, that transition, where do I go next? 'Cause I know I really don't have that much of a life anymore. Like the AS/400 engineers, right? >> And diversity is another, of course, hot button issue in the technology industry. There is a dearth of women, there is dearth of underrepresented groups and LGBTQ. How are you as someone who is a woman of color navigating these thorny issues and helping the next generation come up and to create a different technology industry for the future? >> So it's tough. I navigate through with a lot of candles, a lot of wine. (the ladies laugh) With friends, I've got a great support system, but I strongly believe in paying it forward. There's a lot of stuff I do behind the scenes a lot of people do not know. A lot of forwarding of hey, this person is really good, you know, in this space, you might want to speak with them. I, Tech Field Day, I'm sure you all know the great people over there. I've forwarded a lot of names over there. I feel like I'm-- I've come up the ladder or the elevator, it's time to push that button, send it back down to help others and I've been doing it a lot more, I've always felt it, but now I feel I'm in a position that I can really help others and it just feels really good when someone I've helped Tweets about it. Obviously they're not going to mention my name, but when I see them being so happy, it just makes me feel really, really good, like, wow, you know, you just feel-- Like your heart just fills up like okay. This is good. >> Rebecca: Contributing to their success. >> Yeah and it becomes addictive almost. Like, how can I, you know-- If I see an opportunity to help somebody I will, I'll help 'em, anyway I can. >> So you are an avid blogger and you are considered one of the top 50 tech influencers and thought leaders you should follow. So congratulations on that. >> Phoummala: Thank you. >> I'm interested to hear, how do you keep up on the news and what do you read, who do you talk to, what do you pay attention to? And tell our viewers, too, because they want to know. >> Twitter is probably my source of everything now, 'cause it's quick, but pretty much just keeping up on the internet. Honestly, it's a lot, between my travel schedule, my family, it is almost impossible to stay up to date on everything. And I've learned that I can't. I just-- 'Cause I don't want to get burnout. I've been burnout several times and now I just, I take one day at a time. Oh, there was something that was announced, I didn't hear about it and someone said something I'm like oh, okay, oh that's cool. I'll read up on that later. But I don't feel like I need to know everything all at once. I think when you get to a certain place you're just comfortable knowing what you know and, you know, I'll read, I'll read the news when I get home. You know, something like that where you're-- You've got to be at that place where you're comfortable and not always feeling like I have to know everything, 'cause we're humans, we can't know everything all at once. >> And as we've talked about there has been, talking about not being able to keep up with everything, this conference, Microsoft Ignite. So many new product announcements, new buzzwords, new strategies that are all washing over us. What has been most interesting to you, most exciting? Who have you talked to? What sessions have you seen, that have sort of, sparked your interest the most? >> Azure Arc. Now I'm just reading into it, I haven't gotten real deep into it, but from what I know, from what I've seen, I like it. I like it a lot. It's, when we think about the cloud, it's multicloud, you know, it is right? It's every organization, they're dipping in their toes into just about everything and Azure Arc is giving that opportunity to our customers to be able to say, hey, we know you're in the cloud, in different clouds, here's a view into it. And, you know, you're able to manage these environments and see what's going on. Because that is the future and... Its a hybrid, multicloud. I think that's going to be my word, you know. Hybrid-multi, because we're in everything. I expect every organization to be in a little bit of everything, because it's... It's like, you know, your personal lives, right? You're in that little bit of everything. It makes it more dynamic and I just don't think one, one thing is going to be an organization's like, you know, that's all they're doing. I truly believe everyone's meant to dip their toes in a little bit of everything. They'll have one defined set of, here we're just going to use this one cloud, or this one's servers, but for the most part, they are going to dabble. And we're-- Azure Arc is giving customers the opportunity to manage those environments, where they've decided to dabble a little bit or because of business needs. They need to be in different environments. >> Exactly, renaissance organizations. >> Phoummala: Yeah. >> I love it. Phoummala, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Always a pleasure having you. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (theCUBE theme song)

>> 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)