 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Raphael Meyerwitz. He is the VP Office of the CTO at Presidio and Jake Smith who is the Director Data Center Solutions and Technologies at Intel. Thank you both so much for coming back on theCUBE. You're both CUBE alum. Thank you for having us. It's great to be back. So I want to start by laying out for our viewers why you're here and that you're part of the Microsoft ecosystem, Intel, Cisco, Dell and others. Can you explain a little bit to our viewers how the role you play in this ecosystem? Well for us, Microsoft is a long time partner. I mean it's pretty well documented. We don't want to go there today but at this particular event we're announcing a bunch of new product solutions. We're announcing new technology capabilities and at 4 p.m. we're going to announce some world record results for performance with an operating system in an application environment. So it's a very exciting time for Intel to be a part of this event. Well this is quite a tease. Can you give us a little bit? Gonna have to wait till 4 p.m. I will say it has to do with Windows Server. It has to do with Xeon's scale of a processor family and our future obtained products. Well so these are all great lead-ins and before the cameras were rolling we were talking about all of these things. Do you want to go through a little bit where we are with each of those businesses? Yeah at Presudio we've also been partnering with Intel for a long time and one of the things that we've seen also is how Intel has developed their ecosystem of partners with software like today. If you look at today what was announced today with desktop as a service with Citrix. That's something that we have been involved in probably for about 10 years and now we've actually seen that come to market where not just the control plane is in the cloud but the actual virtual desktops are in the cloud. And we think that that's going to be a really good viable option for customers with Office 365. Yeah Raf maybe expand on that a little bit for our audience. You know one of the things I always say is you're talking this multi-cloud heterogeneous world. You want to follow the apps, you want to follow the data. Well you know the desktop is part of where those applications and data live. So how does that tie into all of the cloud stuff we've been talking about the last few years? So for a lot of customers, one of the reasons they move into the cloud is really for simplicity sake, right? When you look at the desktop, the desktop has really not necessarily been the most simple thing in the world, right? Whether it's virtual or whether it's a physical desktop. By having the control plane and the virtual desktop in the cloud where you can consume it with Office 365 and also through Microsoft and you can buy it through a single entity, customers are really going to see a lot of value in that. And we think it's really going to play in the mid-market really, really well. Upper enterprise customers and some healthcare customers may take a little bit more time to adapt to. Jake one of the things we talked for years we talked about people did their upgrades based on the TikTok of the Intel piece there. Now we're talking about things like, you know Windows as a Service going evergreen. Maybe how does that relationship, the old traditional wind-tell versus the cloud era upgrades? You're talking about the new latest generation. How do we think about that today? You know I'm not going to use that the merged term because that's the work that Windows does on Xeon scalable processor family has been amazing. But typically we've done a two to three year cycle on a server release. With our new roadmap which we announced in August which you were there for, so thank you. We're actually going to release a new CPU every year. And we're releasing a new CPU every year because we have to deal with the fact that cloud customers in Azure want to have the availability to the latest and greatest technology right now. And partners like Presidio and RAF team have developed technologies like Concierge which he'll talk about that give customers the ability to manage their hybrid cloud environments both in the cloud and on-premise. And when you start giving customers that flexibility they want the choice to say, I want to deploy your latest Xeon processors, Xeon scalable processor family, Skylake processors this year and next year I'm going to maybe skip a year before I deploy your next version. Yeah, thanks Jake. So one of the things that we've done at Presidio we've tried to innovate ourselves and we listened to our customers and we know where our customers' pain points are. So Presidio Concierge is something that we developed from the ground up that provides both SaaS based applications provides customers with the usage on their SaaS based applications, how they're consuming their licenses and also provides them with analysis on some of the infrastructure as a service. A lot of customers when you talk about multicloud it doesn't necessarily always mean the hyperscalers right? It could mean SaaS based products as well. So we developed this product from the ground up in combination with Intel and it's something that our customers are starting to use a lot and we think that there's going to be a great roadmap for this product. Some of the features that we actually give to our customers are actually for free because we know that our customers are really battling with figuring out the usage patterns internally. Well I want to hear about those pain points. What were the problems that you were trying to solve with Concierge? So some of the pain points, we have customers today that get invoices from some of their public cloud companies with SaaS providers or with this infrastructure as a service and the invoices are 50 pages long. They can never actually figure out what their true costs are. So we, through a SaaS based platform that we developed from the ground up, we can provide customers with all of those metrics around their licenses plus also their usage around infrastructure as a service as well. And what has demand been like? The demand's been really good actually when we launched a product about two, three months ago we already had 20 customers and we've seen a lot of interest. Presidio has about 7,700 customers nationally that we call on today and we've grown tremendously with about a $3 billion infrastructure partner today that provides both on-premises and public cloud services. Yeah, I like you brought up the fact that customers are looking for simplicity. Unfortunately today, cloud is no longer simple. You know, I would say if you said, okay, if I went to my server vendor of choice and wanted to configure something versus I went to my cloud vendor of choice and tried to configure something, cloud might even be more challenging for somebody to do. But one of the areas that we're trying to help customers get some simplicity back is if you look at solutions like Azure Stack. So Rebecca and I interviewed Jeffrey Snowver earlier today and that was the goal they had is to give kind of that operational model and even some of the services from Azure and put them in my data center. Just wondering if, you know, I mean Intel and Presidio, you're both partnering with Microsoft on this. What are you seeing? What are you hearing from customers? Any proof points as to how the rollouts are going on there? So Presidio, we were one of the first Azure Stack partners probably about a year and a half ago when it was actually announced and when it went GA, I think it was June of last year. And we partnered with Cisco, Dell and also HPE in the space. And we've seen demand from our customers creep up. Single node solutions, we've seen demand where single node POC solutions are being deployed today. And then in the public sector, we also started to see customers that are interested in it because it will provide them with a gateway to the public cloud in the future. Yeah, we're seeing the exact same thing. Obviously we've been partnering together for some time. The beauty of Azure Stack is it's optimized for Xeon scalable processor family as well as Intel Optane technologies, both the SSDs and then in the future our persistent memory capabilities. What we like in our work that we've done on Azure Stack and Azure Stack development is that customers have had a lot of releases to begin to determine where Azure Stack's going to fit in their overall portfolio. And that's really how you have to look at Azure Stack is how do you manage your portfolio between the cloud and on-premise? Azure Stack is a great tool for that. Yeah, you know, leading up to the release of Azure Stack, I talked to a number of service providers that had pent up demand. Leading up to this show, I was hearing a lot of non-North American interest. Can you give us any characterization as to how the rollout's going? Yeah, I think when you look at non-North American interest, there's a lot of localization that has to take place in a lot of those countries. Maybe there's not actually an Azure public cloud Azure in those countries today, which is something that Microsoft is building towards. So customers want to get used to the APIs, they want to keep their data local, and they want to have the same APIs on-premises versus in the public cloud for all of their applications. And that's why I think you see it especially in Europe as an example, right? A lot of countries in Europe where they actually data sovereignty is a big issue, right? The data's not allowed to leave the country that they actually in. And the demand I think will always say Microsoft version two or version three, they always get it right. I mean, we've seen this time and time again. They've proven to us that they get this right all the time, so. I want to follow up on something you were just talking about though, with sort of risk management being a really big, hot opportunity, the next generation of rich risk management and mitigation. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing there and what you're hearing from customers? Yeah, so Presidio developed the next generation risk management framework called NGRM. So we found we do a lot of security with Cisco, Palo Alto, we have a lot of security vendors out there that we deal with, but what our CIOs were really looking for is they were looking for a single dashboard that could actually provide them with a scorecard green, yellow, red, basically saying, you know, this is where we act in our security strategy and this is what we need to remediate right away. They can take that to their board, they can also use that internally for all of their CISOs and also all their internal IT infrastructure personnel that they have. So it's something that we've seen customers adopt because it provides that analysis and the remediation and it's not necessarily tied to a specific product. Again, this is a SaaS-based platform that we develop from the ground up because our customers are always saying, well, there's always security vulnerabilities. How can we constantly check on this, right? And it doesn't matter whether you're in Asia, whether you have on-premises solutions, whether you have some other public cloud provider, we can provide that holistic view for customers today. One of the announcements that I think, you know, surprised everyone. I mean, things like Server 2019, we all expect. The open data initiative, the commentary that we had is, if you talk about digital transformation, I mean, Microsoft, Adobe and SAP, two companies at the center of it, you know, what does it mean? When will customers see the benefits of this and any commentary on digital transformation in general would be great. Well, typically, you know, we've been involved in a lot of these open standards and they typically take three to five years to work their way all the way through the system and build a proper ecosystem and standards and then work their way into the product lines. I think in this particular instance, there is a driver. We talked about the driver of cloud and why we Intel are now producing chips every year and you're not waiting for the three-year release cycle. Well, the open data initiative, I think falls into that camp. I think you're going to see an escalated transition to the open data initiative because people have to be able to move their workloads. Presidio recognized it very early on in the process. We've been working with them for some time, but that's one of the values that they bring to customers is the ability to do that, but more and more customers and more and more data are being stretched and there has to be compatibility between file systems, file format, and data classification. The open data initiative is a start in that direction. Yeah, I mean, one of the examples that I could give you also is, you know, we always talk about IT transformation. We have a large customer that's actually a fleet truck company that underwent IT transformation and they came to us and they said that they actually needed telematics on the trucks and the fleet of trucks. And the reason was because a lot of these trucks were breaking down and they would send it to a mechanic and the mechanic would diagnose it. So we actually created in partnership with Intel and with Microsoft, the telematics platform that actually can provide the customer real-time with what issues they actually have with the truck. And it saves the customer a lot of money. That's the type of information that customers are looking for. This customer has on-premises data plus also in the public cloud. And I think stretching that and providing analytics around that is really important. And is it possible to take away the silos? I mean, you seem to be an optimist here. I'm very optimistic that we can take away the silos but I'm also realistic. The only way to take away the silos is develop new applications, new capabilities. And as my friends in the Windows Server team will tell you, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do we use virtualization and container technologies to you take old legacy data and carry it forward onto new modern IT infrastructure. And when you can do that, then you can extract value from the data. If you cannot take it from an old and equated infrastructure to a new infrastructure as ProCidio has done, you stranded the data and that's where you have those silo breakdowns. So I think we're developing the tools but we're not all the way there. Yeah, you look at with Windows 2019 coming out, there's Linux support in Windows 2019. Who would ever think that Microsoft would be releasing Linux support? Microsoft loves Linux. Microsoft loves Linux now, right? And they all get up. And they all get up now as well. I mean, Microsoft has really developed the ecosystem of partners around, also around the open APIs and what they've been doing over the past few years and I think customers are really starting to embrace that and you look at even another feature that's coming out with Windows 2019 with Storage Faces Direct, right? I think Microsoft, this is really going to be the entry into the hyper-converge space, right? Customers are going to start building their own hyper-converge platform based on Windows 2019 data center. Yeah, I wondered if you could give a little more color here, Af, you and I lived through kind of conversion, hyper-convergence, you know, when we wrote our original research at Wikibon, it was VMware is the one that's going to get everybody talking about it but the one eventually that will be very important here is Microsoft because Microsoft owns the apps. They've got the operating system so absolutely they can be critical in the HCI space. What are they doing and how does Presidio and partners go to market with this? So I mean when you look at Windows 2016, Windows 2016 was really the first generation of Storage Faces Direct. Windows 2019 has really improved upon that and we're starting to see customers become more interested in that, right? The reason is because customers want a single platform that they can easily manage with a single operating system. So there used to be the war, as you mentioned, between VMware and Hyper-V. ESX and Hyper-V, Zsphere and Hyper-V. I don't really see that being talked about anymore. It's more around the features and the robust features that customers can actually get out as quickly as possible. I don't know if you have any questions. Well, Raf, you're absolutely right on. I think people have taken virtualization for granted, right, we added virtualization technology in Xeon in 2006 and they've sort of taken it for granted. Obviously VMware is a big partner for both Microsoft and Intel, but the reality is that in a hyper-converged environment you need a file system, you need an operating system and you need apps and Microsoft has all that capability. As you'll hear at four o'clock, we announced world record numbers and it's spectacular and the reason for it is in our last version of Windows Server 2016, we delivered six million IOPS in a hyper-converged environment. That got Raf and his team off the table saying, okay, you guys are legitimate, you have a legitimate platform now, but it's not good enough. We think this new instantiation that we've already started to announce in Windows 2019 and Jeff Woolsey announced it earlier today and started talking about the features and project Honolulu, we think those kind of transitions are what it's going to take for enterprise customers to begin to break down the silos that you discussed and really start to look at their data holistically, build data lakes that can scale, okay, and build frameworks that are, I don't even want to use the term converged anymore, but hyperscalable. Yeah, I mean, to tie into that, right, you look at what Intel has developed around Optane and some of the storage platforms that they've come up with, you know, 10 years ago, Intel wasn't really known as a storage company, right? But you look at all of the storage vendors out there today, they really are putting Intel inside and when you start looking at what storage space is Direct is going to deliver and some of the robustness that are on Optane, they really think that it's going to be something that customers are going to embrace with Windows 2019 and future version of SQL. Yeah, so Raph, I got to give Presidio a lot of credit, though. We launched a program called Intel Select Solutions and it really allowed us to take Windows and storage spaces Direct and create a solution that included both the CPU, the networking, the SSDs and the memory and Presidio has led that and so because we have these Intel Select Solutions for storage spaces Direct with Presidio, we have the flexibility now to give customers package solutions that are pre-configured. Great, well Jake and Raphael, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it was great talking to you. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up just in a little bit.