 Hey, thanks for joining us at Windows Server Summit. I'm joined today by Rowan Zones. Hey everybody, I am thrilled to be here. I lead our Azure Edge and Platform Product Management Team and a number of the products that we're going to talk about today. So I'm excited. It's awesome. I mean, this is our fourth virtual version of the Windows Server Summit that we've had to date. And there's been a lot of changes going on, but even just specifically in the last year, there's been a lot of announcements, a lot of news. And so, what's top of mind for you for all the new stuff that's happened in the last little while? Yeah, so, I mean, I over-indexed a little bit more recently rather than a year ago. Lots of change in year, but I would say there's been a couple of themes. So maybe I'll start there and we can kind of weave in some of the announcements. So one of the big themes that we take from a product development approach, the team builds the Azure Host OS in addition to Windows Server and the Azure Stack HCI platform. And actually all the platforms in Microsoft, but those are the important ones for today. And so what we've actually been really intentional about is how do we take the innovation that we've put in the platform in the Azure Host OS and bring that down to Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI and what you have on the edge. Where I think of the edge as anything that's sort of outside of public Azure. So a couple of big announcements that we made there. So the first is specific to the Windows Server data center Azure Edition in a bit of a mouthful. But within that Azure Edition, we have support for hot patching. So this now gives you the ability to do a bunch of your live migrations as you think about your updating. The second thing that we've done is we've actually integrated in support for Azure Stack HCI. And so now you can run that capability both in Azure but you can now also run it on-premises. And then third more broadly is we've actually created capabilities around auto manage. This has always been in Azure but again now we're bringing it on-premises. And you know auto manage, right? You know all those mundane tasks that you have to make sure are right in terms of setting up the servers, getting the right authentication, getting the right updating, it's complicated and you can end up with you know, environments that aren't secure if you don't do it right. So while it's mundane, it's incredibly important. I mean to an operations person that's looking at managing Windows servers now they can reduce the amount of times that's reboot their boxes because it patches and now they can also have patching be done automatically for you, logs collected, all sort of stuff that like you said needs to get done can now be done with either of these two things. Yeah, absolutely. So that's kind of my first theme. How do we think about sort of innovation from Azure and bringing that ultimately to the edge? Second big theme is honestly it's customer driven. You know, environments are just so distributed today from what a customer would have on-premises, to in Azure, to in other clouds. And so honestly as more workloads sort of pop up in more places, I feel like the management burden sort of grows exponentially with the distribution of workload. And so we've invested in actually bringing the Windows Admin Center, so WAC for short, which I'm sure many people at Summit know, but we've now integrated that into the Azure portal. So that does a couple things. One, it kind of gives you that one-stop shop. At least you have the UX in the same places. Obviously the level of integration is something that we can do more with in time. But then the second thing is you now get to take advantage of all of the ways that you set up and create that environment. You don't have to do it twice. So same authentication, you authenticate once and you have that both for WAC and you would have that for the Azure portal. And so it really does try to simplify some of the setup steps that are necessary when you think about managing your environment. Nice, now the Windows Admin Center, it was always a challenge for me trying to find the right box where I could situate and have to be able to authenticate it now, but now it's just in some Azure subscription, it just works. It doesn't matter where those target machines that are being managed by that box happen to set. Exactly. Now, there's been a lot of also change and a lot of things going on, a lot of challenges over the last couple of years. Yep. When you're talking with customers, what's top of mind for them? Yeah, well, I will say over the last two years, like innovation and accelerating their digital modernization, like that it has been full force in terms of just the new ways of doing business, honestly, and the new ways of managing employees and serving customers have sort of arisen. More recently, I do think it's shifted a little bit. Obviously, there's a lot of market uncertainty. I think everybody's feeling that from businesses sort of small to large. And so customers are now very much wanting to sort of accelerate their innovation, but doing it in an incredibly fiscally responsible way. So cost is coming into the conversation. How did they get more efficient with things that they've already paid for and already licensed? How did they think about balancing that across environments? How did they think about standardizing on skilling and the capabilities that they have within the team? So that's kind of a little bit, I would say, in terms of what's top of mind. And so from a product perspective, one area I'd love everybody to get more familiar with is Azure Arc. Got it. To me, Azure Arc really embodies both the driving innovation while also doing it in a fiscally responsible way. It essentially helps customers take their existing environments, their existing SQL servers, their existing Windows servers, even their multi-cloud investments. And it bridges those VMs or containers into Azure. So now you can sort of centrally manage things in Azure in one kind of uniform way, kind of building on some of the skilling capabilities that I mentioned. The other thing though that it also does is it really builds also into an innovation story. So a lot of my customer conversations have started from a help me secure and manage and stabilize that estate. But then it moves very quickly into, now I want to talk about out modernization. And in some cases, it's even app modernization that's now driving the conversation before it's the infrastructure modernization. And so one of the things that you'll also see with Arc is it's truly integrated into our GitOps and GitHub workflows, how you think about doing DevOps, how you think about building modern cloud native applications. It's integrated with our Kubernetes services. And so it very much is something that kind of helps you think about deploying new microservice kind of cloud native based applications. And so you can kind of balance both this infrastructure as well as more integrating of Azure services into your workloads. Now from a top of mind perspective for customers, you mentioned the product solution. What else can we do to be able to help them out on that side? Yeah, well, so then I think Microsoft also has a pretty important role to play, not just from product, but also as we think about licensing. And this sort of builds into that, do more with less that efficiency message and this fiscal responsibility message. So there's a few things. I would first say the Azure hybrid benefit, this is something I very much would want everybody to be familiar with. It's got great capabilities today. You can get up to 85% savings of your Windows server and SQL workloads by migrating those into Azure and keeping the same software assurance benefits that you have. It also has extended security updates. And so this is really important because one of the things that we haven't talked about is the fact that Windows Server 2012 is gonna be coming out of support in October of 2023. Good point. So that's a really important thing for customers to be very planful about. And so the extended security updates is something that is a great Azure hybrid benefit. And then at Ignite, we actually announced two new things that I'm personally really excited about. One kind of builds off of this secure and manage capability and that's that we've integrated Azure Stack HCI into the same license rights that you have with your Azure hybrid benefit. So let me clarify this a bit because it gets complicated when you start talking about licensing. I'm not a licensing expert, but basically Windows Server data center edition, you license on a virtual cores basis and Azure Stack HCI is also on a virtual core basis. And so the new thing that we announced is you can basically take those core licenses and apply them to Azure Stack HCI. Absolutely, yeah. So Azure Stack HCI previously was kind of its own list priced V-core product and now you can just extend your data center licensing into the Azure Stack HCI at no additional cost. That's cool. Now there's a second one that's new with the hybrid use benefit that's not specifically just with licensing, it's more on the innovation side. It is, yes. And so that relates to our Azure Kubernetes service capabilities. So we talk about that as AKS for short. It's one of our fastest growing Azure services. And it really is about helping customers with this application modernization journey. That today has been in Azure. We can extend that to the edge on top of Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI as well as through partnerships with third parties. But specifically for Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI now what we've done is actually integrated the costs associated with doing that into the Azure hybrid benefit. Okay. Very, very cool. Yes. Now for stuff that we were gonna be looking at later today, it supports all these different technologies that we talked about so far. So we've got technical sessions that are coming up that we're covering that. Yep. What are your recommendations for people that are watching today that they should go off and do? Yeah. So maybe a couple of things. One is a program. And so to really plug into the sort of Microsoft Engine, we have a set of programs. The one I'd love to familiarize everybody with is the Azure Migration and Modernization Program, or AMP for short. Yep. Since we love our three or in this case, four letter acronyms. And so that is just a great place as a partner, especially as customers as well honestly, for you to be able to understand like training, scaling, the latest materials. We have ways to connect. We have marketing incentives. There's just a whole number of things that you kind of organically get plugged into as part of that program. Yeah, and I want to remind folks that's not just a like, you know, move everything up and it's done. It's a one way street. It also includes hybrid environments. It also includes different architectures, whatever makes the most sense for your workloads. Absolutely. Like we very much think about this as a cloud to edge continuum. And we recognize that there is going to be a whole mix of things within that. And rather than sort of forcing customers to choose, let's actually design products relative to the realities of how they're going to end up using capabilities. And the second thing that you've got. So second thing is more for you as an individual. So there's just been a fair amount of innovation that we've really brought to Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI over the course of the last year. We actually rolled out a new certification as a result. And that familiarizes you with all the innovation. It gives you a bunch of training. It gives you a bunch of sort of test cases and use cases to go through. And you're going to have to help me because it's a mouthful. It's the Windows Server Hybrid Associate. Yes. So the content that we have today and other content you'll be available on demand, that is going to be helping you to be able to go through and do that particular certificate and then apply that to Windows Server 2022 and your hybrid environments. Absolutely. Spot on. You got it. Well, you know what? I've taken enough of your time. Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about this. I really appreciate it. Yeah. And thank you. And I hope you enjoy the rest of Windows Server Summit. Wonderful. And thanks to everybody joining us today and hope you have a really productive summit. And we're certainly super keen to hear from you all.