 At the VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. Oh, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE, live from Gillette Stadium, VTUG VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. A little bit cloudy outside, but a big glow inside here as we get ready for Patriots AFC Championship game. And more importantly, we're here for a great virtualization technology user group talking about virtualization and cloud. And really happy to have a major player in that space, of course, is Microsoft. And first time guest on is Dan Stoltz, who's the chief technology strategist. Sorry, Dan, I got to memorize those titles before I go. So Dan, do your first time on theCUBE. You've been at this show for five years or more. We weren't talking about cloud five years ago, really virtualization. Just give us a quick, since your first time on, background, what you do at Microsoft and what your background is. Sure, so my background, I've been with Microsoft for about six years and my job is really to help customers figure out how to use the cloud to solve real business problems. And I do that through online education, one-on-one meetings, one-on-many meetings. And I do a lot of, I'm basically I'm a public speaker, so I do a lot of presentations all over mostly New England, but all over the country. Speak at TechReady, all of the big events as well. Awesome, so Dan, you know, the message, cloud messaging, you know, there's so many things we did wrong over the years, you know, not to beat a Microsoft, but gosh, I got calls from family when it was like this, it's in the cloud and Microsoft's going to bring you there. And they're like, hey, Stu, don't you work with this cloud thing? I don't understand it. But you know, as I said, not looking to bash on Microsoft, because actually what I really like out of Microsoft is what you call the cloud-first messaging. Azure, you know, in the public cloud and you know, Azure private cloud, Hyper-V type stuff, there actually is really good linkage. I think you guys have one of the best hybrid cloud messaging out there. Can you parse for us a little bit? How does Microsoft look at virtualization and cloud? Is it one thing, two aspects of the same thing, in and yang, how does that all fit together? Yes, yes and yes. So a few things. First of all, let me go back a little bit. Microsoft has been in the cloud business for not really forever. I mean, if you think back to the hotmail days or the creation of the live IDs and that authentication that's been around forever and that was really kind of the beginning. That was the foundation. And since then we've brought in Xbox and Microsoft Azure and just tons and tons and tons of things from Office 365 and just you name it and there's more coming. Seems like every week. So how we got there really, where the cloud has taken us is to what will I believe eventually replace a lot of the stuff that we're doing in our data centers today. A number of years ago, we introduced the platform as a service and that was the part when you talked about in your opening that you really didn't like the way Microsoft was doing things. Microsoft's first venture into that really cloud server type of a market was platform as a service. And people just didn't understand it. Very, very, very powerful and as people start understanding that you can develop your applications and run them in the cloud and all of the great benefits that you have out of running it like that, it's awesome. But infrastructures of service is really the big play. And infrastructures of service is where you take your, think of it as your virtualized servers that you're running in your on-premises environment in your rack on your servers and take the hardware out of the equation and use Microsoft's hardware on Windows Azure. And that's really what you have. You have a virtual machine in the cloud. You manage the operating system, you patch it, you do all the things you've got to do and it's available and you have scalability, high availability, all that stuff all built into the platform. All right, wow, a lot of pieces there. One thing I want to poke at a little bit is I think enterprise IT sometimes is a little bit snobbish. So if they heard your response and they're going to talk about Xbox and there's probably that Skype stuff and things like that, that's not enterprise IT even if it's a cloud service and there's plenty there. Internally, I mean, is there, if the consumer and enterprise business is, because there's a lot that they can learn between them. And if you look at the big cloud guys, I mean, Amazon does a lot with consumers, so does Google and so do you guys. So I see synergies behind the scenes, but from an enterprise consumer standpoint versus a consumer-consumer, those are very different worlds. What's it look like inside? So I'll answer that in two ways. First of all, I want to push back a little bit because the first pushback that I want to make is, and part of the problem that people are struggling with is how they can take advantage of this technology. And the reason for that is because they don't fully understand the capabilities. So let me give you an example. An enterprise, I think it's EA Sports, puts out a product that they're running a game and I'll use Titanfall as an example. Titanfall, whenever you open up a new game room, you're actually opening up a new server that's running on Azure. So literally the whole foundation of that game is that you have endless infrastructure because you're just spinning up a server. So yeah, that is enterprise, even though it is consumer also, because the consumer is using it, but an enterprise, a real company has that product that they're actually using that infrastructure for. But I think what you're talking about is more of what we refer to as kind of the core infrastructure in a company's data center. And in that respect, running it in the cloud or running it on premises, there's really not much difference. The fundamental difference is you have to have that integration piece. And that's the piece that Microsoft does really, really, really well, like you said. And long gone are the days where it really matters where that infrastructure sits. You no longer have to have it sitting in your facility and paying the big air conditioner bills and having the really expensive real estate for the footprint of that rack. Now that can be offloaded to cloud services and you gain all of the other advantages of it too. So yeah, there's a lot of consumer stuff out there, but there's really a big play for enterprises. So I'll give you another example. Let me just give you one more example. Yeah, okay, go. Disaster recovery and preparedness. Companies used to spend hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars even on having backup infrastructure. All of that expense completely goes away because now that backup infrastructure can be on demand in the cloud. Real enterprise uses, use cases for some high-end technology that's available to you in the cloud. Yeah, that's some great points, Dan. And I appreciate the clarification and I agree with most of what you were saying there. So can you talk a little bit more about the infrastructure as a service? Because so many people, they're like, well, Microsoft, yeah, I'm using Office 365, so of course I'm using cloud services, but it seems like EC2 and AWS get most of the mind share at least, even though the market share shows that you guys are doing a ton there. So what's hot and Azure from an infrastructure service standpoint? There's actually lots of things in infrastructure as a service. So to be clear, the infrastructure piece is where you're leveraging the hardware and the virtualization stack in the cloud and you're basically bringing your own machines. You're bringing your own virtual machines. I mean, it's a lot more than that because it's a network, it's a storage, it's the SQL database or whatever. There's lots of other things that you can sit on top of that infrastructure. But specifically, to us, it doesn't matter because we really just look at it as hardware in the cloud that you can run any workload on. So there's a lot of customers that are running SharePoint on it. They're running web servers on it. They're running business application servers. They're running terminal services. They're really anything that you can run in your data center, you can run it on the Azure platform under infrastructure as a service. Okay, great. So Dan, can you now bridge for us the hybrid discussion? Hyper-V versus Azure private, what are those the same thing? And how do you guys look at hybrid cloud? Is it applications here and application there? Are there things that go back and forth? Can you dig into that a little bit for us? Okay, whenever we talk about hybrid, what we're really referring to is being able to, having machines that are on-premises or in the cloud, being able to work together as if they were in the same location. So there's some things that need to be put into place in order to make all that magic happen. A lot of times you're simply just setting up a network path, which is often just a VPN. Sometimes it's a private network line between the Azure data center and your data center. And you're setting up the pieces to make that magic happen. But it's actually a lot more than that because whenever you think about things like authentication, and you want to do things like single sign-on, you want to do things like have, you mentioned Office 365 and have that, which is not part of infrastructure as a service, but it's actually part of software as a service. So you have software as a service and infrastructure as a service all working together as one and that's in a hybrid environment. Take that one step further, that Office 365 is synchronizing with your AD on-prem and also your AD, it's all part of your AD, which is running in your infrastructure as a service on Azure infrastructure as a service. Yeah, Dan, Dan, great point. Active Directory is one place that Microsoft has clear leadership out there. We've seen some moves from some of the other big players out there. Is it a checkbox now that everybody, that others now have? Or obviously you've got years and years of experience, but sometimes there's newer ways to do things. How do you look at Active Directory today, why people rely on Microsoft and some of the alternatives out there, maybe give us a little color? Yeah, actually what we're seeing is actually a little bit different than that. Yes, from the infrastructure side, the Active Directory is king and I frankly see no reason why that will change anytime in the foreseeable future. But what has changed is there's more than one directory now. I mean, you look at all the different directories that people have, you know, look at Twitter, you look at Facebook, LinkedIn, any number of other social networks, they all have a directory too. Those are valid directories. And what you're faced with and how things are changing as the technology changes is Active Directory in Windows Azure allows you to bridge all of those other directories so you can literally have your Active Directory and all these other things that are doing authentication. So you can decide how you want to authenticate. Do you want to use Twitter's authentication? Do you want to use AD's authentication? So that's really how that world has changed and it's not just about AD, it's about being able to integrate all these things and AD being the wrapper, not only around its own directory but around all these other directories as well. Wow, great stuff. All right, I want to pivot a little bit, Dan. You do a lot of education, you've got a ton of certifications and you help users with that. How's that world changing? You know, what does kind of the IT resume look like in a couple of years? Are they going to have, you know, a full list of these certifications or just different certifications? What are you seeing going forward? How are you helping the users with this transition? Sure, I actually had a presentation earlier today at VTOG, I have one of the keynote speakers and actually I had a couple of slides on that. Certification is just as important now as it was back in the NT4 days. It's just as important now as it was five years ago, literally, but it depends on where you are. A lot of companies really, they look at that first. Certification doesn't tell an employer or somebody that you know everything there is to know about that topic. It tells them that you have the, it tells them two things. One, it tells them that you have the foundation, you understand it, right? And two, it kind of tells them that you can retain that information as well because you have to retain the information in order to pass the test. And right now there's certifications for cloud. There's lots of different certifications for cloud. It's not just one. So whether you're on the development track or infrastructure track and even, but then there's other things too. So there are certifications. I am strongly encouraging people to get certified because as you go through that process of studying for certification, you're also learning the technology, the platforms. And as you learn the platforms, you realize how you can use that technology to do magical things in your business. So do you see cloud really as an evolution of what's going on? It sounds like if I'm a Microsoft certified guy, I can go through these steps as opposed to most people would say, I mean, Amazon's a very different world. If I'm running infrastructure today, there's a lot of things to be said for that. There's a lot of things to be said for what I can do in a public cloud, say with Amazon. But most would say it's more of a little bit of a break. I might need some different staffing. I might have less staffing. Do you guys see yours as more of kind of a, you know, an evolution, a journey, you know, but step forward. It's definitely an easier transition because of the, you know, you're working in the same technologies and the terminology is all the same, but you're going to get a lot of that in Amazon once you stand things up. And whether you're going Amazon or Microsoft, there are going to be some things that are different. You know, that whenever you're setting up that infrastructure in the cloud, you have to learn the portal that you basically go through, the self-service portal, to be able to configure those services. So there is definitely a learning curve. I think on the Microsoft side, the big advantage is we're using, we're utilizing the same technology under the covers in Azure that we're using in the data center on-prem. So say you've got a virtual machine running on Hyper-V right now, you can literally take those VHD files, the, you know, the disk file, upload that to Azure, fire it up in your golden, you can download them the same way. So from a, you know, from an integration ease of use standpoint, and then of course you've got PowerShell. PowerShell is absolutely magical. I've been working on PowerShell script for the last few days. It literally goes out, spins up three machines. I'm creating a training environment where I can just give all of my attendees a script, go run this script on your Azure account and it'll create your entire environment for the class. So there's just some amazing things that you can do because of the really tight integration with what you can do on-prem. All right, so Dan, we promised we wouldn't talk about licensing and pricing, but one of the biggest pain points I hear from users is patching and updating, you know, to new versions of the software is the world of today that is nothing but pain. The world of the future is, you know, if I buy into the message of the cloud, it should be able to be updated much simpler. You know, if I go from one version of Azure in the public cloud to another, I mean, somebody in the back end takes care of that. I don't think about it. So, you know, what's the Microsoft position on this? Will there be a day where I don't have, you know, patch Tuesday and, you know, don't have to, God, I've been seeing notifications for the last like six months. There's, you know, a major version of Microsoft Operating System that's going to end to support, you know, this year, the clock is ticking, you better move. So does this go away in the future? I love that question. Yeah. I absolutely love that question. The reason why is because we have a great answer for it. We, in the course of what's, I don't know if you've seen what's on Slate for some of the Windows 10 stuff, particularly with server, but literally in the near future, not only are we going to be able to deal with patches, but we're also going to be able to deal with operating system upgrades and application upgrades and it's, and it can happen very, very seamless. So Microsoft is working on the back end to make that super simple. Now, there's already some really great technology that a lot of enterprises may not be aware of, like, you know, host cluster patching is an example, where you can literally right click on an entire cluster and go patch it all at once. Now, there's still some issues with testing and people have policies and procedures around testing patches and hotfixes and stuff before they go out. I'm not really sure how that's going to play out in this new world where all of it can just magically happen. I'll be curious to see how that shapes up, but definitely Microsoft is in the process of writing some really sweet technology that takes that big pain point and completely eliminates it. So we'll see the juries out on how we can execute on that, but definitely the vision is it's gone. All right, well, that's great news. So, Dan, what do you recommend for users that, you know, they've been hearing about cloud for a bunch of years. You know, maybe they're probably doing something with virtualization, especially Hyper-V is pretty simple to get into if you're a Microsoft client. What's recommended first step for them looking at public cloud? You know, how does that fit into their environment? What should they start doing? Yeah, so I think from my standpoint, the way that I would look at it, and it depends a little bit on the audience, assuming it's an IT Pro audience, the first thing that you want to do is get smart. And there's so many ways to do that, and it's not like you got to go take a class and spend thousands of dollars or anything like that. There's lots of free resources. Microsoft Virtual Academy has won. And, you know, there's lots of videos, you know, TechEd, they record all the stuff that there. There's lots of training on cloud. But the best thing to do, by far, the best thing to do is go start an account, start, you get a free account, go fire up some machines, get it all working, and there's tons of hands-on labs, search hands-on lab for, you know, Azure deploying an Azure virtual machine. There's tons of stuff out there, literally stepping you through step-by-step to be able to make that happen. Super, super important first thing to do. Yeah, you know, the first one's free, right? So. Well, the first one is free, the first one, what is one? It's a lot of, could be a lot of stuff, though. Boy, yeah, so many topics we've covered, Dan. I mean, you guys have unlimited storage now in the cloud, right? Pretty much, it seems like that. Yeah. It's, you know, just disrupting the world. And super too, too. Yeah, no, I mean, but you know, single price and it's like bottomless. Yeah. All you can drink, the first one's free. One of the points Chris Harney brought up is that users are real skeptical these days. Because they hear everything as, you know, sunshine and unicorns and great and everything. But, you know, it takes them a little longer. So, you know, I like, of course, you know, what you do, Dan, you have to educate people. Put the knowledge in their hands, help them do it. I love, you know, give them the first one for you, get hands on so that they can actually play themselves. But, you know, are users, you know, when they start down that path to public cloud or they just excited and they, you know, go full bore? You know, where do you see the balance between cloud and on-premises going forward? There's really two caps. The one camp is, you know, I want to learn this stuff because I see that it's the future. And those people that take that approach, they're going to be the ones that are going to be most successful down the road. You know, I remember, you know, back when there was other technologies that were new and those people that embraced the technologies, those were the people that ended up making more money, had more opportunities available to them because of their knowledge. And then there's the other camp of, I'll just ignore it and it'll go away. Well, not such a smart thing to do because you know what, it's not going away. It's going away about as much as virtualization is going away. It's here to stay. But unlike virtualization, virtualization has kind of gotten to the point where so many companies have already maximized their investment. There's not a lot of savings beyond what they've already done. Whereas with cloud, just the opposite is true. There is so much more that they can do in terms of saving resources, saving money, saving time, or more importantly, taking projects that are on the shelf because they couldn't afford to do them, they don't have the resources to do them and actually get those implemented. But frankly, the biggest problem that I see with the people that want to bury their head in the sand is that all they really have to do is to think about the business. Because really, the cloud is not just a cool toy. Well, it is a cool toy, but it's not just a cool toy. It is an opportunity to take building blocks that make up the cloud platform, put those building blocks together to build solutions to real business problems. So one of the things that are what I would recommend that people do, especially if they are somebody that has their head in the sand, but really for everybody, is to think about the business problems. Think about what the pain points are for customers, for partners, for employees. Think about how you can generate additional revenue for your company. If, and then if you come up with an idea on how you can do some of those things, figure out how you can do it in the cloud because a lot of the time you can take a simple idea and with a couple of days or even a few hours worth of work actually stands it up, proof of concept in the cloud, present it to those people that can make a decision on it and literally save hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for your company. All right, last question for you, Dan. Think back in the day, Microsoft was an OEM company. I bought Microsoft's operating system when I bought a server. So from a technology and a channel partner, you made a lot of people money. I look at Microsoft today. I mean, you are one of the major players in cloud, in virtualization, you do your own Xbox. Microsoft is trying to get a greater share of wallet. What does this mean to the technology and channel partners out there? How do they work with, do they work with Microsoft or is Microsoft the single supplier for the world going forward? I would say they have to do the same thing that's done in the past and that has to continue to grow as the world grows, as the technology industry grows. The technology partners are, what a lot of them are doing is there's lots of different opportunities to add on additional capabilities and niche plays. I mean, you look at people like Cisco or F9 Networks and there's a slew of others that have integrated into the new technology. And you look at, Veeam has a booth right down there and there's probably went down the hall half the people that are here that are vendors have integration points into the Azure platform. So I wouldn't look at it as something where we're taking money out of somebody else's wallet. I look at it as we're giving them more opportunities to expand their wallet share as well. All right, Dan. Hey, I really appreciate you coming on. We went through a ton of topics. Hopefully everybody can keep up. You can adjust the speed when you do the replay a little bit. Sorry about that. It slows down. I'm from Jersey, I don't know about you, but I know I talk a little fast so much. Really good content. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for coming and giving the keynote at the VTUG. We're gonna be back with some users and some more great speakers here. Interviewing from VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. We'll be right back.