 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Dave Totten. He is the CTO US Partner Ecosystem at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Of course, absolutely, thank you for having me. So this is an incredible show, 26,000 people. We are here at theCUBE, we're in the middle of the show floor. High energy. We're going to talk about what you do at Microsoft, but first I just want your impressions of this show in particular. It's incredible, I was saying as I just walked in. At first off, 26,000 people. I think I shook 10,000 hands already. It's pretty amazing. I'll say two things. One, the partnerships and the groups and the companies that are building on Microsoft technology, if you just look around this room, it increasingly gets bigger. They had to take over two new halls this year, it's incredible. And the customers that we're getting at this event are extraordinary now. Everything from SMB, small business accounts, to every single enterprise company that I can think of in the strategic 1,000 here in the US, they're here right now. And it being a worldwide event, I hear languages, I hear people introducing each other to, the energy in this room is just absolutely incredible. The United Nations of Microsoft. It really is, it really is. And it feels that way when you walk around the room, for sure, yeah. So you are the Chief Technology Officer of US Partner Ecosystems. Talk a little bit about what you do at the company. Yeah, yeah, so what we're trying to do, obviously Microsoft being a channel company, right? We built services and solutions through the channel, sold them through the channel since we started inception 45 years ago. So my team helps build that technology practice and those solutions with our partners. If you think about how do you get access to the best and brightest engineers at the company, I'm pleased to say I actually have a bunch of those that get to work for me. And so every day we sit down with partners, we help them think about what technology solutions they want to create, where we see gaps in the marketplace, how do you make the biggest and best applications possible on the Microsoft stack, and then we help take those to market with our partners. So it's a wonderful experience of working with partners both mature and sometimes immature startups, brand new. Well Dave, one of the challenges, the surface area that Microsoft covers is so much bigger than before. This is not the company that I used to get a disk in the mail to get started. You're now in the data center, of course, a strong player in SaaS, in public cloud, at the edge, in devices. How do you manage all of those pieces and give us a little snapshot? We feel like we're getting today at the announcement this week, really a rethinking of how hybrid should be thought of today and in the future. Yeah, I'm glad you said that. It's a really important differentiation there because if you think about our stack, we're a Windows company, I've heard that before. Then we became an Office company, we're the company that does Office and Xbox. Now we're really a services company and that's how we want to make sure that we talk to people about what we do every day is we build services, applications, and the layers that connect people to their productivity, right? And so there were a lot of announcements this morning about Azure, which I think is phenomenal. Azure touches everything that we do. Identity, security, monitoring, it touches everything that we absolutely do. But we bring that to life with applications like Microsoft 365 and our productivity tools. There was a great demo this morning on Power Apps. Power Apps is something I'm really, really partial to, having grown up a developer and then lost a lot of my technical skills, right? Like I don't get to code anymore. Something like Power Platform and leveraging all the bots that we now have to democratize development work and make sure that the citizen developer can build really cool applications on our technology stack as part of that. I will say, everything for a while there moved to Pendulum to Azure because it was this huge market opportunity and there's lots of services out there and being that we're a really secure, trusted, enterprise relationship partner, a lot of people wanted to build applications and services on Azure. There's still a gigantic market opportunity within Microsoft 365 productivity. What we're doing with exchange migrations is still a huge part of our business. And then Power Apps and Dynamics 365, the ease of implementation and integration across all your applications leveraging Dynamics 365, an equal opportunity. Yeah, so Dave, I want to tease apart, you said a word services because Microsoft still, it's a software company, but it's more about the platforms that Microsoft delivers because one of the big challenges for users out there is there's just too many choices. There's no way anybody can listen through all of the announcements this week and say, oh okay, I'm up to speed on everything and I know what's going to work for my company. It's in many ways, it is the integration partners, the SIs, the MSPs, the channel partners, they're going to help pull those together. So, right, how do you make sure that you have comprehensive offerings that people can consume easier rather because we think that's one of the challenges where at a certain inflection point with cloud is remember cloud was supposed to be cheap and easy and it's neither of those things. So how do we make sure that in today's day and age, where do they turn to be able to move their business forward, not spend hours and hours and months and years trying to figure out what the latest thing is when by the time I start doing it, the next thing's out? Yeah, well if you read a lot of the publications, it's like cloud is everywhere. The cloud adoption rate is actually fairly low across US and international business rates and there's several reasons for that, right? There's some trust issues there, there's some, I've got some on-premise applications that I need to make sure that I migrate over. We launched today, Arc, right, which is about really connecting all sorts of data services and wherever your data center is we'll come meet you and I think that's a really nice platform story for Microsoft to tell. We've always been a customer and partner first experience. So now we're going to meet you where you are. Wherever you are you have the ability to manage, control, secure your IT environments. If you're on-premise, if you're with another cloud provider, if you're in a co-location data center and I think that ability to show along the journey to the cloud and along the journey to digital transformation where you're at, how are we going to help enable you? How are we going to make sure that we protect those endpoints and give you a consolidated, efficient UIW through, right? Yeah, actually, so there's Kubernetes inside that Arc from my understanding. We've been watching this trend for the last four plus years and one of the concerns is this is the Microsoft way to do things. Google has the way to do things. There are lots of Kubernetes options out there and it's not a magic layer, so there's still work. How does this become a driver for the ecosystem to participate and we don't end up with, well, I've got my Microsoft silo, my Amazon silo, my Google silo. Yeah, something like Arc is a great example of that, though. We want to meet the customers where they are and we believe our technology stack in the long run, the different plugins to applications, ISVs, different services partners, the way customers want to see their data, we believe it will win out in the long run. So we're okay integrating our backend with SAP on Azure, for example. We're okay with this data exchange with Oracle that we just announced a few months ago. Last year at this very event, we were talking about before, the SAP Adobe Microsoft Data Exchange Program. We are officially an open services company that we believe you should have management control and identity across all of your services, all of your data. And eventually you'll see, well, Microsoft parties in our services and the ISVs that are built on our services will win out in the long run. We really believe that. I think there's another thing about the Microsoft way. It's much different now, right? I mean, I can remember still six, seven years ago where certain companies, whether it's IBM or Oracle or even Red Hat, were enemies to us, right? Now we embrace those relationships and we embrace that data exchange because we're all trying to make sure that we optimize the experience for the customer and we think you can do it best through our shared services environment. And the final thing I'll say is, one of my favorite examples is our number one cost cell scenario out there with our ISVs is Red Hat. Now, if we said that when Mr. Balmer was here or even on the, five years ago, it was a much different experience there about Red Hat and how we embrace open source technologies. Red Hat, even something like OpenShift, which is their container services, we now enable as a first party through Azure. So it's okay, you don't have to use our Kubernetes brand. You can use third party services, put that on Azure for the most secure, integrated experience possible. We absorb and we love, we embrace those relationships, right? Because we think once you get in there and you start leveraging the monitoring, security, identity, provisioning services or within our stack, we think you'll start adopting more and more services from Microsoft. So what's leading this trend? Because I mean, it's so interesting that we're talking about this kind of open source approach to everything and this open brand in terms of using a little bit of Microsoft here, a little bit of AWS here. How are, is it that we're using so much, is that we're so willing to go for different companies in our lives as customers? And then, or is it the technology industry that is pushing this? Yeah, I actually think it's the former. I think that the technology industry would love to say, you're an Amazon person, you're a Microsoft shop, right? You're an open source shop, right? And Microsoft used to be that way. Like in fact, you'll still hear some people talk about it. Oh, I'm a Microsoft shop because I have Windows Server on premise. Now customers are looking for best in breed services, best in breed point solutions. When I started at Microsoft 15 years ago, you were a Microsoft customer and that meant you bought Windows, you bought Office, you bought Windows Server. And then when we started launching SQL Server, okay, you went to SQL Server. Now it's a little bit different. You might use a security ISV solution here. You might use a data transfer or an identity management solution here. Microsoft has embraced that proliferation of purchasing based on point in time solutions, right? Before, the integration was very tricky, right? Between these applications or these different service layers. Now with something like Azure that integrates across all of these platforms, we're winning, we're winning that share. Because we have, listen, if you have an AWS data lake out there, we're okay with that. You can secure it, you can monitor it, you can do analytics on it using Microsoft services, right? And eventually you'll see there's probably some cost benefit, there's probably some integration and some usability scenarios out there on why you'd want to migrate that to Azure. But while you get there, while you're on that journey, we're going to enable the connected infrastructure across that because customers want to buy best in breed. They want to buy what's available, what's easy to consume, what keeps their data secure. And so we're going to develop, we're going to surround all those technologies with our service layer and one by one, right? Show the integration and that true best in breed connected experience that we think Microsoft can provide. Yeah, Dave, I love that message and I think it speaks to one of the reasons you said why the ecosystem is growing. For those people that can't go through, come to the show, give us a little bit of a viewpoint. I mean, you know, we don't have an hour to go through all the options and I'm sure every partner is your favorite, whether it be the biggest or the smallest, but give us around to some of the areas that maybe, you know, you're hearing the most from customers that they're most interested in and some of the new areas that maybe might not have been here in previous years. Absolutely, I mean, where we see success in the channel and frankly in the marketplaces, you know, when we get out of talking about Azure or Office 365 or Windows and we talk about what's the business outcome we're trying to drive, right? So like, contract management is a scenario that every customer needs, right? So something like ICERDIS, which is a really strong contract management ISV solution that is embedded and built on Dynamics 365 is a great example there, right? Do you want your contracts to touch your customer relationship database to get extended through Outlook and Exchange and then to be able to mark up contracts with our productivity tools, whether that's Word, PowerPoint, et cetera? Contract management is an outcome that all customers need. We don't have to talk about Azure or Dynamics 365, we talk about contract management. So I think ICERDIS is a really good example of somebody who's defined a market leading position for an actual workload, a business outcome that all customers need to drive and it just happens to be pulling through our technology. Another company, Nintex, Nintex is right around the corner here. Nintex does an exceptional job of managing workflow. Any sort of scenario you need, are you trying to hire a candidate? Are you trying to process paperwork? Are you trying to run your supply chain or inventory management? I could say go out and deploy SharePoint, Office 365, go out and build an Azure database to go manage a virtual machine to spin up instances. Instead I can say do you have workflow that needs to be managed and connects to your database? Yes, okay, then go select Nintex, go see what they have to offer. They've got 30 plus offerings that you can take to catalog and customers want those outcomes. Customers at this day and age are getting less and less, I guess picky I would say, about the baseline infrastructure that runs all the services that they need. They're really about what's the application or the experience that integrates, that's secure, that is easy to implement and that does a specific job to make me more efficient. So I can spend more time with customers, I can drive more value. The fact that 90% of those applications are powered on Azure is an okay secret, right? That's okay for the channel to exist with all of these applications and services that are built on Azure, built on Dynamics 365 that just happen to pull through business outcomes. And if you're recommending them, Microsoft is this trusted brand and so that's the other part of that too. I think so too. And I think there's groups like Cohesity, another great organization out there that obviously we spend a lot of time in infrastructure with, right? Very driven to business and what are customers doing? If you think about the innovation curve that Cohesity has with their products in the marketplace, it's another great example of solve a business problem, find a business problem worth solving. Go out and invest in the IT and infrastructure to go out and build it, build a marketing and customer success plan around that. And the fact that they can develop and take new solutions to marketplace in Azure quicker, more efficiently, with more customer outcomes focused in that solution stack, they're using our shared services to build and have a faster time to market, right? So it's not even just about the services that are built on Azure. It's how Azure and Dynamics 365 and Modern Workplace 365, how Microsoft 365, how we can enable partners to build solutions that solve customers problems faster, right? And more efficient than we ever have in the past. Well, Dave Totten, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a really interesting conversation. Absolutely pleasure, thank you for being here. Thank you to all of the sponsors that are out here, all the partners that are here to invest in this event. We appreciate your energy and support. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite.