 Hi, Jeff Frick here. We're on the ground at the Western St. Francis in San Francisco at the Cassandra Summit 2014 show. It's about 3,000 people here filling up the western. So we wanted to come out, see what's going on, grab some people out of the hallways and get a feel for the conference. So we're joined next by Jeremiah Talker from Microsoft Azure, an evangelist. Yes, yeah. Jeremiah, 14 years at Microsoft and 27 years in the industry, worldwide experience and currently focused on Azure, very, very optimistic about the potential of Azure. And this is our big bet. So Satya Nadella has been on the Cube. I don't know if you've seen his interview we had him on last year before he got the big promotion. So it was yours a big bet. You've been on Microsoft a long time. So talk a bit about the cultural change of moving from, you know, a lot of licenses to cloud based services. Sure. The time that I was, I started Microsoft, it was all about making different Microsoft products work together, right? So SharePoint only worked on Windows server and with SQL server and everything was tied together. And that integration had its values and benefits and it also basically provided challenges, right? Because ultimately got termed as is a proprietary platform and you bet on a vendor and you get the whole stack from the vendor. So there are pros and cons to that with the cloud and the shift that we have made to the cloud that completely changes because in the cloud it's no longer about, you know, can you have .NET and ASP.NET and SQL server work in the cloud? That's not the stack. People make decisions not on the cloud vendor. They make decisions on a Cassandra. They make decisions on a cloud era. They make decisions about, you know, Java is my runtime on the cloud or other databases. So when they make the decision, if your cloud platform does not support that, they will not go with that and they will go with whoever provides that. So as a cloud vendor, we cannot afford to lock in. We cannot afford to say that this is only a Microsoft stack. It has to be what you want, whether it's SAP on the cloud, whether it's Salesforce, you have to integrate with those. So the traditional concept I think from the product world to the new cloud world is we moved away from, oh, this guy's, this company is a competitor or this set of companies is a competitor to where it's co-opetition. You have to collaborate with Oracle. You have to collaborate with SAP. You have to collaborate with the open source community and contribute. So that's the shift. Okay. So then the other big trend since you were Microsoft is open source, right? Yes. Cassandra clearly is an open source project. So, you know, most people would say that doesn't feel compatible with at least Microsoft roots. So what's kind of the growing presence and or the thought of on the open source side inside Microsoft? I know there is a stigma and a perception that, you know, Microsoft and open source doesn't don't go well together. I think the first comment I want to make is really Microsoft, I don't know most people are aware, but Microsoft actually has a wholly on subsidiary called MS Open Tech and that's, you know, several hundreds of people who are solely dedicated to open source community and contributing in a very significant way to the open source community, right? So they do get across many projects or there's primary things at the airport? Yeah, they have various focuses like BI and visualization data, right? So there are different categories and MS Open Tech is a public site and as I said it's a wholly on subsidiary of Microsoft. Okay. That focuses solely on, so we are committed to open source. We are showing that not by just talking about it, but actually by the projects that we are delivering in, you know, to the community and contributing back to the community as well as leveraging. One of the things that MS Open Tech is actually deeply involved in is also Cassandra since this is a Cassandra conference. There are various plans about integration with Microsoft services. So Azure has different services like Device Hub, which is our internet of things service. MS Open Tech is working with our group, the corporate developer evangelism group as well as engineering to build the integration points between let's say Cassandra and you know, Device Hub. Right. So there's a lot of focus within Microsoft of also adopting. So for example Yammer, which is our, you know, social platform for interaction that uses data stacks. There are many other groups within Microsoft which are, you know, using Cassandra and data stacks internally. So I think that perception of Microsoft and open source not better together. Actually there is a much bigger, better together story that we need to come out and tell actively. Yeah, I would say probably most people probably don't really know that part of the story. Yeah. And I think as a starting point, I would recommend that people go to msa.opentech.com. Okay. And take a look at all the rich work that we are doing with the open source community. So as you said then in this cloud world, it really becomes kind of a co-operative. So then how do you, you know, there's Amazon, obviously your friends, your friends up in the neighborhood. We've got Google now coming on strong with their cloud platform. You have OpenStack in the enterprise. How do you compete then in a world where you have to have kind of all these services available in apps for your customers? Sure. I think from a compete perspective, and this is something I'll cover later in my session with Luke from data stacks, you know, later on in the day. You could start, you know, one sort of competing comparison is you start looking at transactional things. You know, what kind of compute do you have? Does Amazon have this compute and Microsoft has that or Google? And, you know, what kind of storage do you have? What kind of, so you get into those kind of things. And to me, those are, you know, capabilities which at some point become a level for, right? Everybody will get there. Right. All the cloud want to get there. You don't want to compete on, you don't want to compete there. No, it's not that. We have to get there and we have to get much better and we have to keep on getting better. But really the where we start competing or I don't want to say competing, but differentiating. Okay. And it's not just us. I mean, Amazon will do the same thing. We respect them. We will do the same thing. We respect them is you start competing higher up the stack. You have to start differentiating, for example, like with us, active directory, right? Integration with active directory with single sign on with multi-factor authentication. That's one of our differentiators because that's so pivotal to any web or enterprise application that you do. Hybrid is again a differentiator for us. So we don't want to say we compete. We want to kind of outline. There are certain ways and certain beliefs where we start differentiating ourselves, right? Through a hybrid story because not every enterprise or not every web company wants to necessarily say that I want to move. It's either our story. It's not right. There are certain workloads or certain services that will remain on-prem and integrate with what's in the cloud. What can be logically hosted in the cloud? Yeah, how do you do that? You need to have a hybrid story. That's our strong point. Our investment in the footprint of the we have 17 regions today. We are the fastest growing 17 regions worldwide that offer 100% Azure services. That shows our commitment. So that's how we differentiate ourselves. Okay, that's a great point. So with that, we're going to leave it because that's a good evangelical statement. So I'm Chef Rick. We're on the ground at Cassandra Summit 2014, Western St. Francis in San Francisco. Thank you.