 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are in day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, all things Microsoft. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Martina Grom. She is the CEO of Atwork in Vienna and a Microsoft MVP. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Martina. Thanks for the invitation. I'm glad to be here. So tell us a little bit about Atwork. What do you do? So what we are doing, we are in ISV, located in Austria and in Germany. We are around 25 people. And we do software development on the one side and on the other side. We support customers in going into the cloud to develop a deployment strategy, to use Microsoft technology and yeah, governance, deployment, migration, and recently we also started with adoption and change management because it's a huge topic for many customers. So who are your customers? What kinds of industries are they in? Yeah, so we actually do not focus on a specific industry. We are more focusing on enterprise customers. So every customer is a large customer. So one friend once told me, you like the complicated cases. So I like to work with enterprises and learn what they are doing from a security perspective and how they do that. And we have customers in the financial sector as well as in retail business. So all over that. And mainly in Europe, we have some customers in the US as well. So Martina, I know from a Microsoft MVP standpoint, you focus on O365. Is that the primary engagement that you have with customers or is it a span of products and solutions? The interesting part is I started with Microsoft 365 in 2008 when Microsoft started going into the cloud business. So that time back, my first product I looked at was Exchange Hosted Services, which was the anti-virus, anti-spam solution Microsoft provided. And then every single partner of us told us, Martina, you will never earn money with cloud technologies because no customer will do that. Everyone was still on premises. And in 2011, I got the MVP award because I was one of the first to focus so heavily on Office 365. And the benefit I have out of that is that I know all product services quite well. And currently I'm more focusing on the security and compliance side. Yeah, it's interesting. Because today when I talk to Microsoft customers on-premises is the exception. And it's usually, oh, I'm a government agency and I need to be completely cut off from certain environments, so therefore I can't do it. I've said for the last few years, Microsoft actually gave customers not only the green light, but the push to go sass with what they're doing. So give us a little bit of the landscape today. Is that, is it the exception rather than the rule? And are most people kind of okay with the 365 in the cloud? Yeah, I think cloud services is a matter of trust. So as I am located in Europe, we, and especially in the German speaking countries like Austria, Germany, Switzerland, many people just didn't trust it from the beginning because they said, it's an American company. We don't know where our data is and so on. And Microsoft is very open and what they did, they are very transparent what they are doing. So you get tons of material around how to trust the cloud, how it works and so on. And the current state is more for an on-premises customer. He is safer to go into a cloud service than stay on-premises. And this is one of the things I really like about that because it doesn't depend on the customer side. Even a small customer can have the same security features a large enterprise customer has. If you could just expand on that a little bit because for the longest time, security was the blocker to do there. And for many now, looking at the cloud, at least it lets me restart and rethink what I'm doing as opposed to, you know, often security was something that got pushed to the back burner, you know, in my data center. So is it that Microsoft has, you know, all of the security taken care of? Is it a combination of getting to restart and rethink of it? How do you look at that? I think that the main point is traditionally when you are on-premises, you think your data center is secure because you own it. You host it, you organize it, you operate it and everything is there. And we are very, and those customers are very focused on endpoint security. So everything that comes from the outside might be dangerous. But with cloud technologies, it's not only your own network you need to have a safe place for, you also need to secure the cloud services. And that means if you broaden that experience and go into a SaaS service, you have much more security there. In terms of the talking at the very beginning where you said, I like the complicated cases. So we know you like a challenge. And then you also said you're getting into more adoption and change manner. Talk about some of the challenges that you're seeing in terms of your clients embracing this technology. Yeah, so from my perspective, one of the biggest challenges customers currently have is Microsoft is moving very fast. People need to change and get comfortable with an evergreen service, which might change today and might change next week again. And this is something people need to adopt and users put a lot of pressure on that because they say, oh, there are the nice fancy tools, the new tools, it's teams, it's everything else. And we need that to work properly and to be in a modern workplace. And this is quite the challenge for every IT operations team because they need to build a secure environment, it needs governance, and it also needs change and adoption. Okay, Martina, you mentioned the modern workplace. So another area you work on is enterprise socials. So I worked for a large enterprise, a vendor in this ecosystem. Back when that social wave was hitting, used Jive, used Yammer when it first launched long before, Microsoft had brought it. We don't talk about the E2.0 wave anymore. Bring us, what's happening in that space these days? Yeah, so enterprise social, and I love being there as well because I tried to get people, so what I saw when Microsoft acquired Yammer, it brought a lot of change into Microsoft itself because there was currently a graph technology in Yammer as a product which brings up more relevant content to the users and people really like that. And then you saw all the collaboration which is mainly document based on SharePoint, SharePoint online and so on, and currently those services come together. And then after a couple of years, you got Microsoft Teams and people again got confused and said, so this is the next tool, help me, what should I use when? And that's one of the biggest question many customers have currently because they probably don't understand it from the beginning, but if they start adopting that, the use cases become pretty clear for them that to say we work in Teams, in our project environment, but if we want to reach the whole organization, we go into Yammer or in an enterprise social tool. So talk about, there's been a lot of new changes to Teams that have been announced this week here at Ignite. What, as a Microsoft MPP, what is most sparking your interest? I'm not a Microsoft employee, but... MPP, sorry, I said yeah. So what I like about that is that Teams brings kind of a good user experience to users. They have one client, they have the Outlook client, they have the Teams client, and they can work within the team in Microsoft Teams. They can use it for video calls, for conferences, anything. So it's a one stop shop defined in Teams. And with the extension, which is brought now in with the new Yammer experience, they also have the broader experience of the enterprise social network integrated into their Teams client. And this will bring a fundamental change because then a project team which is working together can also look out of one client what is going on in my organization. Are there any questions? Can I share that and so on? Martina, I want to go back to a word that you brought up when you talk about the cloud. It's trust. Something that we heard over and over in the keynote is Sacha positioning Microsoft as a trusted partner. They've got, what's it, 47, sorry, 54 different Azure regions worldwide. So are they local enough? Are they engaged enough? Is Microsoft earning the trust of you as a partner and as your customers? Do they see Microsoft as a trusted partner? Yeah, so from my experience, Microsoft is a trust was a company because what I learned from them during the whole cloud journey, they got a lot of pushbacks in the beginning. They said, it's just in the European Union. We don't like that. We want a data centers which are closer to us because it feels more secure if I have a data center region in South Africa, in France, in Switzerland or wherever I am. And Microsoft invests a lot in building that trust and it's completely transparent what they are doing. So you can go to the websites and can say, okay, I'm located in Switzerland. I want my data in there. So what services do I get there? So it's really a good opportunities for customers. And also what I learned from customers is if you see a service running and you do not use it, you can't build up on trust because you just don't know. It's like swimming in the air without any water. So, and this is many customers just saw and they discovered, okay, it works. It doesn't fail. We can trust on the solution and this is really important. You said that you mainly work with European customers, a few in the U.S. What do you think are the biggest differences between the two groups? Are European customers naturally a little more skeptical, particularly when it comes to data? It's, in Europe, we are very specific in data privacy. And I think that might be a difference between the U.S. and Europe, especially in German, where people really look at privacy issues and could that have meant on? And then we have GDPR, which was brought up by the European Union, which would bring additional trust and security into our customers and on every single website we are surfing on. So, I think that's one of the biggest differences. From an enterprise side, the fears are quite the same. It's like we are going to the cloud and we need to use a service and how can we work through that? I do not see that many differences. So, Martina, you were proven right. You bet early on a technology. Adoption's been there. As you're looking forward, what are the things that we are early on today that are exciting you or that you think we're going to be talking about in 2020 and beyond? Yeah, what I think what will come to us is more intelligence and more AI stuff, because this is something which will really help us. And you see the little small things in PowerPoint that you get your beautiful designed PowerPoint slides automatically that your Outlook client says, hey, you have an appointment, you have a video recording in five minutes, you need 10 minutes to go, should I send an email that you're running late? So, we will see much more intelligence in there. And also the new projects which are brought there, so knowledge sharing will be fundamental in the future that we find the resources we need and the relevance what we need in the time we need it. So what does this mean for the future? I mean, you're just describing a world in which we all can be more productive, we are communicating more seamlessly. What does this mean for how teams communicate and collaborate? Yeah, so what I think every positive side also might have a negative side. We go into an always on scenario. So we will be connected everywhere. At home, during cooking, bringing kids to school and so on. So what I think what we as humans need to learn is how we can separate us from that and how we can just quiet down and get some space left out of the full amount of information which is around us because we can't get every single information. And I see that very often when I talk with customers around Yama, they said, it's just too much. I have to read so much information because you feel you are losing control and you are losing information and this is what we need to learn as humans. Yeah, and what guidance do you give to people? The world of streams, right? I remember social media, they were like, oh my gosh, I didn't look at it for the weekend. How do I look at all of that stuff that I miss? And usually on a stream I'm like, you ignore everything that you missed and you start where it is today but it's different in a work environment. In a work environment, so my advice for customers is every single item you're tagged on is interesting for you. If you're not tagged, it's probably not for you. So this is the main course. It's like unread emails or it's like the little notification bar. You got a message, a personal message, a one-to-one message then you should react on that. That's it. And not read everything because it's probably not relevant for you. That's great advice, words to live by. Thank you so much for Martina. It's a pleasure having you on. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage from Microsoft Ignite.