 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Hello everyone and welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are kicking off three days of live coverage here at the Orange County Civic Center Convention Center. Sorry, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. Stu, we have so much to cover, so many new products, so many new strategies, new emphasis, new buzzwords, tech intensity, and democratization. You were here, you were in the hub, you heard Satya Nadella live on the main stage. I'd love to just get your initial impressions and initial thoughts of his keynote and then we're going to dig into all of the keynote. Yeah, well, Rebecca, it's great to be here second year doing it with you here, your background really on business productivity. Really enjoyed doing this one with you. And as you said, wall to wall, three days of coverage. The place is just buzzing with activity. 26,000 in attendance for a show that's been called Microsoft Ignite for I think it's been about six years. It was TechEd back in the day. As we talked about last year, this was originally the windows and office administrators show and it's really matured over time. Trust was a big topic of conversation and what was my general thing? They rearranged some of the logistics of it. I actually, usually I'm sitting with the press and the analysts up front. I actually went in the shoes of the attendee here which meant I stood an hour for almost two hours waiting to be one of the 3000 out of 26,000 to go get a seat. And communication was a little bit weird and we kind of move in, but I did get a nice seat. Satya Nadella was up on front. I thought they covered a lot of ground and it ran well logistically for those of us that were watching from the main stage. I heard remotely as sometimes happens, internet or things, there could be some challenges. It is with all of these cloud shows that we go to, you just get this barrage of so many different things. Everything from really interesting as your arc which we're going to spend a bunch of time talking about through all of the latest AI and the power things that they're going on all the way down through dynamics and teams and devices and edge and down to the browser and the search engine. So, so many different things, Microsoft of course, one of the stalwarts in technology but literally laying out a lot of announcements, books worth if you were, of all of the announcements that go out there and the general take that I get for most people is they definitely are impressed so far and they're going to spend all week digging into learn more. So we're going to dig in right now but I also just want to say that setting the scene to all of this is October 25th, Microsoft was given the jet, it was announced that it was given the Jedi contract. This was a big surprise and this is Microsoft which is a distant number two to AWS. Did Satya seem on a high from that still or what is your impression there? Unless I missed it, I didn't catch anything about it. Absolutely, I've talked to some people around the show, talked to some of my peers in the media and analyst community that are talking about it. Absolutely, it was a big surprise. Anybody that's interested in this, go check out John Furrier's written a ton on this. Dave Vellante's done a lot of analysis. We've been looking at this quite a bit. Amazon really had won this deal and it went through courts and Oracle, pushed against really hard to try to make sure that Amazon did it. General Mattis writes about it in his book that I think came out recently from the president down to make sure that Amazon did not get this. Politics, intrigue, the high level is it's $10 billion over 10 years but when you look into it, number one is the minimum purchase in the first year is only like a million. It's expected to be more like 200, 250 million in the first two years but it is a big deal. Microsoft really spent a lot of time the last couple of years going deeper into public sector making sure they've got the governance and the compliance. Satya and his keynote talked about the 54 Azure regions and what they're doing. There's still work that Microsoft needs to do. They don't have the level six security yet which Amazon does. They've been given less than a year to get that to make sure that they can fulfill this but a lot of pieces and there will be lots of other government contracts but lots of intrigue there. I think it goes back to the thing we mentioned, trust. Can the government trust that Microsoft will allow them to do all they need to do? There's a lot of Office 365 in the government and of course Microsoft does this. The other thing there's a bunch of in the government is they use Oracle. We know that Oracle and Amazon are still butting heads. You don't expect to see Oracle and Amazon shaking hands on stage anytime soon. At Oracle Open World this year, you saw Oracle allowing their solution to run on Azure in friendly licensing terms because you can run Oracle on AWS but Oracle's going to do everything you can to make sure that the licensing terms are onerous in that environment. They want you to do it on their infrastructure or on their environments and really opening up to Azure. Now the government can trust that they can run it there and for me that trust resonated when I talked to the partner ecosystem. There definitely is some concern about Amazon's power in the marketplace and what they will do. Amazon to their credit has a big ecosystem. Their marketplace is phenomenal and they are open and give customers choice but obviously just like if you start on Amazon.com if it's a Amazon basics or Amazon provider solution they're probably going to move them in that way. Every company does this. Google makes sure that they optimize for their ads and everything like that. Microsoft in the past was known for optimizing their licensing revenue. Today they are more trusted, they are more open. I think Sacha leads that from the top but so many things that they need to dig into. So Jedi, not something I expect to spend a lot of time on this week but thank you for bringing it up and absolutely to the center tone because the moral of the stories today cloud is AWS and Azure are the clear leaders. Yes, AWS still has a sizable lead. Azure is slowly eating into that lead but as a user, as an enterprise, as any company out there you can't be wrong by choosing either of those solutions and one of the things Microsoft's embracing is that multi-cloud environment going back to ARC we'll talk about how do I live in that multi-cloud world. AWS still leads with their hybrid solution and use AWS, don't use other clouds. Azure is more embracing of a multi-cloud world. So let's talk about that now but I just in terms of the trust at a time where there is such deep and tremendous skepticism of big tech in government right now the trust really is a crucial element and we're going to talk about that today with a lot of our guests. Two developments that you're most interested in and really want to dig into here. Azure ARC, we're going to start Azure ARC and Power Platform but Azure ARC brand new today, your thoughts, your impressions. Yeah, so Azure ARC I can automate updates with my policies across any environment not just Azure. So where I look at this and say okay do I manage Azure with this? Absolutely, it's got Kubernetes in it so I should be able to move things around if need be. My data center and what I'm putting there all of the Azure stack and Edge hub all of these Azure pieces in my data center can I manage that with this? Of course, the question is what about if I'm using Google services if I'm using AWS services in the demo that they ran they showed AWS and said oh we can manage that. I said that's great that they can but will customers actually do that? There's a certain skill set there's the way I program for it and of course AWS you know has its tooling that everybody uses there. We've been trying to get that single pane of glass for more than my entire career and the techies I talk to is that that pane of glass is nothing but P-A-I-N is the joke we always make. So it is great that they've done this. By the way it's only in tech preview right now so it's great that they have this. We've been saying for years that Microsoft if you talk about hybrid has the lead and when you talk about thought leadership and solutions but really that hybrid solution is Azure and data center and I've got my apps that live everywhere so O365 or in my data center in there and what we're really hearing here is a comprehensive reimagining of hybrid as we've been talking about it more recently is I really blur the lines between my data center the public cloud and even the edge so it's great to see Microsoft do this. Got a lot of friends that are at the VMworld Europe show in Barcelona this week. We've been talking about this in the VMware environment for the last couple of years of the VMware on AWS, VMware on Azure, VMware on Google, Oracle, IBM and more. So it's great that Microsoft has stepped up here in some ways it makes me rethink how I thought about Microsoft because Microsoft has been in my mind a leader in hybrid and realizing that they need to really make a significant change to the portfolio to really deliver on the promise of hybrid and multi. My definition of when we will have a true multi cloud solution is when the value that I extract from the system is greater than the sum of the parts and absolutely that's not where we are today. Microsoft has a lot of pieces, absolutely they have a right to be one of the leaders pulling those pieces together and really it is a place where you see Microsoft and VMware partnering but also all going to be that leader in the management of my cloud native environment and we're going to spend a lot of time this week talking to the developers because that's another area that Satya spent a lot of time in those 2.5 million citizen developers as he calls them. I'm sure you must have really loved Rebecca. 61% of job openings for developers are outside of the tech sector. Well exactly and that is such a huge point and that's what Satya said, that's always been our sweet spot. We are for the citizen developers and we want to democratize computing. We want to make sure that you can bring your best self to work and be your most productive self to work and so many of the tools that they have introduced today are all about creativity, collaboration, time management, productivity, individual type productivity as well as team productivity. So there's a lot of exciting developments today. Let's talk about power platform speaking of the parts and the pieces. What does it do, what most interests you and excites you about power platform? Boy so first, this is the last thing the citizen developers, it's funny when most people, where do I start? And I started with Excel. And of course Microsoft is probably the company that most people, I'm old enough now that I remember using the spreadsheets before Excel was the leader that it was there but the power platform, the thing I've been looking at is we were here a year ago, there was no power platform. Did we talk a lot about AI? Absolutely. Do we talk about data warehousing and business intelligence and all of these things? So I'm trying to understand how much of this is just the new umbrella messaging around it and how much there's new products. I talked to a couple people that dig in straight here. I talked to a couple of the Microsoft MVPs which boy there are lots of them here. I haven't mentioned it Rebecca already but the community at the show is excellent. It is welcoming, it is engaging, diversity is front and center at this show and Microsoft, great kudos for that because it ties into that citizen developers. But when you talk about the power platform it's about enabling those citizen developers. So a few announcements in there. Power Automate is really their RPA solution. We've got Power Virtual Agents which is understanding natural language and conversations. Satya actually did a cute little thing. He went to like Universal and fought the DemiGorgon from Stranger Things. Stranger Things fan, I thought it was really cute and everything but he explained, he's like, oh okay here's, you know, it's understanding my name and saying it back to me. It's understanding the movements that I'm doing and turning that into what's happening. So, you know, we understand that we're still relatively early into gaining the full benefits out of AI here but there's a lot of tooling and from what the people I've talked to is the power platform absolutely is much more than just a rebranding. There are acquisitions that have come in. There are software launches and Microsoft in the agile continuously shipping code mode that everybody is in these days is going through a lot of iteration. So I believe that the platform was announced back in the spring and something that I've seen with Microsoft in many companies like Cisco that are going heavily in software. A platform of software actually can be a unifying fact of forcing function between all of these groups. So rather than saying, oh my gosh, Microsoft, you've got a thousand different software packages that I would buy. No, no, that's not the way you think about it. You know, they don't come on a CD or disc anymore. Instead, there's something that I plug into and it's cloud enabled. It's able to be purchased in a ratable model. So, you know, we've got a number of guests that that power platform absolutely is hearing good things in the ecosystem and absolutely, you know, it is a strength of Microsoft when you talk about the leverage and use of data in a business environment and it's their legacy. And this is a company that is going from strength to strength right now. Really firing on all four cylinders, Azure, Office 365, Windows. We have talked about Fortnite and the other gaming elements here. But in terms of usage issues, I know there were a couple of hiccups last week. Yeah, so, you know, outages are something people are definitely worried about. The cloud, there was, you know, reported last week that there were some availability and performance issues. They were throttling things back. They were saying you couldn't scale and we're like, wait, you know, infinite compute, infinite storage on demand. That's what we need. And from some of the things I heard from the community, the gaming platforms actually were impacting this and actually gaming that run across both AWS and Azure. So it definitely is a little bit of a red flag. You know, you're Azure, you're Microsoft and you want to talk about that you are a leader in the space, you can trust them. We're going to keep you going. Well, you know, companies have spent decades making sure that their data centers have the uptime and reliability that we need. You know, when I talk to the big cloud providers, they have some of the same conversations we were having back in the infrastructure world, you know, 15 years ago about data availability and data loss, you know, DUDL, data unavailability and data loss. It was a four letter word. You can't have it. You would have war rooms and make sure that things, you know, don't go down. So a little bit of red flag, especially, you know, will there be any contesting of the government deal? You don't want something sitting there saying, oh, hey, wait, I have a critical, you know, DOD operation that needs to happen. Wait, we can't scale up when we need it. You know, that's a no-no. Right, exactly. Well, these are all the topics we're going to get into and then some over the next three days, it's going to be an action packed show. I'm looking forward to it. A lot of great guests too. Thanks so much, too. I can't wait. I hope you'll stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit.