 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 here at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We're joined by Patrick Moorhead. He is the founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. Thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. You're a good friend of theCUBE. Thanks for having me on. I mean, it's a great show and I literally look for theCUBE everywhere. Oh, very nice. Good to hear. I probably do about 40 events a year and I'm pretty sure you're at about 30. Where are we there? Exactly, exactly. We've got a few more for you to come to in the other place. The year is not over. Exactly. So, so many announcements today. An 87 page book from the Microsoft comms team. One of the things that is getting a lot of attention is Azure Arc. Satya Nadella himself said, I am so excited about this. This marks the beginning of hybrid computing. What are your first impressions of it and are you able to see the immediate differences between stack and Arc? Yeah, so I think I would say completely expected. We're out of this drunken sailor mode where everything's going to the public cloud. Oh my gosh, and everybody is toast who's not doing this, okay? And now we're in this somewhat sober right where 80% of the workloads are still on-prem and 20 of those have gone on to either SaaS or IaaS or PAS, but it's expected. Now, Microsoft already had a full stack, i.e. Azure stack, but this takes it up a notch because you can deploy Arc anywhere on anybody's cloud. They even showed a demo of doing backups to AWS. Whether it's on-prem and I'm sure they're going to show it running on GCP as well. So Patrick, for a number of years we've been saying when you line up the big hyperscalers and say, who's doing well at hybrid? Microsoft's been at the top of the list there because they have a strong footprint in my data center. Microsoft gave everyone the green light to go do SaaS as much as you can because they're pushing everybody to 0365 and of course, Azure is growing in one of the leaders in public cloud. The announcements this week were compelling but it made me kind of rethink as I think you laid it out well and said, but we've been talking about hybrid cloud for a number of years, but we're not really there. So Arc, it's a first piece, it's only in tech preview. I think you were saying for a singular application which is databases, when you look out there and you see the VMware on AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM. You look at AWS with outposts and those things. How is Microsoft doing today at delivering for what customers need today and moving forward on their cloud journey? So Microsoft was first out of the gate with Azure Stack, they were doing hybrid before it was cool. It was interesting, for about two years when they were rolling it out or building it, they weren't talking about it. So I was thinking, wait a second, is it not catching on or do they want to put more on the big cloud Azure? But in fact, they have been diligently working behind the scenes. And while they had to show Wall Street this, hey, we're the public cloud, they were actively building out their hybrid opportunities and I do believe that when it comes to the slice of hybrid, they are leading right now. Now, it depends on where you start. I guess what I do is they're leading if you have a major public cloud. AWS is obviously there with outposts and everybody in the audience, we were all in the audience, we gasped when Andy Jassy brought that out, we kind of knew something was being worked on, Anthos as well. And I think to be a credible player, you have to have both implementations, going one way and going the other, being able to work with other people's clouds, but also notice everybody has their single pain of glass strategy. If you want to go all in on Microsoft, you have ARC. And that's really the classic Microsoft embrace and extend. Yeah, so Patrick, you said all in on Microsoft. And if I look at the enterprise, you've obviously got some Microsoft. There's probably some things you're doing in Azure, you're running 0365, there's lots of pieces in the Microsoft portfolio, but most people aren't all in on anything today. So the same thing I looked at Anthos and said, in Google Cloud or in my data center, sure, but Anthos on AWS. And no VM, no virtualized applications on Anthos either. So the same question for Microsoft is, if I'm in AWS, have a big footprint of AWS, is this going to fly or what's your take? Yeah, so it's funny, where I've wound up after 30 years of doing this stuff, is there's always going to be a lock-in. You just have to pick the lock-in that you want. Some people are comfortable with an API lock-in. Some are comfortable with a hardware lock-in. Some people are comfortable with a development environment. And you're going to pick one, just what is it going to be? The reality is in a Fortune 500, you're going to have multiple panes of glass. You just need to determine which two or which three are you comfortable with. Maybe you'll have a pan of glass for deployment. Maybe you'll have a pan of glass for ops. The interesting thing that I'm really looking for though is where this heads with multi-cloud. Because I believe, at least in my definition, multi-cloud is kind of fiction if you talk about actually managing it. Because DevOps are cool, but you know, when you go to multi-cloud, you break dev and you break ops. So this is a way, ARC is a way to keep, if you buy into their dev and their ops and their security, you would go all in on ARC. So I'm actually interested in what you were talking about with Microsoft going sort of working behind the scenes to Wall Street presenting this one thing, but really working behind the scenes. And then talking about being at the conference and everyone gasping at Andy Jassy. How much are companies really paying attention to every burp of these companies in terms of their competition with each other to be number one? They'll all say that they don't track the competition, but they all have these massive competitive teams that are operating in real time. And I guarantee you all of Microsoft's competitors are watching all these are here and doing that. Now, I think the best companies are looking forward trying to change the game. If they have to change the game, the entrenched vendors are really have been playing catch-up mode. If you were 100% on-prem and you're talking about the public cloud, you're going to be in trouble. I think actually Oracle's a great example of they're in trouble, particularly with IS. I see databases as a service, but it's like too little, too late, and I think they're paying the price right now. Yeah, so Patrick, thanks for teeing up the Oracle piece because one of the topics that Saja repeatedly talked about in the keynote was trust. It's actually the exponential to the environment. And if you talk about the ecosystem, Microsoft, if you look at the hyperscalers, is probably more trust than others. We talk about people wanting to break up companies. Well, we tried to break up Microsoft. Back years ago, we know what happened there. And Oracle was up on stage at Oracle, open world saying you want to run Oracle in the cloud, here's Azure, they're our partner. We actually think that was a key piece of the jet ID. I agree. Is enabling that environment. So the question I have for you is, first of all, do you agree that the ecosystem believes that Microsoft is more trusted? But what about customers? I think you actually made a tweet about it because I wonder, historically speaking, Microsoft was not the most trusted. It was the one that was right behind Oracle as to who I spent the most licensing money to. Microsoft has changed. Are they a trusted partner for companies building their IT strategy? I have to say, based on the last, I'll call it five years, the level of Microsoft trust has raised. And there are other players who make Microsoft look like the super trust zone, okay? I mean, and maybe what they're doing in breaking consumer privacy, let's say 95% of your business is advertising, right? Let's just say, what kind of company could be it? Imagine this, right? Having commercial offerings that are SaaS offerings out there, I think you do have to ask the question. But listen, I think nobody's Mother Teresa here, okay? Everybody's trying to get business, but I do believe particularly since Satya's been here, the level of trust has gone up. And I hear it from clients that I meet with all the time. Other people are on the naughty list for sure, even those 95% advertising companies who haven't let's say done something that's horrible, but it's just the notion that something could go wrong. I mean enterprises, they're slow to adopt, they're very conservative, and it makes great fun. It's important, exactly. So one of the other big announcements is Power Platform. That's right. What are your impressions of this? I mean, is it just semantics? I mean, is this just really the umbrella of a lot of things we've seen before or is it something new and different? So we did see some brand changes and name changes, but we did see some real movement here. And I like to put, even though they're different, I like to put BI, Dynamics 365 and Power kind of in the same region because it's, hey, I'm teeing up HR app for you or CRM, but then you're going to build apps on top of that. And that's where Power comes into the play. I think the RPA portion was relatively new and what they brought out, but I wouldn't say this was the big news rollout for Power. I do think interestingly enough it is their largest growth area. If you think about what, let's say Salesforce is racking up, what SAP is doing out there, even a work day, that is, if I look at the cubic dollars that are available, that is their first or second business driver. So I was expecting a little bit more news here. How about you? Well, I mean, I'm just the host here. You two are the analysts. You know what you're talking about. I think that Power, I mean, what do you think, Stu? Yeah, no, Patrick, you know, from the people I've been talking to, there's a mixture of some of it was pulling everything together, but there is a rapid movement. When I talk to the RPA vendors out there, it's not like they're all quaking in their boots. They're still partnering with Microsoft. We see IBM and SAP, everybody's going after that environment. Come on, RPA is the gateway drug to AI. Is it not? It is. UI path, exactly. A show recently talking about that. So back to that trust there, Microsoft is not usually making announcements that you walk across the booth and there's a few people saying, can we roll out the beer early because we think our business is ruined. That's where some of that trust is in Microsoft. But that being said, it was curious to me that they didn't have any big partnerships announcement. Last year, McDermott was up on stage and he's changed companies since then. But there was a couple of small open source announcements, but not any large partnership announcements. So ecosystem, majorly important. Any commentary from you on how Microsoft is doing in that ground battle for ecosystem? So if I look the past couple of years when some of the biggest players, CEOs were on stage, it was about ODI. Hey, let's share our data. SAP, probably one of the bigger one even though they're doing with Salesforce as well. And I think that was a giant leap for folks. And then I think second of all, we weren't going to see Larry on stage because by the way, I agree with you on Jedi, that was a huge deal. To me, it was Oracle outsourcing IaaS to Azure. That would have been newsworthy. If I look at what could have been up here, not that there aren't more strategic deals that could be done, I think people are busy executing at this point. But if you look at who's going to share the data with ODI, that was the biggest. Working with different clouds, well, we're not going to get AWS to get up on stage here, right? We're not going to get GCP up here on stage, although we could have gotten WebEx up stage because apparently, WebEx at a Cisco and Teams are becoming friends. And maybe we'll see that on a slightly smaller stage. Yeah, it's more of an enterprise connect kind of launch than it is a Microsoft show. Exactly, but I was surprised, and I think it's a testament to how powerful Teams actually is. And it's funny when Teams, which everybody thought was dead after Slack was announced and Hangouts with Google has actually ended up being the darling of the enterprise. And not just because it comes free with your M1 subscription, right? It's really, it's a good product. It's a shockingly good product. You don't have to do any of the, any security, if you have any security challenges with anything in Microsoft, you'll have an issue here, but that's not the case. It all uses the back end of Microsoft for security and regulatory. So anyways, I know I'm veering off here, but there was one partner announcement that I saw. It was Cisco WebEx being friends with Teams. Can't we all just get along? I mean, that's, there we go. When there's money for everybody. Exactly, it's with every consumer. Every consumer. And it's too expensive to go out on your own. Patrick, always so much fun to have you on the show. Thanks for having me on. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the Cube's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite.