 Hey everyone, this is our second episode of looking into Azure Lighthouse from different perspectives. Today we're taking the perspective of the ISV or the independent software vendor who just like you may have issues with deploying, managing, and supporting their workload in a customer's subscription. So if this is a scenario that you find interesting or that you're experiencing right now, stay tuned because we're going to be talking with Joseph Foscato from Sage about this very subject. Stay tuned. Hello, Joseph. How are you? Very well. Thanks and you? I'm fine. I'm fine. I hope you're back from vacation. I hope that was a good time for you. Yeah, it was great. It was great. So you are an ISV or what they refer to as independent software vendor. Yeah. What is your usage of Lighthouse? Yeah. So traditionally Sage has hosted many customer installations inside the Sage instances of Azure. So and then it's right. It's really easy for us to manage everything because we own the main credentials. We are global administrators and when it's easy for us to manage all this stuff, right? But since probably one year and a half ago, since Sage started to move to the SPC program, that is the Sage Partner Cloud program, is the way to provide, okay, so instead of Sage managing all the infrastructure and everything which initially is close to other business partners to do some additions. So then why don't we extend this, the mechanism, the hosting platform that we have right now to our partners, right? Right. And based on that is when we faced the first blocker and we said, right, because right now we are able to spin up and create new resources in our subscriptions because we own them, we have the global administration and so on, but then we said, okay, but if we are using someone else's subscription, we cannot do that. We need some global permissions and we don't want that from there, you know? And that's why we have some discussions with Microsoft and is when they point it out to say, okay, why are you are not using Lighthouse, which is a service that allows you to do something in someone else's subscriptions without having a global administrator, password, secrets and so on. And that's why we started to work on that because as I said, right now we are deploying our solution for our business partners in their subscriptions. So Sage doesn't own them. And then we are able to spin up new resources like virtual machines, storages, databases, backups and whatever required for us to work. And not only this, we are also provide the ability to extra services or manage services for the partners. Related to backups and restoring and all these actions that are related to the normal maintenance of an updates of an installation, a customer installation. And actually the users, the Lighthouse actually allows us to do that in a controlled way because the business partner has to consent Sage to access to the subscription because we need to first have this consent from them and they are aware of that. We are doing this running a PowerShell with a template and so on. Maybe it's not very user friendly but we are adding some extra stuff in that PowerShell related to registering some other services that we need to spin up new things, right? Okay. And one this consent is granted that our business partner is also the owner of that. They can remove at any moment. So because they can say, I'm not happy with that or I don't want they can remove. They are the owner of the subscription. And all we have, there is the power let's say to do all the required actions to spin up new customer installations. And as I said, as many resources to make our financial and accounting solutions to work there. So that's basically the usage we are giving to Lighthouse and actually I think it's quite, it fits very well in what we wanted to do. So other than the facility of you being able to deploy your solution into your customer's subscription or your partner's subscription. Has there been any other significant benefits to starting using Lighthouse? Actually, the fact of having a unified locks. Okay. Outditing and to be able to troubleshoot some things that are issues and probably deploying this infrastructure and so on is something that allows you to see what's going on. And I think this is an important thing to have a unified way to see for that business partner that this for us, a business partner can host several customer installations. So then it's easy also for us to go there and deep dive and in case of emergency trying to find out and for troubleshooting. I think that's a really interesting point. But mainly, but mainly we are using, we're supposed to deploy these in arm templates and so on. They are quite robust and well, hopefully this is not much usage of this login. But I think that's another of the benefits of using Lighthouse. Okay. So you've got ability to deploy anywhere with proper authorization and access customers that can or partners that if they're not happy because it's their own description can basically manage your access and then logs that so that the customer and you have an audit trail of everything that was done. All right. Yeah. That's right. Oh, that's very cool. What has been the feedback from your customers at this point versus the old model that you had where you deployed everything in your own subscription? Well, actually, if we deploy in our own subscription, then the partners that have probably new add-ons to add there, they didn't have access to that. So right now, that's why Sage opened these to the partners to maybe install on the virtual machines that we are basically providing other add-ons that may be more specific for project management that maybe this is something that we are not managing and other utilities that they may use so far. I think it has a good accept this very well. And I think there is a lot of things to discover in the next months because we have just launched that I think six months ago and the partners are still being familiar and educating and moving on on that. So but I think it's an interesting way of extending and including other third-party business partners engaged in the business, you know, to extend the product. So if I get it right, you're deploying your solution into the partner's environment or your customer's environment and then because it's their environment, they have access to add to put in their own add-ons or third-party add-ons which they would not be able if they were in your own subscription. That's correct. I had never thought about it. That's brilliant. No, no, I think that's a good initiative. And also, I think Lighthouse helped us to also do that. So great. Because we are the products that we are deploying are let's say desktop on-premise products, right? And we are providing these cloud capabilities to these desktop products because as I said, from that point, we are able to spin up new sites with a few clicks and then provide all the backup and all these extra, let's say cloud, more cloud services to our end partners and customers. That's great. If there was one thing that you'd say or is there anything that in Lighthouse is working for you but there are things that you wish would either be added or modified? Well, with Lighthouse, I think right now the granularity is at subscription level and then our resource group level. But you cannot go, for example, on top of that. You cannot manage anything related to after-directory, for example. So this is something that I don't know if this could be extended with Lighthouse or maybe there are a lot of limitations that I'm not aware of. And when you mean make changes to Active Directory, you mean like adding users and groups? Exactly, yes. These basic actions, let's say to add users, groups and these kind of things that right now is not possible at this moment. Okay, so when that need to happen, what you just tell your customers will go add this user and add this group because it's an added layer of manual steps or complexity. Exactly, yeah. Okay. So Joseph, you mentioned the fact that Lighthouse has allowed you to let your customers or let your partners add on. What has been in retrospect looking at before Lighthouse and now with Lighthouse, what's the business impact that you've seen for your company? Basically, as I mentioned, initially Sage hosted in their own subscriptions all the infrastructure. So then the business partners have no access to do anything there. And the idea to deploy the Sage Partner Cloud Program is just to give the partners the ability to extend and build on top of Sage solutions other add-ons from other third-party companies, ISBs to give a complete or a full set of capabilities application to the customer. So... Has that translated in your business partners actually suggesting or promoting your solutions more to their own customers? I wouldn't say that is to provide to the end customers a complete enterprise solution for financial and accounting. So imagine that maybe a company that needs extra project management and maybe the solution from Sage from a specific country is not providing that. So at least the partner will have the ability, the over business partner have the ability to install this project management solution just to meet the customer, the end customer requirements. So that's a lot more customized. Yeah, a lot more collaborations between you and your partners. That's very cool. And I can assume that your customers are very happy to have that pick-and-choose kind of approach to, okay, I need this and this, and this partner can provide the third part that I need for my solution and be able to collect with that and you be able to supply the foundation for that collaboration to be that. Exactly, that's correct. Yeah, that's probably to meet as much as possible all the customer requirements of their business needs. That's wonderful. Well, Joseph, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today and have a great day. No problem. Thank you very much. Thank you much for the opportunity. Thank you. So the conversation with Joseph Moscato from Sage really kind of went through how ISVs can leverage Lighthouse for the benefits of their customers and partners. Now let's bring in Arkana Balashkarishnan and give us a quick demo on some of the popular ways or scenarios that are being used by ISV with Lighthouse. Hi, Arkana. Hey, Pierre, thank you for having me on here. So what do you got to show me for today? Yeah, so I want to show you just maybe one super popular use case that we've seen ISVs use Azure Lighthouse with. As you know, a lot of ISVs deploy their apps and provide solutions to customers. A common thing that customers end up asking their ISV partners is related to support. Hey, ISV partner, I've got this app from you. Can you offer end-to-end support, which includes managing issues related to Azure as well? So the customer isn't wanting to go to the ISV partner for issues related to the apps and then go to Microsoft separately for issues relating to Azure. And many times they would just rather go to the ISV partner. In these scenarios, what the ISV partner can do is they can get just enough and just write access with Azure Lighthouse to their customer. So in this case, we can pretend I'm an ISV and I'm managing a customer called Microsoft. And as I'm managing Microsoft's customer subscription, I have an issue with... I've got a ticket from Microsoft to me. And I basically know that there is an issue in this particular subscription that Microsoft has asked me to deploy their app into. So as part of it, I also get access to support requests. So without having to go to the customer or direct the customer back to Microsoft, I can now directly on behalf of the customer, right? Say what my issue is, right? So let's say there is an issue with Kubernetes configuration because I'm using Kubernetes for my app. And so I can select a technical issue in here. And then when it comes to selecting the subscription, I can pick subscription that the customer has given me access to, right? And so in this case, I'm literally going to pick the same subscription that the customer has given me access to. I'm going to go and say, hey, I have an issues with my Kubernetes AKS service, right? And then I can kind of go through the rest of the... All the information that I need to provide. This is again a huge value add, right? Because as the ISV, I don't need to coordinate and kind of go between me and the customer, tell the customer to take this back to Microsoft. I'm doing everything together, which really reduces that support, supportability, response times, resolution times, et cetera, right? And so this is a very popular use case. In fact, a lot of our ISVs that are using White House to provide these kind of advanced support services to really have been able to add that additional value to their customer, and it also adds more value to them. As you can see here, this basically auto-selects the support plan as well, right? So as I'm going through the support scenario as the ISV, I'm still leveraging the customer support plan. So let's say the customer has an EA agreement and they have higher supportability plans with Microsoft. It just basically means that the ISV is able to leverage what the customer has in terms of support plans, and yet they're the technical folks who have the know-how, who have the information relating to the ticket, and so this really speedens up the supportability process. This is just one of the many useful ways that ISVs are leveraging Azure Lighthouse with their customers today. You know what, Arkana? I love that. One of my old roles at Microsoft, I was in Premier and I dealt with enterprise support, and this was one of the really sticking point is when you have a customer on one side and a partner on the other side and there's a problem with the solution, and then it's like, okay, can you ask the partner to give me this log? When the partner says, can you ask Microsoft to check this? And you're being the go-between as a customer. That's not a position, first of all, that the customer wants to be in, but it's also not necessarily their expertise. So having the ISV take over that entire and be the single point of contact for the support is huge. Absolutely pure. Yeah, you've experienced it personally as well, right? Absolutely. The changing of hands is a troublesome problem. And Joseph briefly mentioned this as well, but this is the activity log, right? What has happened in the subscription? There is a single source of truth with Azure Lighthouse. The activity is written into the subscription, right? So in case of issues, the ISV, maybe a downstream managed services partner, the customer, Microsoft, we're all seeing the same thing, right? And that, you know, all the activities are a log and you can see, you know, who the event was initiated by, you know, I'm showing you the activity log, but you can go to log analytics and look at all of this kind of from a single source of truth and yet have this collaboration across multiple parties across the whole Microsoft ecosystem come together, right? Which is really powerful, especially in the support scenario to solve the pain point that you've experienced previously. Yes, that's huge. Thank you very much for showing me this because I had not really thought about the support implication of Lighthouse with ISVs, but now that you mention it, I do see an absolute benefit to both the ISV and the customers. So that is great. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me here. So thank you very much, Arkana, for showing us that support, though those demos on how ISVs and Microsoft can help support our customers. Thank you very much. It was great. And for you out there, stay tuned for more content regarding Azure Lighthouse.