 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Enterprise Connect 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host for the week, Stu Miniman. We are in 5ix9ine's booth here at this event. I'm excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Jason Moreno, Microsoft Teams developer, platform lead from Microsoft. Jason, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure. So we're excited that you're here because you are on the main stage tomorrow morning with Lori Wright. But talk to us about Microsoft Teams. You've been with Microsoft for a while now, but about 10 months with Teams. Talk to us about this tool for collaboration that companies can use from 10 people in a meeting to 10,000. Yeah, you'll hear us tomorrow where the phrase we're cloning is an intelligent workplace for everyone, right? And I think for a long time, we've been perceived as an organization who builds tools a lot of times with the Enterprise Knowledge Worker. The whole goal is to dispel that. There's multiple people out there, millions of people who are frontline workers, whatever you want to call them, but the folks that are interfacing with your actual customers. And so we need to make sure that we are developing tools that are for them. But overall, as I look at the product and what we've delivered, it's about bringing you one single place to go to for collaboration, right? So, and that is bringing together your tools, whether or not Microsoft built them into one experience, and then processes and workflows around them. Yeah. So do you find that in terms of traction that like the enterprises and maybe the more senior generations that have been working with Microsoft tools for a long time, get it? Or, I mean, because I can imagine there's kind of a cultural gap there with whether it's a large enterprise like a Microsoft or maybe a smaller organization, there are people in this modern workforce that have very different perspectives, different cultures. How can teams help to maybe break down some of those barriers and really be a platform for innovation? No, it's a great question. I mean, I think we've been battling that cultural digital clash for a long time, you know, to be fair. I think it really comes out with teams though, because it is an entirely different way of working. It's not just chat anymore, right? It's collaboration, it's bringing together all of these experiences. And so I think, you know, there's a maturity curve for some of our average users to be fair. We're already seeing that curve take off as we speak. But what I often give advice to customers and to partners, I call them superpowers, but you've got to find that one reason that really gets people over the line, because we get asked all the time, hey, everybody loves it, but we want to get them to use this as the one tool, the one place that I go, so I know that everything I send in our organization goes to that single place. How do I deliver that? And I go, just give them a reason, right? I mean, that's what it comes down to, honestly. And I genuinely see that with organizations. We're seeing incredible examples of organizations leveraging partner integrations where it's bringing out their culture rather than them trying to evolve it, if that makes sense. Jason, I'm glad you brought up the partners there. And when I hear developer platform, all right, bring us inside a little bit. Everything API compatible. When people think about developers, there've been developers in the Microsoft space. .NET's got its great ecosystem there, but what is it like to be in the Microsoft ecosystem here in 2019? It's a fun place to be. I will say, you know, I've actually, I've even stopped using the term developer when I say platform, though, to be fair, because, and the reason I bring this up, what we've actually built allows a lot of IT professionals to build as well in teams. You know, PowerShell Scripts, as an example, is a huge opportunity for our customers. Frankly, I've never written a line of code in my life and I built a bot for teams. So it's pretty amazing what we're enabling, but when we look at a lot of what partners are building, it's where are they seeing opportunities in the marketplace? So 5.9 as an example with customer care, great opportunity there, where we can extend the capabilities that a contact center, as an example, might need inside of teams if they want to deploy that. I love, I actually got to interview Jeffrey Snover at Microsoft Ignite last year, who of course created PowerShell, and he was like more excited now than he was when it was created quite a long time ago. So when I look around this platform, tell some of the partners that you're working with. I saw some of the early notes at things like Zoom and, gosh, talk about some of the partners you're working with. So one thing I'll touch on too, that I don't know if I fully answered your last question, is what I'm hearing from our partners who have built on teams, and I'll touch on which one's in a second. We call it the extensibility of our platform, but quite literally what it means is we are allowing partners to allow their solutions to render in different ways inside of teams. And what we're hearing from partners, I had a conversation with Disco the other day as an example, so they've built a, I'm not doing them a service by explaining it like this, but it's a kudos bot, essentially, that they delivered. And it's actually bringing out that culture, but they told us the beauty of the team's platform is that they don't only show up as a bot to the end users, they actually, we've offered them other ways to interact with the end user. So whatever's more comfortable for me inside of teams and my interaction with that solution, it's easy for them to have that correspondence. And so, but in terms of top partnerships that we're looking at, we've had some incredible integrations built recently. ADP just launched theirs pretty recently to check payroll and build sort of a time off process flow if you will with the bot. Holley's been a great one from day one. We have integrations with partners like Alasian for DevOps tools, so Jira and Confluence Cloud, Trello for project management, I could go on forever, but we have over 250 in the store right now and that is growing very rapidly. This is what we spend most of our time on. So the initial focus was what are the tools out there that most people need to get their job done every day? So that's where we'll start and now we're really evolving that and we're seeing some incredible things being built as we speak. So just being at Enterprise Connect, this is an event where it's been around for a long time and has evolved quite considerably as enterprise communication and collaborations has. But one of the things that when I was doing research to prep for the show that I'm reading is that customer experience is table stakes, it's make or break but some of the recommendations that when a company whether it's with an business unit buying software and services or at the corporate level, the customer has to have a seat there so that the decision is being made. Are we implementing tools and technologies and services? They're actually going to delight our customers, not just retain them but drive customer lifetime value. In your role, where are some of Microsoft's customers in terms of helping to evolve the evolution of the platform? That's a great question, I'm really glad you asked it. It's been fun in my role because what we're seeing is a lot of customers who have taken the platform and built integrations to their tool. So think outside of productivity for a second, think IT support, think employee resources. They're building those integrations and they're leveraging those as a way to drive that organic broad adoption inside of their companies because they don't want to do the IT force anymore. They want people to love it like you said and naturally take to it. And so I keep coming back to that, I call it superpowers. Again, might be a ridiculous term but it's those superpowers you deliver to your people that allow them to get their work done better, get them to love that product and to your point not want to ever leave it because you can get a majority of your work done every day in that place. So we've seen some really cool ones, a couple of examples that we just shared recently. So Densu's a great one. So they have a three person change management team for a 50,000 person global organization, three people. Got to scale that, right? Can't do that one-on-one training. And so they initially took teams and integrated it into their current website, internet, internal portals to essentially create a chat bot that helped people learn how to use the technology they delivered. Now they're taking that one step further because they saw such great success and they're going to different centers of excellence inside the organization saying, hey, do you want to get on board? Because we'd like to make this the bot that you interact with as an employee of Densu. So it's just incredible but it's driving again that adoption, they're seeing leveraging some of the simple stuff that we have on the platform. Does that answer your question? Yes, very well, thank you. So when I look at some of the macro trends about communication, where I've heard some great success stories is internally, just being able to collaborate with some of my internal people, teams has done really well. Collaborating between various organizations still seems to have more challenges. Can you just bring us a little bit inside as to why I hear great success stories there and not negatives on teams but just, it's still challenging if I have multiple organizations we all understand even just doing a conference call or heck a video call between lots of different companies is still in 2019 is a challenge. Yeah, look, I mean, I'll give you a couple of answers here. We are young, I mean, it's two years old as a product so the momentum's been incredible but I'm not going to sit here and tell you we don't have things to work on, we absolutely do. What I will say though, take Enterprise Connect for example, we actually have a team's team for Enterprise Connect. I actually checked this morning, there's 181 people in that team. A majority of them are guests, so external users, so vendors that we work with to help us plan this conference and bring it all together and a lot of that has been seamless. Yes, there are little things here and there that we're working on but in that respect it's been pretty incredible. I constantly am using it with external parties and I find though, I don't necessarily know if the challenge is in the interface itself. I think it ends up becoming this opportunity to really educate people on this new way of working and so going back to our partners again we're sitting here with 5ix9ine but that becomes critical, is how do we work better with these organizations who we have mutual customers with to create that experience together and bring again superpowers to the users. What about security as a superpower? Where is that in these conversations? I mean everything we build has a layer of security. I actually just got out of a meeting. You'll see we've got an announcement around this tomorrow so I can't blow it unfortunately but the foundation and core of everything that we do will be security focus, absolutely. All right, so I went to the Microsoft show last year. AI is also one of those things besides security. AI is infused anywhere so where does AI fit into the whole team story? Look the way we see it, I look at this in a couple of angles. So most people get on to teams and it's kind of chat and collab at first. Not always the case but a lot of organizations do that. Then it goes to meetings and I think, and you'll see a lot of this cool stuff tomorrow. We're doing it on AI but it's how then do you proactively start delivering better experiences to your end users? So I think of things that we're looking at right now is taking data and sending those as an example to your IT admins about giving them insight into how users are leveraging teams. How do you improve that experience for them? So again, you drive that natural broad adoption but kind of assist them a little bit along the way. So tons of great examples around the board. I don't know if the fully answers your question but just the sky's the limit. I think of some other things we're looking at though. You'll see a lot coming in the form of transcription, translation, those services that really create inclusiveness which is a big focus for us. You know, getting back to that point earlier is the intelligent workplace for everyone. We want to be able to provide services with our partnerships that can really reach anybody in the business world, right? And even in the consumer world in some sense. Well, Jayce, thanks so much for joining Stu and me on the program this afternoon. We're looking forward to hearing your keynote in the morning and sharing with us some of the excitement and things that are happening and announcements we're going to hear from Microsoft Teams tomorrow. That was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, appreciate it. Our pleasure. First Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of day one, Enterprise Connect 2019 from Orlando. Stick around, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest.