 Well, hey, this is Chris Rebuck with another MVP Buzz Chat interview and I'm here with Mike Cake. Good afternoon. Hey, how are you? I'm doing well. So Mike, why don't you tell us a little bit who you are, where you are, what you do? Sure. My name is Mike Nelson and I am a cloud and data center MVP. I actually reside in the Midwest in the, in the freezing cold part of the Midwest here up in Upper Wisconsin. They call it the frozen tundra, a big Green Bay Packerspan about 30 miles away from, from Lambeau Fields or any football fans out there, American football, that is. Well, you know, I was a grew up as a 49ers fan. So I know you guys well. No, anyways, yeah, so I've been an MVP for about five years, hopefully going on my sixth year, but I've been doing this technology gig for about almost 30, believe it or not. I am, I'm pretty old. Yeah, me too. I'm, this is my, I'm in my 29th year of, of IT. Yeah. Yeah. I started out and started out as a little Nobel land administrator. Yeah. I'm in the world of Nobel here in Utah County. No way. Yeah. Really? That's still a thing. There's still a lot of people. What's funny is just until a couple of years ago, Microsoft was still doing, um, you know, kind of, you know, hiring events here, like going after that crowd, because there's a lot of people that are still here. There's a pretty strong tech sector here. A lot of school, I bet. Yeah, there, that, that too, but we, they call it referred to it as silicon slopes. And so Adobe has a huge campus, Oracle's here, Microsoft is here, uh, and then a lot of FinTech. So the startup community is very vibrant here. A lot of, we, we, before all this COVID stuff, we had the, I think we had, we were like the second lowest tech unemployment in the country. Really? Yeah. Wow. Because I know that they started up, you know, you kind of like where I am in the Midwest. Um, I used to work for a couple of different companies, kind of hopped around. I was an independent consultant for a while and one of the companies I worked for, I kind of helped out customers that were in the Midwest region, down in Illinois, in the Chicago area, but also in Michigan and the Michigan area, Lansing area and stuff. It's just like, it's like becoming the silicone Valley of the Midwest. They're saying, well, this is a triangle because if you go over to Twin Cities as well, it's the same thing, whatever I go to events in Chicago, there's tons of people come over from, uh, from Minneapolis and, and, uh, and then likewise events in Twin Cities that people come Chicago over. Right, right, right. But we always get stuck in the middle here in Wisconsin. You know, we're kind of like, you know, from a sales perspective, but also an implementation perspective. Um, we do have a lot of industry, a lot of, uh, financial, a lot of insurance and things like that and medical, epic systems, stuff like that. Well, and massive cheese industry. So come on. And beer and beer. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Don't. I want to Laverne and Shirley as a kid. I know. I know. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. No. Um, and the thing about it is, is that, um, it, it seems like we have all these high powers that are on both sides of us and even down in Chicago and we get kind of stuck in the middle and some folks are like, yeah, you guys are like three years behind the rest of the world. And I'm like, how could we be? We're surrounded by these people. But. Yeah. No. My first time, uh, crossing the border into, uh, uh, Wisconsin was up. I was, I think it was. Is it Harford, Illinois? That's right down by the, the, it was, um, it was, um, uh, it was it Motorola that had a huge factory. Yeah. And, uh, and then we kind of ventured up over the, over the border to some town right up there. So it was pretty close there. But, uh, yeah. And the middle winter, which is the best time to visit Southern Wisconsin, Northern Illinois. That's what I found. It is. It's great, especially with, you know, if you only have about 13, 40, 14 inches of snow, you're doing okay. Oh no, that's what I, I live for that. Yeah. I can tell. I can tell. That's why I'm looking at your face. So, uh, so tell us about, so your specialty in, in the cloud data center, uh, side of things. So what, what's, uh, what's kind of involved? What's kind of involved? What's covered by that MVP specialty? Oh gosh. From the cloud and data center standpoint, I mean we, I came in as Hyper-V. So originally way back when, uh, you know, six, five years ago, six years ago, uh, they still had a focus on Hyper-V and they were just trying to push Hyper-V against VMware and, and, you know, Yeah. We were a huge Hyper-V shop. So, yeah. Yeah. So I was brought in his app, but, uh, CDM, um, as it's abbreviated, uh, that covers everything from the cloud data center. Um, you know, and bring in the networking aspect of it, the software defined networking, uh, things like that. So a lot of the things data center wise, you see on premises and then also hybrid because we deal with Azure Edge and we deal with, you know, the, uh, HCI stack and you deal with, you know, Azure stack, things like that. Have they started, have they broken out the edge services stuff yet and. Yeah. Yeah. The edge services are out there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as an MVP concentration. Oh, no, no, no. That's the Azure stack folks have actually kind of taken that, you know, because the stack kind of goes with that. It's Azure stack edge. Yeah. That's that. Yeah. So, um, a lot of the guy, uh, folks, I shouldn't say guys, a lot of the folks that work on the, uh, the Azure stack, um, they do work on a lot of the edge projects. Well, Let's just a little bit of experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's just a little bit of experience with, with that former company where we actually, we were building out supply chain software solutions. And so I was doing deployments in around Asia Pacific. And we found that we had a lot of these smaller tier two, tier three partners to these, you know, that were a raw materials up to small part and component suppliers to the big electronics companies. Sure. A lot of them had like, uh, I always use the example. I was down in the Philippines, um, about a couple hours south of Manila, um, with working with, uh, Hitachi and they had at the time, uh, so this is like 2003, 2004, they had an entire manufacturing facility, thousands of workers and, and they had a shared IDSL line. Oh, so they would literally, somebody would need to go to, to push data up or pull something down email. They would go move the cord over, plug it into your computer, take a turn on that. And very high tech. Um, but we started, we got into the whole concept of these edge devices. So a way of, uh, of, you know, making the system and I know it's a fake word, but as performant as possible, get rid of all the noise, um, you communicate specifically with our servers. And it was just became much more efficient solution. So introduce the term way back when, but. Right. And this is all a play for hybrid, right? Because a lot of the work that I've done, I do is hybrid. It's a lot of folks that are trying to make a decision to go to the cloud, if they're going to go with, they're going to, what they're going to push out there, how they're going to do it, bringing it on premises up to, up to the cloud. Um, and that revolves around different workloads and revolves around, uh, different, uh, uh, things that they use for security, for networking, you name it, uh, storage the whole bit. Um, because a lot of folks just don't understand it or they don't want to understand it. So they want somebody else to understand and take care of form. Um, and I, I work with a lot of that. And, uh, I can tell you that the, the, the thing about the edge part is this is not something that's really, I mean, it's, it's the way to get that hybrid, um, directly into Azure. If you think about it, because that's what you're dealing with. You're dealing with an actual Azure implementation, just like Azure stack. I mean, Azure stack is Azure inside of your data center. Azure edge is providing that avenue. Um, and you know, they also make that little Azure stack that fits in the back in a backpack. You know, they're, they're coming out with that now where it's going to be, the guys are going to be able to carry that. You know, and they'll be able to take that, that Azure stack anywhere, which is really cool. No, I, I, it's, it's the next stage. It's the preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Yes. Yeah. Having that mobile. Yeah. Start up right now. Just kidding. Yeah. I don't know. I just, Mike, I don't know if it's me. I just, I don't, I could never get a taste for brands, but that's me. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I just, it's, it's the whole knowing at the bone thing. It just, I know, I know. It's not so much the taste as it is the texture. I know. Exactly. Are you seeing a lot of, so we're talking, you know, Azure stack. So is, so bringing Azure into your own environment, you're talking about hybrid and stuff. Is, is there still a lot of resistance in this space for, for people to, to move it entirely over into, I mean, Microsoft, there is a third party, you know, environment for these companies. Yeah. You still see that pushback. There is, there is some pushback because the number one, they're thinking, you know, they bring that environment on premises. They bring it in their data center. It's all proprietary hardware. Right? It's, it's not OEM and the fact of it is that, that has to be managed and worked on by Microsoft. It's kind of like, you know, AWS did the same thing without post, right? They're bringing in AWS hardware into your data center and they're doing the same thing. There are folks that are embracing it because they're thinking that, and I think larger enterprises, divisions within, within larger enterprises. I've seen them implement that. And the biggest reason for that is, you know, I've seen them implement that. And the biggest reason is because then they gain independence. They're gaining independence from IT, from management in the cloud. They don't have to go out and buy their own Azure subscription and be able to manage that upstairs as they call it. They basically can manage it within their own realm with what they can touch, what they can feel. And that's really big to some of the divisions we're talking about here from finance and accounting and, and governance and things like that. So I have seen a lot of, a lot of those internal divisions in larger enterprises go with that type of the Azure stack type model. Well, I guess the benefit of the hybrid model too, is that it does then allow you to kind of introduce some of the new features and capabilities, the new technologies. It makes, if they have long term at the strategies changes and it's going to be moved out of your own data center over to. It's supposed to make the migration easier. It's, it's, it's basically as, as we get in down to the fundamentals of on a whiteboard, when we're whiteboarding this thing, you're really talking about just an arm extension of Azure. That's really when it comes down to it, because you have to have that express route connectivity. You have to have the ability to link that just like another VLAN, another private network. So this is extending that arm of Azure. And then you can just push things up that arm, you know, right up into Azure. I mean, you eventually can migrate things up into there. So, yeah. So, so with events and things, obviously for all of us, everything is kind of on pause right now. Yeah. You've been pretty active out in the community and speaking and that kind of stuff. Yeah. Actually, I was supposed to do the Chicago Microsoft Ignite on tour. Yeah. I'm supposed to staff that and they canceled that in April here. April 14th, I think it was or something like that. So they canceled that. But otherwise I speak all the time. I run two user groups here in my state, a cloud user group and, you know, VMware user group. You know, it's all about virtualization. I'm not, you know, I play all sides of the fence. If you will, you know, just because I'm, I'm all about the total solution. You know, organizations that are single stack customers. I mean, it's a fallacy. It never was true. Not entirely. And certainly not now. And so it's, I think, you know, as you, you've been in the space long enough to know that, you know, culturally Microsoft I think is really eased off on that a lot of other companies. And so they're trying to recognize that, hey, let's do what's right for the customer. And sometimes the customer will be striped across multiple platforms and, and, you know, OEMs. They're bringing, they're bringing in the capability to migrate. You know, and that's, that was the key point is don't have this fight about, you know, who's a better, you know, hypervisor? Who's, you know, who's a better hyperscaler? Bring in the ability to migrate, to move people and move them easily and move them little less expensive than what your competitor would do. And then you'll bring that consumption because what is public cloud all about, right? It's all about consumption. It's all about how much, how much resources can a company use and we can build them for. I mean, that's what AWS and Google and Microsoft are. That's what they're looking for. That's their cloud model. And as you know, Microsoft is saying they're all in on Azure. I mean, everything is supposed to point to Azure. All sales are supposed to point to Azure and Office 365, everything that's up in the cloud. So. Right. Well, and it's, and then it's up to, and that's great from a consumer standpoint because if it's easy to move my data between these, the different cloud vendors and then, then basically I could then go and and price out solutions. Look at the pricing of that, of the storage part of that. Look at the capabilities, the, you know, the value add that are provided. You've got a lot of other, I mean, coming from the primarily within the Microsoft ecosystem, the ISV space, a lot of on-prem software. So it was in the migration administration space within the SharePoint Office 365 space. But there are, you know, a lot of the, a lot of companies, a lot of those ISVs have died. There's been a lot of consolidation and others where they've seen, well, that whole world is kind of dried up with Office 365. There's a different way of looking at it. We now have just a new spate of vendors that are out there with solutions that are purely, you know, cloud-born and value add on top of those services and really cool things. I think there's so much more opportunity and for much more efficient, you know, distribution model for those solutions as well. So it's cheaper to produce the solutions that are then additive to the platforms. One thing also to tie into that is how it shifted over the last couple of years. Remember when it used to be, hey, we're all AWS. We don't want to touch Azure at all. We're all Google Cloud. We develop in Google Cloud. We don't want, you know, Azure's got nothing for us. AWS, they're, you know, nothing. Now I'm more than often we'll get in your conversation where they'll be like, so we want to do this. And I would say, okay, I know you guys are in AWS and you do a lot of this and you do some development in Google Cloud and they're like, we don't care. Just, you know, put it, put it somewhere. And as long as it works and as long as, you know, we can, we can do, you know, update it as long as we can continue the line of business. As long as we can do this or that or the other thing, we don't care what cloud it's in. So the whole mindset has kind of shifted. You know, it's like, it's not, you know, hey, we're an Azure only shop. You know, that's really not, you know, hit anymore. It's like we were only, like you were saying before, we're only one hypervisor shop. We're only VMware. We're only Hyper-V. And not so much anymore. Yeah. Well, I mean, even back today, I mean, we had, we had both, you know, VMware and Hyper-V. We were predominantly a Hyper-V shop, but we, all of our sales engineers, they're all of their environments. They go and build out. You know, VMware based. Yeah. And so it just, it even just co-existed. There's just a, you know, between organizations within a big size company. Yeah. And I did, right. And I did a lot of work with Citrix. So I had a lot of Zen server. And I got to tell you, I mean, that, I mean, Zen server is still kicking, believe it or not. But it's kind of like KVM. It kind of just kind of, you know, sits there and wades in the water and, you know, kind of, you know, like the dock that is kind of like away from the rest of the crowd, just, you know, kind of trailing along. I just don't have a lot of activity with it anymore. But some people just, they swear by it. Yeah. Yep. No, I know. It's a, there's a, well, you remember with, I always refer back to the, like the end of the bomber era, the whole, you know, move to the cloud, go, go, go and that kind of thing. And so I actually did a project and worked with the, the partner team at Microsoft and then we're having a conversation with a senior director GM in that group. And over some of, he caught some of my messaging. I think I did a webinar or something where I was advising customers like, don't let Microsoft bully you into moving quicker than your business needs. And just, you can't just go with what any vendor tells you about what's right for your business. Is there going to be new? Is it going to be faster? Is there going to be more features? Yes. But what is the, there's the cost to move across. And you, so you have to weigh those options. You have to do the math and understand, hey, there's actually this additional benefit and the lost opportunities. And the, here the cost is down. It's easier to move across. And now is the time to move or, hey, six to 12 months from now will be the right time in the new, you know, budget cycle. But just, just don't get enamored by the sales pitch. But remember to consider what your business needs. Right. And I get that a lot for the user group aspect, right? Because user groups, they come in and they don't want, they don't want a lot of marketing fluff. They don't, I mean, they, they want technical information. I mean, we, we push that. VMware has its own thing with user groups. They, they, you know, they pump money into them. They control them. But the cloud, like the cloud user group I have, it's just, you know, me, nobody really, you know, I'm a sponsorship. I mean, Microsoft doesn't sponsor to use a group. And I don't know how many years they used to do that a lot. But they don't do that anymore. But I'll tell you a lot of the folks are just like, you know, what, what is the best solution for me? And, you know, I don't want to hear about, you know, you know, the charts and graphs and, and the shiny balls that float in the air. A lot of executives and sea levels, they really like that. But the folks that come to these meetings are like, I need to get this done. Tell me the best way to do it. Or if you have advice, because they'll go around and they'll be like, Hey, are you doing this? You're in the same type of vertical I'm in, you know, you're in insurance. Exactly. Well, that, well, it's the danger too of those comparison charts. It's like, Hey, AWS does this and Azure does this. Those are so skewed towards the person who's creating those things. Oh yeah. And, and usually don't give you the right perspective. What you need to do is exactly what you said, like you're in financial services, you know, is the user groups that I'm involved with. I love having that rotation will have somebody come in in from industry talking about, not that it was the end all be all solution that they created. But here's what we did. Here's what we learned. And even for them to get feedback from people is like, did you not think about this? And usually like, Oh, I didn't thank you for that. We'll go investigate that. But otherwise see what other companies have done. Look at the case studies. Look at the, the examples. There is so much content. I apologize. Do you hear the dogs? That's all right. Yeah. So much of the, you know, the content that's being created. Now that we're all online and we're recording these things. Go in and be very specific about what your requirements are. Put it out there and say, I, I'm really looking for examples that are in financial services for a mid tier company. That are hyper V base. We have these others. Software solutions that we utilize. And you're going to find examples. You're going to find people that have those scenarios. Exactly. You may not, you may not get it, you know, in, in the context you, you know, because some folks are looking for exact, you know, everybody wants that list. Like tell me these five things to go and do. Right. I'm more interested. Yeah. When I have conversations, I'm more interested in, you know, I'm more interested. Yeah. When I have conversations, I'm more interested in what they failed at. I really am. I always want to ask, I said, well, what went wrong? Because these are the, the, the trips, the trip ups that we're going to get probably is you had something go wrong. We don't want to run into the same thing or we want to prepare for it ahead of time. And at the user groups, I'm like, so everybody talks about, you know, how everything went right. Tell me what went wrong. You know, because nobody likes to really talk about that, let's, you know, that's, I wouldn't know Mike because all of, none of my projects have ever gone. So I just, I like 30 years in, in tech and it's just been, just, yeah, nothing's going wrong. Yeah. So, strike you down, sir. That's it. Well, there's, I know this is a completely different topic, but I, my perception is that, I think that the business culture and especially around the technology sector, the technology sector within all these industries, I think that more organizations are recognizing that they can't penalize people for failure that they need to learn from those and learn quickly. And it just seems like I look, you know, first half of my career, it was awful. Like you were afraid to point out the fact that something went wrong and you, you know, immediately they want to know who's Ed will roll kind of thing versus like, look, stuff happens. A decision was made with the best information we had. We were incorrect. We now know, and, you know, and this is what we're going to do to make things different. Here's how we're going to mitigate this going forward. There's a lot more acceptance for that kind of, you know, there is. And especially today, you know, I got to tell you going way back. This is, you know, way back to the, the time of what I was talking about before, the Nobel Network's arc net. I remember one particular disaster where it was, it's actually more mechanical. You know, it was around the design of the arc net network and how everything had to be in that star, you know, and the connectors had to be just right because if you had a connector that was just a little bit off, you know, you'd get the workstation that wouldn't connect. And you know, and you'd end up doing a, when you tie two of the arc nets together, you can get a loop, which was screw everybody up. Right. And this is a project that you're working on. And we were working on it. And for some reason we got that loop. And then the whole thing went offline and it had to deal with tax preparers. And it was in tax season. So it was like heads are going to roll here because we lost hours and hours because of that one connector that we couldn't find that was causing the loop that we had to take it down. And now I work for companies that are just basically like, if you don't make a mistake, then something's wrong because you're not, you're not working hard enough. You're not doing it right. If you don't make the mistake, you're not doing it right. And they, they said everybody learns from them. That's exactly the truth. I believe everybody should learn from that. You should have that experience. And just so I sound more knowledgeable. So the arc net that was part of Tony Stark's father's company. So it was Stark Industries, the early version of that. I just, just want to make sure that I get that clear that that's what we're talking about. Yeah, we're talking about the, you know, the boxes that were about this big, you'd have to plug each cable into them running to each individual workstation with little T adapters. Yeah. Yeah. That was back in the days of token ring. Yeah. Exciting times. Yeah. It was one of the, I loved some of the presentation, the IOT presentations from Bill the last couple of years. They're showing some of the technologies to be able to go in and identify and send alerts out. Some of the bots and, and intelligence to know exactly where the points of failure were between hardware devices. Like, Yeah. I love the example of what was the water processing plant with some of those and the monitoring. So having like the physical, like the analog, the cameras on this, and that the system is intelligent enough to know that, you know, heat tolerances, it's gone past the level and know exactly where that is. And alert people. And I think the example, like there was a pager involved. They got a notification. That's in old school now. I know the pager. I think they still exists as a technology, but. Oh yeah, they do. They do. Let me look it up on my other device to pager still exist. Cause yeah. Mark Rosinovich actually gave me a, gave a presentation where he talked about the undersea. He was talking about the Azure data centers and how they're built and things like that. And he'd given us the inside of that. But they build the undersea data centers now. Yeah. They showed the videos of going undersea. And he actually showed the information they get out of AI. That will tell them how to troubleshoot that because they're not going to send anyone down to fix those things. No, that'd be a crappy job. It really would be because they got to raise it. And you know what he said, it cost an enormous amount of money to raise those. Probably more expensive to raise than it is to sync them. Right. So he's like, you have to have the minimal thing. And we have AI that sits there and monitors every single connection. You know, and we'll tell us if it's a, if it's an actual break, if it's a leak, if it's, you know, something, we figure it's, it's essentially it's like the, you know, like the Mars rover. It's like, you're not going to be able to go on it. It's, it's out there. It's gone. We lose it like, okay, we're dropping the next one in there because that one's gone. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, there's so much exciting stuff. Like even though I don't work within that space, I mean, I love going kind of following what's happening. I mean, we really are in kind of a golden age as far as that, you know, the automation, a lot of these really cool things that, that we could be doing. It's, you know, and, and the, I know there's always those people that say, Oh yeah, these kinds of tools and this kind of automation. It's what's, you know, driving away jobs. Like no, it's, it's not really it's, it's doing things that we don't need to be focused on. So we could go in, think about solving bigger things. And there's a lot. Yeah. And I'll give you, I can give a good example of that is actually a, I do a lot of work with Azure Sentinel and Azure security center threat, threat hunting. So I do a bunch of presentations around how to use Sentinel to do, to hunt threats, to create investigations and things like that, because one of my realms is security. So I, when you look at that AI is embedded in Sentinel. They embedded Sentinel to go out there and take a look at all these different aspects of, you know, what, what a actor is doing. And by actor, it could be a person. It could be a device. It could be a bot. It could be, you know, just about anything. And AI is out there to do that. It could be a bot. It could be, you know, just about anything. And AI is out there determining, hey, this is, you know, they're doing some weird stuff here. We've collected all this data and now they're starting to do this. It's a little variant. It's extremely intelligent, extremely intelligent, but you still need the people to be able to, to take a look at that and, and look at it from an objective point of view, because AI can't be objective. Really. I mean, if you think about it, it's not something that it's capable of doing, at least not yet, you know, is to have that human objectivity when you're taking a look at that data, because there could be false positives or it could be, you know, all kinds of other things that come up. So yeah, I don't agree with that. I'm taking the whole, you know, taking the jobs away, taking the resources away. If anything, there are, I think there are more resources that are needed in order to interpret that data and be able to be, you know, be able to take a look at it from a broader view and then just what AI does. Completely agree. As I always say that some of the most exciting products and features that are coming out these days are AI based and a lot of it, you know, again, I also agree that it's not, it's not this is driving away our jobs. It's doing the things that it can do a lot better so I can go focus on adding value elsewhere and there's so many other opportunities that are going to be created because of this technology, rather than destroyed by it. Except the facial recognition thing. I get that, you know, it's a little, it's a little big brother, you know, kind of thing. I don't know when you're between this, like the same app will identify me as 17 year old. I'm not so worried about it just yet. Not yet, not yet. But yeah, like really appreciate your time today. People want to find out more about you get in touch or follow you. What are the best ways to reach you? Absolutely on Twitter, Mike Nelson IO on Twitter, my website, Mike Nelson dot IO. Anything you can do Mike Nelson dot IO, you know, you can probably find me same thing on LinkedIn. Excellent. Well, thanks a lot for your time today and stay safe out there. We'll talk to you. Thank you very much, sir. Talk to you soon.