 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 in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside of my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Lonnie Phillips. She is the Vice President US Channel Sales at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to have this conversation. You are a CUBE newbie, so this is going to be great. It's going to be great. So why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about what you do at Microsoft. You've been there for 22 years, which is not, we can hardly believe it, but tell us about your job. I know I have been with Microsoft for a very long time, but currently I am responsible for driving our digital transformation and partnership with all of our partners. For example, Cohesity is one of those partners, where we actually take that to the customer and make sure that we ensure their success. We also have the co-selling partnership with all of our partners. We make sure that we can work on joint pursuits together to ensure that we ultimately meet our customer's goals together. So you are in charge of Microsoft's own digital transformation, as it is helping other customers with their digital transformation. That's right, we're doing all of it. So how are you taking what you're learning, the successes and the mistakes along the way to make sure that you're putting together the best practices? I think the biggest thing that we're trying to do is just make sure that we create forums, to make sure we bring our partners together and bring our people together and make sure that we have those sessions where we can talk about what we're learning along the way. And it's not just us as a leadership team, but it's us collectively. One of the things that I enjoy hosting is I actually bring together a group of our partners and we talk about what's actually happening in the marketplace, and they kind of share the best practices that we're learning as we go out and we talk to different customers. So it's really nice. Lonnie, I love that. And when we talk to customers, they're going through that transformation. It's really about getting the data inside that environment. That's what differentiates between before you've been transforming after, as you can drive that environment. How does data and being customer obsessed play into your role? Oh my gosh, so talking about customer obsession. 22 years I've been with the company. I want you to know of all those 22 years I've always been customer facing or I led the teams that were customer facing. So I have a tremendous amount of passion for it. You know, the thing I tell most people is there's actually a forest or research study that says when you have so much digital disruption, the one competitive advantage you can have as a company is to really deeply understand your customers. What's important to them, build those connections with them, understand what problems they're solving, and be a part of that solution. I actually wrote on this recently and I talked about four key areas. One, as you think about customer obsession, it's really about engaging with your customers to understand their industry and their business deeply and what problems they're trying to solve. And then it's really about advocating for those customers and making sure that whatever problems they're trying to solve that you bring together the right solutions to solve that problem. Sometimes that's going to be partly Microsoft, other times it's going to be partly our partners coming together to solve their problems from end to end. Then I think it is so important once you bring the solution to them, you're really empowering them. You're empowering your customer to really be able to meet the needs of their customers, right? And then last but not least, you have to listen. We have to listen to our customers to make sure we're learning from them. And I think that is going to be a competitive advantage for anyone that really focuses on what does it really mean to be customer obsessed? One of the things that we heard on the main stage this morning was trust and how important trust is. And this is at a time where there is a lot of mistrust of big technology companies, a lot of some bad actors, some in real and perceived problems in the industry at large. What, how do you make sure that you are transparent and that you are perceived to be this trustworthy partner for customers as they embark on this digital transformation? Thank you for that question and I agree with you. I think it's one of those things where as you start to practice the four things that I talked about, you do find yourself being seen as a trusted advisor at that point, right? So they invite you to the table but I think part of what you have to do to build that trust with your customers is you have to have a level of integrity and you've got to be able to be forthright with being able to say what you can do and what you can't do, right? Or if you see them making a mistake in a respectful way, offer them that feedback. I have found time and time again, our customers really appreciate that transparency and that clarity around what we can do and what we can't do. And when you practice that, I think it is so important because what happens is the customer becomes, they find themselves valuing that and then what it allows you to do is to be a part of conversations where they share their articulated need but then it also allows you, I love when Satya says the unarticulated need to really understand what problems they're solving and how we might come together to solve it. One of the real interesting things to watch in this transformation journey has been the channel. In the past it was, I'm selling you licenses, I have a certain infrastructure piece that I'm going to help you with, but today I need a Microsoft practice, I need to help you understand how to take enable the cloud. Bring us inside a little bit of what's been changing in your organization, how you're helping your partners move along this journey. I think the biggest thing that in the co-selling part of things is we're trying to do a better job of making sure that we include partners from as we identify opportunities within our customers, bringing them in earlier in the sales cycle so they can participate on the entire journey with us. I think it is so important for them to be able to really understand what the customer is trying to solve for and be at the table with Microsoft earlier. I think it's also important to make sure that we are listening to our partners as well. They're spending a lot of time with our customers that we don't actually have time with them, we don't actually sit at the table with them, and it's important that we create an environment where we're both sitting at the table and we're sharing with one another how things are going, and when we start running into issues, let's see what we can do to start removing those blockers to ensure our customer success. So we're just trying to include them into the fabric of everything we do. Internally, we refer to it as hard-wiring partners into every aspect of everything we do because we can't be successful without them. Another hot button issue in the technology industry is diversity or the lack of it. We know that there is a dearth of women leaders, a dearth of people of color, a dearth of people of different sexualities, LGBTQ. How are you tackling these issues at Microsoft and can you talk about inclusion initiatives within Microsoft and at its partner ecosystem? Absolutely, so another topic near and dear to my heart for obvious reasons, and having been here for 22 years, I can tell you that it is an area that I can personally say at Microsoft, we've gotten so much better, but we are definitely not at end of job. This is just, this is going to be a journey, and we still have a lot more to learn, but I would say to you, the biggest thing that I think we've done is we've declared that this is going to be a foundation of everything that we do, and we're now holding one another accountable. Some of the initiatives that we're doing, I love the fact that we did training around unconscious and conscious bias. That started a conversation that wasn't happening before and it caused us all to kind of pause and assess. And all of this is rooted in, you've heard about the growth mindset to make sure we're constantly learning from one another. But the biggest thing that I've really come to appreciate in the famous quote we hear everybody talk about is, diversity is being invited to the party, right? Inclusion is being asked to dance. And then there's another element of that, which is even deeper, and it's belonging. And belonging is like dancing like nobody's watching. And I would tell you that some of the initiatives that we're trying to drive on the inclusion front is to make sure that we create a space as leaders to make sure all voices are heard and to create that forum for that. Also, to make sure that we are just being intentional about connecting with people, understanding what their needs are and doing everything we can to incorporate it. Everybody's doing something a little bit different. We have big initiatives, but we're all held accountable and I equally am just so excited about the changes. And then the belonging aspect, which is so important to me in my organization, is making people feel like they're valued for being here and we have to create opportunities to really allow them to be able to shape our direction and make them feel like they really belong and they're valued. And how is it being built to the employees? Is it, this is something that will impact the products and services that we as Microsoft deliver to our customers and our customers are diverse? Or is it something else? I mean, how would you, is it sort of, this is the right thing to do? How would you describe how it's talked about? I would tell you that it's talked about in a couple of different ways and it's all the above. I would tell you that when it comes to, is it the right thing to do for business? Does it drive business outcomes and profitability? Absolutely. I think there's a lot of studies out there that support it. Is it the right thing to do because you have all of these diverse people in the workplace? Absolutely. But we're also saying that as you think about the future of technology, it's going to be so important as you start to think about some of those native behaviors that are going to be built into AI and we think about the foundation of trust. We got to be very sensitive to those biases that will come out. So we have to make sure that we're always being mindful of diversity and inclusion there. So we talk about all the above. Yeah, Lonnie, I'm just curious with your role in the channel, did they look to Microsoft for guidance in this space? Is there education? You talked about some of the bias, training the likes that technology and channel partners can leverage and learn from what Microsoft is doing out there when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Absolutely, absolutely, they can learn from us. So one of the things that we have done is we kind of have like a little bit of a culture committee at the global level where they are actually working with our partners around DNI. And then in the US, I actually signed up to kind of support that initiative here in the US and we're just getting started. But we are trying to make some of the things that we're doing, make sure it's available to the channel so they can leverage it. But you know what I would say? We don't have all the answers. So our partners, believe it or not, some of them are extremely progressive in this area as well. And we want to make sure that we're learning from them as well. So we're going to start to do more blogs. We're going to make sure we can do some form of videos. And we're going to start sharing two ways. We want to make sure we can make with what resources we have available to them. But we also want to learn from them as well. I mean, so much of this interview has focused on learning and the collaboration that goes on between Microsoft and its customers and its partners and its collaborators. So how, when you're here at Ignite. Yeah. And this is not your first Ignite. No, it's not. So what described the community for us here and what goes on here at this conference for our viewers who don't have the luxury of being here in Orlando? Oh my gosh, there's so much that goes on here. I think one, it allows us to really add Ignite to really connect with more of the TDM and the technical audience within our customer base. But it also allows us to connect with our partners. And it allows us to really get embedded with our partners around the solutions that they have to offer our customers. And we make sure that we create a forum that brings those two together. It's also an opportunity for you to understand where we're trying to go from a technology direction from a vision, like everyone's talking about the buzz around Satya's keynote. I think that's really another reason why you come here. When you think about the amount of money that our customers invest in our solutions, it's important to understand that that's a good investment and you're not just thinking short term, but you're thinking long term. So it's an opportunity to come here and learn a lot. Yeah, so Lonnie, just with your experience out there, sometimes people have a hard time understanding that the company that you see today is different than the past. So, you know, I think back in the early days and you think Microsoft and it was the Microsoft that is you're going to use my OS and my business apps and it's all Microsoft. Talk a little bit about, especially as you're going to the channel, how Microsoft, its ecosystem and its ISV partners, how those all interplay. Oh my gosh, there's so much to tell you about that. I would tell you that when we think about how we're going to be successful today, is we're the platform company and we've got all of these technology companies, our partners that sit on top of that. Let me give you an example of that. When I think about Cohesity, right? Cohesity is actually this modern, cloud-first architecture, right? That has Azure running natively. So our customers have the ability to really be able to run their data workloads in Azure seamlessly with Cohesity. That is what it means when it says customer obsession, customer centric. They keep the customer at the center and make it seamless for them to transition. It's because of those partnerships that Microsoft's going to continue to be successful and that's where we're going to continue to invest. We want to make sure that we leverage our partner ecosystem to meet our customers' needs from end to end. So it's limitless the opportunity that's out there for us. Excellent. Lillani, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great having you on. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite.