 All right. Okay. Welcome everyone to the sales enablement training for, what is it? November 1st, we are going to do part two of the sales enablement for Azure DevOps, formerly known as VSTS or Visual Studio Team Services and TFS, which is a team foundation server. Okay. So, Joel last, last time, kind of one of the, one of the key questions that we want to talk about the rest of this session, which is what do we feel are top value statements against Azure DevOps? How do we approach this? So I'm going to cover two areas on this page, strengths and weaknesses, or sorry, three areas on this page, strengths and weaknesses, and then further down the page positioning based on mostly those strengths and weaknesses. So high level that you guys can go read the details, but one of the strengths that they have that we know about is that they are in the enterprise, they have a pretty good foothold for a lot of things, and not just necessarily for development tools, but they can extend their enterprise software, you know, sales into that area, even if they're not already there. So that's, that's a challenge that we're going to have to figure out how to face with them. One of their strengths, again, mentioned in there, I mentioned when I brought up that presentation and that they're obviously playing on is they're a large organization and what many consider a very legacy organization and they converted themselves using DevOps methods to doing DevOps and being very efficient at software delivery. So they are able to use themselves as a solid example of how their tooling works for that purpose. And they did use all of their tooling and they developed the tooling based on that experience. And the key here is that they didn't just do it, but they're being very vocal about it. So there's plenty of material out there about Microsoft folks sharing it at merge and, you know, does and velocity and all these different conferences about the process that they went through and what they learned. And so they're being the kind of organization that we like to see in the DevOps world, which is they're sharing what they learned and how they got there, which is great. But that also gives them a lot of credibility in this space. So that's something we're going to have to face. They have a lot of technology partners, which means they have a lot of potential for, you know, a leg up on us on you know, there. I mean, if we decide integrations, you know, I think one of our keys is integrations is not the best because you have this, you know, plugins you have to deal with and you have, you know, changing code and you've got all sorts of challenges and you don't have the best interface, etc. But most of the industry right now that in this space basically reaches out to other partners or does integrations to bring in capabilities that we are building. And they have lots of partners, as we know. And they are Microsoft is like, as you guys are aware, was next to Alassi and probably above Alassi and they are one of the few competitors out there that's got products that covers the entire SDLC stack. Not all of it's called Azure at this point, but it probably will be so they're turning everything into Azure. That's not all integrated into the Azure DevOps suite either, but but they have capabilities across all of that. Let's talk about weaknesses. So as I mentioned before, the security scanning is not built in. And that's that's that's pretty significant. And I have under positioning some more points about that. There's a very valid concern about cloud lock in or sorry vendor lock in because they are providing the cloud services and they're, that's a big part of their revenue stream coming in. So a lot of folks are leery about whether or not they're going to be forced into using Microsoft's cloud by using Microsoft's tools. And so the burden of proof that they're not going to do this is on Microsoft. So, especially given their past history. Dan, however, you mentioned earlier that they are cloud agnostic. So how do you How do we reconcile that if they're cloud agnostic? Therefore, I don't see where they would be locked in. Well, so being able to use another vendors tools or sorry, being able to go to any vendor for cloud. Doesn't mean that it's not That it's not more compelling to to to use if you have a certain set of tools that you're already using that are tied into all the other pieces. It can be harder to pull out of that. So They can do things that can be very compelling. They can make their products that you're become dependent on work best with right. And at the same time, they can make their products that you're becoming dependent on work best with. Right. And I think that's that's where the the concern is you're right that you can always move to another cloud vendor, but there are switching costs and grant it with things like Kubernetes or more containers. The switching costs are coming down quite a bit and that is kind of the whole point. But there are still things that Microsoft has proven to be very adept at this that that can say, okay, well, if you're using our SCF, The test suite really works a lot better and this works a lot better and the project and portfolio management works better together and that kind of thing. So that can drown that can be used to drown out people into force, force hands, also from a contract perspective, maybe that's to the benefit of some of Some some prospects. They can strong hand still because they have a lot of power and we'll have to see how that unfolds. They may be completely called agnostic and and and and not not try and push and take advantage of that fact, but it is a fear that's out there. If you read around, you'll see that folks are concerned about that. So VST S and TFS, they've been out for a while. Azure DevOps is built. It really is basically you're rebadging at this point of those products. As a weakness, if a customer is not happy with it for whatever reason, when you come in in a scenario where you're brought in because they have those tools and they're talking to you and looking for something else. For example, You know the name change and the potential price drops that Microsoft will put in place aren't going to fix the underlying tool issues. So if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And they have that history built up right now. So Some of it may be good. Some of it may not On the pipeline side, these are more smaller things and I marked these as ephemeral because right now they're they're true, but I'm sure they will change rapidly as as as Microsoft develops and releases on a three week cycle. The pipelines As code as I mentioned is It's actually a different pipeline than the ones that you would build using the UI. So if you built pipelines in the VST S or even Azure DevOps UI And then you want to then tweak them using code. You can't do that. They're absolutely literally separate. The animal stuff is just it's almost like an experiment. It's early. It's preview. You actually it's on by default. But if you want to use the UI, you have to instance wide turn it off. Pipelines that you can use the YAML pipelines. And that's what this is kind of talking about here. And then under evidence is the whole page where the discussion of this happened. Right now again ephemeral you can't link work items or issues what we call issues with builds. The YAML based pipelines are just disconnected from that. Again, I'm sure that that will close quickly. But and this is all just this is really they're building this out and that's really the key here is they are still pipelines as early for them this this particular type you know YAML based pipelines is very early for them. And as I mentioned, still in a preview feature. And if you want to not use it, you have to go turn it off. So how do we what do we do with this and again, I'm going to remind you on this is this is kind of early. We know what we know about BST S and TFS. We're just starting to collect information about that into one place and so this is as a team we need to build up how we're going to how we're going you know what is going to be our best attack path when we come face to face with them. I mentioned the security scanning piece a couple times. It's integrations for them, which means you know all the standard problems to vendor UIs more friction, higher overall costs because you have to actually pay for each of those ones that you integrate in. And you know a lot of maintenance requirements and disjoint visibility. We are the number one in market of self-managed Git repos, right? We're two-thirds of the self-managed market. Their Git repo isn't really leading in any sense. So we have that built in. Our self-managed and hosted versions come full functionality. Equivalent functionality on the release dates. Their self-managed version, which they're trying to push people away from is going to be three to four months behind any new changes or capabilities added to the online to the SAS version. And this is the point we talked about Microsoft to provider of cloud services, which is their money maker. So they're going to do what they can to sculpt things to be biased towards using their services. So a couple of things I want to point out not to use. We're proud and we should be of the fact that we're top rated in CI by Forester last year, Q3 2017. But I want to point out that right below us on that chart is Microsoft, right? So they're not, they're lower in what their current offering has. And this is probably because of the pipeline build out, you know, and how their pipelines were, but they're strong in strategy. So it's not a great argument because they're on the chart with us in the same quadrant or in the same way, part of the way. This, and this actually Joel kind of asked this as well, GitLab is better for dot net shops. Don't use that or not. And I'm just being straight honest, we have some work to do there. How we're going to position against that we need to work on. GitLab can do dot net because we can do anything, but it's better. It's not better than Microsoft in this area. For example, they have a binary repository that also does new get packages, which is a dot net specific packaging mechanism. We don't have that yet. We have Maven right now. GitLab doesn't have built-in facilities for building new get packages either, which they do because it's kind of native to that stuff. So two things to be aware of. Don't go out and fight with those because those aren't those aren't strong. Actually, I actually, Dan, I think the forester gives us some credibility as well. So I'm not sure I would, I'm not sure I would be nervous about presenting that. I wouldn't, again, thank you. I'm not saying don't present it. It absolutely gives us credibility. Don't hold it up as the, as the, you know, the torch on, on, you know, why pick us over them. It may be one of the, of the quills, you know, arrows in the, in the quill, but, and definitely we should make the point we are very strong CI the strongest, but just be aware that they have a pretty easy comeback on that, which is that they're right there too. So questions. Oh, I'm going to turn off the recording.