 Okay, awesome. Okay, so Tibi, did you start at the recording? That's awesome. You know what's coming, right? The smile, everything. The fun part. Awesome. Okay, welcome everyone to a new episode of our Azure Stack Hub Partner Solution video series. And again, I'm joined by Tiberio Radu from the Azure Stack Hub team. How are you, Tibi? Hello, Thomas. Hello, everyone. I'm doing very well. Thank you. How are you? I'm doing great. As always, when I'm talking with you, you have another very interesting partner solution for me today, right? Who is the partner and who I'm going to speak to? Indeed, indeed. Today, we're going to talk about another service provider. So in the series, we've been talking with enterprises, hosters, service providers that provide the managed service. In this case, Datacom is one of these examples which has a suit of services that they provide to their customers. So they have both a multi-tenanted environment as well as dedicated environments to their customers. So it's going to be an interesting discussion on how they provide value to their customers and the things they build to actually automate some of these things. So they have a lot of automation built in the back to create this operational, to simplify the operational aspects from their behalf, right? So their teams are building these for their customers. Okay, now that sounds super interesting. Now, I'm super happy to talk to Darren from Datacom today. So Darren, how are you doing? And can you like introduce yourself and Datacom a little bit? Sure, welcome. Thank you, guys. My name is Darren Hopper. I'm the general manager of product for Datacom. And yeah, Datacom is an Australasian organization. I've been around for around 50 years, 6,000 employees across New Zealand, Australia, and a few other countries as well. Largely, an organization that is about solving problems for customers. And that can vary. Today, we're going to talk about some of our cloud solutions, but Datacom as an organization has a much wider breadth of capability. So it's largely around how we actually understand our customers, how we solve their problems, and how we take them on a bit of a journey really to make sure that they're successful and we continue to be successful as well. Oh, that sounds great. Now, first of all, I'm really a pleasure to have you in our video series, obviously, really looking forward because that is something which is really interesting to me and also to our viewers, is like, how do we actually help the customers right on their journey? And speaking of that, when you speak about clients and customers, can you tell me a little bit more what clients and customers these are? Yeah, sure. So we've got a wide range of customers. We service large government agencies as well as commercial enterprises. And these can vary in size right up to the very top and down into that mid-market category. And largely some of the solutions that we're looking to bring to market at the moment are looking at that mid-market, that opportunity that we can provide to those organizations that don't necessarily have the in-house expertise to drive themselves forward. So a huge range of clients and customers and their technical expertise varies as well. So it really depends on the engagements that we have with those customers to what they're actually looking for us to provide. Okay, now that that's great, especially I also like, as you mentioned, like some customers who do not have the in-house knowledge, right, for going on that journey and where, like, how you can help them. So before we go on and talk a little bit more about what you provide, and one of the interesting questions we always come up with is, why did you and your company choose Azure Stack Hub as a platform? And how does that like fit into the overall solution you're offering? Yeah, great question. And I think with all of these solutions, first of all, it starts with what problems we're trying to solve for our customers. And so I think what we've been doing is, instead of taking a technology first view, we take a customer view first. So what is the customer problem and how can we look to solve that? And also as well, looking outwards and looking at research and insight, which is giving us those key lead indicators to what's important. So key stats and some research that we've done recently suggesting that 93% of customers that we're talking to are looking at a hybrid solution. They're looking at a multi-cloud solution. They know that they will need to put workloads in public cloud, but they have a real inherent need for some of those workloads and applications to be there in what's derisive, a private hybrid cloud environment. We've seen other statistics suggesting that organizations in the next five years will look to move all of their infrastructure from a non-prem perspective and move it off-prem and look for a managed solution from organizations such as ourselves. So that gives us a real insight in that sort of near term to how we can start working and supporting customers. And the other thing we're seeing is 67% of organizations want to use a hybrid solution. And I think I might have mentioned this because they're looking for that secure aspect that a hybrid solution can provide. So security is critical and we're seeing that coming through time and time again with customer interactions that we're having. Once we understand and once we understood the customer challenges that were being faced out there, it's then working with key partners to understand the solutions that they have and can they address those particular problems. So in this particular context, we were looking for solutions that we're going to be able to provide. A hybrid platform that allowed a good solid, there's a stepping stone to further solutions that they could develop. We were also looking to develop a solution that I think we made the point earlier, allowed the organizations to probably focus more on focusing on their customers, not necessarily the technologies. We talked around the automation that we've actually delivered within the solution that we're utilizing, that's benefiting our customers because we take that heavy lifting away from them and then we can provide a lot of that support. So it's taking the effort out of some of those customers day to day and our job really is to do that heavy lifting on their behalf. That is interesting. I like that one because we had this, I remember working with other customers on this and as you said, it's a very good approach like look at the problem and offer them a solution for that and not really necessarily like, okay, we offer you this technology or something like that. And often as you said, you're doing the heavy lifting for them because at the end they just want the solution. So you decided to go with Azure Stack Hub and hybrid in that case. The next question would be, so how are you using that platform and how are you providing like with that value to your customer? Yeah. So we've got two stamps for Azure Stack Hub. One of the key areas of focus was our deployment in Townsville, which is in Queensland and Australia. And that was solving a very particular problem for customers in Queensland and that was around latency, that was around location and geography. So deploying a Azure Stack Hub solution in Queensland has allowed us to provide localized solutions for those customers. It reduces that latency that they've seen historically. But also as well took a lot of the complexity out of the running of their on-prem equipment. There's an ongoing trend you won't be surprised to hear around organizations looking at how they can actually take some of the pain away from the on-prem equipment that they have reduced the cost of running that infrastructure and get a more streamlined, manageable solution. So Azure Stack Hub certainly in Queensland ticked all those boxes for those particular customers. It was an easy sell for us to get that solution in there. In the conversations we've had with customers, they can see the value straight away as well. So it's one of those scenarios where if you do the work up front, understand the customer problem, understand the challenges that you've got, you can introduce a solution that really is, it pays off quite quickly for those customers who are deploying their workloads onto that particular infrastructure. Okay, so I found a couple of things which were super interesting. First of all, one of the reasons why you, for example, used it in that case was the latency, so network requirements, so your customers actually closer to where you actually provide the services. And the other one was really also very interesting in terms of like reducing the operational overhead. If I understood that correctly, right? Instead of like just saying, okay, we're doing everything from the bottom up, we just start to take these higher level services and basically let the base part done by the solution as well as from a partner like you as well. I like that approach and I think that is also good that this comes out in one of our videos as well. Yeah. So my next question would then be, so we talked about the platform and why your customers are using it. What are kind of like the platform features you and your customers are basically using or what are you using for your customers depending on the scenario? Yeah, well the features that we're sort of utilizing, I mean the features that come out of Azure Stack Hub, one of the great benefits is you've got that consistency, so Azure Stack Hub and Azure, we're having discussions with customers around where they're going in the future. So they can look at developing their applications and their workloads in a way that will allow them to, if they want, in a future state move completely to public cloud. So it's giving them that flexibility. So we're seeing the sort of web apps looking at the marketplace that's available through the Azure Stack Hub, database services, network, the usual kind of typical infrastructure services like compute and storage and then there's the security aspect as well and I think that's one thing that's coming through loud and clear and there's often, well there's more and more challenges really with regards to security and it's a big concern of our customers. A lot of the customers that we work with have significant security concerns. So having solutions that we can actually provide that can meet those particular needs, particularly around security or key and that's why I think when you've got a hybrid type solution you've got that assurance that we can provide and the customers have around the security of their core applications, the data that's retained on those particular or on that infrastructure and that's really something that we found is a real driver for taking particular solutions such as Azure Stack Hub. We also provide services like backup, so data retention and backup services is critical. We all know and it's a terrible cliche right that data is the new oil, it's really important, it's growing exponentially and customers really want to make sure that we're working with a provider and they have a solution that's going to protect that fundamentally. This is again, I found a couple of key points here I think. You mentioned security as one of the key factors and I think that is also something we have very unique solutions as well. But then I also like the very early part you talked about the consistency with hybrid where I mentioned actually we bring these Azure services, these public Azure services to the Azure Stack Hub so you can offer it closer to your customers and also as far as I understand you also help the customer like transition to that and bring them on that cloud journey and helping them with that not just to host the application but also help them modernizing it, taking advantage of these cloud platform features. Just adding to that, I think one of the key benefits that Datacom offers for customers is we're not just a technology company or a platform company or an infrastructure company. So the opportunity that we have with customers to take them on that journey where we can have a look at where they're going, the direction they want to take and if it is an eventual a public cloud, a Microsoft journey that they're on, we can help them transition from where they are today in that on-prem environment all the way through to that pure public cloud environment and we can take them through those particular steps. We've got the technology experts from a Microsoft perspective in-house to your point to be able to look at the applications, modernize those that need to be modernized, and secure those that obviously are still probably best suited for a more hybrid environment. But we can actually help those customers look at the opportunity that they've got in the future, help modernize those applications, work with those customers, and provide that expertise that sometimes isn't necessarily always available within the company itself. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what I like the approach because that's exactly what I see for many customers, right? As soon as they want to go on that journey, they probably at the beginning do not have that expertise and I like also that, well, you mentioned the technical expertise you have in-house, but I also like the approach you have where you say, okay, we're not just going to talk about technical stuff, we're really going to have a look at your challenges and then we're going to have look at solutions and then we add the technical know-how to that as well. And again, I can see that this provides a lot of value to many, many customers, especially when they get started with Azure and Azure Stack Hub and you start using these cloud services and being on that cloud journey. Yeah. So with that, I'm sure there are now a lot of our viewers are now interested to find out more about Datacom. So can you let me and our viewers know where can they find more? Sure. Well, they can find out more, they can search Datacom. They can go to our website datacom.com and they can also search datacom.azurestackhub and there's a wealth of information that's available that talks about that particular solution. But I think more importantly, they can go to those particular websites and understand exactly how we're going to help you find the solution that's right for you and the journey that you're on. The strategy that we're utilizing at the moment is it's all about right cloud. Okay. So what is the right cloud for you now and what is the right cloud for you in the future? So if they come to Datacom or search for Datacom, they can find all that information and they can get in touch with an expert and maybe we can help another customer with that cloud journey. Okay. Now that is awesome. And again, we will put all the links in the descriptions so you can easily go and read the description and click on it and find the right information. With that, I want to say thank you, Darren. I want to say thank you to Tipee again for introducing me to another great partner in the Azure Stack Hub ecosystem. And I also want to thank all of our viewers for watching. I really hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope we'll see you in the next one.