 Okay, then look at everyone look happy, okay, so let me see. Hey, welcome everyone back to our Azure Stack Partner Solution video series. Again, I'm happy to have Tibi from the Azure Stack Hub team with me. Tibi, with who are we going to talk today? Hello, Thomas. Hello, everyone. Today we're going to talk with a partner from Tunisia. That's been a partner of Azure Stack Hub from the early days. They've been part of the initial initiatives as well. And as we've discussed before in this series, we are focusing on the Azure Stack Hub partner solutions. The solutions range from direct platforms, meaning consumers from inside the company that deploy the applications on top of Azure Stack Hub. But also actual end customers that are resold by the partners. So CSPs that host the Azure Stack Hubs and then sell these as services to their customers. RSC has an interesting story where they have both models and they have a mixture of both managed services as well as hosting services and they partner with ISVs as well. I don't want to get too much into details. Iman will go through their journey and how they started and what their value is for this. That sounds awesome. I'm really looking forward to talking to Iman and I will directly switch to him now. Hey, Iman. Nice to talk to you. JB just told me a little bit about your story and about your background. But can you introduce yourself and RFC a little bit more for our viewers? Thank you, Thomas. Thank you, Tabi, for having me in this video series. Hi, everyone. My name is Iman Manny. I'm in charge of technical sales at RFC. RFC is a Microsoft partner based in Tunisia. For 15 years now, we have been a gold partner with Microsoft on multiple competencies. We hold 11 gold competencies and three silver one. We have been a partner with Microsoft on the virtualization solution since 2008. Then with Windows Azure Pack, we have deployed it a couple times. And after that with Azure Stack since it was being launched. So we are a very close partner with Microsoft on the North African region. And we work with Azure Stack on multiple solutions. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, I remember the good times we had with Windows Azure Pack and then the transition to Azure Stack Hub and so on. So now that's a really interesting journey. Can you tell us a little bit more what kind of clients you're working with? What kind of customers you have and like the use cases? Sure. Actually, we have two types of offering based on the Azure Stack Hub solution. We have the dedicated Azure Stack offering where we sell an Azure Stack platform with our OEM partner Cisco. And we deployed with Cisco Advanced Services. We provide after that a managed service around the patching, configuring the clients and offering in the Azure Stack. We also support the end customer to learn how to use the stack. And we have some partnerships with ISVs that provide the application on top of the stack in SAS model. So our first, let's say, biggest customer in this model is the government of Tunisia who decided to deploy a solution called Elise. Elise is a document management solution from a company called Neoledge, also a Microsoft partner. They actually have been nominated partner of the year in 2019 in Tunisia for this project. And this project consists of digital transformation of the Tunisian government, so EGov initiative to allow or to provide all ministries of the government and also administration to exchange documents between them, digitally signed documents to have workflows on correspondence between ministries. So the solution initially developed on Azure. And the government was not, let's say, 100% okay on hosting some sensitive data for some ministries and so on the public clouds on Europe or on other region. So they asked if possible to have the same services that are used by the Elise solution but have it on premise. So that's where Neoledge team asked Microsoft if they have a partner or someone that could provide Azure services in Tunisia. And that was in 2017, just around the launch of Azure Stack. In the meantime, our company RFC was discussing with Microsoft team the possibility to have Azure Stack in Tunisia. Since, as you know, Thomas, Azure Stack when launched in July 2017 was not available in all countries. There was a list of authorized countries and Tunisia was not on the list. So actually it was a very nice discussion with Microsoft Corporation team in the Inspire meeting and we were able to work together to get the country Tunisia in the list and we were able to have this Azure Stack and propose it to the government of Tunisia who were very happy because they had everything they needed to have the same architecture that are deployed on Azure but in their own data center. So that was, let's say, the first deployment for Azure Stack in Tunisian territory. Oh, that's awesome. That's a very, very interesting story. I have a lot there and I love that how you described basically bringing Azure into their on-premises location and to their data center or basically in your location and hosting the platform and having the same consistent experience as you would get with Azure. Also very interesting, by the way, how you went through the process of making Azure Stack available in your country which is also very much like and I'm happy that you had these conversations at conferences like Inspire and actually the team worked on this and it was able to deliver that. Very interesting. So from a technical side and use cases, kind of like why did you decide for Azure Stack Hub and how does it fit in the overall solution? We already talked a little bit about it but maybe you can share a little bit more about in a technical sense how that fits into the picture. The solution that we are talking about for the government, the electronic management of documents, relies on scanning the documents. So first of all, it will be digitally scanned to be introduced into the application. And there we have what we call Dock Factory is the name of the scanning application. The Dock Factory is used with not a balanced way. So sometimes it's used very heavily in some hours of the day and in some other timeline, it's not used at all. So it was the first architecture, let's say traditional one. It will be deploying 20 or 22 VMs, one for each ministry, and it will be, let's say, a loss of resources. So the Azure Stack VM Scale Set was a very good solution to scale out when there is many users doing the scans and to scale in when there is not much of a need for these VMs. So this one of the feature that was used into the architecture. Another feature that's also very important in this architecture is the Azure Stack Key Vault. And the Key Vault holds all the scripting keys for the databases, for the stock files, and for identifying the users. So everything around scripting the architect, the solution was stored in the Azure Stack Key Vault. And this was a very important feature in the architecture. Another feature, which is actually like you said, the consistency with Azure and its Azure Resource Manager, which provided the ISV Neoledge here, the possibility to use his same scripts, his same ARM template that already developed and validated on Azure to deploy all the solution for 26 ministries in one night. And it was like a very good win on the timeline for the project and also from human resources perspective. So deploying all this architecture, which is heavily based on virtual machines, in one night it was like science fiction and ARM provided this possibility. That sounds really impressive. I love how you described how they could take basically things they used in Azure like the ARM templates, infrastructure as code, which they basically used against the Azure cloud. They were able to use the same templates to use them on the Azure Stack Hub infrastructure to deploy that. As you said, basically overnight and obviously saved a lot of time. And I think I'm sure also the customer was very impressed by that. Speaking of that, so obviously since you're on this journey very early on, you have a lot of experience with Azure Stack Hub but also the hybrid journey. I want to ask you what are your lessons learned in terms of the whole cloud journey? Okay. Thank you, Thomas. Before going into the lessons learned, I would like to continue on some other points because we have two ways of providing Azure Stack to the customers. This first offering was a dedicated Azure Stack. Like we said, we have the transition government. We also have a private group of companies. It was called the Bayehe Group and it's 30 plus companies that are consolidating all their data centers into Azure and Azure Stack Hub in a hybrid architecture. It was also one of the customers where we deployed a dedicated Azure Stack. We also have an ongoing third project that is still a confidential. So this was let's say one part of our offering. And before going into your question, I would like to present a second part of our offering which is our hosted Azure Stack offering as a CSP service provider. We have transformed our business from an original system integrator into today's service provider using the Azure Stack Hub solution to provide for SMB or corporate customers that do not need a dedicated Azure Stack for them. So we have our own stamp hosted in Tier 3 data center. It's actually the biggest data center in the country. It's our partner that action who holds this data center. And from that data center, we provide Azure services in hybrid modes with Azure with the customers to provide them the possibility to choose where to deploy their services. If, for example, they have data warehouse where data are masked and there is no sensible data, they hosted on Azure using platform as a service, modern data warehouse services. And if they have, for example, transactional application for banking or data that are sensible, they store and they run it from the Azure Stack inside the country. And that's offering a transformed our company. Now we are more into the service provider business. In partnership with the Telco providers, we integrated this Azure Stack Hub with the private network which called MPLS. So the MPLS private network provides the enterprises to access Azure Stack directly from the Tunisian backbone network without going through internet. And that provided a more, let's say, a better latency and also a better bandwidth. So that's one of the advantages of the Azure Stack Hub multi-tenant architecture. And we also have another partnership, actually three more partnerships that we did to bundle these services with our basic Azure Stack services. One of them is Cloud Asserts billing solution. Cloud Asserts provide us with pay-as-you-use billing model so our customers can pay as they use the Azure Hub services with, let's say, billing as... If they use some services, we have monthly billing and if they do not use anything, we do not bill them anything. So pay-as-you-use model. So that's one of the advantages also that we have. We also have assessment and migration planning service with the current technology, also one of our partners that provide us a surplus application that we use for what we call Express Migrate Mission. So Express Migrate is a full bundle of service where we do the assessment of the data center of the customer, what they have, what are the challenges that could face him if he migrate to Azure or Azure Stack, what is the TCO of the architecture, our cloud architects help them into doing the migration plan. So also this provides our customer more visibility when migrating to the cloud. Third partner that's also helping us into this multi-tenant architecture is Commvault. And Commvault provides our customer with the possibility to do backup of their Azure Stack services in a self-service way, is a backup as a service offering and also replicates from the Azure Stack Hub stamp to another Azure Stack or to Azure or to whatever other, let's say, location they choose. So this offering for multi-tenancy has been very important into driving our business. So I just wanted to mention this, Thomas. That makes a lot of sense. I love the story when obviously different partners, the platform with Azure and Azure Stack Hub and different partner solutions are coming together to basically then deliver a very nice platform solution for the actual customer. And I really love that story of different partners coming together and solving customer challenges. So what kind of business impact does Azure Stack Hub have for you? RFC is a Gold Partner with Microsoft on Azure. So we are a cloud platform partner and as a CSP, we resell Azure services and we provide manager services on top of it. But what was very interesting is that since we started providing these Azure Stack Hub services, we saw that our Azure service and Azure consumption went very high, around 200% more, so like three times the consumption of Azure. And we explained that that customer actually see in us very experienced and a partner with many expertise on Azure, on Azure Stack, hybrid Azure. So now not only they choose us for their Azure Stack project, but also they choose us for their Azure product. And not only choosing the partner, but also having this Azure Hub in the country was an accelerator for their Azure adoption. Before, we had some discussion with customers where they tell us either you take everything to Azure or you don't take anything. And sometimes there is a legal team, they say, oh, this application cannot go to the public cloud. So we have all the projects lost and we cannot get the customer to stop investing into the data center. Now, with the hybrid architecture, we can actually take everything and remove all servers because we can, let's say, mix between Azure Public and Azure Stack Hub and we provide 100% consistent architecture to the customer. So the customer actually agrees and move to the cloud. So yeah, Azure Stack Hub was a very good accelerator of our Azure business. And going back to your original question, Thomas, about the lesson learned, the challenges that we faced into our journey. Like I said, we started with Azure Stack since the beginning. And let me say that everything around technical, it can be handled. After all, we have 50 plus team of experienced engineer and consultant certified on all solution. So technical issue have never been, let's say, a blocker and it's not, let's say, an important part of the journey. The important part in our vision, an important part of the journey, is actually the technology partner who you work with. And here we have Microsoft. And let's say that Microsoft has been there for us for over 15 years now, since 2005. And let me tell you something. Tunisia is a small country. So we are not, let's say, a big market. We are not doing like, for example, our company do $5 million turnover. It's not like a big portion of Microsoft revenue. But the intention and let's say the focus that Microsoft provided us to help us first bring the Azure Stack to the company, to the country. And also in transforming the company business, it's very interesting. And seeing, let's say, key executive from Microsoft talk to us in the inspire, let's say, lobbies. And when we meet with Tiberio and other team member of the Microsoft corp, they encourage us into going into this Azure Stack business. They follow us very closely and they support us even in our lunch event. There was the general director for the region and there was many Microsoft sales executive present with us in the lunch of this offering. And having Microsoft as a partner is the most important thing. Everything around technical, it can be handled if you have a great partner like Microsoft. Oh, okay. First of all, I'm super happy that this worked out so well and that you really see a strong partner within Microsoft. And I think, again, the same thing for us. We are a partner-driven company and we need partners like you to obviously work with our customers together and help each other there. First of all, that's super impressive story. Thank you for sharing that, especially. And also, like I like that you mentioned that actually it's not really the... You can really handle technical challenges as long as you work with a great partner. I feel like that's a very important part of this story as well. Yes, exactly. Yes, Thomas. And to close things, of course, we have our website, www.rfc.com.tn. We could share the information after the video. There is also my email or our marketing address. If any customer is interested, we also work in France and in Europe for the service part, but mainly our business is in the North African region. Okay, that's awesome. So people, if you want to know more about RFC and what Aimen just shared, we will put down the links in the description so you can find them, you can contact them and talk to them and get more information on that and hopefully also work with them in the future. With that, I want to say thank you very much, Aimen, for joining us today. I want to say thank you to Tibi. Thank you to all the viewers and we see you in the next one. Bye-bye. Thank you. Pleasure with mine.