 Hi, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Carmen Crencoli. He is the Senior Program Manager for Strategy and Ecosystem here at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Carmen. Thanks for having me, really, really excited to be here. Thank you. So, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about, we're going to talk tech in this interview, but right now, we're going to talk about solutions and really sort of explain what the problems are that you are solving for your customers. So, talk about the customer pain points that you and your group are looking to solve. Yeah, so the WSTD program, when we conceived it was to address a problem that I think a lot of people who've worked with Microsoft technology are familiar with. We have some really great technology. It's very easy for users to dive in and start using it, but to really be successful requires additional level of expertise that not every AT shop is going to have. And it gets more and more complex, and we start bringing in more and more IT functionality into the stack with software-defined technologies that challenge grows. So, we feel like we've had very, very great advances in what our tech can do, and we were watching our customers struggle with it, and we decided that the best way to fix it is to create a solution program and work with our partners who have that expertise to take them, bundle them together with a set of best practices, some additional testing and validation to ensure that customers are selecting the right hardware for the tasks that they need, and then offer that as a solution instead of as build your own, which is a little more traditional in the Windows world. So, explain how it works. So, there's a frazzled IT person who's saying, I don't even know where to begin, but I have these issues. Can you give us some examples of how you hold a customer's hand through this and walk them through the process? Sure, sure. So, I would say the way we approach it right now is if a customer is going to get on board the HCI train, which I think more and more of them are, we're watching the industry shift in that direction pretty rapidly now. And they say, I've heard about Microsoft technologies, I've heard about storage spaces direct and your software defined networking capabilities, and I want to pursue that. You say, well, okay, don't just go buy some servers or recycled servers off the shelf. We want you to contact some of our partners and talk to them about their solution catalog and say, look, this is the kind of workload I'm going to consolidate on it, right? I'm consolidating virtual machines from multiple environments, and it's going to be a mix of traditional line of business apps and SQL, and I think I'm going to have about this IO profile, and they'll help you size a solution and then deliver it on site and integrate it into your business environment, right? And it lets you get something that is more tailored to what you need rather than trying to piece it together. All right, so I want to hear a little bit more about HCI, but before we do, you've got ecosystem as part of what you work on. I think most people understand that Microsoft has a huge ecosystem. Some things are really simple to understand. Server, you guys don't make servers. Operating system sits on top of that. The storage piece of it, I lived, worked in the storage industry for a number of years, worked with Microsoft, obviously a huge player in the software layer, but that was back before we called things like software-defined storage and the software-defined data center and heck, pre-cloud and all that stuff. So you've been there 21 years at Microsoft. Give a little bit about where Microsoft thinks they need to play, how you partner with the ecosystem out there, and then we'll get into some of the new pieces. Yeah, we've always viewed storage as, I mean, it's part of the area you breathe when you're computing, right? So we always partnered with the storage ecosystem to make sure that SANS and NAS devices work inside general IT environments. The shift to the software-defined mentality involved some new learning from a Microsoft perspective. We're taking on some of the integration responsibilities that storage vendors typically had, and that's part of what birthed WSSD as a solution program, was if we have to take on all of the integration work, how do we ensure that that's a good quality, right? Just buying some disks off the shelf and plugging them into the motherboard does not result in a enterprise-quality solution. So we had to define some parameters and then work with OEMs and partners who know how to do the integration work as well, put some testing parameters around it and turn out solutions, software-defined solutions that worked as well as the highly integrated, tested SANS and NAS devices of the last generation. Yeah, yeah, great, I think back, most people probably know Microsoft for like SMB, it's like you have protocols that help people with NAS devices help bring us up to speed when things like HCI, so HCI technology that's been around for a number of years, many companies partner with Microsoft, Nutanix is nearby, partners with Microsoft, VMware partners with Microsoft on some things but is a big player with their vSAN technologies. What do we call the Microsoft HCI solution and how would you compare and contrast it to the existing solutions out there? So yeah, it's a traditional strength of Microsoft, right? We're very good at partnering even with people we're competing with, right? And we're very serious about it, right? It's part of our core DNA is partnership and competition at the same time. So our HCI stack is really about integrating the functionality it's there. There's, I would say the way we talk about it, there are three main components. There's the storage layer, which is storage spaces direct. There's the networking layer, which we just call software defined networking, which includes a network controller and network virtualization capabilities. And then there's the compute layer, which is Hyper-V and the additional capabilities we layer in Hyper-V, where we think we add a lot of value, things like secured VMs and security capabilities that we add on. You layer those technologies together and integrate them into a solution with validated hardware, tested hardware, a network controller, network switch, and you get something that you can integrate into a business environment, right? These are all capabilities that are in Windows Server 2019 data center, right? This is not an additional add-on. It's not a component. It's not a thing that you download. The solution program is really about taking the stuff that's in the box and making sure customers succeed in it without having to bring in all of the expertise into their IT staff from day one. Yeah, thanks for the explanation. The one piece, if I understand right, Azure Stack also has storage spaces direct in it. So should I look at this as a spectrum of how Microsoft puts the pieces together and the WSSD is just one of the storage fundamental component that plays a few places along the stack. Am I getting that right? Yeah, it's kind of a foundational technology, right? Just like Windows Server is the host layer for all of the upper higher level workloads. Storage spaces direct is the foundational layer for building our storage for all of these like hyper-converged solutions. Azure Stack's business goals different, right? They're looking for Azure consistency and really giving an Azure experience to a customer on-prem. WSSD is more for the traditional IT shop that's used to running their own virtual environments and they're just looking for some infrastructure hosting a virtual workloads. So we're covering different ends of, I would say, the IT maturity spectrum with the two solutions but the underlying pieces are very much the same, right? The plumbing that powers Azure Stack and the plumbing that powers WSSD and the plumbing that powers Azure is built on a lot of the same core Windows technologies. What are the outcomes of this solutions department? How have you seen changes in customer behavior and helping them understand the best practices that have emerged as they implement and deploy different kinds of technologies? I would say the biggest thing we've noticed is just we get customers to be more successful when they work with our vendors, right? WSSD launched the original version of the program for the 2016, launched about nine months after we RTM. In that nine month gap, we had a lot of customers who were excited for the technology. We'd been talking about it. Our engineering teams do a great job of making people excited for the technology. We get our lovely core IT geeks pumped for this stuff and they were going out implementing it on their own, right? Buying hardware that they thought conformed, trying to implement and we were having a lot of struggles, right? It was generating more support than we'd like. Customers weren't having the experience we wanted them to have with it. Since we've started the program and we've been getting customers pointed at our hardware partners that deliver these solutions, we've had a lot more success, right? They're much happier with it. We have multiple stakeholders bought into the success of that customer solution. So the OEMs are just as invested as we are, as opposed to if you buy a server off the shelf, they're just like, the server's working fine. I don't, that's not my problem. So we're just seeing a lot more customer success out of it and we want to keep driving that forward with the 2019 version of the solution program. All right, so Carmen, anything, there's so many announcements that were made at the show. Anything in your space that you want to make sure, kind of highlight that people might have missed. Everybody knows Windows Server 2019's coming, but what's that mean for your area or anything outside of that one announcement? I think the most exciting thing is just some of the tech improvements that I know really land with this IT Pro crowd that is here at Ignite. So yesterday during Aaron Chappell, our CBP of Windows Server during her Windows Server 2019 intro session, she announced a number that we achieved on Windows Server 2019 with scalable persistent memory. I forget what the name of it is. Anyway, it was like, it was a crazy IOPS number. Scalable Optane stuff, I remember, because we had Jake on yesterday from Intel and he was like, you're going to be blown, your mind will be blown when you hear about this. It was like 13.8 million IOPS on a 12 node cluster, right? So we're continuing our engineering focus, we're an engineering company, we love making the tech better and we're getting people excited for it and then we're following up with a, by the way, if you want this kind of thing in your environment or you need it, if you need to deliver it, these are the partners you work with, we partner with them, we engineer with them, right? Like this is an engineering, a co-engineering program, get the solution from them. So, you know, I would say that's the new thing from MySpace, right? We get, I get to piggyback on all of this great engineering announcement and work and excitement and say, this is how you succeed with the technology. Don't go do it yourself, go to these people. And we're here to help you. Yes, yes, that's why I'm really grateful that you guys had me on, right? But one of the things, early things I've been told since I took over the program was I didn't even know Microsoft did HCI and I didn't know, I definitely didn't know that you had a solution program and I'm like, I know, I will work on fixing that. Well, I mean, Carmen, look, HCI, we understand that the virtualization layer is critical there. Microsoft obviously, one of the top players in that industry, so we've been waiting to hear, you know, a broader story from Microsoft in this space, so congrats on all the progress. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, this has been a really fantastic show so far. We actually have a hyper-converged expo in the application infrastructure area where six of the WSD partners just showing off their solutions in one tight space along with the engineers who work on the HCI stack at Microsoft right nearby. So if anyone wants to come check out, talk to the engineers who wrote the software, talk to them. It's a really small space, you hyper-converged it, right? Yes, it's like, it is a hyper-converged space, this. Great, well, Carmen, thank you so much and encourage anyone who is here at Ignite to go check out that booth and see what's all about. Great, thank you so much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit.