 Hello everyone. My name is Tiberio Rado. I'm a Program Manager on the Azure Stack team. Welcome to our new episode in the Azure Stack Hub Partner Solution Series. We are today joined by Glenn from Byte. Although he's in lockdown, he was happy to join us and kind enough to join us to give us a bit of information on what exactly they do and how they as a service provider sort of work for their customers. Let Glenn introduce himself and tell us a bit about the company. Sure. Thank you very much. My name is Glenn Neeland. I'm a Glorified Account Executive, but I've got a more fancy title, but we'll go with the Account Executive. I work at Byte Information Technology here in Australia. We have been in existence for 25-plus years. We started from a consulting background, and we continue with that vein in our approach to our customers. We're looking at how we can improve their business, how we can actually meet and solve their problems without coming to them with a technology solution per se. Very closely aligned with Microsoft and offer a lot of Microsoft solutions, particularly around a zero stack, clearly, and also teams and enablement for the modern workplace. So we work in those spaces quite a lot. Excellent. The solutions you offer, do they span Azure as well as Azure Stack Hub? Yes, absolutely. Depending on the customer, we do a lot of work with accounting firms, professional services firms. In that instance, Azure Stack Hub is a really good tool for them because they're very conscious of data security and data sovereignty and the customer requirements for segregation of their data into nice secure tendencies, etc. So in that case, Azure Stack Hub is fantastic for that. We can utilize that in an on-prem hosted solution, which is not so much in their home buildings, but it's clearly in a class one data center, those types of things. Then we use the extension of that as you're public for the flexibility in that single pane of glass. Excellent. Do you have Azure Stack Hubs, which are dedicated to one customer, or which are multi-tenanted and have multiple customers onboarded? At the moment, they're very much single customer. So each customer has their own requirements. So we've done Azure Stack Hub as a hybrid model. We've also done Azure Stack or HCI when they wanted really dedicated high-power, high-performance, but on-prem, but still with that same familiar interface of the Azure Stack. Excellent. That makes it easy for my team to manage and have consistency across the different platforms. Excellent. And your team will be operating and managing the hardware or also working with the customer to build their solutions? Yes. Hardware and then the solutions. We will go as far up to the vendors level on the applications. And in some cases we'll do, if their requirement is there, we'll go and do integration work and extend it out into leveraging other services. For example, one of our customers at the moment has a fairly significant SQL environment, and we're working with them now to start using SQL services out of Azure Public and blending that in across the Azure Stack. So it's a mix of both consultancy, architecture, support, trusted advisor, as well as managed services. It's a mixture of all the worlds. Have you done this from the beginning with them or was it like a journey to sort of get there based on the data privacy and regulatory requirements that you mentioned? Look, I'll give you one example where we had a customer that was on a journey themselves and they'd move from everything was on-prem probably four years before you introduced to them, they went to an IS model, but felt all they'd done was just lift and shifted their own issues to someone else to manage and they weren't at all satisfied. We actually introduced them to the concept of Azure Stack and talked to them about how we can leverage physical hardware and Azure Public and give you that nice sort of blend and single pane across the two. And that has enabled that organization to stop worrying about whether their environment's up and running and now they're starting to look at innovation and how they can enable the technologies to meet the needs of the business. So we heard what they were talking about when we were initially talking to them and that's how we sort of presented it back to them and it really resonated with their CIR. He was very happy with that. We now run roadmap every month, every quarter to go through and revisit. Are we still delivering to the right direction? What's the next level innovation? So that's been a great journey for that organization. I can see that continuing on. They'll never, never will never go backwards there. I think eventually they'll be all, they'll move a lot of more of their services to Azure, but at the moment they're putting their toe in the water and very comfortable with the temperature. I see. So it's more of a journey, like a step-by-step journey. So probably the things that can go to Azure will go to Azure and then based on the regulatory compliance security issues you will use on-premises to sort of host those workloads needed. Right, yeah. That's a great point and that's one of the main use cases for Azure Stack Hub and something we've seen with many other partners as well where they use Azure Stack Hub as an accelerator for their Azure consumption rather than a replacement for Azure. I assume overall you're looking right now at the IaaS parts and starting with virtual machines and moving the workloads as is and are you looking also at higher up services, so containers and app services and that sort of thing? Yeah, absolutely. And that's absolutely spot on. So the issue that we come across with multiple customers is their applications, the maturity of their applications and the way they run they're not ready for Azure services and Azure containers. They're still the traditional IS model. They require a VM and then from a value proposition to move them to Azure, it doesn't always work. Right. But the Azure Stack Hub gives us that great stepping stone so we can get them off some fairly antiquated and legacy equipment, get them on to modern architecture and then we can chip away at it in a more systematic sort of approach and say, okay, let's test this one, move across. So going back to the example I was giving before we have an file services proof of concept running with them at the moment. So once that gets up and running, I can see a lot of the data that can be moved to Azure file services will go there because they don't want the cost and effort of backups and storage and so forth and takes pressure off there and they're sequel environment. We're looking at database services and so forth and re-architecting a lot of their apps to leverage the modern database services that we can get to. And from an Azure Stack Hub perspective, even with these moving these VMs, for example, even if they are VMs, are you leveraging things like ARM templates or infrastructure as code or any of the ARM dependency, the ARM enablements, so to say? To be honest, I'd be speaking out of my technical pay grade to say whether we are or not. I know that we've been running Azure Stack Hub for coming up to two years that we've been utilizing it. When we first started, I think we're doing a lot of very manual activities and I know the guys are now taking advantage of that. I think the feedback I've had is, I wish we had those tools when we first started, which is always a way, development comes a long way. So certainly made it easier. We recently did a HCI implementation for a customer that needed on-prem equipment and that ran really smooth. It was amazingly quick and the customer kept saying, we made me finished, so that was a great result. Excellent, excellent. As these projects sort of onboarded and your customers use Azure Stack Hub, they use Azure, they use Azure Stack HCI in a combination of manners, right? They have a number of ways of doing things, but from a business value perspective, what are some of the lessons learned you've seen throughout the years and some of the gatchas that you've identified in these projects? Step back one from there. We certainly have learned that it makes a lot of sense to get a really good relationship with the hardware vendors. Obviously, when we're doing Azure Stack, we're going to one of the third vendors and we're stuck with Dell in this case and then leveraging their expertise is setting up the base level. So thinking you can do that yourself, thinking that you can just follow the knowledge-based articles and do that without assistance is a lesson. Don't attempt it, leverage the expert, pay the professional services. From there, then I think the next lesson is really don't underestimate the complexity of the work you're doing, but at the same time, be prepared to reach out to the knowledge that you can get from Microsoft or from Dell. I think we struggled on the first one. We took the old engineering approach of we can work this out. So the very first one we did, we probably spent way too much effort and over-invested in the solution. Post that, we've learned to leverage that and very much more efficient and cost-effective delivery. Excellent. And from your customer workload perspective, do you have any insights on how the customers are or what types of applications they're using? I assume you're not using any ISVs to provide the things on top. The customers would bring their own applications or would you provide the whole solution to them? No, in most cases, the customers are bringing their own applications and they can be everything from, if we're looking at accounting and legal side of things, they're typically your various accounting, auditing, those types of applications. The example where we've gone with the HCI solution, they're a heavy graphics and drafting organization so that they need that strength or that power locally for them. So they bring their own licensing there and we've found that the HCI solution, for example, on the graphics and the data speeds, there's been no issue, no complaints whatsoever since we've installed them. In fact, the level of support we need to do for that organization has probably diminished significantly, which is great for my operations team. Yeah, that's what I wanted to say. I guess the operations team is happy about that part. I don't think they would be sad to have a system that works properly, right? Exactly, we just get into a routine and cadence and keep it up to date and patched, which is probably the other lesson learned, staying on top of the developments that are happening in the Zero Stack Hub, keeping all the roll-up patches and all the various, staying on top of that has been a lesson that you don't ever let get behind. Because we're missing out on the advantages that are coming with the new patches and the new changes. So, yeah, I think early on we were a little bit, Blase is probably the wrong word, but I think we were thinking, oh, we just will roll this up in each quarter, but no, I think, right, just stay on top of it. And when it's ready, we're basically one month behind and just keep going and keep on top of it. I think it's more, I think we've touched on it, but it's giving the bandwidth for the organization and for us to focus on innovation and customer-enablement. That's really the area that I want to highlight. It's less about having to keep the lights on, the lights are on. So, let's focus on how we furnish the room, let's focus on how we can actually do the next step. That change of spending every month, just, is it, if we fix this issue, that's gone. We're now focusing on, okay, what's the next step on our path to enable the organization to work more effectively? And one of our larger customers is now looking at how they can expand it out across some of their, if we look at it into, we're providing support for the organization at the base level IT. Now they're saying, okay, how do you expand and support our consultants so they can actually sell a service to our customer, their own customers. So it's jumping out to the next level. That is a great point and a good thing to catch because what we've seen across all our partners is the thing that you are highlighting as well, where instead of focusing on keeping the lights on, you are now focusing on creating value for the customer, enhancing their operational or development or DevOps processes, as well as focusing on the higher levels of the solution rather than keeping the lights on as you've said. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you everyone for staying with us and hope to see you in the next one. Thank you.