 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here at the Orange County Convention Center in the middle of the show floor, one of Microsoft's biggest shows, 26,000 people from around the globe. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman, and we're joined by a third co-host. But he is also the principal CTO advisor, Keith Townsend. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It is a pleasure to have you. So you come to a lot of these shows. I'm interested in your thoughts and impressions of Microsoft Ignite 2019. So, you know, I'm part of the V community, which is a pretty close-knit community, very focused on one part of the whole IT picture, which is infrastructure. It is amazing coming to a show like Microsoft Ignite, where the breadth of content is so wide and the conversation so wide and surprisingly deep. This has been one of my, I think, favorite shows of the year so far. Talk about the content. You're absolutely right. We had so many product announcements. I mean, it felt like an Amazon show, we were saying, because of the number of products that were being announced and demoed here. 87 pages from the COMPS team. I mean, so does this feel like a different era for the company itself? You know what? Microsoft announced, I think UiPath has some crazy over-billion-dollar evaluation. Microsoft quietly announced that they're entering RPA, Robotic Process Automation. They're challenging SAP when it comes to data warehousing and data analytics. And then they just happened to announce that, oh yeah, by the way, we're making Kubernetes easier. Then there's still the team's announcements. The amount of content in the areas that Microsoft is going in. Just to highlight it, Azure Arc replicates data. One of the jobs is replicate data. And they said it'll replicate data to AWS cloud. Microsoft, great position. Keith, as you're alluding to, Microsoft has a large portfolio of applications. If you think business productivity, you're probably using Microsoft. Everything from teams that we've hearing a bunch about. Through, of course, O365 is the solution that gave everybody the green light to go satisfy as many of your applications as you will. And Arc, very much from what I've seen so far, takes that application-specific view of Kubernetes. We know Kubernetes is supposed to help be that platform to build on top of, but I've tended to hear a very infrastructure view of here's what you'll build in your data center and the compute network and storage that you need to think about. Here's the IaaS that it might live on. But when you talk about Arc, they're talking about, it's about SQL and databases and how those pieces go together. And it's not, you know, this is a view for Microsoft, but if you want to go do OpenShift, if you want to do Spring with a Pivotal, VMware or Tanzu with there, Microsoft, of course, is saying that that's your option. But would love your viewpoint so far, you know, Azure Arc and, you know, where Microsoft sits in this, you know, this broader ecosystem today. So I'm coming off fresh a conversation with David Armour, the PM for Microsoft Arc for Azure Stack, and their attention to detail is amazing. You know, I'm not the world's biggest Kubernetes fan. For some of the very reasons that you mentioned, you just, it's too much attention to the details in order to provide a Kubernetes experience that developers will accept. Microsoft, a big developer-focused company. So when you look at Arc and what it does for Kubernetes on Azure Stack, it makes the provisioning of storage, networking, et cetera, invisible so that you can take Microsoft's cognitive services, deploy them on Azure Stack, and just consume those services. Microsoft, again, when you look at it from a different angle, when you're not taking the infrastructure angle at it, and you know, you're doing the whiz-bang features of making sure that Kubernetes can do X, Y, and Z. More importantly, can I use it to build applications? It's Microsoft's approach, and you can see it in Arc and how they approach it in Azure Stack. Absolutely, and you're talking right now about this app development for everyone. We had Satya Nadella yesterday talking about democratizing computing. Anyone can do it, AI for all, too. Does, what are the most exciting new tools that you're seeing, and what are the kinds of conversations that you're having with developers around these new tools? So I just talked to a professional services architect, or architect for professional services, one of the global big fours, and he was telling me that they've deployed RPA to the entire organization of over 100,000 consultants and end users so that they can build robots to power the next phase of productivity increases within their organization. No rules, no constraints, just here's the tool, go out and do. Microsoft talked about 2.5 million non-technology focused developers. It is, I think, a key theory of the CTO advisor that the future of enterprise IT is that companies like Microsoft, VMware will push AI, machine learning, these robotic automation processes down to the end users so that they're creating the content. It's just not enough of Keith's and Stu's in the world to do this by hand, so great vision. And Keith, you brought off the SIs, and you've worked for some of the big SIs in the past. How is Microsoft doing out there? We've seen with cloud and AI, the big SIs rolling out armies of people to help integrate this, to help customers adopt this. Cloud specifically is supposed to be cheap and easy, and we know it's neither of those two things. So if you look at cloud and AI, how is Microsoft to be a partner with, and I'd love a little compare and contrast to the VMware's and AWS's of the world. So if you look at, let's take a look at VMware. I'm a big VMware fan, but one of the things that if you're a VMware bar, or if you're in VMware period, if you go outside of that infrastructure lane, you go to have conversations, the technology is there. You can use VMware, vRealize, automation suites, the cloud health, the hefty old, they have the individual components, technology components, but they absolutely need the pivots of the world to go in and add credence to their talking points around these products, because they don't have that reputation to come in and have the conversations with the CMOs or the application developers. Microsoft on the other hand, developers, developers, developers, and then they also have Microsoft Dynamics. We ran into a customer who was desperately just searching out, she came to the conference expecting to see dynamic experts. And I'm sure she found them. Microsoft has the ecosystem to support their vision. One of the things that we've been talking about on theCUBE this week at Ignite is that it seems like a different kind of Microsoft. It seems like one that is not only embracing customers who choose Microsoft in addition to other companies, but championing them and supporting them and saying whatever you want, we're meeting you where you are. Have you found that? And is that striking to you based on the Microsoft of your, which was more proprietary about where its customers went for its technology? So we mainly cover enterprise tech, but I think today or tomorrow, the Surface Pro X gets released, which is an ARM-based device that runs full version of Windows. I was in one of the Lightning Talks, Microsoft Lightning Talk, on a completely different topic. And at the bottom, they had a logo for UiPath, Automate Anywhere and Blue Prism, some of three of the, I think, leaders in the space of RPA. And they were talking about the integrations that Microsoft has gone with these companies and their own power automate, their own power automate was not even mentioned as part of that session. So Microsoft is meeting customers where they're at. So I think the AWS, the example for ARC replicating to AWS, customers have AWS. They're the biggest cloud provider. Microsoft isn't closing their eyes to it. Yeah, well, we noticed the biggest thing repeated over and over again in the keynote yesterday was trust. And while the Microsoft of old days was, you're going to buy my OS and my apps and everything Microsoft on top of it, and we're going to maximize our licensing, the Microsoft today is those choices. You know, we talked to UiPath yesterday, they're not worried about their relationship with Microsoft, when I talk to the ecosystem of partners here, they trust that they can work with Microsoft, compare that to some others out there in the industry in the big hyperscalers, there might not be as much trust. What I'm curious from you Keith, is do customers see that? Do they understand that today is a different Microsoft than the one that we grew up with? So some of the conversation on Twitter, not the, just remotely, people not here, this is the best ignite I've ever seen. People who are not even here, this is from the keynote yesterday. I think customers are starting to embrace Microsoft and trust Microsoft. I think there's still some holdout, some people who remember this thing of going to force to use Microsoft management suites on products that probably didn't integrate well with those suites. But as that thing starts to subside, you have to look at it objectively and say Microsoft is a different company. This is not a show I think I would have enjoyed three years ago. What's driving it though? I mean, is it, this is something that we're seeing in the technology industry at large. This understanding of customers needing different things and wanting best and breed. But are there other elements that we're not privy to, would you say? I think the, it's the demarcation of technology via cloud. I talked to a just regular small business owner. She runs a trucking business. She uses her computer as a tool. It was a five-year-old device. She really didn't care, did the job that she needed to do. We talked about a business challenge that she was having. And I described cloud and general health. She never even considered cloud as a thing. She just said, you know what? I want this solution. And if it's Microsoft AWS or Google that provides it or VMware, she didn't care. She wanted to buy it. And that relationship wasn't a traditional ISV, MSP. These are, I think, business owners and business leaders are being approached whether it's ISVs or consultants and business advisors. And they're being advised to adopt these technologies regardless of the source. There's no loyalty anymore to just Microsoft. Remember when you bled blue? Or whether it's IBM blue or Microsoft blue? I read an unfortunate article on one of the big ERPs providers had a $100 million failure. And the company just decided, you know what? We're not going to go with one provider anymore. We're just going to go with breast-and-breed across these business processes. So what does that mean for the competitive landscape? I mean, we've talked about a lot about this. Does Microsoft really have a shot at taking on AWS or will it always be number two? Well, Microsoft won a $10 billion Jedi contract from the U.S. I wrote about this in my newsletter last week is that $1 billion over 10 years will make Microsoft Azure better. You can't help but to have that type of discipline that comes from a contract like that and pack Azure. Will they catch up with Microsoft? I mean, with AWS? AWS is still a very, very small fraction of the overall IT landscape. That business owner I talked to never heard of AWS. 50,000 person conference in a month, she only knew Amazon as a bookshelf. So they say that Microsoft won't catch up with AWS, I think is a very, very short view of the landscape. We're just scratching the surface when it comes to cloud. All right, Keith, what other things, you know, have you seen at the show jumping out at you? You said you might not have enjoyed a show three years ago. So what are some of the things that make this show enjoyable? I know for me, it is a different community than the V community out there. There are a lot of overlaps, a lot of friendly faces that I know here, but community, diversity, inclusion, super strong here. Love your comments on that and any other takeaways. So someone pointed out to me something that I didn't notice and I'm happy I didn't notice it was that there's a lot of women at this show. And I looked up and I'm like, wow, the lines for the men's bathroom aren't as long. And that's a nice thing is I don't think it's just facilities. It is a massively diverse show, not just from a ethnicity and gender perspective, but from career levels and in age groups, there's millennials all the way up to boomers. And the conversations, the conversations that I've had, I'm really surprised with. Straight on business conversations to deep and dirty, you know what, these are the cloud providers Azure provides for Kubernetes. That's super geeky and it's conversations all around the breast, infrastructure, application, business, and then even social. I had that social conversation about diversity and for a change, I wasn't the one that brought up the conversation. You know, that's a really good point. And just even here, I mean, and I know you made the schedule, which I salute you because we are having many more women, many more people of color on our stage, which is reflective of who's here. And it's easier at this show than it is at most as opposed to like, you know, please find me some more underrepresented or you know, diversity there. And luckily there is a lot of options at a show like this. Yeah, the pool just hasn't, and other shows, the pool just isn't very big. Normally I can newly say at a show, I can say I'm the tall black guy with the beard. And hey, I'm the tall black guy with the beard. And this show is not that case. No, there's more, there's more. Exactly, well Keith Townsend, thank you so much for coming on, a pleasure having you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman and Keith Townsend. You are watching theCUBE.