 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 wrapping up the first day of a three day show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Scott Lowe. He is the CEO of Actual Tech Media. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having us. And also David Davis, Director of Events at Actual Tech Media. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. So you are a former CIO that started Actual Tech Media in 2012. Tell our viewers a little bit about Actual Tech. What was the vision and what did you set out to create? What kind of content were you setting out to create? You know, what we started and what we have today are actually very, very different things. We started out to create sort of an empire of, you know, websites to provide content to people. But what we do now is we're helping connect enterprise IT vendors with buyers. That's really what we've settled on over the years. We've found our path about six years ago, five years ago, and we've been executing on that ever since. And that's our mission, is to help buyers find the right enterprise IT solutions. So how do you do that? I mean, what's the lead generation that it takes? I mean, we basically four our clients who are companies, including Cohesity and companies like it. We do an event series. We call MegaCast, EcoCast, Virtual Summit, webinars, things like that. We have a significant audience that we draw from to drive those events. And we also created our own content series. We call it Gorilla Guide, which is a series of books to help educate IT buyers about solutions on the market about different technologies and try to help them understand the lay of an ever evolving landscape that seems to be changing faster than it ever has before. Yeah, and actually one of the reasons I invited the two of you, you both have deep background in this environment. Scott, before the Gorilla Guides, you wrote big books about Microsoft. And David, you've been training people on this ever environment, but the pace is faster. You're talking about it's changing all the time. So I'd love for both of you just, here 2019, Microsoft Ignite, first impressions, how you think of Microsoft in the ecosystem? David, let's start with you. I mean, it's my third Microsoft Ignite and every time I come here, I'm really blown away by kind of the scope of the show compared to the typical infrastructure shows that I go to. Those shows are more the plumbing of the data center. This show is, the keynote is like using AI and ML to cure cancer and provide food for the world. And it's just like really empowering and exciting. And so I find it very personally exciting. And Microsoft, Azure just seems to be on a breakneck pace to catch up with AWS and Office 365 and all these innovations they keep coming out with have been really impressive. So I've been excited about the show. What about you, Scott? The same, I mean, I think that when we talk about other shows, we are really looking at plumbing and that's a good word. When we look at, when we're here, we're looking at real solutions that are helping solve big problems. And it's because Microsoft has such a wide ecosystem in which it participates from productivity in the enterprise to driving quantum computing to artificial intelligence to help tractors talk to the internet. I mean, just, it does everything and it does it increasingly well. Microsoft hasn't always been thought of as the most innovative company in the world, but I think in the last few years, we've seen a different Microsoft. And I think that has a lot to do with Satya and leadership change, but it also has to do with just a renewed vision for what the future looks like in terms of IT. And what does that future look like? I mean, it is interesting because Microsoft is a middle-aged company compared to all these young upstarts that really, the much more DNA of innovation. Of course Microsoft has innovation in its DNA, but how would you describe what is driving the change of Microsoft? This is not your father's Microsoft. Honestly, the Microsoft we see today and the Microsoft we saw 10 years ago are not the same company. I feel like Microsoft is almost a start-up again. And I think if you look at Microsoft as a company, it has its hands in so much that each individual silo is almost a start-up feel in the way that it's brought the market. Let's just look at Azure. I mean, Azure has been playing catch-up in a lot of ways to AWS for a lot of years, just like a lot of smaller companies are playing catch-up to some of their bigger cousins in the market. But Azure has proven itself and it's still not quite as capable as it's bigger sibling, AWS, but it's more capable than GCP, for example. But as Microsoft continues to iterate that service, it gets ever more capable, it gets ever deeper into the organization. And I think it's something that, I see that across Microsoft and everything that it's doing. It's not just Azure that's like this. It's like this with Windows Virtual Desktops. That's not all that sexy and exciting on the surface. I'm no pun intended on surface. Sorry. But it's something that the world needs at this point in how we're trying to handle computing in the enterprise as we move into 2020. There's so much. There's a few shows I go to every year where you just like drink from the fire hose when you go to the keynote. This absolutely is one, we've talked Amazon absolutely is one where you come through and the breadth and depth of what they offer. So we've spent a lot of time saying something like Azure Arc, it is early. And still trying to understand exactly where that fits. Being to the day I'm like, wait, it's management, but actually it's highly tied to the application, which really is the strength of Microsoft. If you talk about what Microsoft knows, Microsoft knows your apps. You're running so many of those apps, not just Office, but SQL and some of the various pieces. Would love to hear what, give me one or two things that jumped out at you either that you want to dig into or that you've been saying, oh, I've been waiting for that. I mean, I was really impressed with the technical keynote where they talked about Azure Stack Edge and they have this mini server that can be ruggedized and even put in a backpack. And he had the demo going with the server, a person sitting next to him using this server and he said it has battery power. So he pulled the power plug on it and it kept working. And then he said, and it's rugged and he just dropped it on the ground and it bounced on the ground. And he said, see the demo just keeps on running. So I was like, okay, that's cool. That's pretty impressive. Yeah, we actually had the HPE, an HPE representative on the program. They're super excited to have their gear in the keynote and those of us with a hardware background do like to wrap our arms around some sheet metal every once in a while and touch this thing. Software might be eating the lead. We call it a server hugger state. Exactly. Am I an edge hugger now? I guess you probably are. Yeah, it's free shrugs. When it comes to, in my opinion, ARC and Edge, I'm sorry, Azure Stack, I think it shows some incredible opportunity for Microsoft moving forward. I mean, Microsoft has a formidable presence in the enterprise and not just the enterprise, from the SMB to the mid-market to the enterprise, everybody almost has something Microsoft. So there's an opportunity for Microsoft to further that incursion into the enterprise and that can help them be a driver for Azure because when you think about a lot of the challenges people have with cloud, it's around adoption and integration. That's not quite a solved problem, but close enough when you start thinking about the merry technologies that Microsoft is bringing out. So Scott, I think back your background, you worked in some of the commercial markets. You talk about the education space, areas where Microsoft had a strong history. Are they still as prominent today as they might have been back in the days when you were a CIO? Yes and no. It depends on the organization. If I look at K-12, I think Google's had a lot of inroads there because of Google Apps for Education. Whether that's good or bad is really a different opinion, but I think Google's taken a lot of Microsoft's market share there. In higher education, we still see a lot of Google colleges and universities, of course, but we see a lot with O365 and a lot of that's because of the pricing, which you can't beat free, but it also has to do with the capability that the stack brings to bear. I think that Microsoft is playing differently than they used to. Not necessarily, maybe probably a little bit more strongly, but in some ways and weaker in others. Yeah, another area I'd love to hear you say and think about is the Microsoft of old, I think of as rather proprietary and you will do all Microsoft. We had one of the Microsoft partner executives on the program today and he was talking about embracing VMware, embracing Red Hat, not something that you would have thought of Microsoft in the past. How do you think of Microsoft just as a trusted partner in the ecosystem today? Yeah, you bring up that word trust and in fact, we were talking about that at lunch. Microsoft, we feel like has so much more trust when it comes to our data, when it comes to our applications. I mean, there's another cloud provider that starts with a G that's well known for selling data, selling data that they own. He talked about in the keynote today, we protect your data and the security around your data and I feel like trust is going to be a big factor in the future when people think about which cloud should I trust? Microsoft seems like they have a leg up on some other competitors. I may be naive, but I actually trust Microsoft and I have for a long time. There's other companies I don't trust. And Microsoft, I actually do trust because for Microsoft, our data is not their resource to mine. They're using it to give me things, but they're not using it to sell things to other people. Does that make sense? I mean, we're not the product of Microsoft and it might be a little bit more expensive because of that in some ways, but I think it provides that layer of trust that you're not necessarily going to get from other providers in the near term. So we're nearing the end of 2019. What is on deck for IT pros in 2020? I'll start with you. I want to hear both your impressions, but I'll start with you. That's a great question. We're actually doing a big event this week. In fact, and that's the topic, is the pillars of IT for 2020. I might have done some research. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, in fact, I was at a local user group recently and I was asking IT professionals that very question. Where are you going to spend your budget in 2020? What are you going to re-architect? A lot of there's a lot of answers around security. That was the, I think probably the most popular one that I heard, automation. Some people were interested in that and improving the efficiency of their infrastructure. I think overall, no matter how they do it, hyperconvergence or something like that, just overall improving things make their life easier. For me, I've looked at the role of the CIO and if you look into 2020, I think we see a lot of legacy challenges. They're still not solved, but some new opportunities is probably a good word. Some of the legacy challenges are, what's the role of IT? That's the age old question. I think we saw the next phase of IT business alignment with digital transformation and now we're going to look for what's next, right? Because that phrase is now going out of style. But we're still looking for ways that we can do more with technology than we ever have. And as I look at some of the things that happened at the show this morning that were announced, I see a lot of opportunity for CIOs and for organizations as a whole to do more than they ever have before without having to bring a whole lot of complexity, a lot more complexity to the organization. But I also think we see some of the things that have to be addressed. Security is a board level issue and it's a top issue for the CIO. It's a make or break your career type issue at this point. And I think going into 2020, as we look at some of these technologies, it becomes even more important because it's going to all require a new focus on security. We have an opportunity around just to actually solve the data analytics problem at some point here in the near future that hasn't always been possible. And now we have the tools to do it and we have tools that can do it without having to hire a whole bunch of IT experts through some of the things like companies like Microsoft are bringing to market. You know, we'd love to get your viewpoint on just the future of work. If you talk about, you know, we were saying what is the role of IT? And we say in its best light, you know, IT helps drive innovation and actually can be a leader inside the business. But we know that the roles have been changing inside a company. Microsoft talks rather aspirationally about, you know, citizen developers and we're going to empower everyone to be their best out there. But, you know, what does that mean to the person that has been, you know, assist admin or going through certifications or trying to learn the latest on, you know, hyperconverged infrastructure in Kubernetes and the latest buzzword that they heard of? I mean, I think that's exciting, especially for people who are new in IT or people who have the time to, you know, invest in learning development. I mean, they were talking about Power Apps, you know, in the keynote, I was excited. I wanted to try it for myself, looks fun and easy. But, you know, in reality, in the real world of IT organizations, things take time. I mean, I talked to a CIO at a large bank and he said, hey, I have 10 stand administrators and we're going to move to hyperconvergence when they die or retire, you know. So things take time. That's my take, Scott. Yeah, and for me, I think it's enabling new ways to work. I mean, if you look at actual tech media, we're 100% virtual. We don't have, people ask where we're headquartered. We have a P.O. box in North Charleston, South Carolina and the rest of us work in Microsoft Teams. And my, for me, one of the most exciting things I've looked at in the last year is Teams. I've absolutely adored the tool as you can attest. You know, I've heard a couple of people talking about, you know, people thought Teams was dying, Slack was killing it, but Teams is really good. What is it about it that drives your business? So we used to use Slack, okay? We use Skype and then we use Slack. And Slack was good for what it was. It's an instant messaging tool that makes sure that you can get in touch with people right away and you can share a file. What it lacks is context. Once something has scrolled off the screen, that's it. You don't ever look at it again. And what we get with Teams is an ability to provide context for the work we do. So we were working on one of our Grilla Guide books this week, collaboratively inside Teams. We had the document open in one window and we were chatting about it in a chat in Teams in the other window. But the document lived in the same channel that we were having the conversation. So we enabled a great degree of collaboration that we just couldn't get with Slack. That's not to say Slack's not a great tool. For what it is, it's a great tool. And I still use it for other Teams, which sounds weird. But I love the ability that we've had to bring additional tools into Teams that we didn't have before. When we bought, when we bought, we have deployed Teams. We got rid of Slack, we got rid of Smartsheet, and we're in the process of getting rid of Dropbox. And it wasn't because we wanted to save money. I mean, it's nice. But at the end of the day, it's about improving workflow, especially when you don't live in the same office. You don't get to talk to each other over the waterfall. So particularly for distributed virtual Teams, Microsoft Teams. It's a beautiful thing. And so, and also even with clients, now that Teams has guest capability, we have guest teams that we work on, work with clients in the same way we work internally. So it's become a central hub for just about everything we do. I mean, literally Teams is open on my laptop and on my phone 24 seven. It's an app that never closes. It's a powerful endorsement. It is. Scott, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. David, thank you so much. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will see you tomorrow for more of theCUBE's live coverage from Microsoft Ignite.