 Live 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. Happy hour has started. The crowd is roaring. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Thomas LaRocque. He is the head geek at SolarWinds. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So great title, head geek. Yes. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you, tell us about SolarWinds, and then also about what you do. Oh, SolarWinds is a company that offers about 40 different products to help with your enterprise infrastructure monitoring, really unified management of your systems. And I've been in business about 20 years, and I've been with them for about eight now, and head geek is really just equated to being a technical evangelist. Okay, so you're out there trying to win the hearts and minds, telling everyone about what you do. Yes, I need you all to love me. I love my products. So Thomas, and for those that don't already follow you on Twitter, you're SQL Rockstar. Yes, yes. And you were actually, I need to say thank you, because you helped connect me with a lot of the community here, especially on the data side of the house. You and I have known each other for a bunch of years, and you're a Microsoft MVP, so maybe give us a little bit of just the community aspect, what it means to be a Microsoft MVP, that those that don't know about, you're an evangelist in this space, and you've been to the show many times. I usually don't talk about myself a lot, but sure, let's go for it. So I've been a Microsoft data platform MVP for about 10 years now, and it was interesting when you reached out, looking to get connected, I was kind of stunned at how many people I actually knew, or knew how to get in touch with for you, and I helped you line up, I guess a handful of people to be on the show, because you were telling me you hadn't been here to TechEd or Microsoft Ignite, and I just thought, well, I know people, and they should know Stu, and we should get them connected so that you guys can have some good conversations. But yeah, it's been a wild ride for me those 10 years where Microsoft, they award people, the MVP designation, and it's kind of being an evangelist for Microsoft, and some of the great stuff that they've been doing over the past 10 years. Yeah, it's a phenomenal program. Most people in the technology industry know the Microsoft MVP program. I was a VMware vExpert for a number of years, many of the things were patterned off of that. John Troyer's a friend of mine, and he said that was one of the things he looked at Citrix as programs like this. Many of the vendors here have evangelists or paragons of showing that technology they're out here. All right, so talked about a little bit of community. Talk about the database space. I mean, data and databases have been going through such the cambering explosion of what's going on out there, right? So, you know, wait, SQL's still around, it's not all cosmos and just, you know, some microservices-based cloud-native architecture? So, yes, the SQL Server box product is still around, but I think what's more amazing to me has been the evolution of, you know, let's take, for example, one of the announcements today was the big data cluster. So it's essentially a container that's going to run SQL Server, Spark and Hadoop, all in one, but basically a pod that'll get deployed by Kubernetes. And when you wrap all that up together, what you start to realize is the pattern that what Microsoft's been doing for the past few years, which is essentially going to where the people are. And what I mean is you have, in the open-source world, you have people and developers that have embraced things like DevOps much faster than what the Windows developers have been doing. So instead of taking your time and trying to drag all these people to where you want them to be, they've just started building all the cool stuff where all the cool kids already are, and everybody's going to just gravitate. Data has gravity, right? So you're building these things and people are going to follow it. And now it's not that they're expecting to sell a billion dollars worth of licenses, no, they just need to be part of the conversation. So if you're a company that's using those technologies, now all of a sudden it's like, this is an option, were you interested in it? And Microsoft is the company that has best poise to bring enterprises to the cloud. I mean, Amazon has a huge share, we all know that, but Microsoft's already the platform of choice for these enterprises. Microsoft's going to be the one to help them get to the cloud. Just as- I'm sorry, Thomas, just explain what you mean by that because the strength I look at Microsoft is, look, they've got your application, business productivity, that's where they are. Apologize for cutting you off there, but yeah, is that what you mean that the applications are changing and you're trusting Microsoft of the application and therefore that that's a vendor of choice or? Absolutely, if it's already your vendor of choice, then I don't want to say lock in, but if it's already your preference and if they can help you get to the cloud or in a hybrid situation or just lift and shift and just get there, then that's the one you're going to want to do it and everything they're building and all the services they're providing, you know, at the end of the day, and Amazon, they're the new electric company. They want your data, that's the electricity and they don't care how you get it, but in even VMware, between Amazon, VMware and Microsoft, they're going to be the ones to help, they're going to be your infrastructure companies. Microsoft manage desktop now. We'll manage your laptop for you. Everything that they're doing is essentially like, I don't even need my own IT department. Microsoft is going to be the largest MSP in history, it's just, that's where they're headed. They're going to manage everything for you and the data part of it, of course, for me, I just love talking about data, but the data part of it, data is central to everything we do. It's all about the data. They're doing their best to help you manage it and secure it. Security is a huge thing. There was some security announcements today as well, which were awesome. The advanced threat detection and protection that they have, if I'm always amazed or when I walk through the offering they have for SQL injection protection. And I try to ask people, I go, who's right now monitoring for SQL injection? We're not doing that. For $15 a month, you could do this for your servers. That's amazing what they're offering. Why wouldn't you want that as a service? Why wouldn't you sign up tomorrow for this stuff? So, I get excited about it. I think all the stuff that they're building is great and the announcements today were great. I think they have some more coming out. I think over the next couple of days or at least in the sessions, we'll start seeing a lot of hands-on stuff and I'm excited for it. So, when you were talking about Microsoft being the automatic vendor of choice, why wouldn't you? You portrayed it as a no-brainer. What does Microsoft need to do to make sure that all its customers feel that way too? Oh, well, I think Microsoft is going to do that in how I would do it. A couple of ways is, one, at the end of the day, Microsoft wants what we all want, while I want, is they want happy customers. So, they're going to do whatever it takes so their customers are happy. So, one way you do that is you get a lot of valuable feedback from customers. So, one thing that Microsoft's done in the past is they've increased the amount of telemetry they're collecting from their products. So, they know the usage. They know what the customers want. They know what the customers need. But they also collect, it's a simple voice of the customer, right? You're simply asking the customer what is it you want. And you're doing everything you can to keep them happy and you're finding out where the struggles are. You're helping them solve those problems. How do you not earn trust as a result of all that, right? So, I think that's the avenue that they've been doing for at least 10 years. Well, let's say at least eight years. That's the avenue and the approach they've been doing and I'd say it's been somewhat successful. So, Thomas, it's interesting. As our team was preparing for the show, we understand that Microsoft has a lot of strengths. But if I look at the AI space, Microsoft's not the clear leader today. We think that some of the connections that Microsoft has, everything as you said, down to the desktop. Heck, even in the consumer space, they're down to the Xbox. There's a lot of reasons why Microsoft, you could say, okay, here's a path as to how Microsoft could become number one, number two in the AI space over time. But we're listening to things like the open data initiative that they announced today, which obviously Microsoft's working with a lot of partners out there, but it's a big ecosystem. Data plays everywhere. I mean, Google obviously has a strong play in data. We've talked plenty about Amazon, so what does Microsoft need to do to take the strength that they have in data, move it forward in AI and become an even stronger player in the marketplace? So AI itself is kind of that broad term. I mean, AI is a simple if-then-else statement. It doesn't really have to do anything, it's just right. So let's talk about machine learning, predictive analytics, or even deep learning. So that's really the area that we're talking about. And what does Microsoft have to do? Well, they have to offer the services. But they don't have to be, they don't have to offer, say, new things. They just have to offer things that already exist. For example, the idea of incorporating Jupiter notebooks into the Azure Data Studio, right? So if that could be achieved, now you're bringing the workspaces that people are using just into the Microsoft platform a little bit, making it a little bit easier. So instead of these people in these enterprises, they already trust Microsoft, they already have the tools, but I got to go and use these other things. Well, eventually, those other things come into the Microsoft tools, and now you don't have to go and use that other stuff either. I would talk a little bit about the ability to publish these models as a service. Which, so I've done the Academy program, I've earned a few certifications on some of this stuff, and I was amazed at how easy it was with a few clicks. Publish as a service as an API, it's sitting there, I send it my data and I get back a result, a prediction, and I was like, that was really easy. So I know they're not the leaders, but they're making it easy, especially for somebody like me who can start at zero and get to where I need to be. They made it incredibly easy, in some cases, it was intuitive, I'm like, oh, I know what to do next with this widget I'm building. I think it'll take time for them to kind of get all that stuff in place. I don't know how long, but does Microsoft have to be the leader in AI? They have the cognitive toolkit, they have all that stuff with Cortana, they have the data, I think the customers are coming along, I think they get there just by attrition. I'm not sure that there's something that they're going to build where everybody just says, oh, there it is, except there's the quantum stuff. And last year's announcement of quantum, I thought it was one of the most stunning things. It just hit me, I had no idea they were working on it. So who knows, a year from now, there could be something similar to that type of mouse where like, now I get it, now I got to go have this thing. But I don't think we all need, you know, a hot dog, not hot dog app, which seems to be the bulk of the examples out there for, but some of the image classification stuff that you have out there is fabulous. There's a lot of use cases for it. Yeah, I'm not sure how they get there, but I do think eventually over time, the platform that they offer, they do get there just through attrition. One of the things that you brought up earlier in this conversation was the open data, initiative, and Stu, we'd expressed a bit of skepticism that it's still going to take three to five years for really customers to see the value of this. But once the announcement was made today, so now we're going to go forward with this initiative, what do you see as the future? Yeah, I was trying to even figure it out. So it sounds like the three companies are sharing data with each other. They pledge to be open, so if you buy one of their products, that data can seamlessly go into the other products, is what it sounded like. And they were open, if I heard it right, they were open to partnering with other companies as well. So it wasn't just those three. Other vendors or customers even that could tie into these APIs, do everything that they're doing, open data models. Speaking as a data guy, that means if I trust one, I have to trust them all, right? So I don't know. So I have trust issues, and I'm a DBA by heart, so I have trust issues. And I need to know a little bit more about it, but on the surface, just the words, open data, sound great. I just don't know the practicality of it, but it sounds like it's a way for these companies to partner with each other, to get more of your data into their platforms and their infrastructure. Yeah, I think next time we have Thomas on, we're going to spend some time talking about the dark side of data. Yes, indeed. We could talk dark data. Oh, sure. Well, Thomas, it was so much fun having you on the show, and I should just plug your book. You are the author of DBA Survivor. I am, yes. It was a little book, so being a DBA, I had some challenges in my role, and I decided, as my friend Kevin Klein put it to me, he goes, you should write the book you wish somebody had written for you and handed to you on day zero of being a DBA. And I said, oh, so it took me, I think, like three weeks. It was just so easy to write all of that. It's just stuff I had to say. But yeah, thank you. Excellent. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from the Cube's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit.