 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. That's right. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Pumala Schmidt. She is the Senior Cloud Ops Advocate at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Pumala. Thank you for having me. So you are a Cloud Ops Advocate. What does that mean? What do you do? Pretty much anything that has to do with servers. So if you are an IT professional that's touching a server, whether it's on-premises or in the cloud, we're here to help you. We're going to give you some technical guidance. We're here to help and support the community in any way that we can to pretty much advance your career and the technologies in your enterprise. Yeah, Pumala, maybe give us a little, unpack that a little bit, because we look at, you know, this is a show, you know, it's TechEd back in the day, it's now Ignite, but there's people that have been coming for 20 plus years to an event like this. And when we talk, those careers are pretty important when you say, okay, how do I get from being, you know, was I an exchange admin? Am I a server admin? Am I, you know, I run the operating system. Fast forward to 2018. Well, you know, usually, you know, is it a generalist? Are you, you know, now I need to be coding? Give us, you know, a little bit of that. That's a great question. It's a little bit of everything. It really comes down to what your business needs are. So depending on where you work, you may need to start developing a little bit more. Or if your business is starting to outsource, maybe you need to start exploring some cloud options and learning about Azure. And that's what we're here to do, is to help guide you through that. I just came from a customer. So one of our biggest challenges was, what do we do with Azure? There's so many things, so many services out there, but where do we start? And that's one of our initiatives for our team, is to help customers and, you know, IT professionals around to get you started with Azure if you don't know where to begin. Because I'll be honest, nine weeks ago, I was sitting there at a meeting going, where do we go? There's just so much. Do we start with DR? Do we start with just running some VMs? So our goal was to kind of help shed some light and kind of guide that path a little bit. And I know that you, I do want to get back to the fact that you are pretty much, you're brand new at Microsoft and I want to get to what made you want to come to Microsoft. But first I want to ask you about that question. Where do I go? Where do we go? There's so many options. So now that you're on the vendor side, how are you going to go about helping customers walk through their options? First we have Microsoft Docs. That's pretty much our repository of all our documentation guides. And we just announced Microsoft Learn, which is a learning portal where you can learn all about the different services. It's self-paced learning that you can do with some videos. So it's going to be a little bit of that, but also going out and speaking to people and trying to find out what they want to get out of Azure because you just can't go to the cloud. You have to figure out, why am I going there? And then once you figure out the why, and we can kind of help you, here's where you need to go. Here are the different paths that you can take. Because just to say I want to go. Oh, thank you. One of my favorite quotes all the time, the Cheshire cat and saying, well, where do I go? Well, how can I tell you where to go? You know, which path to take if you don't know where you're going. So, you know, cloud is not a destination. Cloud is an operating model. So, you know, I need to understand, you know, how do I try to get into the business with what, you know, if I'm IT, what am I serving? How am I helping the business run even better? I'm sorry, can you repeat the question? It was more of a statement, I actually is to where you're going. So, look, maybe let's get back to, you know, you're, you know, I've known you for Twitter a long time. You know, you were new to Microsoft, but you've been in this community for a long time. So, what drew you in to go to the dark side of, you know, the vendor world and what excites you about Microsoft these days? What drew me was the idea that I could help others because I struggled as a customer trying to figure our way around this whole cloud thing. And I figured, you know what? I had this opportunity to make a difference in other people's lives and kind of help guide them. Because I'm all about sharing knowledge. So it was a great opportunity, plus they have great cookies. So talking about that, that really, what you're just saying really resonates with what we are hearing. Obviously what we heard from the keynote with Satya Nadella, just this using computing as this great empowerment, as this way to help everyone do his or her best in their job and in their lives. I mean, how does that mission play out in the culture? And I know you're brand new at Microsoft, but I mean, how would you, I mean, in terms of you wanting to say, oh, I actually want to go to the vendor side, how is that playing out? For me, I look at this, if you want to share knowledge, you want to help others, I mean, it's all about, and you don't have to go to the vendor side. You could still be a customer. You could be a partner. At the end of the day, it's about community and helping each other out and sharing your knowledge because somebody might learn something from you or if you know something and others are stuck in a rut, because I know when I would blog and I would think, oh, wow, no one wants to know about this topic. And then I find out, oh my gosh, there's tons of people. They didn't know how to do this. So if we just kind of share our knowledge together, everybody wins, whether you're going to a vendor or you're staying on a customer. Yeah, it's interesting. People are overwhelmed when they look at not only changing landscape of what's happening in IT, but even if you come to a show like this, it's so big, there's so many sessions. Most of them are recorded, so I want to get your take as to things that you're excited about this week and anything in the technology sessions this morning that you saw already that's excited you. Well, I was totally geeked out at the technology at Keynote with the mixed reality. I just was absolutely going in awe with that. I mean, the idea that a technician can have HoloLens on and do a remote assist while she's trying to troubleshoot some type of malfunctioning equipment, that's amazing. That's futuristic, but it's here. And to me, it's just like, wow, look what we've done. I mean, you think back 20 years ago, we were still having our rotary phones and walking around the room trying to make a phone call. And now, you could literally make a phone call with your HoloLens. And I felt like we're watching a movie. And I talked to most of the attendees, I've met here, said that they do have room in their luggage to take home a HoloLens. So, you know, absolutely. And so another one of the things I'm excited about obviously is Exchange, Exchange Goddess. So I'm a little partial to that one. So I'll be checking out those sessions, all the exchange sessions, even though more Azure focused now. Yeah, anything in the announcements, either Server 2019, Go NGA, there's always so much on Azure, the regular cadence that you've seen so far that you can talk about? The Admin Center, so the new Windows Server Admin Center is a hot item. But also from the Azure standpoint, Flash, the enhanced Flash storage, I think that's going to be awesome, especially for customers that have really high intensive workloads. Because we always have those apps that just are super, super performing. And now that we have the ability to provide the disk capacity for that, we're going to be able to support our customers better. So you've been coming to this conference now for many, many years. I mean, what would be your advice to an attendee who is maybe here for his or her first time? In terms of, as Stu said, there is just so much in so many sessions. You want a network, you want to build your knowledge, you want to maybe get trained up on certain products and services. What do you think? Great question. Make a plan. And you can't hit everything. So have a plan of what do I really want to get out of this? Maybe you want to do some sessions, but take time to network. Because sometimes you're actually going to get more information from the others around you. And then the sessions are all streamed and recorded, so you can go back and watch them later. So don't be in a rush to just go to all sessions, take the time to walk the expo floor, talk to others, go to the different lounges, things like that, because it's the overall experience of being at this conference and not just going to sessions. And then take time for yourself. Eat, drink and sleep, because it's very exhausting. It is, indeed, indeed. Well, Pumala, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite at the Orange County Civic Center just after this.