 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. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Frank Artali, the managing partner at Prime 4A. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Frank. Glad to be here. So before the cameras are rolling, we were talking about the energy of this place. You've been to many, many an Ignite, way back before it was even called Ignite. Oh yeah, so Ignite is the evolution of something that Microsoft used to call TechEd. So it was like back in, when I was at Microsoft, so even back in the 90s, we had to figure out a way to educate the technical community and we decided to start this thing. And interestingly enough, the first one ever was here in Orlando, much smaller venue, I think at this one in the Dolphin, but I've been coming to them on and off for the past 26 years or so. So tell us a little bit about what you're doing now at Prime 4A, what is Prime 4A? So we're a boutique and advisory consulting company and we do work with what I call ISVs, so basically someone that makes software. But we engage with folks who are at some point on a journey to cloud and that means both from a business and technical perspective, whether they're just getting started, thinking about moving products that maybe they had from on-premises and to a cloud platform or maybe they're well on their way and they're really looking to just amplify and accelerate that. And so we're a team of people that have experience from product, business development, sales and marketing to really get those companies to the place that they want to be relative to cloud because as we know, cloud is still the future and everyone wants to get there. All right, so Frank, bring us inside. Without giving away state secrets, dealing with Microsoft today is very different from the company that we grew up with of Windows and Office. So what's it like working with Microsoft? Give a little bit of where some of the key enablers are. Yeah, so in the early days, if you think about it, Microsoft is always great with evangelizing to an independent software vendor around building to the platform. So back in the day, so much of the Microsoft actual market cap was dependent upon the ISVs building to the APIs and the APIs were sort of the lock until the ISVs were locked. But there never was really, let's say a great channel program for someone that was an ISV. The channel programs were largely structured for people that sold stuff. And so what you're really seeing now for the first time, and this is not exclusive to Microsoft, but other cloud partners, but of course, since we're at a Microsoft show, we can highlight some of the things that Microsoft is doing here. It really is creating super incentives for ISVs to come to the platform, such that the ISVs feel like they are selling side-by-side with Microsoft. There are some great incentives around that. They provide some great access to technology and tools, really great credits to get onto the platform. And so they focus as much on the business, like they always, more on the business now than on the access to the technology. And to the extent that they can work side-by-side with the company in building their business, well, the folks that are the business owners really like that. The tech guys always like bits and bytes wherever they can go. So describe how the partnership works. I mean, as you are now holding hands with companies that are going through a digital transformation and some working closely with Microsoft, some maybe just on the fringes of working with Microsoft, describe how the partnership is working. Yeah, so I would call it, I'd like to say that it's really in some ways an evolution of the way Microsoft started working with ISVs a number of years ago. And so at the core, the way Microsoft thinks about them, thinks about the ISVs is really an extension of their own product line. So a platform is only as good as the things that stand to top it, right? And so if Azure is a platform, or Business Apps is a platform, or Modern Workplace is a platform, you need applications that sit atop those things. And one of the key things that Microsoft has done has really enabled the ISVs to become connected with the Microsoft sales organization without having intermediaries. So a lot of ways, when you're an ISV and you go work with a larger company that you want to have a partnership with, you have to find somebody that knows somebody that's the account manager for some large account. What Microsoft has done is they've automated that once you pass through a series of hurdles and certifications, you can actually enter into a program where you're opening leads into Microsoft and that partner gets connected with the Microsoft sales team on the other side. So whenever I talk to people about things that they're doing, that's what I think the ISVs are most proud of. You'll hear them say things like, well, we are in X amount of accounts together with Microsoft. And from a business perspective, why ever enter into a partnership if you were not going to sell stuff? Again, you can do bits and bytes all day, it's a lot of fun for people like me, but at the end of the day, revenue has to come out the other side. I think from a partner perspective, they've done a better than good job at that. All right, so Frank, when you look back to when you were inside Microsoft, give us a little bit about how the roles have been changing as we've gone into this world of cloud and AI. Right, how the world has changed. And the roles inside of Microsoft specifically to fit the world. Right, right. So when I was there, you know, long ago, we were, obviously it was a much smaller place. And you basically had, inside the house, you had product development. And outside the house, you had channel development. And then you had direct sales. And you also had OEM sales, which was actually a very big piece of the puzzle. But the linkage between sales and channel wasn't really there back then. And sometimes, like even the role that I had in program management, in times we had to be glue for that. I think in a sense now, with the roles have changed in such a way that you have people inside the house now that are really responsible for not just ensuring that a partner feels good about what they're doing, but that the partners are actually selling side by side with folks in the field. And that would have been an impossible thing, really impossible thing to do at the time. And so the other thing that's really changed is now that you have an overlay sales organization called Worldwide Commercial, and also a direct sales organization. So direct sales organization are people that carry the bag and have quota right on the accounts. But then you have another organization that looks after the 500 largest accounts. And there are a lot of specialists in that organization that by definition work with partners to move both the Microsoft products and the partners products together in there. And so those are large organizations that plain and simply just didn't exist. And they may have not even made sense at the time because at the time, a lot of what we were doing in the 90s, we were still distributed computing with still really a technical curiosity. And then it became trust and infrastructure. And it's really only in the last few years that cloud computing has moved beyond that from being a technical curiosity to trust and infrastructure. And the way it's taken to market is so much different because we took finished goods to market. We relied on people to carry boxes of stuff. We relied on people to do inventory. It's no more inventory. I mean, it's just there. You turn it on and you go. So I think what you'll see also from again, from where the commerce engines are set up and the kind of people that are deployed are really being tooled for that kind of go to market, which is significantly different. So we're really just scratching the surface when it comes to cloud. As you said, so many of these companies are only at the beginning of their journeys. What do you think the future holds in terms of trends in the marketplace and what companies are going to continue to want? And are there any blind spots that you as someone who's been in this industry for 36 years sort of know are there? Right. So today was an interesting one to see Arc announced. And it shows a natural evolution of the way we think about a platform. So if we go back to even like the late 80s, we had a build servers. So you got a network operating system and there was a set of network adapters and a set of hardware it worked on and you had to pay a systems integrator to go put it all together and then you kind of hope it worked. Well, then we got this stuff called plug and play in the early 90s and it flattened the playing field and you can take an operating system like Windows NT, the one that I worked on and as long as it adhered to a plug and play standard, it generally worked on that platform. But the operating system then grew to become a collection of services. So file server was an identity server, eventually things like transaction processing, networking was always in there. Now, if you look at what's something like Arc or any of the services that are available on other clouds, they're really services on which applications are built. So now it's just natural to see that these services like from the cloud vendors are being taken onto other cloud infrastructure. So today we're here at Microsoft. You see Arc, which is a set of Azure services which are being made available and useful on other platforms like on premises as an example. To me, that's no surprise for Microsoft. They kind of led the way with that with their IoT technology, how you see Azure services moving on to there. So now, from an opportunity perspective as someone who's building applications, you could say, okay, I can now go look at services that I know will be available on all clouds. So I have a, let's just say I can snap to that and now I can go to my customer and also talk about a flexible opportunity about where and why you might want to deploy. So more opportunities around that though, what gets complex? Management gets complex, security gets complex. We're sounding like the 90s again, right? Where whole industries grew up around things like performance and security and systems management around that. And so I think just strictly from an opportunity perspective, there'll be companies here that see that and go take advantage of it to get out in front and there'll be ones that are already incumbents and hang on for dear life saying, things have to be different on each cloud. But I think as you see companies that embrace the notion of sets of services that'll be running across clouds, those are really the opportunities will be. Just like we saw in the 90s folks that said, hey, I'll run my application on Windows NT on any piece of hardware, right? They didn't tie themselves to, I'll just say like compact or tandem folks that don't exist anymore. I don't think that the folks we have here today. All right, so Frank, you know you can't get through an interview with theCUBE without getting a question from John Furrier. Okay, is he on? So John's been watching and he wants to know how's the restaurant scene's doing in Seattle? Okay, so yeah, Seattle restaurant scene to second to none. Obviously a unique cuisine. Two restaurants that I'm personally involved with, one in downtown Seattle and one in Bellevue, Washington. Both completely different cuisines, one heavy on steak, one heavy on plants. And we'd like to say we're up and to the right on both of those, John, so thanks for asking. Great, excellent. Frank Artali, always a pleasure having you on. Thanks so much. Great, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite.