 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Barton with Keith Townsend and we're joined by two CUBE alumni. We've got Powell Galgian, Senior Director of Microsoft Hybrid Cloud for Dell EMC and Claude Lorenzen, Senior Product Marketing Manager and a Cloud and Enterprise platform from Microsoft. Hi guys. Hi, how are you? Welcome back. Thank you, it's really great to be here. So we've had almost two full days of talking with customers, partners. We want to talk to you guys about what's next, what's next, what's next, we'll get there. What's new, how about that, with Dell EMC and Microsoft? Yeah, so we shipped toward the end of last year, the fourth quarter of last year, we went GA. And what's happening, there's an amazing amount of momentum in the enterprise now. We're seeing a lot of interest from the financial sector, from manufacturing, oil and gas. People are really interested in exploring use cases for Azure Stack and also government. Government is also spinning up and we're spending the week here with a ton of great customers and exploring how we can extend their IT business. Yeah, we've been very happy with the number of new customer that have joined this platform with Dell EMC. As Paul mentioned, we're seeing some focus on a few verticals, manufacturing, financial services. And for Microsoft, working with Dell EMC has been an actual because we've worked on solution like this for quite a few years. So it makes the making the sausage part easier when we work with Dell EMC because we're a trusted partner for quite a while on these solutions. We've been making sausage with Microsoft for a long time. That is a few clip for sure. So, it's been nine months, there's the ideal of what a product is and then customers get it and they start to use it. What have been some of the surprises? Has it been exactly what you guys thought it would be or have the customers kind of stretch the imagination to using the Azure stock, is that? So the thing that surprised me the most is how much our portfolio, at least from a Dell EMC perspective is how much our portfolio really plays into the decision. And I'll give you an example, our Icelon Attach rate with Dell EMC Azure Stack is tremendous. And it's because the inherent, the storage density of a hyper-converged infrastructure is what it is. And when you have a multi-pedabyte data set that you want to process using cloud types of technologies, having an Icelon sitting right next to it makes sense. That has surprised me how quickly people have jumped to that with production use cases. It is an interesting concept. For Microsoft, the thing that surprised us a lot is the customer that actually get the platform as an enabler of digital transformation. The amount of things that they want to do on it, this is like mind-boggling. So we are constantly asked to add different things to the base services. And of course, we're doing our best to triage this and prioritize what make the most sense. But there are the people who gets it, they have tremendous use case and very specific for them that Azure Stack enabled. So we're on our toes to keep improving the different services that we can offer for Azure Stack. And you mentioned a number of verticals that seem to be kind of early adopters here. Are there common use cases among government, financial services, or are you seeing specific use cases to those industries? I can talk to the gas and mining industry. We see a lot of interest in the disconnected scenarios because of poor latency with the internet. They want to run some of their application that they run usually on Azure, but they want to run it in the mineshaft, for example, or they want to run it in a drilling platform in the ocean. So Azure Stack is an extension of Azure for this. So in these kind of industry, the disconnected scenario is very, very big. You can think of defense also if they want to use something and moving vehicle, Azure Stack is a great platform for that. And it's not just latency, it's just simple data gravity. If you're generating petabytes of data on a daily basis out on an oil rig, you're not going to be able to get that into AWS or GCP or Azure. So you can process it, upload results, filtered results back to Azure for the process. It's a really common use case and the federal space is quite big. So what are some of the most common services on Azure Stack, taking advantage of the petabyte of Iceland right next to it, as opposed to shipping it back to, you know, on a truck, back to the Azure data center? So you want to talk about some of the recent developments around IoT? So what we're seeing a lot of initiatives around her is IoT and those are, that's that very typical data gravity type issue. And it also has compliance implications, particularly in the EU, being able to control where the data is and being able to stay within the border of the country so you don't move it in a data center that is not in your country. So Azure Stack become Azure in your country if you don't have your own Azure data centers and the banking industry in Europe is really particular about this. So that's a big vertical for us in Europe. Yeah, a lot of finance. I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, thank you, sir. I wanted to talk, Claude, to you about what differentiates Dell EMC as an OEM for Microsoft with Azure Stack? Well, one thing that differentiates Dell EMC is the fact that they have a broad portfolio of server storage, they have great backup solution, for example, and that's needed in Azure Stack. And also let's face it, familiarity. We've been building these integrated systems together for a long, long time. So we know their engineering team, we have a well oiled machine in terms of testing. So it's easier in some ways there. There's a familiarity about how we work that's quite well known. And we can take advantage of their portfolio. Like I said, backup is a huge thing for Azure Stack. I mean, it's hard to find a better partner for backup than Dell EMC, for example. So we have a long experience also in selling product together in the client side, the laptop side. We have a long experience of selling Windows Server together. I mean, for years, they've been in one of our biggest reseller of Windows Server. So all this knowledge about Microsoft and not Microsoft's work make Azure Stack simpler to develop with partners like Dell EMC. So can you guys expand upon the advantages of the relationship when it comes to support? Nine months in, there's going to be stumbling blocks. There's going to be challenges. There's just going to be a lot to learn. What has been a typical customer support experience with the two companies? So this really speaks to the learnings that we've had over the years working together. We have jointly, we've worked together on what we call a case exchange API, which allows for, it goes well above and beyond kind of the typical TSA net case exchange, you know, with FTP sites and blogs. This is API level access into the mutual case management systems where we can get visibility into Microsoft status with a given case and Microsoft can get visibility into Dell EMC's status with a case. And so it makes it so that the customer experience is completely seamless and they can call, it doesn't matter which number you call for support, it ends up, you end up with a completely seamless experience. And we had the years to improve that process and now we have an electronic automatic ticket exchange and Dell EMC was one of the first partner to really implement this with us and it's helped tremendously the customer experience. And luckily so far, support hasn't been a big issue on Azure Stack. As number grows and grows, I'm sure it'll change. So you've been partners for a long time, you talked about this well-oiled sausage factory, partners, collaborators. I'm going to request a tag. If they can tweet, you will get tagged. It is a tweetable moment. So collaboration, visibility. Talk to us about the two cloud strategies, Dell EMC's cloud strategy, Microsoft's cloud strategy. How do they align them? Okay, well, from a Dell EMC perspective, it's a no-brainer that of the big public clouds, Microsoft is really unique in their hybrid cloud approach. You know, there's the VMware approach with AWS bringing the workload to the cloud. Microsoft is the only major cloud vendor right now bringing the cloud to the world. And it's just a no-brainer from that perspective and unlocks some of the best cases. And from Microsoft? Well, our cloud strategy is pretty clear, it's Azure. But that being said, Azure Stack is an extension of Azure. It brings Azure in different scenarios that would not be possible before. And we rely on our trusted, secure, and hybrid. Hybrid across the board, not only with Azure Stack, but with SQL Server, with identity, with security, our pillars on these key functions are hybrid across on-premises and in the cloud. Azure Stack bring this all up for different workloads. So Azure, we're all in and it's going well. And Azure Stack is an extension of that, bringing it to a customer data center. So let's talk about this Azure inside of a customer's data center. This is public cloud inside of a customer's data center. Expectations change, operations change, technical capability changes. What have been some of the key learnings as customers start to assume public cloud in their private data center? Like you said, this is a unique approach. This is hybrid cloud like no other model instead of going inside out. You guys are going outside in. Yeah, I think the biggest perception change that needs, that customers, it helps that customers learn it early is that Azure Stack is cloud. Simply because it's residing on your data center for, doesn't mean that it's virtualization and all those concepts go along with it. Give you a perfect example. If you have a workload that has some sort of unbalanced, you need a lot of RAM, but a little CPU, a lot of IOPS, but not a whole lot of capacity. Those are things that you capture as part of the re-platforming, the refactoring process. If you're going into public Azure or AWS, that same process needs to be followed for going into Azure Stack because from an operating model perspective, it's an identical process. So let's talk about what's next. I talked to Jeff Snow over again about nine months ago and one of the things he said, one of the advantages of Azure Stack is that it is new and being new, you can bring in new services. So customers as they're looking at the cloud, they're going to look at things such as containers, functions as a service, et cetera. What's next for Azure Stack and they'll see. I'll talk a little bit about, well, we have a roadmap. It's a public roadmap and you can find it on azure.com. So what's next is extending the platform with our more and more services. So one of the things we have to tell customers, not all services in Azure run in Azure Stack today. There's a subset, we're expending that subset. We take input from our partner and customer and prioritizing what we're going to do. But also what's next is things like increased scalability, for example, increase efficiency in terms of virtual density, virtual machine density, increase the number of region that you can support. So making it from a one-off to a true scale product is one of the things we're focusing on. We're putting a lot of emphasis and making sure that our customer are happy. So I wanted to play Azure Stack. We want to make sure that their experience is good. So we're spending effort on making sure that there's a good way for them to reach out to us. But basically expending the number of services on the platform is what's new and what's next. So Claude, last question for you from Microsoft. We're at the first Dell Technologies World, right? Last year of Dell EMC, 14,000 people here. That's a huge load of partners. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to hearing tomorrow in your session from the Dell Technologies customers? Interested in learning about their use case. How does it fit their data centers? Because every customer is a little bit different. I had some customer meeting today. Dell EMC has invited me to quite a few customers. And hearing what they want to do is really interesting because it can guide which next services by, for example, we should implement. So hearing the specific is a very important thing. My experience, I've talked about Dell World and Dell EMC World for quite a few years. Very often the people who come in these sessions, they're kind of like rookie. They want to know, they want to learn. The experience folks, we get to talk to them in the booth. But in the session, we get a lot of rookies. Like, oh, what is this thing? What it is? So you've got to be conscious of that too. So thanks guys for stopping back by theCUBE, sharing what's new with Microsoft Hybrid Cloud and Dell EMC. We appreciate that. Thank you. We appreciate the time. Look forward to it next year. Absolutely. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live on day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.