 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone. We are wrapping up day three of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida, CUBE's live coverage. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman, my esteemed co-host for these past three days. It's been fun working with you, Stu. Rebecca, it's been a great show. We're really excited. Our first time at a Microsoft show, and it's a big one. I mean, the crowds are phenomenal. They're starting to come in. Great energy at the show, and yeah, it's been great, breaking down this ecosystem with you. So, three days, what do we know? What did you learn? What is your big takeaway? What are you going to go back to Boston with? You know, it's interesting. We've been all talking, and people that I know that have been here a couple of years, I've talked to people that have been at the show for decades, this is a different show. There's actually a friend of mine said, he's like, well look, Windows pays the bills for a lot of companies. There's a lot of people that, all the Windows components, that's their job. I mean, I think back through my career, when I was on the vendor side, how many rollouts of exchange and SharePoint and all these things we've done over the years? Office 365, been a massive wave that we watched. So, Microsoft is a broad portfolio, and they've got three anchor shows. I was talking with one of the partners here, and he's like, there's not a lot of channel people at this event. At VMworld, there's a lot of channel people. I'm like, well, yeah, because there's a separate show that Microsoft has for them. You and I were talking in an earlier analytics session with Patrick Morehead, and he said, you know, when I look at the buy versus build, a lot of these people are buying, and I don't feel I have as many builders. Oh wait, what's that other show that they have in the spring? It's called Microsoft Build. A lot of the developers have moved there. So, it's a big ecosystem. Microsoft has a lot of products. Everything from, you know, my son's excited about a lot of the Xbox stuff they have here. Heck, a bunch of our crew is picking up Xbox sweatshirts while they're here, but a lot has changed. As Tim Crawford said, you know, this is very, you know, it feels like a different Microsoft than it even was 12 or 24 months ago. They're innovating. So, when we look at how fast Microsoft moves and some of these things, there's good energy. People are happy, and it's still trying to, you know, it's interesting. I definitely learned a lot at this show even though it wasn't the, you know, most sparkly or shiny, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Right, I mean, I think you made a great point about just how integral Microsoft is to all of our lives as consumers, as enterprise, the Xbox, the Windows, the data storage. There's just so much that Microsoft does that if we were to take away Microsoft, I can't even imagine what life would be like. What have been your favorite guests? I mean, we've had so many really, really interesting people, customers, we've had partners, we're going to have a VC. What are some of the most exciting things you've heard? Yeah, it's interesting. We've had Jeffrey Snover on the program a couple of years ago, and, you know, obviously a very smart person here, but at this show in his ecosystem, I mean, he created PowerShell, and so many people is like, you know, I built my career off of what he did in this product that he launched back in 2001, but we talked a little bit about PowerShell with him, but then we were talking about, you know, Edge and the Edge boxes and AI and all those things. It's like, this is really awesome stuff and help connecting the dots to where we hid. So, you know, obviously, big name guests are always nice, always love talking to the customers. The thing I've been looking at the last couple of years is how all of these players fit into a multi-cloud world. And Microsoft, if you talk about digital transformation and you talk about who will customers turn to to help them in this multi-cloud world. Well, I don't think there's any company that is closer to companies' applications across the spectrum of options. Office 365 and other options in SaaS, all the private cloud things, you start with, you know, Windows Server, or you've got Windows on the desktop, Windows on the server, virtualization, they're starting to do hyperconversion, everything, even deeper, as well as all the public cloud with Azure and developers. I talked to the Azure Functions team while I was here, such breadth and depth of offering that Microsoft is uniquely positioned to play in a lot of those areas, even if, as I said, certain areas, if the latest in data, there might be some other company, a Google, Amazon, well positioned there. You know, we had a good discussion. Bernard Golden, you know, who's with Capital One, you know, gave us some good commentary on where LA Boba fits in the global scheme. So, you know, nice broad ecosystem. I learned a lot, and I know resonated with both of us, the, you want to be, I learn it all, not a know it all. And I think people that are in that mindset, this was a great show for them. Well, you bring up the mindset, and that is something that Satya Nadella is really such a proponent of. He says that we need to have a growth mindset. This is off of the Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth's research that talks about how important that is, how important continual learning is for success. And that is also, that is success in life and success on the job and organization success. And I think that that is something that we are also really picked up on. This is the vibe of Microsoft. This is a company, Satya Nadella's leadership, talking to so many of the employees, and these are employees who've been there for decades. These are people who are really making their career. And they said, yeah, I've been here 20 years. If I have my way, I'll be here another 30. But the point is that people have really recommitted to Microsoft, I feel. And that's really something interesting to see, especially in the tech industry where people, millennials especially, stay a couple of years and move on to the next shiny new thing. Yeah, there was one of our first guests on for Microsoft said that, you know, been there 20 years, and what is different about the Satya Nadella Microsoft to the others is we are closer in listening even more to our customers. We talk about co-creation, we talk about how do we engage. You know, Microsoft is focusing even deeper on industries. So that's really interesting. An area that I wanted to learn a little bit more about is we've been talking about Azure Stack for a number of years. When we talk about how people are modernizing their data center, I actually had something click with me this week because when I look at Azure Stack, it reminds me of solutions I helped build with converged infrastructure. And I was a big proponent of the hyper-converged infrastructure wave. And what you heard over and over again, especially from Microsoft people, is I shouldn't think of Azure Stack in that continuum. Really, Azure Stack is not from, you know, the modernization out, but really from the cloud in. This is the operating model of Azure. And of course it's in the name, it's Azure. But when I looked at it and said, oh, well I've got partners like Lenovo and Dell and HPE and Cisco building this, isn't this just the next generation of platform there? But really it's the Azure model, it's the Azure operating stack and that is what it has. And it's more WSSD is their solution for the converged and then what they're doing with Windows Server 2019 is the hyper-converged. Those are the models that we just simplify what was happening in the data center. And it's similar but a little bit different when we go to things like Azure and Azure Stack and leads to something that I wanted to get your feedback on. You talk business productivity because when we talk to companies like Nutanix, we talk to companies like Cohesity who, you know, we really appreciate their support bringing us here, giving us this great thing to write the center of it. They talk about giving people back their nights and weekends, giving them back time because they're an easy button for a lot of things. They help make the infrastructure invisible and allow that. Microsoft says, you know, we're going to try to give you five to 10% back of your business productivity. It's going to allow you to focus on things like AI and your data rather than, you know, all the kind of underlying spaghetti underneath. What's your take on the business productivity piece of things? I mean, I'm in favor of it. It is a laudable goal. If I can have five to 10% of my day back of just sort of not doing the boring admin stuff, I would love that. Is it going to work? I don't know. I mean, the fact of the matter is I really applaud what Cohesity said and the customers and the fact that people are getting, yes, time back in their day to focus on the more creative projects, the more stimulating challenges that they face, but also just time back in their lives to spend with their children and their spouse and doing whatever they want to do. So those are really critical things and those are critical things to employee satisfaction. We know the vast body of research shows how much work-life balance is important to employees coming to their office or working remotely and doing their best work. They need time to recharge and rest. And so if Microsoft can pull that off, wow, more power to them. And the other thing I'll add to that is if you want that work-life balance and you want to be fulfilled in your job, a lot of times what we're getting rid of is some of those underlying, those menial tasks, the stuff that you didn't love doing in the first place and what you're going to have more time to do and every end user that we talk to says, by the way, I'm not getting put out of a job. I've got plenty of other tasks I could do and those new tasks are really tying back to what the business needs because business and IT, they need to tie together, they need to work together. It is a partnership there because if IKT can't deliver what the business needs, there's alternatives. That's what Stealth IT was and the public cloud could be and Microsoft really positions things as we're going to help you work through that transition and get there to work on these environments. I want to bring up another priority of Microsoft and that is diversity. So that is another track here. There's a lot of participants who are learning about diversity in tech. It's not a good place right now. We know that the tech industry is way too male, way too white and Satya Nadella, along with a lot of other tech industry leaders has said we need more underrepresented minorities. We need more women, not only as employees but also in leadership positions. Bev Crair who was on here yesterday, she's from Lenovo. She said that things are starting to change because women are buying a lot of the tech and so that is going to force changes. What do you think? Do you buy it? And I do and here's where I'd say companies like Lenovo and Microsoft, when you talk about who makes decisions and how are decisions made, these are global companies. Big difference between a multinational company or a company that is headquartered in Silicon Valley or Seattle or anything versus a global company. You look at both of those companies, they are working not just to localize but have development around the world. Have their teams that are listening to requirements understand what is needed in those environments. Going back to what we talked about before, different industries, different geographies and different cultures we need to be able to fit and work and have products that work in those environments. Everything, I think it was Bev that talked about even when we think about what color light, well, you know, oh, well, default, we'll use green and red. Well, in different cultures, those have different meanings. So yeah, it is something that, definitely I've heard the last five to 10 years of my career that people understand that. It's not just, in the United States, it can't just be the US or Silicon Valley creating great technology and delivering that device all the way around the world. It needs to be something that is globally developed, that co-creation and more. And hopefully we were making progress on the diversity front. We definitely try to do all we can to bring in diverse voices. I was glad we had a gentleman from Italy, shouting back to his daughters that were watching it. We had a number of diverse guests from a geography, from a gender, from ethnicity on the program and always trying to give those various viewpoints on theCUBE. I want to ask you about the show itself. The 30,000 people from 5,000 different organizations around the globe have convened here at the Orange County Convention Center. What do you think? Yeah, so it was impressive. You know, we go to a lot of shows, I've been to bigger shows. Amazon re-invent was almost 50,000 last year. I've been to Oracle Open World, it's like takes over San Francisco's sixth year, 70,000. This convention center is so sprawling. It's not my favorite convention center, but at least the humidity is to make sure I don't get dried out like Las Vegas. But logistics have run really well. The food has not been a complaint. It's been good. The show floor has been bustling and sessions are going well. I was talking to a guy at breakfast this morning that was like, oh yeah, I'm a speaker. I'm doing a session 12 times. I'm like, you're not speaking on the same thing 12 times. He said, no, no, it's a demo and hands-on lab. I'm like, oh, of course. So they make sure that you have lots of different times to be able to do what you want. There is so much that people want to see. The good news is, is they can go watch the replays of almost all of them online. Even the demos are usually something that they're cloud-enabled and they get online. And of course, we help to bring a lot of this back to them to give them a taste of what's there. All of our stuff's always available. On the website at thecube.net. This one actually, this interview goes up on a podcast. We call it The Cube Insights. So please, our audience, we ask you whether it's iTunes or your favorite podcast reader, go to Spotify, The Cube Insights. You can get our key analysis from every show that we do. We put that up there and that's kind of a tease to let you go to thecube.net. Then you see the hundreds and thousands of interviews that we do across all of our shows. Great, and I want to give a final second shout out to Cohesity. It's been so fun having them, having being in the Cohesity booth and having a lot of great Cohesity people around. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so much. I wish we could spend a little more time even, AI, if we go back to the keynote analysis, I mean, you can watch that. I can talk about the research we've done and said how the end user information that Microsoft can get access to to help people when you talk about what they have the touch points of Microsoft Office and even things like Xbox down to the consumer side to understand, have a position in the marketplace that really is unparalleled if you look at the breadth and depth that Microsoft has. So yeah, big thanks to Cohesity. Our other sponsors of the program that help allow us to bring this great content out to our community. And big shout out, I have to give off to the community too. First time we've done this show, I reached out to all my connections and the community reached back, helped bring us a lot of great guests. I learned a lot, you know, Cosmos DB, all the SQL stuff, all the Office and Microsoft 365, so much, you know, my brain's full leaving this show and it's been a real pleasure. Great, I agree too. And thank you so much to Microsoft. Thank you to the crew. This has been a really fun time. We will have more coming up from the Orange County Civic Center, Microsoft Ignite. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will see you in just a little bit.