 We need cool backgrounds as well, Thomas. We've got to have matching backgrounds. We're innovating all the time, guys. Welcome everyone to another one of our videos about the Azure Stack Partner Solution video series. Again, I'm joined by Tiberio Radu from the Azure Stack Hub team. I hope he's doing fine again. Tiberio, who I'm going to talk to today? Hello, Thomas. Hello, everyone. Today, we're going to talk with a Caribbean partner. They are a service provider offering a managed services offering to their customers. As we've seen before in our series, we have from an Azure Stack Hub perspective, we have various partners across the globe, offering different levels of service. That means they're either partnering with other ISVs or they are offering a managed service themselves that the customers will use to build a solution on top. I'll add Blair to go through these. Awesome. Thank you very much, Tiberio. We'll switch over to Blair and Blair. First of all, welcome to our video. Secondly, I hope you're doing fine. I just talked with Tiberio a little bit about it. He explained a little bit about the company. But can you go a little bit deeper on who you are and also talk a little bit more about the company itself? Sure. Good morning, Wothian. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. Salt is a Caribbean-based Microsoft partner. As you can see by our cool backgrounds, we won partner of the year this year. That's three out of the four last years. What we have is the we're the only ones in the Caribbean offering a multi-tenant Azure Stack offering. We've had it up and running for about a year and a bit now. In Cayman, Bermuda came online right in the middle of COVID. Actually, the equipment arrived like two days before lockdown and we built our Azure Stack offering in Bermuda during lockdown. I think it was the first time anyone had done it all remotely. That's from HPN Microsoft and of course ourselves. We're happy to say that we just ordered equipment for Jamaica. We have an extensive roadmap on rolling out throughout the Caribbean. We work in that partner ecosystem. Clients can obviously come directly to us, but we found that there was a niche for companies such as ISPs or service providers to be able to or want to consume Azure-type services within the Caribbean for data residency and low latency concerns. We took the initiative of building these out. We do not focus just on the ISP. I know a number of people initially have rolled out Azure Stack clubs using just the ISP services. We've chosen to go down the path of offering the full suite of software from right from one end to the other. We've been going to the company about four years old now, and that's who we are. That sounds pretty cool. Not only the location sounds pretty cool, but also the solution you're offering. You mentioned you're working in a partner ecosystem. Can you explain a little bit more who your clients are or your partners are and how they work with you? Sure. We are off the offset. As many of us know, each stamp has its own interface, its own provisioning engine. We realized very quickly that we would have to create our own API to be able to manage this as we plugged into the ecosystem. Our clients are everyone from distributors in the US, so we've got IncomeX who have come online and you'll be able to within the next couple of weeks, be able to provision right through their interface, their platform services with us all the way down to some of the ISPs. We have them here in Cayman and Bermuda, Jamaica that we're working with, where they wanted to add value to their clients. I think the big thing around this was that, a number of them already have Cloud platforms, and one of the big selling points for us is obviously security and compliance around Azure Stack. It's a closed system. It's not your traditional private Cloud where it's a high provider who's reach up theoretically and touch the VMs and do as you wish with them. It's closed as the solution provider don't have access to that data. The security and compliance, I think is a huge thing that even when we're approaching some of the ISPs and partners that already have a Cloud platform, they could see the benefit that there were the areas where there are clients that would want to consume these types of services. It was complimenting their offering rather than competing with their offering. I think that's one of the things really important to highlight. Okay. Now, that's a good thing to know and how it all fits together. Obviously, this is about Azure Stack Hub, and what I usually ask is why did you choose Azure Stack Hub and how does it fit in your solution? That is one thing. But then on the other hand, I also want to ask you, why do your customers choose Azure Stack Hub? Vic's been with me throughout this journey. I'm the owner of the business. Vic is a technical director. We started this journey with a view of being a Microsoft shop down the Caribbean. We have a lot of places that are jack-of-all-trades and nothing against them. I was in that business for many years before I went into solely being a Microsoft shop. We built out the solution thinking and knowing about Azure Stack was coming. We thought we were going to be able to install it on our own hardware. We built out S2D data center with many servers and we played around with it. That was our first version of Cloud that we had. I think that had a lot to do with why Microsoft chose us to give us the exception, because in the Caribbean, you need an exception for every single location you go. We have to write to Microsoft. We have to prove that with the business case. They do interviews. It's not just I want to purchase it and you're on your way. We have to do a lot of justification to them. But we knew that all along, we'd heard about Stack and it come in. We're like, this is the perfect Cloud solution for us. It's Azure but down here. It's same interface, same CSP billing model, same marketplace, the APIs, all these kinds of things, the DLL, the versions. It's all the same and we really wanted to. We had a vision from day one on extending Azure outside of the regular data centers into our regions. That is awesome. Again, I love that and that is also why I want to remain reasons we have Azure Stack to actually expand Azure not just in our own regions, but to regions where it's just not available. We were talking a little bit about the why and how it fits in. I'm also super interested in what platform or how are you using the platform to deliver value to your customers? I'll take that one on Blair. As Blair mentioned, we started off by running our own Cloud Platform, very common in the region. One of the big things we were doing with those Azure Stacks was taking clients who had a heterogeneous top design and saying, let's give you a bit of standardization. With the Azure Stack, these customers can't leave these regions for a variety of reasons. It could be data sovereignty, regulatory control. What we wanted to do was start that journey by moving them out of there onto the Azure Stack. IS was a big part of that initial roadmap. That's a lot easier said than done. Right in the beginning, we came up with our own data box solution. We stole shamelessly from Microsoft's portfolio. We could help our clients to take those big data workloads that they've got sitting in their data centers. We could help them to securely ship their data using our backup solution. Take that, bring it into our data center, give them high-speed access to the Azure Stack, and then be able to upload their virtual machines and their data in a time that's reasonable. I mean, the internet is great, but it's not great when you're trying to move 10 or 20 terabytes worth of infrastructure into a data center. IS was absolutely the start of our journey. Of course, they had that high fidelity. Those clients who could move minor workloads out into public Azure, they were already aware of how to get their ARM templates running, a Terraform running, how to get those things going. Really, that was the start of our journey doing a lot of IS. The other thing that we started doing from the very beginning was offering virtual desktop solutions, which is actually really interesting with the Azure Stack. We eventually built up those virtual desktop environments that were to almost dozens, if not 100 or so concurrent today. When we went to Azure Stack, that was another thing that we really excited about was the ability. We could take what we knew about that and give clients the Windows Virtual Desktop experience on our Azure Stack, but using the session host model. We did that. We found ourselves in that place where we had clients, here's your application servers, here's your file servers, all running on IS. Now we give you the Windows Virtual Desktop experience. Of course, through the power of Azure Active Directory, we were one of the first partners in the Caribbean to sell the E5 licensing suite. We could give them all the security of Azure Stack's SOC2 data center, absolute Azure Stack security. Now they've got their tendencies, they've got their virtual networks into there, they've got their infrastructure, bring the virtual desktops in, and we really saw that explode with COVID. Unfortunately, as more people had to work from home, and they were able to scale those out so quickly on the Azure Stack platform within their regions for low latency. Then as we've moved forward, we've obviously now finding that we have clients who are very savvy, but they still have that problem. They can't leave these geos for whatever reason, and sometimes it's even just a DR concern. Like a hurricane comes through, takes the telecommunication, links with them, they still got to operate. This really opened the door for us for the PAS solution. We're very, as an organization, we've always been very aggressive with keeping up the ASD case, the Azure Stack Development kits, so we were always trying to stay on the edge of that. Now we've gone in and put our SQL solution in, which is actually extremely popular. We have this issue now with clients reaching end of laugh on their 2008 R2. Thanks to Microsoft, appreciate it guys. We now have the option to extend the patching in the service laugh with the Azure Stack, which we've done, and we're offering PAS SQL, which is the cheapest way to consume SQL, compared to trying to run the last to see models yourself. That just a small insight into how we're starting to leverage this product from a technology perspective. To be honest, that's very awesome. There are many, many different things you just put out there, which I really love. I mean, starting with just migrating the IS and bring IS features, but then also remote desktop. Also, I like that you mentioned the offering with Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, which customer if they move it to Azure or also Azure Stack Hub, they get free extended security updates for these. Again, you mentioned also then the modernization parts, so you're not just taking them and just leaving them at just virtual machines, you also help them to modernize and go forward. A bunch of different things and awesome things here, I just took out and I find it super interesting. With that, that brings me to another very important question, but I'll let you first go and add something to it. Yeah. I wanted to talk about a little bit more about the PAS solution. We had a customer, we're under NDA with their customer, so we'll talk about it in a very general term, but we had this customer approach us, and they're doing amazing things with IoT. They have a model that they've built up for themselves, and it's been doing the job, but it's becoming very expensive for them. I'm very proud that with the Microsoft's roadmap, we now have all the benefits of IoT Hub, all the web apps features, and so with this client, we're very proud that they're actually developing their next generation platform directly on to the Azure Stack. I mean, it's not often that you get to look at the Azure Reference Libraries, the architecture patterns, and actually apply those in places like this. We're very excited that we're going to actually have a client who's going to have all these telemetry sensors uploading directly into the Azure Stack where we're doing the hard computation, and then a lot of that data will then flow up to Azure to make use of Azure Search and Cognitive Function. So it's a really advanced use case, and I mean, this is something that's really exciting because Salt actually had a case study where we worked with a client that was doing artificial intelligence and we helped them to achieve that platform in public Azure. So for us, it's really rewarding to not only have these solutions being built now for clients who can achieve public Azure, but those who are now going to be in the Caribbean as well. No, that's awesome. I love that you're bringing these Azure services to where the customer actually need them, right? Again, many, many different services, and I love how you built that whole Cloud journey, if you will, and help customers in whatever state they are and whatever actually they need on that. That brings me up with a question which I want to ask you. So during that journey and obviously, also the journeys you see with your customers like where they are in, do you want to share any lessons learned or something you learned during that process and that journey? I think there's a couple of things for it. I think as part of us learning about the Azure Stack, we had a lot of tremendous support from our partners and Microsoft to do that, and we've overcome a lot of that. A lot of that was learning barriers. When it comes to the most important people to us who are our partners, these are our resellers, these are guys who are making the journey possible for their clients and their Geos. What we've really learned is that we need to listen a lot more. What's really exciting is they can come to us with their particular use cases and we can apply those within the Azure Stack. For example, what are they doing with networking? We've had to learn a lot about how to integrate people into the Azure Stack and a lot about networking partners. In the beginning, we found that in the marketplace, for example, there wasn't a lot of, there were very few handful of Telco or I have to put this, networking providers that had their virtual appliances in the marketplace. That was very interesting to try and we have to challenge to go to a client who might be running, let's say a Cisco product and say to that client, well, Cisco isn't yet in the marketplace, you need to use a product that we have. The beautiful part about that though is that we built such good relationships with the people who are in the marketplace, and that's really helped us to continue to get those solutions out there. The other one was we had to, essentially, if you think about the clients we have, who can't leave these regions, right? That limits our options for backup. Think about that because we can't just go and use a lot of the Microsoft type, public Azure type backup solutions, which we'd like to use but they're not really isolated. We learned a lot working with our strategic partner to build a high-speed DR and backup solution within the islands so that we can say to the client, well, you're not only are you going to run on the Azure Stack and that's great and you're going to be in public Azure, but you also have a bring your own key, secure backup solution that's high-speed running in our data centers as well. As Blair said, you can see from the theme, it's that end-to-end. So our challenges are to find our clients and understand what their customers are trying to do, because a lot of our clients are partners, give them the Cloud Solution Architecture Experience, and then help them to shape and reform a lot of the perceptions and technologies in their clients' environments to fit within that model. If you don't mind it, I'm just going to add two things to that. I think when we started this journey, we came out and we talked about this partner network. Our managed service is actually Azure Stack. Azure Stack is a service, whether it's you're consuming it as an end-to-end client, or whether we're running and operating it for you in your own data center, however you choose to consume it. But I think for quite a while, there was a creating that perception, or having a number of conversations with a partner saying we're not going to compete with you. We're thinking of us as like an extension of Microsoft. We're here to help you. We have the engineers, we have the sales team, we're not going to compete for the office licenses or any of that. We're looking for people to consume Azure Stack and let us help you build those solutions for your clients. That continues to be quite a challenge. People kind of go, are you really serious? You're not going to come in and bid on this? No, I promise we're not. But the other one was, as we know, what it says on Azure Stack on paper, as with anything, I think it's any product when you read it and says, this is what I can do. We've found some of those limits and barriers actually don't exist. It's what's built in. So if you use third-party products, like I just mentioned around checkpoint or other firewalls, your VPN throughput gateways, and these kind of things goes away, your 200 meg limit, and these types of things. It's all based on what your connectivity coming in. But it's also about, Vic had touched on a couple there being the backup and some of the other solutions. The other one was ExpressRoute, that connectivity. So we've created our own quasi ExpressRoute equivalent to be able to allow clients to get in. So again, every day you're asking the lessons learned, and we've mentioned before we go to the call, every day we learn something new and there's a new challenge that we have to come up with or do, and that's just part of being on the forefront of technology. You get to be one of the ones who sit there and go, great, we have another challenge today. Billing was a huge one. Actually being able to build more than just IaaS. If you're wanting to build against the entire platform and be able to offer that to clients, I don't know how many providers we went through or people partners we've partnered with that it just didn't work. We now have a working solution. We've got a great partner we're working with. But every day there's new challenges and we enjoy it. As you can see, Vik and I wake up each day and we're like, right, what are we on today? What challenge comes today? Now I was about to say our big Microsoft fanboys, and I think that that really takes us to the other part of it which is we want to make sure that people, we want to drive Microsoft consumption. We're desperately passionate because we know how good it is. We drink that Kulein ourselves every day. So I think a lot of part of it as well is these people have relationships and they are trusted people. That's really great. We are really love our position is being able to go in and give them a skilled hand because this is all we do to actually make that experience. And we've had that come back and they've said, oh, you know, our clients are really loving this. You know, the stability is great and the performance is awesome and their costs are coming down and they're getting to reuse a lot of what we sold them before. That to me is honestly why I wake up every day. I think that that is beautiful. And the Azure Stack is what's allowing us to do that because if the Azure Stack wasn't in the Caribbean, right, what you'd find is you'd find, okay, we've got whatever platform we have and we're kind of trying to shoot them in. But because it's fully integrated with the Microsoft journey, that experience, that fidelity is there. And it gives them a seamless, pleasant experience from the moment we meet until their clients are done and everything's in support and they're just using the system reliably day in and day out. No, I love that to be honest. And I love the energy and especially like how you use that and actually not like, you really believe in these products and you really know they're working, but then you're taking that knowledge and that experience you have and enable others, right, to help their customers as well. And I think that that is really a really powerful thing to do. And I think it really important, especially in these times, right? Absolutely. I agree. So obviously there's a lot of exciting things we just talked about and I'm sure there's much, much more we could talk about, but if people are watching this video and they wanna know more about you and your solutions, where should they go? I think, you know, in this day and age, it's the website, so salt.ky is our website. And obviously, I think you guys are gonna share the contact information for our team. So we'd love to hear from them. The word's always open. They can also, if they're in our region, come into our office, have a coffee. We'll do our social distancing. We've got the desk space, the chairs. We've got a chess board if you like, if you like to play chess. Awesome. Now, thank you very much Blair. Thank you very much Victor. Thank you very much TB for adding and connecting me with salt. It was absolutely fun talking to you and a lot of exciting things are happening and you're doing. So people definitely check out the link. We will put it in the description so you can learn more and contact Sol to learn more about how they can help you with that. Thank you guys for watching and hopefully see you in the next one. Thank you very much. Thanks guys. Bye. Have a good day everyone.