 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Welcome back to theCUBE, everyone. It is Microsoft Ignite and it is happy hour. There are people walking around with beer and wine and snacks and it is a great time. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Jeremiah Dooley. He is an Azure advocate at Microsoft. Thank you so much. Cube Veteran, esteemed Cube Veteran coming on theCUBE. Yeah, I've been doing this for a while and Stu and I have gotten to talk a few times and it's good to be back. Yes, well, welcome. So you joined the Microsoft advocacy team a little over a year ago and I read a blog post that you wrote, this is the most interesting period of my career. Agreed. I'd love to hear you riff on why it is such a gratifying time. What exactly you're doing as an advocate and why it's so interesting? Sure, so I guess we'll start with the last part. My job as a cloud advocate is literally simply to engage with and help communities who focus on a specific technology and help them build bridges into whatever part of Azure makes sense for them. My job specifically is that I run a team who's focused on enterprise platforms and tools communities and for us that's VMware, that's OpenStack, that's CloudStack, that's any of the communities where the members of it identify themselves by the platform that they operate, not necessarily by the language that they use to write code in or the applications that they're running. They're worried about the infrastructure portion of it but usually from a software standpoint. Part of the reason that it's interesting is one, it's fun to have an advocacy role where I work as part of the engineering team. My job is simply to be that conduit between customers who say it would be really cool to have this and an engineering team who is desperate for feedback from customers around what do we build and how do we build it. And especially for me coming from the infrastructure side of things, before Microsoft I worked at NetApp, I was part of the solid fire acquisition, I've worked at infrastructure companies kind of all the way down back into my service provider days. The larger transition of customers, especially enterprise customers who are moving from one side of that divide to the other really matches up well with what I did from a career standpoint. I came to a company who looked at everything that I knew how to do technically and said, we don't really need any of that but we love the context that it gives you for being able to go out and talk to these communities and show them what Azure could do. So it's very interesting to work somewhere where my involvement with the community, my involvement with the technology helps make me a bridge into something that was all new to me. But I'm not a developer. I didn't work inside the Azure cloud before I took the role. What I knew was the technology and the communities and Microsoft gave me the opportunity to build the other side of that, which is how do we take all of those things and how do we move them into an Azure context? So it's been fantastic. Yeah, and Jeremiah, we're at an interesting point in this journey we're going on. I think back to the virtualization journey and we've reached a certain point where you could virtualize anything and virtualization was growing but getting from the 20% to the majority was challenging. I feel we're at a similar point and for myself I look at where 20% of the workloads are in the cloud. This movement of data is not going to be a one-time or one-way journey. There's my data center, there's the public cloud, there's the edge, there's SaaS. My data, my applications are everywhere and I think that's a lot of that hybrid environment but how do we simplify this environment and make it more consumable for everyone and tell us a little bit about, what are some of the real challenges that you hear in the field and how is Microsoft and the ecosystem helping to solve that? It's an interesting parallel. On the 80% virtualization challenge we had a couple things. One was workloads that we just couldn't and so we were waiting on the business side of things to give us something that we could virtualize and then there was the law of diminishing returns on the amount of money that it would cost to virtualize them. When we look at the, I'm trying to move workloads from on-premises into the cloud, the transition challenge is similar. The big difference is it's the operational investment that is holding it back. It's not the law of diminishing returns, it's the law of the sunken cost, right? So we've got customers who have invested decades, literal a decade into the automation and the orchestration and the run books and the what do you do at three o'clock in the morning when things go wrong all in a VMware context or all in an OpenStack context and those are the things that are more valuable to them frankly than the vendor who sits underneath it, right? We can change vendors as long as it doesn't impact operations and so from an Azure standpoint that's exactly the angle that we want to take. If what you need are workloads that live inside a hyperscaler cloud and what you have to have in order to take that first step is don't touch my operations, don't touch my scripting, don't touch my infrastructure as code, don't touch any of the stuff that I've built up as operational intellectual property over the last however many years, don't touch any of that and that transition becomes easy and then once I have a footprint now I can be real selective about cherry picking which of these cloud native services makes sense and how can I as a customer choose when my operations team starts to have to take on some of these additional burdens rather than what I feel like the perception is which is as soon as I get anything from Azure my entire operations team now has two jobs and everybody has twice the amount of work to do and I have to go hire new experts because these skills don't translate and so if we can make it easy to do that initial move without having to change anything and then give customers a very transparent way to decide what cloud services are they going to adopt and how is it that they're going to manage that impact on their operations teams? I think we've got a path that really starts to overcome some of those initial fears. But customers are on a continuum. I mean wouldn't you say just in terms of where they are in terms of where they are in the technology and then also their mindset and how much they're willing to adopt and change? Yeah and I think that the group that I'm in the larger group that I'm in mirrors that. We have four different teams, three teams in addition to mine that sit on that continuum from are we an infrastructure community and are we a platform community to are we a workload community particularly on the Microsoft side to identify by the workloads that I run to am I a modern operations community? The SRE principles, the things that we're doing from a culture standpoint to be able to build operations teams that can manage this type of environment and then finally are we developers and do we want to really look at the DevOps side of things and how do we tie the developers and their needs back organically in and I think that customers are on a continuum all the way across but even before they get into that we went through the virtualization journey and now we're trying to figure out how can I be efficient? How can I take advantage of things that I really don't want to have to build on premises? I would love to have someone else take care of that for me but how can I do that without swamping the humans that have to take care of all the things in the background? Yeah so Jeremiah we actually had a guest on earlier that said there's companies that would consider themselves a Microsoft shop just like there were people that would say I'm Cisco certified and that is my job. How's Microsoft helping customers move kind of beyond that vendor view to the language that we hear from Satya Nadella is about business outcomes and the agility and what we all talk about is how the future should be but it's very difficult inside the enterprise organization to change those roles and reskill and learn up or hire people into that. You've got those four teams maybe how does Microsoft help people move along I think rule number one is meet customers where they are it's not our job to dictate how fast customers move or what direction they move in it's our job to build bridges maybe lots of bridges and let customers decide which of them make the most sense. If we can meet customers where they are today and in the case of VMware that means building a bare metal environment that we can deploy VMware onto so that customers can take advantage of it without having to change any of their operational stuff then I get to compete on the merits of the services Azure offers and I'm happy to do that. Once we have those workloads in a place where you can take advantage of managed database instances or no sequel geographic distribution models that you didn't have the ability to build on your own or even intelligent edge connected firewalls or application load bouncers there's so much stuff in there that when we talk to the operations teams they're like I want that and I would like that now and we just don't have the ability always to push that down into the on-premises side of things so meeting them where they're at and then doing a good job of translating the value the business value of the services that we offer into the language of that audience and I really think that's where the advocacy team comes in it is almost a business value translator where we look at all these things in the Azure marketplace and say here's why this matters to you here are the things that you're doing today that we could make go away let's work on figuring out what the return on that investment would be to find out if it's a good business deal. And the thing about Microsoft is that it has been around for so long that so many of these companies have had decades long relationships with Microsoft which is not something you could say about all the other cloud providers because they are relatively newer to the scene. And good and bad, right? I mean on the good side there's literally not an enterprise that I walk into that there isn't some Microsoft relationship. In many cases it allows us to be really aggressive in going into customers and saying the licensing on-premises that you're trying to move away from has a Microsoft logo on it and the cloud that you're looking to move into has a Microsoft logo on it, let's figure it out. Sometimes, I mean every especially large customers they've got multiple vendors in there there have always been things that have happened along the way in that relationship but absolutely it's great to be able to look at a customer and know even if you're not an Azure customer I promise you're a Microsoft customer that gives us some sort of common ground to be able to start that process. Yeah so we know that the customer experience is so very important but one of the other experiences is the employee experience. I've got great respect for Microsoft I've worked with them most of my career but Jeremiah there's a number of people I know that 10 years ago would never have joined Microsoft that now find themselves working for Microsoft. Gives a little viewpoint as to how the Microsoft of the Satya Nadella era is different from what we might have seen in previous days. It's a great point and I know that when I interviewed with Microsoft and went through my loop with some of the people that you're going to have on the show this week that was my question was would you have seen yourself working for the Microsoft of five years ago and especially when we're talking about the SRE and the DevOps folks it's just a categorical no across the board and I think it's from a personal standpoint the idea that it is new technology that we're looking at that everything I've done in the last 18 months has been something that I got to learn from the ground up new content, new technologies new ways to translate that new ways to translate that into customers the I thought that working for a giant company like this would be challenging from a logistical standpoint what it really has been challenging from is from a focus standpoint there is so much to focus on to learn I mean even just looking around this place you can get lost wandering through just the hub and the social spaces my challenge has been less of is this a good place to work or is the culture something that fits and more what are the I'm never going to know everything what are the small number of things that I can focus on and really provide value for but overall culture wise I love the empower everyone on the planet messaging and when you walk onto the floor and you see the tagline you can't empower everyone unless you include everyone it's just it's really fun to be at a place where you can feel excited about those things and having worked in IT particularly on the infrastructure side for a long time that's not always the case so if you're excited about the type of company that you're going to work for and I have all of these toys to play with and I have so much stuff that I can learn and get involved in and then translate back into that core enterprise community no this has been not just the most interesting 18 months but we were talking about this is a hard job not to love with the opportunity that we get and then the technology we get to work with that's a great note to end on Jeremiah Dooley thank you so much for coming on theCUBE of course thank you I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman stay tuned for more of theCUBE