 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at NetApp Insight 2018 from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host. For the day, Stu Miniman. We're all welcoming back two distinguished alumni to theCUBE. We've got Anthony Lai, SVP and GM of the Cloud BU at NetApp. Hey Anthony, welcome back. Thank you very much. We're here in the keynote stage. And we've also got Tad Brockway, the head of product as your storage media and edge at Microsoft. Tad, welcome back. Yeah, thank you. So guys, this is day one. Keynote this morning, it was standing your only 5,000 plus people here. Gene English was on your CMO of NetApp and said most ever customers and partners in under one roof at NetApp. So that's exciting. Let's talk about partnerships. NetApp has been around 26 years and the slide of partners and sponsors this morning was like a NASCAR slide. Tell us Anthony about what you guys are doing, how you're evolving your relationship with Microsoft. Oh, I mean, I think of all the relationships Microsoft is unique. Tad and I have worked together now for over a year. Yeah, yeah. And it's an engineering relationship. There is absolutely no doubts about it. We are doing things in Azure that nobody else has ever done. And I think we sort of bring 26 years of NetApp experience to the infinite possibilities that Azure brings to its customers. And it's sort of its transformation based on very reliable infrastructure. So you sort of get all the forward-looking values of Azure complemented by the 26 years of NetApp. Yeah, it's a great way to. So a year ago at this very event, NetApp Insight 2017, you announced some exciting things, one of them being Azure NetApp files. Correct. Tell us about a year later where you are with that. I know McKesson, big brand in healthcare, they're going to be on stage tomorrow. Give us a little bit of perspective about what that announcement has transformed into one year in. Well, let me give you my perspective. And then, Tad, you should obviously give the view of Microsoft. For NetApp, it's given our customers confidence and confidence in their choice of public cloud that they now feel that Azure has a distinct advantage in that it can land workloads that today currently run on NetApp. And they have the confidence that Microsoft has selected NetApp, that Microsoft will sell the service, Microsoft will support the service, Microsoft will build a service. I think we've also done something quite unique in the way the service is delivered. We could have just thrown up storage and said to customers, you manage it. But I think together we wanted to try and provide almost like dial tone. We just wanted storage to be there and we wanted to give people performance guarantees. So they felt very comfortable picking a particular performance level with a particular workload. And that's not been done before. So, we're seeing fantastic results from customers. We have a backlog that's growing by the day. And customers who have been onboarded onto the system have rave things to say about it. And you'll hear from one of those customers tomorrow on stage with Tad and I. But Tad, how would you characterize a year? Yeah, sure. So, a lot of engineering effort. And that's the thing that makes this, and customers don't care about how something's implemented. They care about the value that they get out of it. But it's because we've put so much effort into this across our companies from an engineering standpoint that there's nothing like this in the industry today. And as we roll this out into Azure regions around the world, it is going to be a highly differentiated offering. And that's because fundamentally what we're doing is we're bringing Azure NetApp into Microsoft data centers and we're wiring NetApp on tap directly into Azure. And so we've worked together on the design for some advanced networking capability all the way down to the switch level where we have very low latency, very high throughput from the Azure, the Azure public cloud, all of the infrastructure, all of the customer VMs directly into on tap, very low latency, very high bandwidth. And so all of the performance characteristics of on tap on-prem and then bringing that into the public cloud. So you get really a no compromise transformation for your existing apps and you get the ability to provision NetApp volumes in a way that is fundamental unique. It fits with the whole cloud paradigm of being able to pay for your resources as you go, the democratization of IT so that individual business units can go provision volumes. So it really is cloud paradigm plus all of the performance capabilities of on tap. I'm wondering if we can unpack that a little bit. When I think about Microsoft and NetApp, you both have really, it's called today hybrid multi-cloud but Microsoft has been given a lot of credit that it's got a strong hybrid strategy. And when I think back, I mean, Microsoft's always had storage as part of the stack. Today in Azure Stack, it's got storage spaces direct. You've got a cloud first strategy so I want to be able to do the same thing in public Azure as when I'm building solutions put it in the environment. Can you help connect? Where does this on tap solution fit in there? Cause you know, some people would say, well, come on Microsoft, wouldn't you just build this with your own solutions? You know, why do you turn to NetApp? So the, it's true. I guess the spirit, I think the spirit of what you're asking is it's an observation that what brings our companies together is an appreciation for enterprise customers being able to do things on their terms. And that involves customers taking existing IT workloads and then transforming them over to the cloud as opposed to zeroing everything out and starting over. That's just not realistic. And so the, it's the strategy for Microsoft and the strategy for NetApp. And then our partnership together to meet customers where they are help them evolve. And so scenarios like hybrid, they fit very nicely within that and Microsoft's portfolio with Azure Stack. And some of the other things that we're doing there with data box and so on. These are edge investments that are intended to extend the reach of cloud into customer environments. And then to make it really easy for customers to take their existing assets and then take advantage of the cloud. And that fits with the whole model of what we're doing with on tap as well. Anthony, we'd love to hear your piece because there's NetApp pieces that are going into the cloud. But we see Microsoft, the cloud is the starting port. We start in the public cloud and then that pushes out to the edge. I think I would make two points. I think just to reinforce what Tad said, there's just a technology that sits behind the file system that you kind of underestimate the importance of what, Dave Hitz really started. I mean, on tap does things that no other file system can do. It manages the data in a very particular way. It allows us to run NFS and SMB protocols on the same volume for certain use cases. It has almost linear performance through the characteristics. And we've been able to sort of take that file system and then build intellectual property for certain workloads. So NetApp is really the most commonly deployed platform for SAP. We are probably still the biggest platform for Oracle database deployment, for MySQL deployment. So I think there's a technology. I think there is a sort of a history and legacy in Linux and open source based workloads that we have an understanding of that adds to Microsoft. Now, the second point I would say is I personally agree very much with Tad that I think what you're going to see is IT will be redefined by cloud. And what I mean by that is the cloud will essentially establish the baseline and then push itself and its own sort of access control list, security models. Those will end up getting pushed back to IT. And so I think you're going to see sort of a cloud defined IT business as opposed to an IT defined cloud. And I think there's just so much elegance and simplicity and scalability in Azure. Now, they had sort of 25 years of watching everybody else make a mess of legacy IT and now Azure is such a pure environment that it can extend, I think, and provide tons of value outside of Azure. So you guys mentioned, I think, Anthony, you mentioned when we kicked off that this is really kind of an engineering partnership. But if we look at the history that both NetApp and Microsoft have massive install bases of customers, customers that didn't start out in the digital era, obviously customers that are born in that too. I'm curious, you mentioned about IT from a joint selling standpoint, where are these conversations initiating? Are you talking with the IT folks? Are you going to the business folks who are having a more business outcomes led conversation? So Anthony, let's start with you. Well, so I would say my favorite line about cloud was actually a line Mark Benioff quoted, which was what clouds do is they democratize innovation. And if you think about that for a second, the environments that we grew up in, the big companies had a material advantage in their use of technology. The small companies couldn't afford to do it. You look at Azure now, and any single person on the planet can consume Azure. They don't need permission in many cases. And ideas that would never get through the business case can now be started on Azure. And there are so many great ideas and concepts that needed that sort of easy onboarding and services that machine learning and artificial intelligence, there's a handful of companies that could buy that stuff themselves. Azure gives you access to all of that. So I think what's happening is that democratization has sort of infused more buyers. And so what used to be a sort of a fairly linear process through the CIO has now been fractured. A lot of application developers are buying by themselves. Line of business people are funding project work, sometimes without IT's knowledge. So for us, we wanted to sort of make sure that we could allow traditional customers to extend to Azure, traditional customers to migrate to Azure, but we wanted to build a service that would appeal to the new cloud buyer, to the application developer, to the data scientist. And I think we've done a very good job doing that. Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's the combination of empowering folks to go do things, to increase productivity at the individual business unit level, but then do that with technology that has taken decades of thousands of engineers to develop this combination. There really is nothing like it in the industry. It's really unique. At lunch, I was talking to a couple of users here and they were a little bit nervous, a little bit exciting, going to go through some certifications. Cloud is an opportunity for a lot of people to skill up on new skill sets. I'm sure there's new certifications. Can you talk a little bit about how you're helping customers move towards the future? Yeah, I think we've sort of in many ways made ONTAP very much a relevant service in Azure and what we hope that means is for all of the people that have been very loyal to NetApp and to ONTAP, that their skill set now translates into the cloud conversations. And one of the things we'll see on stage tomorrow is Microsoft and NetApp have worked together to create a certification that blends the best of what ONTAP can do for sort of workload strategy and design with the wealth of services that Azure has. And it's awesome to be on stage with that. We provide a critical service but Microsoft has how many services now in Azure? Oh gosh. Hundreds. Yeah, yeah. Hundreds of services. And as a developer, I sort of feel, you're like a kid in a candy store when you're in Azure. You can switch on almost anything and find services that will do incredible things that you could never get from IT. You could just never get those services that what Microsoft has is a scale so vast. I mean, how many data centers will you be at by the end of the year? Well, we're in 54 regions today and then each region has multiple data centers. Hundreds. So anyway, we're all over the planet. So guys, we're out of time, but just really quickly, so we've seen this evolution. You guys have lived this evolution in the last year. The public preview is out for Azure NetApp files. Azure NetApp files. Any sneak peek you can give us into what some of your customers are going to be saying tomorrow about the business outcomes, like reducing cost or speed of transactions that are going to be there tomorrow. We should get Brad up here from McKesson because he's awesome. Brad's been on point for it and I think you'll hear from a customer tomorrow that they plan to bring the biggest enterprise workloads to Azure. I mean, I think when he names the applications, they are non-trivial applications that couldn't move, but now with Azure NetApp files can. And I think he's also going to say that as well as sort of benchmarking very well at the big workloads, we actually benchmark very well on the cost curve that we can migrate workloads and give very good cost, I think, characteristics as well as performance. So we've tried to give people that sort of two-dimensional flexibility. Well, that's going to be something not to miss. So if you're here at NetApp Insight, check it out. If you're not, watch on their live stream. Tan, Anthony, thanks so much for joining. Thank you very much. For me and sharing with us the momentum and the vision that you're now seeing manifest. We appreciate your time. Thank you. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas, NetApp Insight 2018. Stick around, back after a short break.