 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Tal Klein. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at Lakeside Software. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It's turning to the show. It's going to be back, yeah. So tell, you're based in the Motor City. Tell our viewers a little bit about Lakeside Software. Sure, Lakeside Software is what people call a workspace analytics vendor, which is like gardener terminology. And as you know, whenever you go to the gardener terminology it doesn't actually mean anything. But what we do is we help IT groups hone in on things that affect user experience, whether it's on devices or applications or even in workflows. So if we do a Venn diagram of what your work is, it's basically people, process, and technology. So we think of ourselves as the thing that enables the center of that Venn diagram, which is really understanding how those things interact with each other and what impacts productivity in any one of those circles. Yeah, it's interesting. I've talked to some analysts that focus on, well, it's not just your application, but how we interact with that and the users and it's tough. I railed for years. It was like virtualization was awesome from an infrastructure standpoint, but one of the horrible things that they did is they said, let's take my 15 year old application that we should have replaced and we'll shove it in a VM and then leave it there forever and the users are sitting there like, oh my God, can you please give me something modern to work on? So is it that kind of user piece or what, you know? So part of it is like understanding, it's part of it. Part of it is understanding, you know, what is it that you need to do in order to get your job done? So like, you know, I need to have a laptop or I need to have a mobile device or whatever. And once you get beyond that point, it's like, you know, what are the components of your job? Like the check marks of like, what do I need to get done through my day? And what things impact your ability to check those boxes? Like, so if it takes me too long to reply to an email, if it takes me too long to go to a website or view a video, you know, those things are really meaningful over the daily tasks of a user. So like, if everything starts to be impacted by five seconds, 10 seconds or whatever, user experience is impacted and then things fall apart. All right, so one of the things if you talk about, right, I'm running some application that's really old. One of the things we're trying to get to is, you know, how do we stay up on newer things? You know, when I had something in my data center, well, what's the cycle I refresh hardware? How often do I update software? You know, when you go to a customer, say, you don't say, hey, what version of Azure are you running? Right, it just updates. So we get to more as a service, I think what we're looking at today, right? And I think a lot of, you know, there's the old school of thinking, which is part of IT's job is to be the jail warden, which is like, you know, how do I prevent bad things from happening, but also how to prevent users from doing bad things, right? Like, you know, if you think of a jail, it's a very like, you know, closed off, managed environment. Whereas I think now we're moving towards the age of like the crossing guard, which is like, if somebody wants a J-Walk, they're going to J-Walk, right? Your job as IT is to provide the best possible path towards, you know, getting from point A to point B. You know, and that's like what really, what moving to software as a service or Windows Evergreen, all those kind of terminologies that we're here is about saying like IT, you know, is moving away from that role, towards a role where, you know, their job is mostly to support the user, help them get where they're going safely, faster, more efficiently, that kind of thing. Okay, you mentioned a term that I want you to explain, Windows Evergreen, so explain what that is, how that ties into the whole story. So this is your first time at Ignite, so welcome to Ignite, first of all. Thank you. Three years ago, at Ignite 2015, Microsoft said Windows 10 was going to be the last version of Windows Ever. And at the time, people didn't really understand what that meant. They were like, are you guys getting out of the operating system business? Like, whatever. But the strategy that they've been following is to say like, look, you know, we've created this operating system. It's a framework. We're going to update it. We're going to secure it. We're going to do whatever it needs to happen, but don't think about it as a version anymore. And so you mentioned like, there is no Azure version two or whatever. Don't start to, don't think of Windows as a software package. Think of it as an environment that Microsoft is managing for you. And the sooner we get to that point, you know, that's like, that's where, you know, we really consumerize the enterprise, is where we no longer have to think about, like, you know, I ostensibly know what version of OS X is running on my iPhone, but you know, there's like an Apple event, and I'm like, okay, that probably means that I'm going to have to reboot at some point. You know, like it's, I don't think about version. You know, I'm like, okay, that's, there's a refresh coming, you know, and I think Microsoft is moving that control and that power away from IT and towards them as the vendor, because honestly, who better than Microsoft knows how to secure Windows? Right? It's just, there's a really weird notion in IT where I think, you know, dinosaurs like me and probably used to, like we go back to like, you know, we used to think that we could do a better job than Microsoft in securing, you know, desktops or whatever. But at this point, I think, because of the amount of effort they spend on security, the amount of data that they're looking at, that I think we could trust Microsoft and we could trust ourselves. But it really is such a huge paradigm shift. What effect is it having in the industry? I mean, you've been in the industry a long time. I think that, I think people are having a hard time. It's an existential crisis. The closest I can compare it to is parenthood, I guess, which is like, you know, when your kids are young, you're in control of like a hundred percent of everything that they do, like where they eat, you know, where they play, what they do. And, you know, as they get older, you kind of lose that control and instead you become an influencer. And you hope. You hope. If you're lucky. If you're lucky. And I think that's a big paradigm shift and you're seeing a lot of people try to fight back against it and, you know, Microsoft is accommodating that with different types of, different flavors of Windows licenses and different types of builds. But I think it's the easiest way to think about it. Whenever I talk to an IT person, they're like, well, I'm in charge of procurement. Well, okay, then you're making the decision to make certain purchasing decisions within the framework of whatever. But you're not going to stop your business from running Windows. Like it used to be that you, like people would be in charge of like saying, oh, we're going to use, you know, Windows or not. It's, that's no longer the case. And things like Office 365, like, you know, you can think that maybe there's an option, like let's say with Google Apps or whatever, and you could try to be an influencer in that regard, but the business is going to do what the business is going to do. So I, it's a big shift from control into kind of support and maybe some amount of, you know, insights and intelligence. So Tal, it is our first time here at the show. I'm a little surprised. I haven't seen more Citrix, you know, been a long story partnership with Microsoft and Citrix in a lot of ways. What are you seeing these days? How does that play into the environment? They're here. They're here. You know, I think that, you know, Microsoft has become a lot more than, you know, sort of an end user computing company, obviously. So I think that's what you're seeing. You're seeing the growth of the ecosystem or focus on cloud. You're seeing Microsoft use verboten words like serverless and, you know, which a few years ago would have been, you know, unthinkable. So that's what you're seeing. It took us till 5.30 until we got Kubernetes mentioned on the program and almost 6.30 before we got it. I need a glass of wine to drink. Got serverless, obviously. Not necessarily at this show, we've seen Microsoft participate. I was at serverless comp. We had theCUBE there the last few years. Microsoft's there. It's different. You're right, absolutely. The ecosystem's been changing and growing. The breadth and depth has really impressed us here at the show. I agree. And that's what I'm seeing too. You know, I've been walking around prior to here. I was trying to be more educated about, you know, the sort of conversations we might have. And it's true. You're seeing a lot of people who are, you know, API partners who are just like plugging into the API ecosystem and, you know, networking vendors and people that you're never not used to seeing, you know, at a Microsoft show. I saw like Juniper as a booth here. I'm like, what are you guys doing here? You know, it's an interesting discussion. And I think that's, I think speaks to Microsoft's maturity and their ability to kind of grow as a company and accept change rather than try to fight against it. Which I think for a long time, Microsoft was trying to fight against the change. And I think that's obviously what we're seeing is an adoption of it and acceptance of it and even some desire to lead it. Well, talking about that desire to lead in the cultural transformation and in this growth mindset that Microsoft is such a big proponent of, I'm curious, because you're an industry veteran and because you've rushed up against Microsoft for a lot of your career, what are your perceptions of it as a place to work, as an organization that is selling products and signing products, selling products? Well, they bought my last company, so I'm very impressed. Okay. So I think that one of the unique things about Microsoft's Phoenix Moment, if you will, is the fact that they're truly rising out of the ashes of old IT. And I think what you're seeing is the manifestation of new ideas, a new blood in general. Will all of them be home runs? We don't know, right? But at least you're seeing a lot of experimentation where we didn't used to. It used to be that everything had to be within a very, very specific Microsoft box. And I think what you're seeing here is a much more open-minded perspective. I don't know if it's Satya's influence, I'm sure part of it, but it's just cultural. You could tell that the DNA of this company has shifted. You don't feel like you're in an old school Microsoft conference, you know what I mean? It feels dynamic. And finally, I know that you are an author of a book, The Punch Escrow, which was debuted on the Cube, we didn't interview talking about it, yes. So it has now been optioned for a movie since that interview. So tell us what's the latest? Who's going to star? What would we? I'm not legally allowed to talk about any of that stuff, but it's very exciting. All the news is very exciting. And it's tough because you as an author, it's almost like being a mouthpiece of an organization. You could never tell people how the sausage is actually made, but it's very, very cool. And I've really enjoyed it. And part of it is actually getting to share it with a lot of my IT guys that have had years and years of decades of boring conversations, and I'm having a little bit of a different thing to talk about, which is fun. And are you working on another one? Yeah, they bought three books, so I've got to write two more. Okay, all right. Well, get back to your laptop. Well, Tal, it was so much fun having you on the show. I love being back. Thanks for having me. And again, welcome to Ignite. So excited to have you guys here and hopefully we'll do this again next year. I hope so too. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. This has been day one of Microsoft Ignite and theCUBE's live coverage. We will come back tomorrow with a whole lot more, so stay tuned.