 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Welcome back every up three days of wall-to-wall coverage of Microsoft Ignite. It is a game day atmosphere on the show floor at the Orange County Civic Center. Thank you so much to Cohesity for hosting the Cube for this fantastic three days. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. Thank you, this is awesome. Well, we talk about the buzz on the floor and the energy on the show. And definitely here, Cohesity always bright and have a lot of activity in the booth. And it's been a lot of fun hanging out here for the week with you, Rebecca, and our host and all of the guests. Yes, absolutely. So this is day three. We are starting our series of interviews, but I want to hear, because you are so in this community. You have a lot of connections, a lot of buddies, a lot of colleagues, former colleagues, current colleagues. What has impressed you about this show and what is missing? Let's start with the positives first. Yeah, and it's interesting, because this is only my second year coming. One of those, you know, my background is networking. I've interacted with Microsoft for most of my career. I would not say I'm deep in the community, but I know enough of the MVPs have friends here and really have learned a lot in these two years. So first of all, the breadth of this show is just so impressive. One of the things you and I have been talking about the last two years here is what is this show? It started out as a Windows admin show. A lot of discussion about Office, you know, migration to Windows 10 was a big thing last year. We haven't heard as much about this year. Yesterday was a big developer day. Of course, Azure sits at the center of everything. Lots of big announcements here felt like, you know, a kind of on par with what we hear at AWS's shows with just so many announcements across the board. But really when you talk about, you know, the applications and business productivity, people come to this show when I talk to people in the booth, I'm looking for solutions and how do I put those together? It's not some of the tech shows where you just, you're constantly down in the speeds and feeds and what they're doing and some of the competitive dynamics. It's I have a problem, my business needs something and this is what I'm looking to solve. And Microsoft has a broad and diverse ecosystem and the word we kept coming back to, the word of the week I think is of course trust. I couldn't agree more with what you've just said. That is what we hear and the other thing about Microsoft is that at a time when big tech is really under a lot of fire, there's a lot of suspicion, policy makers, regulators are bearing down on a lot of the tech CEOs. Microsoft really stands above. And when you think about antitrust, there's major presidential candidates talking about breaking up big tech. Microsoft is really riding above that fray. There's sort of a feeling of deja vu for Microsoft, I'm sure, but they're really been there done that. They're not going there. Yeah, I mean it was Satya Nadella really could put a pointed attack, he did not say it, but we all know it's Google. The company that was do no evil at the start now, everybody's concerned because Google's model is primarily selling ads and while Google will say what they're doing in the enterprise, they just acquired Fitbit and said, you're not going to get ads on your Fitbit. We're not going to leverage that way but there's not that trust built up. And then the number one competitor out there is AWS and if you talk about the ecosystem, the concern at every AWS show is oh my gosh, what announcements are Amazon going to make and are they going to steal my lunch money? If you were or put me out of business for the years worth of work on doing, Microsoft doesn't feel that way. They, if you talk about the ecosystem, I was talking, they made announcements that do compete against a number of the products. RPA was announced as part of the power platform out there. There's a number of RPA companies here. I talked to them. They're Microsoft's the strong partner. We've been doing breakouts. We're talking with them. Yes, they are just like SAP getting into this market but it's a Microsoft shop and it's not, it is new, it's not the best of breed there. They are not concerned that they can still live in this environment and I'd say both AWS and Azure very much about choice and ecosystem and building them out. So you're talking about the marketplace here. So in terms of the marketplace, what is Microsoft doing to drive business and is it effective? Well actually, and I'm glad you saw it, specifically we talk about the marketplace. So there's the ecosystem and then there's actually the marketplace. So AWS has what we really consider, it's the enterprise app store. If I want to go buy software, there's Salesforce and all of their connectors and everyone that uses Salesforce knows that but AWS really has driven a robust ecosystem just like on amazon.com. Most of the products that are sold are from third parties. The AWS marketplace is mostly how I can procure and buy software and they drive a lot of it. So a lot of the AWS adoption is through the marketplace and the ecosystem makes lots of dollars. Reminds me, we used to talk about VMware for years is for every dollar of VMware you bought you would buy $10, $20 worth of third party ecosystem but we were talking about things like storage for AWS it's on procuring software and underneath I'm leveraging the AWS services. While Microsoft Azure has a marketplace, it is not as mature. They don't really push as many people through it. So while I've talked to a number of the partners that are yes, we're part of the marketplace but people buy lots of different ways as opposed to AWS is trying to get everybody from a customer and an ecosystem through it. And part of that is to simplify the environment, how I purchase it, but it's that balance of trust and ease of use out there. So when I look forward, what do I like to see from Azure is how will they mature there? I was actually something John Furrier had us digging into here and the marketplace at Azure definitely is I would say years behind where AWS is there. But Azure great growth doing really well a strong trusted ecosystem, just some areas for improvement that I would look for going forward. But maybe that's part of their approach and their strategy is we'll work with you, we collaborate, we can do this together. Whereas AWS, there is that feeling sometimes when you're at a re-invent as you said, roll out the beer curts early please, my business is over. So comparing the two show, the various cloud shows, and this is not just a cloud show of course, we're going to get into that more. But when you think about re-invent and you think about VMworld, how does the feel and the energy here differ? Yeah, so the thing that always strikes me when I go to an AWS show and I've been to many of them from the regional shows through the big one of re-invent which is more than twice the size of this 26,000 person show, the customers there are always trying new things. They are open and looking for the environment that they can do new things here. What we're talking about here feels like it's like a tweener. We had a lot of conversations about building bridges to where customers are. While AWS is starting to talk hybrid more and meet you in your data center and doing outposts, Microsoft, they have their Windows install base, they have their O365 pieces. So there's a broad spectrum of from the latest and greatest autonomous systems, you want to talk about it. Microsoft has that through, I'm a 20 year CIS admin and I'm going to hold on to my servers as long as I can. They're there for you. So Microsoft does span that gamut and VMware is more once again, making that transition as we go to the cloud. So Microsoft right in the middle of that transition, we talked a bunch about digital transformation with the customers on here. So really it has a lot for a lot of different people. One of the things I've heard is they really ramped up some of the developer activity at this show. They just like GitHub, GitHub has their own show, GitHub Universe next week, which will stay very focused on that environment. But Microsoft also has a conference build and there's been some rumblings that maybe build and ignite, get wrapped together. We saw that with IBM. IBM had lots of different shows and they put all the wood behind Think and made that a massive show. There's pros and cons of that. Seen lots of companies that have taken a big show and put it into a 40 show around the globe. Someone like Amazon has reinvented, but then they have lots of second tier and third tier regional shows to push that out. So lots of different ways to get to customers. And it is interesting. We spent a lot of time talking about Azure Arc. I'll be at the KubeCon Cloud Native Clon show in just two weeks in San Diego and expect that to be talked. And really it is in preview mode. So when I look at it at the end of the day is, you've got Red Hat OpenShift, you have Google Anthos, you have what AWS is doing with Outposts and welcome to the party Microsoft. They have got a strong hybrid solution already because they played at both ends. But really Azure Arc is unifying and pulling those together so that it's not just my data center in Azure, but even AWS they're saying, we'll see how this all plays out. Microsoft definitely has a strong data focus and a strong application focus. And so it would be interesting to see where that adoption happens. I've been saying for a couple of weeks, really Kubernetes just gets baked in everywhere and customers aren't going to have to think about it much. Microsoft definitely strong partner focus just to reinforce something I've said a couple of times this week, they still have a partnership with Red Hat, they still have a partnership with VMware. The Azure Arc is not the only way to get the Kubernetes story and play in your Microsoft environment and Microsoft's done well at that. We all know from the early days, Microsoft living on tops of lots of hardware. Now Microsoft software will live a lot of places. Yes, their cloud is large growing. One of the top two choices out there, but they truly embrace that it will be multi-cloud and be able to live in lots of environments. So I want to talk about something that's more in my wheelhouse and that is productivity. So we have heard a little bit about teams. I mean, there was a lot of announcements. It's not exactly where we focused a lot here on theCUBE this week, but there were some really interesting announcements about the ways in which Microsoft is thinking about human productivity, both individual productivity and team collaboration, the way teams interact and communicate. There are a lot of interesting new characteristics and elements to what they're doing in terms of Cortana, read me my emails. I'm going to send this email, but I'm actually going to wait. It's going to be a scheduled send. It's going to send when the person I'm sending it to is actually at his or her desk. And so those are just some interesting things to me that really speak volumes about how Microsoft views the future of work and views the future of our lives and understanding how much technology has encroached in our lives because they're saying, read me my emails. Why don't I take my dog for a walk? While I am actually doing, while I'm on a run, first thing in the morning, make me more productive, but also give me my time back. And so I think those are some really, really interesting ways in which Microsoft, as I said, understands that technology has taken over and they're trying to give you a bit of your time back. And it's interesting because when I look back, Microsoft has a bit of a checkered history when it comes to some of those environments. We all know the Office suite. Teams is now part of O365 and I hear very strong, the people that use it really do like it. But those of us look back and we said, oh, I used to like using Skype and then Microsoft got ahold of it and oh my gosh, what a horrendous mess. Skype was for a long time. When it talked to collaborative environments, Google really jumped Microsoft with the G Suite and many smaller companies were like, oh, it's relatively easy to use and I can collaborate there. Well, Teams really has gone through and understand that and we talk about a collaborative environment. Microsoft Teams, best of breeds. I attended Enterprise Connect earlier this year and I couldn't hear enough about how much that was going on and strong ecosystem of companies that Microsoft worked with. So it's very strong, but it's kind of if you were a Microsoft shop, you're doing it, but they did lose many companies to free or less expensive or lighter weight options out there and then everything from Slack ate into it. But Microsoft has a good product, absolutely. It just, some of it is the perception and some of it is the pricing. They do a good job of making sure that when you get to college, you want to use some of these environments. Oh yeah, the pricing's great, it's free. But then when you get in the real world, hopefully you'll like it. So Microsoft does a little bit of battle, not something we focus a lot on, but did hear really good things about it and it does get lost a little bit in some of the general discussion about all the other pieces. Autonomous systems, AI and the later stuff of Azure take a little bit of precedence over some of the things that are a little bit more on, just as you said, business productivity or even on the consumer side of the house for Microsoft. So we're wrapping up here, but I want to hear just final thoughts, final predictions for 2020 and you've really gotten, we've covered a lot of ground here this morning, but I'm interested to hear what you think is on tap for Microsoft in 2020. Yeah, so I'll bring back to something we kicked off with, the Jet Ideal coming in here really has that whole process of winning that bid was a fortune function for Microsoft to rapidly mature some of their environment. You talk about security and trust, the government is not going to give that environment to Microsoft if they could not trust them. Back when AWS won a CIA deal, it was like, oh wait, if the security's good enough for the CIA, it's probably good enough for me to consider it. So the government agencies, which historically is not who you think about when you talk about innovation and driving change today, public sector is really interesting. Even when we're talking to some of the people about, hey, how come we haven't heard as much about Azure Stack over the years? Well, it's been a lot of service providers and government agencies that have been deploying this and therefore we'll do it. So Microsoft still has a lot of work to do. The Jedi contract, they still have to get some more security clearances. They need to make sure their performance and reliability is up to snuff because they just can't have outages. If this becomes a greater and greater piece of my overall, how I run my business, I can't say, oops, wait, the internet's down. This is now 2019, going into 2020 and in 2020, we'll all have perfect hindsight. Right about this. Of course, oh yes, indeed. Stu, I'm looking forward to another great day of coverage with you and thank you again to Cohesity for hosting us in this really cool booth. So please stay tuned for more of the Cube's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit.