 Welcome to a new episode of Azure Unblocked. Today, we're going to talk about the new Microsoft Partner Advanced Specializations for Hybrid Cloud. Here I'm with Lior. He is one of the well-known author from the Azure Arc Jumpstart project. Obviously, I'm happy to have him here to talk about today's Advanced Specializations for our partners in the Hybrid Cloud arena. Welcome Lior, how are you doing? Hey Thomas, it's good to come back. Great to have you. Obviously, Microsoft is really a partner company and we both know that I worked for a partner before and you're working a lot with our partners. Can you tell us a little bit more like how important partners are for the Microsoft ecosystem and how we actually work with them? Yeah. To put it simply, it's without partners we can be successful. Partners are the vessel that takes all our technologies to our customers. Obviously, we are investing a lot with our partners, we have a lot of programs, a lot of incentives, and honestly, it's super fun to work with partners because at the end of the day, they're also trying to be successful with our technology. So really, if you're thinking about the one Microsoft approach, I like the fact that a lot of the time extending that approach to our partners, bringing them along, making sure that they are set for success. So yeah, I really like working with partners. It's awesome. Yeah. No, I completely agree from experience. I mean, obviously, a lot of the great feedback we also get is from our partners. So we learn always a lot when they bring back different information from different customers to us and actually we can then go and improve the products. So what we're actually here to talk about is obviously the certification for partners. There are different ways Microsoft partner can actually show off or show their skills basically for customers and partners to actually see, hey, I actually have skills for that specific topic. And there's also something called the advanced specialization. Can you talk a little bit about this? Yeah, advanced specialization, if you're a Microsoft partner, advanced specialization is something that you want to strive for. Advanced specialization is really the gold standard when it comes to a specific solution area that the partner is specialized on. If we have a lot of solution areas like modern workspace, Azure, data and AI, each one of those solution areas has its own advanced specializations. We have different advanced specializations for different solutions, meaning that you can have advanced specializations for, for example, for our data platforms. We have ones for Azure that are specific, modern workspace, which is a big topic these days, right, with hybrid work. But really advanced specialization is a tailor-made certification that we are producing for our partners. This is basically a set of criterias that they need to go through or achieve in order for them to be on our partner network and have this goal competency when it comes to making sure that customers are aware to their skill sets, their ability to deliver these solutions at the highest level with the deepest tech intensity that is possible. So really advanced specialization, like I said, it's the gold standard. It's really the pinnacle of what a partner can get when it comes to a specific area of solution. Okay, now this is great. And obviously this helps definitely also the customer as well as the partner to actually get recognized for their skills. But why we have you today is actually, we have two exciting new ones for Hybrid Cloud. And obviously, since you're doing a lot of Azure Arc work, can you tell us a little bit more about how, like what do we have? Like we have definitely one on Azure Arc and we have another one for Azure Stack HCI. So can you tell us a little bit more about these two specializations? Correct. And let me show you and we'll talk about what are these advanced specializations? Why did we create those advanced specializations? What was the motivation around that? If you're a partner in our previous Inspire event, our partner annual event, we announced two advanced specializations, like you mentioned. One for Azure Arc in operations and management with Azure Arc. And another one that goes around Azure Stack HCI. And those two advanced specializations really show the focus that we as Microsoft are taking when it comes to our hybrid approach and the hybrid cloud notion. So here I am in the advanced specialization homepage. If I scroll down a bit and we can see those two advanced specialization that we now have in the catalog. What I wanna do with you is maybe show you some of the categories and criterias to become advanced specialized. We'll talk about the standards, the numbers around that. And really what is the motivation around that? So, yeah. Yeah. No, that would be definitely great because I'm sure like people are looking at it and they're like, how do I get this advanced specialization certification? And so happy to have a quick look at that. Yeah. So, you know, Thomas, the Azure Arc Advanced Specialization is the first one that I wanna talk about. That's the one that I'm showing on screen right now. And the Azure Arc Advanced Specialization is unique in the sense that we wanna make sure that the partners that are targeting that advanced specializations are covering all our angles as of today, right? At least all the general availability solutions that we have as part of the overarching Arc umbrella. The data services, the Arc-enabled servers, Arc-enabled Kubernetes, they're all part of that advanced specializations. And what we want is we wanna make sure that these partners will acquire the right skill sets in order for them to actually go by to customers, deploy those services and having those operations and processes and really educate our customers around Azure Arc. Obviously those partners need to meet certain criterias which we're gonna talk about. But the notion of having a partner that is dedicated for hybrid practice and specifically on this one, Azure Arc is a very unique opportunity because of the uniqueness of Azure Arc and because it touches a lot of angles when it comes to our technology sets. Yeah, no, this is absolutely makes sense, especially like I was just thinking about, like if I would be a customer and I'm looking for a partner to help me, I obviously, like Azure is a huge field, right? And if I look just for an Azure partner, that is great, but I actually want an Azure partner maybe for certain specializations, and especially when it comes to hybrid now, I also wanna know that the partner is actually skilled on this and knows, has people who can actually go out and implement this. And I think it's absolutely a great thing to see for the customer that the partner can do this as well as for the partner to actually show that he has the skill or that they have the skill to actually provide this. Correct. And once the partner is achieving that advanced specialization, this is really the bragging rights. He will get into the partner directory, will have this goal competency. And honestly, along the way, they are achieving a lot of skills that they might never thought of because now they're getting into the space. And I really like what you said about the fact that Azure is just huge, right? There is a lot of things in our portfolio, but as you are diving deeper into the hybrid space around Azure Arc and Stack HCI that we're gonna talk about, you're discovering that hybrid by itself is a really interesting and unique space because it touches so many things and so many processes and terminologies and really things that partners never thought of when it comes to their current practices and how they are embedding the Azure Arc, for example, practice inside their current solutions. So it's really interesting. Now, if you're thinking about how do we measure? How do we make sure that these partners actually are eligible for this advanced specialization certification? We have a set of criterias, right? This set of criterias usually assembled from a couple of categories. One is the Azure Attach Revenue or Consumed Revenue. And the second one is the Microsoft certifications that the partner should have as part of him trying to achieve that advanced specializations, right? And the performance sections is what you see here where what we want from our partners that are shooting for Azure Arc advanced specializations is for them to play in all areas of Azure Arc. Again, as of today, the GA services that are part of Azure Arc. So we have numbers around Azure Arc enabled servers. We have numbers around Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes and data services. And the last thing that I would say about this part is really that Azure Arc is very unique in the sense of it touches what we called Attach services, right? Because as you are, and you know that as much as I do as you are onboarding those servers, onboarding those Kubernetes clusters and deploying those data services, it opens a whole new world of Azure to these services, right? And if those services or those resources are, for example, on-premises services or resources, now the fact that you can attach those Azure services to those, it's very interesting. And that's why that's what the advanced specialization is touching on. Oh, that's great. Again, I absolutely see that coming. Like obviously when you deploy a service in Azure, like if it's a virtual machine or if it's a AKS cluster, you actually get all these benefits from our, like let's say just from our management experience, right? From our security tools, all these things we have there. And with Azure Arc, as you just mentioned, we can actually enhance Kubernetes clusters and servers and many other things which are even running outside of Azure and actually showing that off. And what you also just showed me, like what I find interesting, so to actually get that like advanced specialization, I needed to do a couple of things, right? There's also one thing as you just showed me, like there's the knowledge thing. So I always need to show that I have trained people in Azure technology, but I also find it very interesting about the performance piece that even though I've just trained people, I actually need to have something to show that I have done this before, right? It's not that like, okay, I can just train people and here we go. We did never do it. We never did it in production environments without customers. Now the partner actually needs to show that he actually worked with customers already on this and that is kind of like, I feel like that is where the performance sections come in. Yeah, I think that you're touching a very important point because if a partner is looking at advanced specialization, what a partner needs to understand is that we wanna show that level of, we want him to show that level of integrity that he was actually able to deploy our services with our customers at scale, showing that they're successful. And really, once you do that as a partner, the way to advance specialization is golden because customers are the key piece, right? You wanna show that you are able to deploy this with customers and just be successful about that. So yeah, you're right. That's a very important point. So what else do I need to do? Like, so we talked about performance. We talked about knowledge, obviously, where we actually need to have like, individuals certified in Azure technologies. Is there something else on that list? Yeah, every advanced specializations has multiple components and in the knowledge component of our certification, you need your people, you as a partner, you need your architects, your consultants, right? System engineers, you want them to be certified on Azure, right? And currently, what we are asking from our partners when it comes to the Azure Arc advanced specialization is the certifications that you're seeing on screen. So if you're familiar with the Azure world, this certification will not be anything new to you. And most likely, you as an Azure partner, you already have multiple people that are already certified on the Azure platform. And I know that you've been doing a lot of work when it comes to the certification. So I really like how this, you know, really connecting the dots here. I think this is really also, again, great point, absolutely. I mean, this is like, kind of like we do the specific or specializations for partners where we actually like train or make sure that the partners are trained. The certifications also show that the individuals actually are trained and you have certain skills to actually work with Azure and actually show, okay, what you can do. So absolutely great thing to see. And it's also great that like, it's not something you probably need to go out and do already. So if you're already a partner which has like, Azure administrators and Azure solution architects or Azure DevOps engineers, they have already that certification. They need to not go out and now take another exam. They actually just need to show like, okay, how can I work with Azure Arc in terms of like creating that consumption? Exactly, exactly. So there's also another one I wanna quickly have a look at. We talked about the Azure Arc one and maybe we come back to that later, but the other one I wanna talk about is actually also an interesting piece is the Azure Stack HCI, which HCI stands for hyperconverged infrastructure. And it's part of, well, one of our latest additions basically to the Azure Stack portfolio. So can you talk a little bit about more about that one too? Yes, of course. So our mission when it comes to hybrid cloud in Azure and in Microsoft is to understand how customers are using their environments and how do we bring those environments and connecting those into Azure, not just from a network connectivity point of view, but also from how they are designing their applications, what are their edge cases and really how do we bring Azure to them if they need to? And a lot of these customers when it comes to Azure Stack and if you're familiar with the Azure Stack world, and I know you are, but for our viewers, if you're not familiar with the Azure Stack world, it's really about bringing Azure to you. Some customers cannot deploy their applications in our own data centers and they actually need their hardware close to them in their own data centers. And even if it's something that is mobile. So they need that close to them. And this is where Azure Stack HCI specifically with this advanced specialization comes into place. What we wanted to do with this advanced specialization is to make sure that our partners that are in this Azure Stack space also now will start working on Azure Stack HCI and bring that hyperconverge motion into their customers and by doing so start working with us on getting this advanced specializations. It's really about modernizing your own data center by using Azure technologies like Azure Stack HCI in this case. No, again, I absolutely love the Azure Stack portfolio and especially with Azure Stack HCI and Azure Arc combined and we can talk about that in just a bit but it really offers up like for customers who need infrastructure in their own data center but they also need like Azure services and they wanna have that Azure management control plane like combining all this together is definitely a super interesting piece. Now you show me what you need to do for Azure Arc to get that. What does a partner need to do to get that specialization? So the same as Azure Arc, you have those components, right? You have the competency, you have performance knowledge and the audit and on the performance section as you can see we have these ACR requirements that are in front of you and those numbers are very much achievable. We'll, I'm sure we can talk about that but really that advanced specialization and the numbers that you're seeing here, again, we wanna see that the partners are bringing those customers having that HCI deployed running production workloads generating that those workloads in a way that is really truly hybrid, right? You are deploying your application on an Azure Stack environment but it's outside of Azure and that's really what we're asking our partners when it comes to this advanced specialization and on the knowledge piece, again, same certifications and like we said, if you are already an Azure partner most likely you already have people that I train and certified with this type of certifications. No, this is great. And yeah, I see it's basically the same certifications as that before. So I could even be like for both of them I don't need now like this needs free the other one needed five people this can be still the same five people, right? It's not need to be now eight people or something because you also have smaller partners which obviously do not have like hundreds of people but they have the skills and so they can achieve that too. Now, one thing which is really interesting and you quickly mentioned that is these numbers in terms of ACR, Azure Consumers Revenue they're not, they don't seem to be so high like they like usually like when I compare this to others and the numbers are way higher. Can you explain a little bit about like why is that? And also maybe a little bit what is that number actually mean? Is this like this is not something the partner needs to consume, right? This is something the customer needs to consume and do I need to have like especially for the Arc one do I need to have like one customers or can this be multiple customers? Can you just talk a little bit about that? Yeah, of course. And I think it's a good observation like the numbers are actually pretty low and there is a reason behind that. And first of all, I wanna answer your question around is it the partner that's supposed to generate those numbers or the customers? Well, these are the customers that's supposed to generate those numbers, right? The partner is really the vessel to bring our technologies into the customer and by doing so he will eventually be advanced specialized as long as he's meeting those criterias. So I'll go back to the Azure Arc for a second to talk about the numbers that we saw and really what we wanna see is we wanna see these numbers of ACR and ACR is Azure Consumed Revenue. By deploying Azure Arc enabled servers, Kubernetes, data services, you are starting to spin the meters, right? These are Azure services that a customer will pay for and the numbers that you're seeing right here the reason that they're so low is because Azure Arc is what we call an emerging technology. It's a new prospect or a new set of technologies that are inside our hardware portfolio and why the reason that we designed that advanced specialization with these numbers is because we really wanna penetrate the market when it comes to Azure Arc and the fact that this is very much achievable. If you look at these numbers and if you're already familiar with Azure Arc you know that these numbers are one step away. It's not that big of a deal and honestly, if you're a partner this is a good time to take advantage of the fact that these are very much low numbers because it will bring you to that pinnacle certification that I was referring to or that bragging rights situation that I was referring to before and having that advanced specialization. So these are the numbers for Azure Arc that you're seeing right here and the motivation around that. And the same goes for Azure Stack HCI. Azure Stack HCI is a new product inside our hybrid portfolio. And again, for partners that are already familiar with the stock world, partners that already deploy Stack Hab and Stack Edge they're already familiar with the concept and how to approach customers. So the $500 ACR that you're seeing here is really a low number because all you need to do is deploy Azure Stack HCI that hyperconverge infrastructure is starting to generate that consumed revenue. And from that point you're starting to get the ball rolling towards the advanced specialization certification. So that's the motivation around that. It's really about an emerging technology and the fact that we think this is the right bar to enter with. Yeah, no, I agree completely with that. I mean, it's a number where it's not too low that everyone can do it but it's also not so high that like it's like super just you need to have like super huge customers to do it. It really, I think it's a good metric to partners like actually, hey, I have the skills I work with my customers, I approved I did this and with that I earned the specialization for that. So this is absolutely fantastic. And again, if I would be partner I would definitely have a look out because especially as we said also with the knowledge piece most likely I already have people with these certifications so that is awesome. So one thing I wanna talk about by the way while we are having you here and maybe this is also a good chance for another video but it's interesting that we now have this Azure Stack HCI and this Azure Arc advanced specialization at one point because it's also interesting how these two services or products work together. So maybe you can also like talk a little bit about that. What is your experience talking with partners and customers about bringing these even together for different solutions? Yeah, again, it's another great observation because Azure Stack HCI really complement Azure Arc and Azure Arc really complements Azure Stack HCI. When you're deploying Azure Stack HCI environment you already have Azure Arc capabilities embedded inside of it, right? So if you are taking this from the angle of I'm a partner now I'm going by and deploying Azure Stack HCI environment inside my customer data center you already getting some Azure Arc capabilities and really this is the gateway for the second certification which is dedicated for Azure Arc. So those two are complementing one another. If you are focusing, if you're a partner that is focusing on Azure Arc and you wanna start looking at Azure Stack HCI you will find out that a lot of the use cases that we're seeing when it comes to Azure Arc is really about those data sovereignty especially with regards to data services is really about those data sovereign keys and the fact that customers cannot go outside of their data center and really cannot deploy their application inside our own Azure data centers. So that present an opportunity for an HCI environment and architecture and design because really that's what this solution is all about. So that's why I said that those two are complementing one another in certain situations. Yeah, I could not have said it better so absolutely completely agreeing with that. So one last thing I wanna ask you about is like okay we have now these two new advanced specializations for our partners. Does that kind of like show the commitment we are having in these hybrid cloud partners and the investment they're doing? What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, I've said this before and I'll say it again Azure was built with hybrid in mind but before Azure Arc and really before Azure Stack HCI the conversation that we used to have with customers was really around the physical layer of hybrid technologies or a hybrid architecture oriented solution, right? Because we had Azure Stack Hub and Edge and really that was what we were focusing on. The Azure Arc portfolio and the set of technologies and HCI opening an all different world of possibilities when it comes to hybrid architectures. And the reason that I'm bringing this up is because that showed the level of investment and commitment. Again, if you're already familiar with Azure Arc and you already started to look at Azure Stack HCI you understand the innovation around these solutions and the fact that this is really the North Star when it comes to our hybrid story. And this is why it's super important to understand that it's not just the partners that are looking at this it's also we as Microsoft we are investing so much in these technologies that is just amazing and I really wanna see our partners and customers joining that train and having some fun with us. Yeah, no, I agree. And I mean, it's absolutely hybrid and multi-cloud is really critical to most of our customers out there. And so it absolutely is a great, great initiative. So with that, I definitely wanna say thank you, Lior. But before that, I also wanna quickly point out where do we actually partners go now if they're interested in this and you showed these documents where can they find these PDF documents? Yeah, so the best way or the only way to get these PDF documents is to go into the partner network homepage. This is open for all. You don't have to be a partner to download those PDFs. And if you'll go to the, kind of in the middle of the list of Azure Advanced Specialization Certification you will find the Stack HCI and Azure Arc Certification once you click those you will get the same PDFs that I showed. Awesome. Thank you very much, Lior. It was great having you. And for everyone watching, thanks for watching. And I hope you to see you in the next one. Now when everything is recorded. It's okay, awesome. Good, then I'm here. And welcome to another episode of Azure Unblocked. And today we're gonna talk about the new Microsoft Partner Advanced Specialization Certification. It's better than... Specification. Welcome. Welcome to a new episode of Azure Unblocked. And today we're gonna talk about the new... Oh, God. Welcome to a new episode of Azure Unblocked. Today we're gonna talk about the new Microsoft Partner Advanced Specifications for Hybrid Cloud. No, not good. Specializations. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.