 Hi and welcome everyone to an Azure video from our Azure Stack Hub partner solution video series. Again, I'm joined today by Tiberio Radu from the Azure Stack or Intelligent Edge team, and he brought a very special guest today. So Tiberio, who I'm going to speak to today. Hello, Thomas. Hello, everyone. As we've seen throughout the series, we have with Azure Stack Hub, we have a number of partners starting with CSPs and that offer less complex services. So like hosting services, all the way to more complex offerings, including managed service providers and CSPs that actually partner with ISDs to deliver a full blown solution to their customers. Today, we're going to meet with Dino Bordonaro from Bordonaro IT. He is one of our MVPs and he leads a team that offers a range of services to their customers. We've already met them in a previous video with K-Park, but today we wanted to go deeper into what they offer and the types of services that they offer, because these range from less complex services, like having a hosted environment, a co-located environment, all the way to providing managed services to their customers and creating these solutions on top of Azure Stack Hub. They are also one of our Azure Stack insiders, meaning that they deploy the updates as soon as they come out, and they validate these updates for the rest of our partners and customers. As well as Dino has built this center of excellence where we are able to validate solutions and we're able to have ISDs and partners actually validate their solution so that they can build these POCs and demos and whatever is needed for customers to realize how their solution could actually look like. I'll let Dino go deeper into details on this. I'm sure you guys all have a great talk. That sounds great. I met Dino very early on in the process, so I'm sure it's definitely going to be an interesting talk we're going to have. Welcome Dino. It's great to have you on the show. We know each other from many, many early projects with Azure Stack, Azure Stack Hub and the MVP Summit, and a lot of different projects as well as community activities. But for those who don't know you, can you introduce yourself and your company a little bit? Hello Thomas. Thank you for having me here. Hello everyone. My name is Dino Bordonaro, owner of Bordonaro IT in Germany and early adopter of Microsoft Azure Stack. Now these days called Hub. I'm very proud to be part of the SI program and one of the first round of five partners or the preferred SI on Azure Stack Hub and working with my team 24-7 for customers around the globe, operating and providing managed services for Azure Stack Hub and around Azure Stack Hub. That's basically I'm located in Spire, which is 100 kilometers away from Frankfurt just to have a regional location. My specialty with the company is just Azure Stack Hub from 1st January this year. We focused on this only product and with the Azure hyper part around it and got rid of everything we did before. Right now, we are on a very fast track on transforming our data center, which we also run for customers. Directly to Azure Stack Hub for this, we also own three Azure Stacks in our data center. Right now, we are since a couple of months on the track of lifting and shifting our Hyper-V workloads to Azure Stack Hub and future. Then I hope at latest two months, we are at Azure Stack Hub only in our company. That sounds pretty exciting. I see you do a lot of different work around not just Azure Stack Hub, but also Azure Hybrid, right? You do a lot of also consulting and managing and operations. Can you explain a little bit more on what you're doing for these different customers and who your different customers are? It depends. From one customer perspective, basically we do the consulting, which is in very early stage when they try to find a solution on the edge. We come in because they heard Azure Stack Hub could fit. We are brought in from the OEMs or from Microsoft side and help the customer find the best solution for his needs. This is the basic consultancy piece of the product. Then we do also the installation for some OEMs as well as the operator as a service. If a customer just want to have an on-premises cloud platform, they just have us on their side to operate the operator as a service. They can just use the cloud, but they don't have to build and run the cloud. We take care about this and this is what we focus on and what we are really good in. The cool thing is as Azure Stack Hub is a cloud platform with all the RBAC system that public Azure also has as well as the control system like Azure Monitor and all around it. It's very cool to be operator on Azure Stack Hub platform because normally you don't even have the chance to touch or get into a customer tenant workspace and get access to the data, at least until the customer opens the subscription gives you rights like in public Azure. It's very cool on Azure Stack Hub to give away the operator role but in a secure way so that everyone knows, we can only access the operator role features like the admin portal and patch an update and do all these things around it, but at no point of time we can access tenant workloads which would be a security breach in most cases. Azure Stack Hub is perfect for us to be the platform of the customer's choice and then we just run it for the customer, monitor it, operate it, extend it, whatever the customer wants. We take away the pain from infrastructure and the customer just uses the cloud compared with the OEM builds the bus, we drive and maintain the bus and the customer just needs to put people in the bus. That is actually a pretty cool explanation of how you do your services and which parts you're taking care of and how you're supporting the OEM as well as the customers. I also know that you do a lot of things on hybrid, right? You're not just using Azure Stack Hub as isolated system, you also help your customers using hybrid services and bringing Azure services in. 100 percent correct. We need to find out what the customer from a secure perspective can use. We also have the hybrid journey for some customers, we also have tenant workloads with Azure Apache and update management, with log analytics, with change tracking and all these features. If the customer is allowed to use it in a public cloud, we are happy to use it because I think it's the best of this cloud journey to have the on-premises cloud and attach it with real cool cloud service from public Azure. This is the one part and the other part is at the end that the customer is brainless for him because even if the disk breaks, the memory module breaks, whatever, we also take the communication to the OEM and coordinate the service technician that comes on site. Then we have to do our work as an operator to, for example, drain a node and shut it down so that the technician can take the server out from a hardware perspective, change the broken part, put it in, we retest the platform, do our test Azure Stack stuff, document the whole stuff and then give the customer from an ITIL perspective the summary of what happened. And in most cases, that's the only time the customer hears of us. First time we tell him something is broken and then we tell him it's fixed again. And if everything went fine, which is most of the cases, then he didn't even feel the impact. So that's perfectly for both sides. We have on our end, recurring money with managed services and the customer just have to trust in us, focus with their people on providing services on the platform and just use it. Okay, that is actually pretty cool. I love how you are taking care of like abstracting the Azure Stack operating model, if you will, and the task and Azure Stack operator needs to do from the customer and for the customer and then the customer can just use it as another cloud platform, right? So if we look at the customer who actually like extending their hyper journey there, like using Azure and they're using Azure Stack Hub, what are kind of like the reasons for our customers to leverage Azure Stack Hub and why do they want Azure Stack Hub? So most of the time it's data sovereignty. Customers want to keep the data or must keep the data in their building or even their data center. It's sometimes even from a product standpoint, they have a, as an ISV, they have a certified solution and part of the certified solution is to run it in the certified data center themselves and they just choose the platform and we take the best of both worlds. So we take what we can from public cloud combined with the private cloud, but at a lot of cases now in these days, like IoT for example, latency matters. So if you have a production plan and you're really counting productions like it's in nanoseconds or milliseconds, you don't have the time to transfer the data to cloud process it and then bring the data back. So because for example, machine is moving at this time or some products are made. So for this case, it's very important to have data processed on site in a very fast way. So imagine you're on a Formula One team for example, it's a, I know Azure Stack Hub is not running there, but just as a comparison, when the car drives with 300 or 350 miles per hour or kilometers per hour, they need to have the data. In this second, they look on the screen or not one or two seconds later because if they decided wrong, they break the whole engine and the car breaks down and this is how I see it. So for data, sovereignty, compliance and for latency, most people choose Azure Stack Hub and the cool thing about this is when they choose this track on premises and combine it with Azure, they even have the doors open for some service like their websites or uncritical services to even run them on Azure, but from a process standpoint in the background, like they define their services and their incidents and their change requests, they can run it completely as one. So running or installing a software from a CSD pipeline in Azure Stack Hub as well as Azure most of the time just targets different APIs, but it's just a different connection JSON file that you use but the deployment process itself, it's the same, it's unified. So it's very easy for one cloud team and the customer to run public cloud and Azure Stack Hub with the same set of people in the same teams and all hyperconverged and software defined which makes it much easier to work as a team instead of as silos like firewall storage, whatever and that makes it very agile and fast to work with these cloud technologies and processes compared to the earlier days, standard hardware silo thing of doing a business. Yeah, these are some great use cases. I love how you address these different things like data sovereignty, latency issues but also modernization of applications, right? To actually give people that cloud platform that consistency with public Azure so they can just use it at itself but also combine it with a hybrid cloud environment. Now, what is very interesting and I wanna know more about is the COE. So TB mentioned in the beginning that you're part of the COE. Can you tell me and our viewers a little bit more about it and what it is and how you're part of that? So the COE is a brainchild of TB of Kenny Law from the EMC and me and it was about, let's say it like this, we see projects where there could be a better result if the people would choose the right hardware or the right tooling or right technologies and we thought we can do it better but to prove this, we needed to have the hardware on premises like in our data center and then go to the customer and say, okay here's the perfect platform. It's the latest, greatest, the best you can get for money and this is what we wanna give you as a POC as a proof of concept platform to put your workloads on and then we can do benchmarking, testing and whatever and decide which size fits for you. So we take the approach from this is all we have but maybe this is more than you need and we have the customer decide what you need. So just from a standpoint better have the power and then find out you don't need that much then you try to test something and you think, oh no, the platform doesn't fit because it doesn't have the power to run my workloads just because you're testing on let's say on a hybrid low setup of an OEM and for the people who don't know it for Azure Stack, we have this hybrid setup. Hybrid is not from the connection mode. Hybrid is spinning, rotating disks combined with NVMEs or SSDs as a performance booster compared to all flash which by name is just flash storage and it's much faster from a latency perspective as well as from the IOPS that come out of the system. So at the end of the day we have all flash systems there and a large configuration powered by Dell Technologies who also made this happen together with Kenny and his teams as well as in Germany and in the USA and we're very proud to run today one of the eight node all flash large configurations in our data center which is publicly connected for a use case in a customer direction so the customer can come to us get a subscription to approve of concept but also from a validation as a service perspective imagine you're a software vendor and you want to bring your solution to Azure Stack and you have no idea so you get someone from a consultancy site like me or my team to help you on a fast track program let's say like this to bring your workloads in an ARM world to automate deployments as well as test them with the goal to bring them to the Azure Stack marketplace or Azure Stack marketplace to get a certified ISV solution so I just mentioned we are SI partner, program partner or prefab partner, SI program that's also an ISV program for the software partners and this is the right choice if they want to bring their solution certified to the marketplace and then customers just can go to the Azure Stack I've been told to say add from Azure they see all these cool solutions in there and can just edit and the customers can use it and that's what the COE is about we just want to show what is the maximum that is possible combined with cool people who burn for the hardware and the system and we have Microsoft in the boat we have Dell in the boat as well as us on the boat and we can give the customer or the ISV the best experience and helping hands to certify their solutions and help them get issues fixed and even bring issues to engineering and help them if there's some need on the networking layer for example or storage or whatever and can bring all the pieces together to make it happen Yeah that is actually pretty cool I mean I remember that from doing many many Azure Stack Hub POCs and working with customers that it's good to have like an overview about what you actually can do with it hardware side but also software side and there's one more thing and I always wanted to say the sentence even though I'm not Steve Jobs we are bringing it further so we are just in the part of integrating third parties so we bring cloud a third for example even to the COE and show the customer with their hybrid platform how billing can be handled and how our service catalog can be added to provision service in a workflow perspective like from I tell you want to change then you get an email to responsible person they have to acknowledge for the new VM and we can make this whole workflow thing as well as billing visible to the customer but as well Dell EMC or Dell Technologies is adding their backup product so we now get an IZLON even in there with the custom resource provider which is added to Azure Stack and customers can consume an Azure Stack Hub backup with network backup which is a super cool new product brought to Azure Stack Hub from Dell Technologies so that the customer can use it like in a way from Azure backup they just go to the port and say add backup from the side panel of the menu and then choose I want to backup subscription by tags by VMs and then just click together the backup plans and he submit and the backup is done nothing it's complete brainless like on public Azure but brought by Dell Technologies to Azure Stack Hub and this is what I love to have these third parties now coming together and help us build a full powered solution even with an ecosystem around it and not a standalone Azure Stack Hub which is just sitting there alone. It's great to see all these partners coming together and bring all their knowledge together to build that solution for our customers. Now, thank you very much for that interview so Dino, if people want to know more about you and your company and your services you're offering where can they find more about you? They can just visit our homepage www.bordonaro-it.com they can find us under Azure Stack Alliance when they Google for it or Azure Stack-Alliance.com which is our partnership with Tech Networks our Azure Stack Hub Day 1 partner which we provide these services for Azure Stack Hub operators and tenant workloads so we have together a network operation center and as well as very soon starting my blog which is dino.blog and also on Twitter, on LinkedIn and everywhere else I guess my handle is always at dino underscore-bordonaro just find me, click me I'm always happy to help and chat to people and help making cool projects happen. Awesome, so if you want to know more about Dino check out the links in the description of this video we put all for you together with that I want to say thank you Dino, thank you TB and thank you for all who are watching this video and hopefully see you in the next one. Bye bye. Thank you Thomas for having me here, thank you TB. Take care, bye.