Hi, I'm Sue.
I'm here today with Anand.
Hi Anand, welcome.
Thanks for having me, Sue.
I appreciate it.
So Anand, tell me a little bit about your role
at Workplace from Facebook.
I'm responsible for our ecosystem partnerships
at Workplace from Facebook.
What that effectively means is my team of partner engineers
and partner managers, we work very closely
with technology partners such as yourselves,
so we can deliver better experiences together
for our mutual customers.
Tell me a little bit about Workplace from Facebook.
Workplace from Facebook is an extension
of Facebook's core mission,
which is to give people the power to build community.
We haven't had a chance to do that eight to nine hours
that people spend at work working intensely with colleagues
and that's the problem we trying to solve here,
which is how do we build an experience for people at work
that reflects the reality of who they are
and how they show up at work.
It feels like we have an alignment at a mission level.
Microsoft is about helping organizations
and individuals achieve more.
So tell me a little bit about the partnership.
I know there's a lot of things we're doing.
At the end of the day, it's about serving the customer.
And as customers try to piece together
these various solutions,
it's important that as technology providers,
we come together to help them do that better.
As we look at the customer base,
we're increasingly seeing customers expressing to us
the need to have a single source of truth
and how they manage the users
and manage the security controls.
And so from our perspective,
as we look at helping customers get the value from Workplace
we're experiencing that it's a better outcome for customers
when we put Identity, Security, and the Control Plane
in Azure AD and build the community in Workplace together
so that Workplace inherits User Management
from Azure AD, Groups, Security Controls,
and then that flows into how content
and people experience content inside Workplace.
And that's a large part of the motivation
behind why the partnership
has been incredibly valuable for customers.
You know, you took the words right out of my mouth
by saying that Azure Active Directory is the Control Plane.
We say that a lot, but and we truly mean that,
you know, it's not just for Microsoft,
but it's just simply the Control Plane from Microsoft
and that means that it can extend its capabilities
to protect customers and users of Facebook
so that everyone has that that single Control Plane
as you were saying.
I know at Ignite recently, we talked about the Azure AD
as a preferred identity provider.
Tell me a little bit more how you arrived at that.
If you have the identity store in Azure AD,
how do you provision people from Azure AD into Workplace?
How do you deprovision them when they leave?
How do you establish controls like maybe security policies
through a control session in Azure AD
that then flows in such that when content users
or devices exhibit behavior that are probably
a security risk or signal that the content in there
needs to be managed?
We're able to flow through those policies
as determined by the customer.
One of the things that excites me about this partnership
is it's not just about the transactional things
we can do today, but it's really looking at
what we can do going forward into the future.
I think the last year plus has been about establishing
the baseline helping customers
get these integrated experiences that we talked about.
Now that we've done that and we're starting to put
the engagement models in place
so that better support flows for customers,
I think we jointly have a responsibility
to co-innovate together to serve those customers better.
I think there probably three areas.
The first I think is we can continue
to make the experience better for administrators
who deploy both our products,
whether that makes provisioning
and Single Sign-On much easier.
So whether it's leaning together into standards,
like SCIM and FastFed or FIDO.
I think a lot of opportunities with the work
that you guys are thinking about
and the work that we're thinking about to come together
to solve those customer problems.
So I think that would be area number one.
I think area number two, both our organizations
are investing quite a bit in keeping our customers safe.
You guys invest a ton in AI and ML,
trying to think about building a threat-free world,
we invest a lot in making sure the communities in Workplace
have a positive experience.
And I think by working together,
we can offer that to the customers
that they could not otherwise get
which I think is an example of
where the partnership could truly go deep,
whether that means exchanging risk signals
around user access or other forms of data sharing.
The third area is how could we jointly bring technology
and the experience of community together
for populations inside customer organizations
that have historically probably not have an identity,
had an identity in the organization
maybe because they didn't have an email address,
not have access to modern workplace tools.
But if we could put both our heads together
and think through what it means to serve,
Microsoft calls it the Firstline Worker,
we call it the Frontline Worker,
how do we serve these incredibly impactful people
who are the edges of the organization serving customers,
by bringing them together through our products?
Well, I think the Firstline Worker
is one that's super important to us.
It wasn't until we really started talking to customers
that we started to see more of the scenarios
that we probably wouldn't have seen on our own,
and we've actually designed features based on that.
So now, not only can they do it for things like HR,
but they can do it for like sharing information
between each other for how they do their job.
And that collaboration that you offer in Workplace
really opens up and gives a way for those users
to be more productive.
That sounds like you're taking the controls
and the administration model,
one level down in the organization at the manager level
to empower them to be able to help their people
get access to these tools and products.
Not just for the administration and security
but for actually the productivity of those users as well.
So it really opens up a way for you to get a lot more
from the people you have than
you would if they were working by themselves.
I think the key thing that we've learned is customers
do not buy anything in isolation, not what they have.
They have a tech stack, it's important
that whatever we put in there works better together
with those products so we serve the customer.
On the Identity side it's Azure AD,
on the productivity side it's Office 365,
on the intranet side it's SharePoint.
I mean, there's like obviously, a lot of investments
that customers have put in.
And Workplace acts as one of the better discovery
and engagement surfaces for someone on a mobile device,
to see content sitting someplace else and engage with it,
and go back to where the content is.
So we think of the Newsfeed as a way
for surfacing interesting information as an organization
that you would not have found
and ends up in interesting outcomes
we should totally not only expect.
For example, let's say you have a new person
on the Microsoft partnership next week,
that thing I'm going to tell them is go to Workplace
and go look at the Microsoft partnership group,
you will have content from like five years
or four years or seven years and you will know
the history of the relationship, or anything.
So knowledge, management, giving people context
so they can do their jobs becomes easier.
You know, there's a theme that's webbed across
all of those use cases.
And I'm thinking particularly where you talked
about having the bidirectional communication
and that's inclusion.
Like this ability for conversation and not just be one way,
and an ability for new voices that maybe haven't been heard,
as part of an organization to be able to express
what they like, don't like, ideas and so on.
That's really interesting, I think our cultures
are evolving away from just top-down
this is how we do things, to more of a participative way
for employees to be part of their companies.
Going back to the core of why Facebook is doing Workplace.
The mission is to give people the power to build community,
but it's not an isolation of the realities
of where we see the market going.
I think there are like five big trends
that we see in the marketplace.
Organizations are getting flatter
to your point participative,
there is more remote work happening,
there are five generations at work today,
there's also this move towards people communicating
and expecting the kind of stuff that they experience
in their personal lives,
and so engaging formats are a thing.
There's also fifth one that knowledge is starting to reside
at the edges of the organization.
It could be that somebody serving the customer in the store
has more insights about the pulse of the customer
than somebody who doesn't engage customers on a daily basis.
And how do you surface that information back,
which is to include those folks in the conversation
like it's becoming increasingly
a central part of organizations want to
have a conversation with an employee.
So if you put those five things together,
that's reflective of where the market is going.
And I think as technology organizations,
both Microsoft and Workplace from Facebook,
I think we have an obligation to help further
a workplace where everyone has a voice,
and build technology and product experiences
serve that goal, and I don't think
any organization alone can do this.
Back to our conversation about Frontline
or Firstline workers, we're gonna have to give them
access to technology through some form of identity
that is low friction.
And if people can provision themselves
to access Workplace through Azure AD,
through a phone number,
rather than an email address, that's great.
You've lowered the friction for these,
as you call it the middle managers and store administrators.
It allows for those people to have access to Workplace
and share their learnings, get support
and help from others who run into similar problems
or share customer feedback and hear from the leadership
and engage with them.
I think the joy of a CEO liking a comment that you put in,
and you've never seen the person ever
or feel intimate with a person, it's just like magic
because it's an acknowledgment
that the work you're doing is visible.
That diversity of voice and thought and knowledge
actually leads to better business outcomes.
That's interesting I think as you talk about that,
that notion of the knowledge at the edge,
it's also about putting the provisioning,
it's putting the management at the edge.
Yeah.
Because organizations are much more agile,
and people move more than they did in the past.
And so that ability to be able to make sure that
users are properly administered and managed,
is super important in the world of cloud speed,
as they would say, also for that information
to come in quickly.
You know, you could survey that edge,
but that isn't gonna give you the sort of metabolism
of business that you need to be able to respond quickly
when things change.
For a long time, people didn't think about the problem
and now the goal is to like figure out how to solve it.
The interesting thing that you highlighted is, yes,
we need to solve for the user experience
but at the end of the day,
there's also an administrator in the middle.
You're actually adding to the person's job
by now helping them give these new set of tools
to a population that they didn't have to think about,
which means unless you make that middle step
for the administrator easier,
you're never gonna be able to fulfill the mission,
which is why I'm really excited about
the investments that you guys are making,
on making Identity and Access easier,
low friction, more secure.
And it gives us a chance to actually achieve
the threat-free world.
There you go.
So Anand, I'm a voracious reader.
What would you recommend I put on my reading list?
The one that I have personally found useful
in the last year is investing and thinking about mindfulness
is really easy when talking about inventing the future
to always be in the future and think
about what next, what next, what next.
But ironically, it's really hard to do that
unless you're deeply grounded in understanding the problems
that you're trying to solve
and to do that active listening and mindfulness
has been helpful to me.
So the book that I would recommend to you
is Mindfulness for Beginners by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
I read a book once by Max Strom called,
There Is No App for Happiness.
And one of the things that he says in there
is that we always are living in the future,
or we're just basically never living in the present.
So he says, you're at yoga class,
and you're thinking about what you're gonna have for lunch.
And then you go to lunch,
and you talk about what you did in yoga class.
And I thought, that's a really interesting way of thinking
about how it's so easy to not be here, now.
So I actually made a New Year's resolution
that my 2020 year was going to be "be present".
That's interesting.
It sounds like you're in your mindfulness journey as well.
Tell me more, I'm curious now.
Well, I started meditating about a year and a half ago.
And I find that it is a way to center me
in ways that I hadn't expected.
For example, one of the things I've noticed
is when I'm in a really crowded room,
and a lot of people are talking,
as I've gotten older, I've not been able to
like listen to you and ignore all the other voices.
Since I've been meditating, I can now focus on you
and I can tune out the rest of the noise.
So Anand, I really want to thank you
for taking the time to be here today.
I appreciate it, thanks for having me,
the partnership with Microsoft Azure AD
is really important to us and our customers.
So we're really excited about the work we've done so far,
and the work we look forward to doing together.
Your team has been great.
Thank you, onto the future.
Yes.