(upbeat music)
>> Narrator: Live!
From Orlando, Florida,
it's theCUBE!
Covering Microsoft Ignite.
Brought to you by Cohesity.
>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage
of Microsoft Ignite, I'm your host Rebecca Knight,
co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman.
We are joined by Frank Artale,
the Managing partner at Prime Foray,
thank you so much for coming on theCUBE Frank.
>> Glad to be here.
>> So before the cameras were rolling,
we were talking about the energy of this place,
you've been to many, many an Ignite,
way back before it was even called Ignite.
>> Oh yeah!
Yes, this is,
Ignite is the evolution of something
that Microsoft used to call TechEd.
So it was like back in, when I was in Microsoft,
so even back in the '90s, we had to figure out
a way to educate the technical community,
and we decided to start this thing,
and interestingly enough,
the first one ever was here in O\rlando,
much smaller venue, I think at The Swan and the Dolphin,
but I've been coming to them on and off,
you know for the past, 26 years or so.
>> So tell us a little bit about what you're doing now
at Prime Foray, what is Prime Foray?
>> So we're a boutique and advisory consulting company,
and we do work with what I call ISVs,
so basically someone that makes software,
but we engage with folks who are at some point
on a journey to cloud, and that means
both from a business and technical perspective.
Whether they're just getting started,
thinking about moving products,
that maybe they had it from on premises,
onto a cloud platform, or maybe they're well on their way
and they're really looking to just like
amplify and accelerate that.
That's where a team of people that'll have experience
from product, business development, sales and marketing,
to really get those companies to the place
that they want to be, relative to cloud,
because as we know, cloud is still the future,
and everyone wants to get there.
>> All right, so Frank, bring us inside.
Without giving away state secrets,
dealing with Microsoft today is very different
from the company that we grew up with,
of Windows and Office.
So what's it like working with Microsoft?
Give a little bit of you know,
where some of the key enablers are.
>> Yeah, yeah so in the early days,
if you think about it right,
Microsoft is always great with evangelizing
to an independent software vendor,
around building to the platform.
So back in the day,
so much of the Microsoft actual market cap,
was dependent upon the ISVs building to the APIs.
And the APIs were the sort of the lock,
right, until the ISVs were locked.
But there never was a really, let's say
a great channel program for someone that was an ISV.
The channel programs are largely structured
for people that sold stuff.
And so what you're really seeing now for the first time,
and this is not exclusive to Microsoft,
with other cloud partners.
But of course since we're at a Microsoft show,
we can highlight some of the things
that Microsoft is doing here,
it really is creating super incentives for ISVs
to come to the platform,
such that the ISVs feel like they are selling side by side,
side by side with Microsoft.
There are some great incentives around that,
they provide some great access to technology and tools,
really great credits to get onto the platform,
and so they focus as much on the business,
like they always put more on the business now,
than on the access to the technology,
to the extent that it can work side by side
with a company in building their business,
well the folks that are the business owners
really like that.
The tech guys always like bits and bytes
wherever they can go.
>> So, describe how the partnership works.
I mean what is, as you are now holding hands with companies
that are going through a digital transformation,
and some working closely with Microsoft,
some may be just on the fringes of working
with Microsoft, describe how the partnership is working.
>> Yeah, so well, I would call it,
I'd like to say that it's really in someways
an evolution of the way Microsoft started working
with ISVs, a number of years ago,
and so at the core, the way Microsoft thinks about them,
thinks about the ISVs is really, you know,
an extension of their own product line.
Right, so a platform is only as good
as the things that, that stand atop it, right?
And so, if Azure is a platform,
or Business Apps is a platform,
or Modern Workplace is a platform,
you need applications that sit atop those things.
And, one of I think the, one of the key things
that Microsoft has done,
has really enabled the ISVs to become connected
with the Microsoft Sales Organization,
without having intermediaries.
So when, like in a lot of ways,
when you're an ISV and you go work with
a larger company that you want to have a partnership with,
you have to find somebody that knows somebody
that's the Account Manager for some large account.
What Microsoft has done is they've automated that,
once you've passed through a series of hurdles
and certifications, you can actually enter
into a program where you're opening leads
into Microsoft and you get, and that partner,
gets connected with the Microsoft Sales Team
on the other side.
So whenever I talk to people
about things that they're doing,
that's what I think the ISVs are most proud of.
You'll hear them say things like,
well, we are in X amount of accounts together
with Microsoft.
And, you know we're going,
and from a business perspective,
why ever enter into a partnership,
if you were not going to just, to sell stuff?
Again, you can do bits and bytes all day,
it's a lot of fun for people like me,
but at the end of the day,
revenue has to come out the other side.
And I think from a partner perspective,
they've done a better than good job at that.
>> All right. So Frank, when you look back
to when you were inside Microsoft,
give a little bit about how the roles have been changing
as we've gone into this world of cloud and AI.
>> Right, how the world has changed?
>> And the roles inside of Microsoft, specifically,
to, you know, fit the world.
>> Right right.
So when I was there, you know long ago,
obviously it was a much smaller place,
and you actually had, you know inside the house,
you had product development,
and you know, outside the house,
you had channel development,
and then you had, then you had direct sales,
and you also OEM sales which was,
which actually is a very very big piece to the puzzle.
But, the linkage, right, between sales and channel,
wasn't really there back then.
And sometimes, like even the role
that I had in program management, at times we had to be,
we had to be glue for that.
I think what, you know, in a sense now
with the roles have changed is such a way,
that you have, you have people,
you know inside the house now that are really responsible
for not just ensuring that a partner feels good
about what they're doing,
but that the partners are actually selling
side-by-side with folks in the field.
And that would've been, you know, an impossible thing,
really impossible thing to do at the time.
And so the other thing that's,
I think that's really changed,
is now that you have, you have an overlay sales
organization, called Worldwide Commercial,
and also a direct sales organization.
So direct sales organization,
are people that carry the bag
and have quota right on the accounts.
But then, you have another organization,
that looks after the 500 largest accounts,
and there are a lot of specialists in that organization,
that by definition work with partners
to move both the Microsoft products
and the partner's products together in there.
And so those are large organizations
that plain and simply just didn't exist,
and they may have not even made sense at the time,
'cause at the time a lot of what we were doing in the '90s
we were still distributed computing,
with still really a technical curiosity,
and then it became trusted infrastructure.
And it's really only in the last few years
that cloud computing has moved beyond that,
from being a technical curiosity,
to trusted infrastructure.
And the way it's taken to market,
is so much different,
because we took finished goods to market,
we relied on people to carry boxes of stuff,
we relied on people to do inventory.
There's no more inventory, I mean it's just there,
you turn it on and you go.
So I think what you'll see also from again,
from where the commerce engines are setup,
and the kind of people that are deployed,
are really being tooled for that kind of a
go to market, which is significantly different.
>> So we're really just scratching the surface
when it comes to cloud.
As you said so many of these companies
are only at the beginning of their journeys.
What do you think the future holds,
in terms of trends in the marketplace
and what companies are going to continue to want.
And are there any blind spots,
that you, as someone who's being at this industry
for 36 years, sort of know are there?
>> Right, so like today was an interesting one,
to see ARC announced.
And you know, it shows the natural evolution
of the way that we think about a platform.
So, if we go back to even like the late 80s right,
we had to build servers, right?
So you got a network operating system,
and there was a set of network adapters,
and a set of hardware it worked on,
and you had to pay a systems integrator,
to go put it all together,
and then you kind of hope it worked.
Well then we got this stuff call plug-and-play,
in the early 90s, and it flattened the playing field,
and you can take an operating system like Windows NT
the one that I worked on,
and as long as it'd adhere to a plug-and-play standard,
it generally worked on that platform.
But the operating system then grew,
to become a collection of services.
It was a file server, it was an identity server,
eventually, things like transaction processing,
networking was always in there.
Now if you look at what something like ARC,
or any of the services that are available
on other clouds,
they're really services on which applications are built.
So now it's just natural to see that these services
like from the cloud vendors,
are being taken on to other cloud infrastructures.
So today, we are here at Microsoft,
you see ARC which is a set of Azure services,
which are being made available and useful
on other platforms like on-premises, as an example.
To me that's no surprise, for Microsoft,
they kind of led the way with that,
with their IOT technology.
How you see Azure services moving onto there.
So now, from an opportunity perspective,
as someone who's building applications,
you can say OK,
I can now go look at services
that are I know will be available on all clouds.
So I have a, let's just say I can, I can snap to that,
and now I can go to my customer
and also talk about a flexible,
you know flexible opportunity about
where and why you might want to deploy.
So more opportunities around that though,
what gets complex, management gets complex,
security gets complex,
we're sounding like the '90s again right,
where whole industries grew up around things like
performance and security, you know, and systems management,
around that.
And so, I think, you know from a,
just strictly from an opportunity perspective,
you know there'll be companies here that see that,
and go take advantage of it to get out in front,
and there'll be ones that are already incumbents,
and hang on for dear life,
saying things have to be different on each cloud,
but I think, as you see companies
that embrace the notion of sets of services
that'll be running across clouds,
those are where really the opportunities will be.
Just like we saw in the '90s,
folks that said hey, I'll run my application on Windows NT,
on any piece of hardware, right?
They didn't tie themselves to
I'll just say like, you know Compaq, or Tandem,
folks that don't exist anymore.
(Rebecca laughs)
Now they've got the folks we have here today.
>> All right, so Frank you know you can't
get through an interview with theCUBE
without getting a question from John Furrier.
>> Frank: Okay, is he on?
>> So John's been watching, and he wants to know,
how's the restaurant scenes doing in Seattle?
>> Okay so, the Seattle restaurant scene's second to none.
Obviously you need cuisine.
Two restaurants that I'm personally involved with,
one is downtown Seattle,
and a one in, one in Bellevue Washington.
Both completely different cuisines,
one heavy on steak, one heavy on plants,
and we like to say, we're up and to the right
on both of those John, so thanks for asking.
>> Great, excellent.
Frank Artale, always a pleasure having you on.
Thanks so much.
>> Great, thank you.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman,
stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage
of Microsoft Ignite.
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