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[Michelle] We're seeing a lot of great traction in the market for HPE ProLiant for
Microsoft Azure stack what I wanted to do today is talk with Claude Lorenson
about what is Azure Stack, how is it different from Azure and what traction
are you seeing in the market. [Claude] That's great well Azure Stack is essentially an
extension of Azure and your data centers. It uses the same API, the same portal, the
same billing system as Azure but it bring a set of ayahs and pass services
from Azure in your own data center. It's a very elegant concept it brings the
cloud to your on-premises environment for scenarios that are needed where for
example you have latency issues or regulation issues and the traction has
been very very good so we're very happy with the momentum we're having. We're
having lots of success at first with service providers and now we're seeing
more and more enterprise adopting and we're starting to win very big deals for Azure Stack.
[Michelle] So when I talk to customers the conversation always drives towards
use cases so cloud from a Microsoft perspective what are some of the key use
cases that you guys position Azure stack for?
[Claude] That's a really good question,
and that's one of the driver of course for the product so the use cases we've
seen are really divided in three areas the edge and disconnected scenarios are
sometimes called a submarine scenario. So think of aggregating data locally and
later using Azure for further processing so this is a scenario very popular in
manufacturing. Think of oil and gas. Think of a manufacturing line where there's
latency issue and you cannot be connected to the cloud all the time so
Azure Stack provides a very good solution for that. We also see a bunch of
usage in areas where you have regulation. For example, this is a scenario very
popular in a banking industry in local government in healthcare so if you need
data locally that cannot cross a border because you your data by regulation has
to be in country or you have to be on premises
for some regulatory issues that's quite prevalent for example in banking in
health care. Azure Stack provides the cloud application
on your own premises so that's another scenario that we see and it's quite
popular like I said in banking government and healthcare. A third
scenario is modernizing your application for legacy investment for example
if you have a lot of application running on a mainframe and you want to start
modernizing with modern paths and IaaS services Azure Stack fills the gap
where you can start developing your application and when you're ready to go
you have the freedom to deploy them either in the cloud the public cloud or
on-premise if that makes sense. So, Azure Stack is being used in that scenario quite a lot
we see that in a lot of pharmaceutical companies.
In general, these scenarios will fit within one of these three big buckets and now
that we've expanded the geography where Azure Stack is available to over
80 some countries I'm sure we're going to start seeing very different use cases
because of remote location and things like that but essentially the three use
case I've talked about our the main one. [Michelle] Okay great and I know - from an Internet
of Things perspective we're hearing a loT of use cases coming from customers
around that as well and that's a big driver of food future product capacity
and capability and product features for Azure Stack.
[Michelle] I know you mentioned traction a little bit.
Can you talk a little bit more about the types
of customers you're seeing adopting Azure Stack?
[Claude] Yeah so we are really happy with momentum we're seeing with Azure Stack.
We're doing very well with HPE.
In the beginning when we went to market many of the adopters were service
providers because we had a lot of program to help them be early adopters.
There's was a huge spike of demand from service provider and now the the main
drivers is actually enterprises. Enterprise that are using Azure they're
seeing Azure Stack as a way to extend their use of Azure and use case that
they can't use the public cloud and we're gaining big big deal which
really helps the credibility of the product and it helps generate more word
of mouth demand for Azure Stack where the first year has been very, very good
for us the product capabilities that gos that we're serving and the strengths
we're having with HPE for example in many of the verticals is really boding well
for the future it's a something that we're very, very bullish about.
[Michelle] That's great. Thanks for joining me today, Claude, I appreciate it.
[Claude] Great, thank you.