>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida,
it's theCUBE!
Covering Microsoft Ignite.
Brought to you by Cohesity.
>> Hello everyone and welcome back
to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite,
I am your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost
Stu Miniman, we are joined by Dave Totten,
he is the CTO US Partner Ecosystem at Microsoft,
thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
>> Of course, absolutely, thank you for having me.
>> So, this is an incredible show, 26,000 people,
we are here at theCUBE, we're in the middle
of the show floor, high energy.
We're going to talk about what you do at Microsoft,
but first I just want your impressions
of this show in particular.
>> It's incredible, I was saying this as I just walked in,
first off, 26,000 people,
I think I shook 10,000 hands already, it's pretty amazing.
I'll say two things, one, the partnerships
and the groups and the companies that are building
on Microsoft technology, just look around this room,
it increasingly gets bigger, they had to take over
two new halls this year, it's incredible.
And the customers that we're getting at this event
are extraordinary now, everything from SMB,
small business accounts, to every single
enterprise company that I can think of
in the strategic 1000 here in the US,
they're here, right now.
And it being a worldwide event, I hear languages,
I hear people introducing each other to,
the energy in this room is just absolutely incredible.
>> Rebecca: The United Nations of Microsoft.
>> It really is, it really is,
and it feels that way when you walk around the room,
for sure, yeah.
>> So you are the chief technology officer
of US Partner Ecosystems, talk a little bit
about what you do at the company.
>> Yeah, so what we're trying to do,
obviously Microsoft being a channel company,
right, we've built services and solutions
through the channel, sold them through the channel
since we started, inception 45 years ago.
So my team helps build that technology practice
and those solutions with our partners.
If you think about how you get access to the best
and brightest engineers at the company,
I'm pleased to say I actually
have a bunch of those that get to work for me,
and so every day we sit down with partners,
we help them think about what technology solutions
they want to create, where we see gaps in the marketplace,
how you make the biggest and best applications possible
on the Microsoft stack,
and then we help take those to market with our partners,
so it's a wonderful experience of working with partners,
both mature and sometimes immature startups, brand new.
>> Well Dave, one of the challenges, the surface area
that Microsoft covers is so much bigger than before,
this is not the company that I used to get a disc
in the mail to get started, you're now in the data center,
of course a strong player in SaaS,
in public cloud, at the edge, in devices,
how do you manage all of those pieces,
and give us a little snapshot,
we feel like we're getting today
at the announcement this week,
really a rethinking of how hybrid should be thought of
today and in the future.
>> Yeah, I'm glad you said that,
it's a really important differentiation there,
because if you think about our stack,
we're a Windows company, I've heard that before,
then we became an Office company,
we're the company that does Office and Xbox,
now we're really a services company,
that's how we want to make sure that we talk to people
about what we do every day,
is we build services applications and the layers
that connect people to their productivity, right?
And so there were a lot of announcements this morning
about Azure, which I think is phenomenal,
Azure touches everything that we do.
Identity, security, monitoring,
it touches everything that we absolutely do,
but we bring that to life with applications
like Microsoft 365 and our productivity tools.
There was a great demo this morning on PowerApps,
PowerApps is something I'm really really partial to,
having grown up a developer and then
lost a lot of my technical skills, right,
I don't get to code anymore.
Something like power platform and leveraging
all of the bots that we now have to democratize
development work and make sure that the citizen developer
can build really cool applications on our technology stack
as part of that, I will say,
everything for a while there moved the pendulum
to Azure, because it was this huge market opportunity
and there's lots of services out there,
and being that we're a really secure,
trusted enterprise relationship partner,
a lot of people wanted to build applications
and services on Azure.
There's still a gigantic market opportunity
within Microsoft 365, productivity,
what we're doing with exchange migrations is still
a huge part of our business,
and then PowerApps and Dynamics 365,
the ease of implementation and integration
across all your applications leveraging Dynamics 365,
at equal opportunity.
>> So Dave, you actually, I want to tease a part,
you said a word, services, because Microsoft is still,
it's a software company but it's more about the platforms
that Microsoft delivers, 'cause one of the big challenges
for users out there is there's just too many choices,
there's no way anybody can listen through
all of the announcements this week
and say "Oh okay, I'm up to speed on everything,
"and I know what's going to work for my company."
In many ways it is the integration partners,
the SIs, the MSPs, the channel partners,
they're going to help pull those together,
so how do you make sure that you have
comprehensive offerings that people can consume easier,
rather 'cause we think that's one of the challenges,
where at a certain inflection point with cloud,
is remember, cloud was supposed to be cheap and easy,
and it's neither of those things.
So how do we make sure that in today's day and age,
where do they turn to to be able
to move their business forward,
not spend hours and hours and months and years
trying to figure out what the latest thing is,
when by the time I start doing it the next thing's out?
>> Yeah, well if you read a lot of the publications,
it's like cloud is everywhere.
The cloud adoption rate is actually fairly low
across US and international business rates,
and there's several reasons for that, right,
there's some trust issues there,
there's some, I've got some on-premise applications
that I need to make sure that I migrate over.
We launched today, Arc, which is about really connecting
all sorts of data services.
Wherever your data center is, we'll come meet you.
And I think that's a really nice platform story
for Microsoft to tell, we've always been a customer
and partner first experience,
so now we're going to meet you where you are.
Wherever you are you have the ability
to manage, control, secure your IT environments,
if you're on-premise, if you're with another cloud provider,
if you're in a co-location data center,
and I think that ability to show
along the journey to the cloud,
and along the journey to digital transformation
where you're at, how are we going to help enable you,
how are we going to make sure that we
protect those endpoints and give you
a consolidated, efficient UI to view through, right?
>> Yeah, actually, so there's Kubernetes inside that Arc
from my understanding, we've been watching this trend
for the last four plus years,
and one of the concerns is, this is the Microsoft
way to do things, Google has the way to do things,
there are lots of Kubernetes options out there
and it's not a magic layer, so there's still work,
how does this become a driver for the ecosystem
to participate, and we don't end up with,
"Well I've got my Microsoft silo,
"my Amazon silo, my Google silo."
>> Yeah, something like Arc
is a great example of that though,
we want to meet the customers where they are,
and we believe our technology stack in the long run,
the different plugins to applications, ISVs,
different service partners, the way customers
want to see their data, we believe it will win out
in the long run, so we're okay integrating our back end
with SAP on Azure for example.
We're okay with this data exchange with Oracle
that we just announced a few months ago.
Last year at this very event,
we were talking about before, the SAP Adobe Microsoft
data exchange program, right?
We are officially an open services company
that we believe you should have management control
and identity across all of your services,
all of your data, and eventually you'll see,
well Microsoft parties and our services,
and the ISVs that are built on our services
will win out in the long run, we really believe that.
I think there's another thing about the Microsoft way,
it's much different now, right,
I mean I can remember still six, seven years ago,
where certain companies, whether it's IBM or Oracle,
or even Red Hat, were enemies to us, right?
Now we embrace those relationships,
and we embrace that data exchange because,
we're all trying to make sure that we optimize
the experience for the customer,
and we think you can do it best
through our shared services environment.
And the final thing I'll say is,
one of my favorite examples is
our number one co-sell scenario
out there with our ISVs is Red Hat.
Now, if we said that when Mr. Balmer was here,
or even five years ago, it was a much different experience
there about Red Hat and how we embraced
open-source technologies.
Red Hat, even something like OpenShift, which is their
container services, we now enable
as a first party through Azure,
so it's okay, you don't have to use our Kubernetes brand,
you can use third party services,
put that on Azure for the most secure,
integrated experience possible.
We absorb and we love, we embrace those relationships,
right, because we think once you get in there,
and you start leveraging the monitoring, security,
identity, provisioning services
that are within our stack, we think you'll start adopting
more and more services from Microsoft.
>> So what's leading this trend,
because I mean it's so interesting
that we're talking about this kind of open-source
approach to everything, and this open brand
in terms of using a little bit of Microsoft here,
a little bit of AWS here, how are,
is it that we're so willing to go for different companies
in our lives as customers, or is it the technology industry
that is pushing us?
>> Yeah, I actually think it's the former,
I think that the technology industry would love to say,
"You're an Amazon person, you're a Microsoft shop,
"you're an open-source shop,"
and Microsoft used to be that way,
in fact you'll still hear some people talk about it,
"Oh, I'm a Microsoft shop, because I have Windows server
on-premise,"
now customers are looking for best-in-breed services,
best-in-breed point solutions.
When I started in Microsoft 15 years ago,
you were a Microsoft customer,
and that meant you bought Windows,
you bought Office, you bought Windows server,
and then when we started launching SQL server,
okay, you went to SQL server.
Now it's a little bit different,
you might use a security ISV solution here,
you might use a data transfer or an identity management
solution here, Microsoft has embraced that proliferation
of purchasing based on point in time solutions, right.
Before, the integration was very tricky, right,
between these applications
or these different service layers.
Now with something like Azure that integrates
across all of these platforms, we're winning,
we're winning that share, because we,
listen, if you have an AWS data lake out there,
we're okay with that, you can secure it,
you can monitor it, you can do analytics on it,
using Microsoft services, right?
And eventually you'll see,
there's probably some cost benefit, there's probably
some integration, and some usability scenarios
out there on why you'd want to migrate that to Azure.
But while you get there, while you're on that journey,
we're going to enable the connected infrastructure across that,
because customers want to buy best-in-breed,
they want to buy what's available, what's easy to consume,
what keeps their data secure,
and so we're going to envelop, we're going to surround
all those technologies with our service layer,
and one by one, right, show that integration
and that true best-in-breed connected experience
that we think Microsoft can provide.
>> Dave, I love that message, and I think it speaks
to one of the reasons you said why the ecosystem is growing.
For those people that can't come to this show,
give us a little bit of a viewpoint,
I mean we don't have an hour to go through
all the option, and I'm sure every partner is your favorite,
whether it be the biggest or the smallest,
but give us around some of the areas that maybe,
you're hearing the most from customers that they're most
interested in, and some of the new areas
that maybe might not have been here in previous years.
>> Yeah, absolutely, I mean where we see success
in the channel, and frankly in the marketplace is,
when we get out of talking about Azure
or Office 365 or Windows, and we talk about
what's the business outcome we're trying to drive, right,
so contract management is a scenario
that every customer needs,
so something like Icertis,
which is a really strong contract management ISV solution
that is embedded and built on Dynamics 365,
is a great example of that, right?
Do you want your contracts
to touch your customer relationship database,
to get extended through Outlook and Exchange,
and then to be able to mark up contracts
with our productivity tools, whether that's Word,
PowerPoint, et cetera.
Contract management is an outcome that all customers need,
we don't have to talk about Azure or Dynamics 365,
we talk about contract management.
So I think Icertis is a really good example
of somebody who's defined a market leading position
for an actual workload, a business outcome
that all customers need to drive, and it just happens
to be pulling through our technology.
Another company, Nintex,
Nintex is right around the corner here,
Nintex does an exceptional job of managing workflow.
Any sort of scenario you need,
are you trying to hire a candidate,
are you trying to process paperwork,
are you trying to run your supply chain
or inventory management?
I could say, "Go out and deploy SharePoint,
"Office 365, go out and build an Azure database
"to go manage your virtual machine to spin up instances."
Instead I can say, "Do you have workflow
"that needs to be managed and connects to your database?"
"Yes," "Okay, then go select Nintex,
"go see what they have to offer,
"they've got 30 plus offers you can take to catalog,"
and customers want those outcomes.
Customers at this day and age are getting less and less,
I guess picky I would say,
about the baseline infrastructure that runs
all the services that they need.
They're really about, what's the application
or the experience that integrates,
that's secure, that is easy to implement
and that does a specific job to make me more efficient,
so I get to spend more time with customers,
I can drive more value.
The fact that 90% of those applications
are powered on Azure, is an okay secret.
That's okay for the channel to exist
with all of these applications and services
that are built on Azure, built on Dynamics 365,
that just happen to pull through business outcomes.
>> And if you're recommending them,
Microsoft is this trusted brand,
and so that's the other part of that, too.
>> Yeah, I think so too, and I think there's groups like,
Cohesity, another great organization out there
that obviously, we spend a lot of time
and infrastructure with, right?
Very driven to business, and what are customers doing.
If you think about the innovation curve that Cohesity has
with their products in the marketplace,
it's another great example of solve a business problem,
find a business problem worth solving,
go out and invest in the IT and infrastructure
to go out and build it, build a marketing
and customer success plan around that.
And the fact that they can develop
and take new solutions to marketplace in Azure,
quicker, more efficiently, with more customer outcomes
focused on that solution stack,
they're using our shared services to build
and have a faster time to market, right?
So it's not even just about the services
that are built on Azure,
it's how Azure and Dynamics 365 and modern workplace 365,
how Microsoft 365, how we can enable partners
to build solutions that solve customers' problems faster.
Right, and more efficient than we ever have in the past.
>> Great, well Dave Totten, thank you so much
for coming on theCUBE,
it was a really interesting conversation.
>> Absolutely a pleasure, thank you for being here,
thank you to all of the sponsors that are out here,
all of the partners that are here to invest in this event,
we appreciate your energy and support.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman,
stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage
of Microsoft Ignite.
(techno music)