(upbeat music)
- Hi everyone,
and thank you for joining us today.
My name is Stephen Richardson.
I work in the high-performance compute
Global Black Belt team based out of London.
I joined Microsoft this year
after working for 20 years in the finance industry.
And I'm really pleased to
have us joined today by Greg Ulepic.
Greg is also a Global Black Belt specializing
in finance, based out of Chicago.
So thanks for joining us today, Greg.
Greg, would you mind talking about
the work of the Global Black Belt team?
- Sure Stephen, and thanks for asking me to join this today.
So the Global Black Belt HPC team has been focused in
on bringing risk workloads to Azure.
Working across banks, in insurance firms.
We've been on this mission for about 24 months,
and it's been very rewarding.
Of course, the last 120 days has
really amplified our work and also
the need for customers we're working with
to bring these workloads to Azure.
Stephen, what types of trends are you seeing in your work?
- So the key industry trends are,
obviously a huge increase in demand for compute.
We're seeing customers want to move
their grids wholesale to the Azure cloud.
And we're also seeing customers
who want to burst into the cloud.
The customers that burst into cloud do that initially
and then usually move their grids in good time.
Customers are also taking the opportunity to accelerate
their modernization of their risk management systems.
We're working with customers
who want to build the native cloud,
born in the cloud risk management systems,
and they're using PaaS technologies to do that.
And the developers love working on the Azure platform.
They're using the Azure Marketplace
as their service catalog,
rapidly prototyping solutions
and delivering and iterating quickly to provide
the best solution to their customers.
So Greg, are you seeing
those trends in the Americas as well?
- Without a doubt, Stephen.
And in fact, it goes beyond Americas;
it's global in nature,
and it comes down to some of
the economic factors in play.
So volatility is a key ingredient.
We saw a VIX over 80 in the US in late April.
We're also seeing low to zero interest rates,
which impacts banks.
And we're also seeing a number of institutions,
both financial- and insurance-based,
who have to consider provisions
or write-offs that they have to take for loans,
both consumer and commercial, that are gonna be delinquent.
And so, what this is doing is just creating a mountain
of computational demand to manage risk
in the business, which is a core function.
And so the requirements are such
that you gotta run your risk workloads more often,
and the business needs the results in less time,
especially on these very volatile days.
And, you know, fundamentally we all started
the year with assumptions
that are pretty much been thrown out the window.
So we're in a new time here,
and we're working very hard
with our customers to help them move faster.
Stephen, as a practitioner of 20 years inside of a bank
and working to bring risk workloads to the cloud,
it's amazing to have your perspective and also to give you
the opportunity to bring that expertise to a broad set,
a global set of customers.
So what are some of the key values of the platform
and capabilities that you're sharing
with customers to help them understand
how we can help them to do more?
- The customers are impressed with
the completeness of the portfolio.
So Microsoft loves Linux, and 40% of
virtual machines running in
the Azure cloud run Linux,
and now it's a first-party product in Microsoft.
Microsoft also loves Windows Server.
Windows Server workloads
in competitor clouds costs as
much as five times what it costs
to run in the Azure cloud
when you combine with Hybrid Benefit.
Windows Server 2008
going end of life is also forcing a lot of people
to consider their options.
On the Azure cloud, they can migrate
their Windows Server 2008 servers to the Azure cloud
and receive three years extra support whilst
they migrate them to a more modern platform.
Customers also love the way
that they can buy capacity on the Azure cloud.
So for those that have known demand,
they can commit to a Reserved Instance
for one to three years,
and that achieves a 40% discount of what
the equivalent capacity would cost them on-premises.
Customers are also bursting,
as we talked about earlier.
So where there's really specific short-term demand,
they're using the opportunity to burst to
the Azure cloud and paying pay-as-you-go prices.
Where there's incredible demand is for the spot pricing.
So spot pricing achieves a 90% discount on
the pay-as-you-go rate.
With the gotcha that Microsoft can take
this capacity back or when
it's needed elsewhere in the Azure cloud.
Cloud and grid workloads
are used to being interrupted.
You know, back in the day
we used to do a lot of cycle-scavenging
on desktops and our servers
where workload was interrupted
and then resumed later.
And so there's a good history
of working in this type of scenario.
And we're working with customers
who are building 100,000 core grids.
On the F series in East US
are industry-leading sizes of grids running
that workload for the 12 hours
and achieving 1 million core minutes.
And they're achieving a very good price of only $10,000
for that type of workload.
- 100% Stephen.
And in fact, you know,
amidst the volatility, and very low interest rates,
and a lot of uncertainty costs.
Cost is a key component to getting
this conversation started.
And we can absolutely help drive out costs
for this type of infrastructure.
And in fact, we just ran a comparative calculation
for a large financial institution
in the United States.
And this was for their XVA calcs.
And on a 30,000-core environment,
which needs about 5 million CPU core hours per month,
we were able to show them
a 70% savings over the internal costs.
And the internal costs
were incredibly competitive as well.
So, at the end of the day, on Azure
this customer could anticipate doing this XVA calc
for a third of what it cost them to do it internally.
So it's critically, critically important to do this
and to show this.
And we will work with customers
to help them model their workloads
as we understand them so they can bring
the case forward to their management.
- So Greg, what should we do,
when customers are ready to take
the next step and engage with us?
- I think the key thing is to know
that there is a specialized team inside
of Microsoft with HPC understanding,
scale-out understanding.
And we've been working with a batch of
about 30 customers globally over
the past six months to help them
get to shorten their path to cloud compute
and also help them expand
and broaden these workloads on Azure.
So the first thing to do is to bring a risk workload
that you know you can prove out
and then get approval to run a production,
cause that's the key path.
Then reach out to your Azure technology strategists,
reach out to your Azure account executive,
and also work with your Azure seller.
They will know how to find
the capabilities and resources on
this Global Black Belt team,
and we will meet you where you're at.
We'll understand your workload, help you profile
the best way to get started;
we'll help you create the paths for orchestrating
and scheduling these very large workloads on Azure.
We'll show you how to do it cost-effectively.
We'll help you understand security requirements
and the hurdles that you need to beat
for the business in order to get it
into production and get CISO approval.
So, we're here to help.
And we've got very specialized resources to do so,
and it's all about helping you shorten
the path to realizing the potential cost savings,
and also the potential to expand the capability,
to understand risk in your business.
So I'd like to thank everybody for
the time you took to listen to Stephen and I today.
And we hope that we've compelled you a little bit
to take a look at what we have to offer
and how we can help enable your business to do more.
(upbeat music)