HPE Discover 2024 | Seamless Azure Virtual Desktop Experience with Microsoft and HPE

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Alan Kerr

Director, Adaptive Cloud Specialist for the Americas

Microsoft

From data centers to manufacturing: The power of Azure hybrid cloud and AI

Enterprise computing innovation has flourished, spanning from artificial intelligence hardware to high-performance computing and advanced analytics.Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. have partnered to foster that same innovation by co-developing enterprise hybrid cloud solutions spanning data centers and manufacturing facilities alike.Microsoft’s Alan Kerr unpacks Azure hybrid cloud.“When we had initiatives like the hybrid cloud, we’re really responding to customer requests,” said Alan Kerr (pictured), Azure hybrid and adaptive cloud specialist and director of AI for the Americas at Microsoft

play_circle_outline Bridging the Cloud: Microsoft Teams Up with HPE and Azure Virtual Desktop Revolutionizes VDI

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Manufacturing: AI, Digital Twins, Edge Computing, Azure Stack, and Customer Success Stories

play_circle_outline Real-time operations and supply chain improvements

play_circle_outline Microsoft's Thriving Culture of Innovation, Excitement, and Customer Focus

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Seamless Azure Virtual Desktop Experience with Microsoft and HPE

Alan Kerr

Director, Adaptive Cloud Specialist for the Americas Microsoft

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone. We are in the homestretch of theCUBE's live, three day coverage of HPE Discover here in the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Sitting alongside, my co-host and co-analyst, co-founder of theCUBE, Dave Vellante. Homestretch, Dave.

>> It's been an amazing spring-

Rebecca Knight

>> It really has....

>> Rebecca. I mean, it feels like it's just getting crazier and crazier. I don't know what the fall's going to be like, but I'm excited to look back on this spring and all the changes in AI and infrastructure and cloud. It's just amazing.

Rebecca Knight

>> And HPE Discover is really the final sprint for-

>> That's right....

Rebecca Knight

>> theCube for the spring. So again-

>> The longest Day of the year.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. So I'd like to welcome to theCUBE Alan Kerr. He's the director, adaptive cloud specialist and AI for the Americas.

Alan Kerr

>> Hey, thanks for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you so much for-

>> Great to see you....

Rebecca Knight

>> coming on the show to see.

Alan Kerr

>> Thanks for having me on.

Rebecca Knight

>> At Microsoft. I hope I said at Microsoft.

Alan Kerr

>> At Microsoft.

Rebecca Knight

>> So why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about Microsoft's partnership with HPE for the hybrid cloud? Start from the beginning.

Alan Kerr

>> So we will start at the beginning. We're going to take one step back and say we've been HP partners for coming up for decades. It is a long time. So when we had initiatives like the hybrid cloud, we're really responding to customer requests. They came and said, "We want all of that chewy goodness that is Azure in our data centers, in our co-location facilities, in our manufacturing facilities," wherever. And so the very first thing we do is we go to our great partners like HPE, get them on speed dial and say, "Here's what we are thinking," because our software runs on hardware. And so why not have some of the best hardware out there co-engineered with Microsoft to deliver to those customers?

>> Microsoft is insane. It's just unbelievable to me how ubiquitous the company is. We do quarterly surveys with our partner ETR. I actually have to take Microsoft sometimes out of the analysis because it skews the data so much. In other words, you do the quadrants and it's so far up to the right, it pushes everything else down. It's just remarkable the progress that this company has made. Starting with the transformation of cloud and now with the AI play that you guys have made, what's it like being a Microsoft person these days? What's the sentiment? What's the cultural vibe? Give us a feel for that.

Alan Kerr

>> So imagine waking up every day and it's just about excitement. I mean, all the new stuff you see, we are doing it. We're actually doing what we're telling customers about every single day. And so when you're in there, it's just this positive vibe of like, "Okay, what's next? I am seeing what we're doing now. What are we going to come up with next?" And then when customers see that, they get excited. And it's about delivering that to wherever that customer needs it.

>> Well, it's funny because the pendulum swing in this industry. You go from mainframe to client server. Swings back to centralization and cloud, and now it's swinging back to the distributed edge. You're positioned for all of it, which is pretty unique in the industry. These waves oftentimes disrupt companies. It's almost like Microsoft is like, "Hey, here's another wave, let's ride it." You like the surfing champ. So what waves are you on now in your world?

Alan Kerr

>> So in my world, which is basically the Azure hybrid world... So I talk to the customers every day about what we're doing sort of on-prem in their locations, whatever that is. The big ones that we are seeing is kind of the, "Deliver that cloud experience anywhere." And in doing that, it's a matter of having sure that... well, making sure that we've got the same tooling, same capabilities, or that kind of stuff. And along with that it's things like, "Hey, you've got these services in Azure, like Azure Virtual Desktop, and we want to do that here. We want to do that." So it's a matter of delivering those kind of things. So every day, the thing I like about it, it's solving use cases for customers. They come to you with a legitimate problem: "I want to improve my manufacturing; I want to be more secure," whatever it is. And we're able to, within our own tool set, solve those problems.

>> How identical is the experience that you just described? Is it, "I don't even know," or are there still kind of nuances? Obviously, security is maybe a little bit different, but can you help the audience understand that delta?

Alan Kerr

>> Well, so this is the great thing about it. It is literally the same tool set. You go to the portal, it's all there, right? The same stuff I manage in Azure, it's the same stuff I manage on-prem. When I'm deploying a workload, whatever that may be, I just decide where to put it. Do I want to put it in the cloud? Do I want to put it? So what we're really giving customers is that ultimate sort of flexibility of being able to, not only decide where a workload goes today of whatever type that workload is, but in the future, if the situation changes or they change their mind, they can move it up to the cloud or move it down to the cloud. Because we have this one contiguous compute platform, this one container platform everywhere, wherever they need it.

>> And of course you're taking that out to the edge?

Alan Kerr

>> All the way out to the edge, the operational edge.

>> So when you think about virtual desktop, I just typically think of regulated industries or sort of controlled environments, government, healthcare, claims processing, things of that nature. Is that still the case? What are the main use cases that you're seeing?

Alan Kerr

>> That's absolutely one of the use cases but what we're finding is that... When we first invented Azure Virtual Desktop, it was really a matter of responding to, once again, like every company we were responding to customer demand. And one of those requests was, "Hey, our current VDI situation is both complex and it's expensive." And so we said, "Well, how about we solve that for you?" So what we did was we lifted the control plane of that, so the gateways and everything else that goes into the controlling and allocation of VDI into the cloud to make it simpler form. So now you can whiz deploy the entire environment in the cloud. Now that gave them access to the workloads and data in the cloud, but like anything 72% of stuff is still outside the cloud. So as part of this working with HPE and hybrid cloud movement, it's being able to... What we did was we took the AVD and then run it on-prem. So you do have those secure environments, but you also have situations whereby I'm in, not a secured environment, but I'm in an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea. And so we need to get access to those applications. And so it's really just a ubiquitous platform to put the VDI wherever that data and application is.

>> So you're putting the VDI on Azure Stack and bringing in Azure Stack HCI with your partner HPE, right?

Alan Kerr

>> Yep, HPE. And then we drop it right next to where that workload is.

Rebecca Knight

>> I would love you to be a little more specific. When you talked about the customers and their pain points and they come to you and they say, "I want to be more secure," or, "I want to get more efficient with my manufacturing," can you walk us through some of your success stories? You don't need to name the names of the companies, but exactly the outcomes that you've helped them achieve.

Alan Kerr

>> So this... We have millions of outcomes every day. I like to talk about the exciting ones like we all do. So we've had a lot of very effective situations in manufacturing. So for manufacturing, for years they had the operational edge managing the machines, and then they had the IT side, which was the traditional IT. And we had a customer very recently, we just closed this global customer in all of their manufacturing, for the first time in their entire history, had security sign off on using Azure Stack in the way we did it, to both link the OT and IT network and use the software defined network and split those in physical networks. But they've never signed off on it before, ever. But because we could bring confidential compute to it, we could bring NIST policies on-prem, they looked at it, their security team, which is the hardest people to get past and said yes for the first time. So it's things like that. It's like we are solving problems that have been there for literally ever, and now they're able to manage it all from the cloud.

>> Interesting. So when you think about the IT, the OT, the manufacturing 4.0, industry 4.0, can you give us a glimpse as to when you're talking to customers about their future, of course, AI comes into it I'm sure as well, but what are customers... Paint a picture of what that future looks like for manufacturing.

Alan Kerr

>> So there's a million ways this goes. Most of it's around modernization because if you go into some of these manufacturing facilities, they're walking around with floppy discs, updating things from 30 years ago.

>> Come on.

Alan Kerr

>> I know, right? Shocker. And so we are working quite often with the industrial manufacturers and their teams to integrate what they're doing in that factory 4.0 type model. So whereby instead of having these physical stuff everywhere, now virtualizing for the first time, but we need to maintain that sort of high availability because the one thing... And the reason this is going to be on-prem, we will be on-prem forever. As we all know, internet goes down some other kind of problem, I don't want my widget maker stopping. And so that's part of it, but they need to modernize because when you go update these locations, it sometimes takes a month to get to all these locations versus I push a button and it just updates it, which is where we're at now with a lot of these things. That, combining with things like metaverse that you've heard, that kind of industrial stuff where we can apply that. AI is another big one. We had a situation where a customer had millions of components that they manufacture whizzing by on a conveyor belt. The system that those used, the AI was determined if there's a problem, they stop it, rewind the conveyor belt for 30 minutes, scrapple that material. With our modern AI system, we're able to narrow that to five minutes. So we're now saving them hundreds of millions of dollars annually in waste in producing that stuff.

>> And I would imagine the supply chain's going to benefit from this. I always use the example, just recently we had some furniture delivered. My wife wasn't home. She said, "Dave, can you be home to get the furniture?" And there was two pieces, of course, only one showed up. This just happened again like two weeks ago. And so my wife, Deb, was complaining, "Why is that? Why are they split the..." The reason is because it's this big asynchronous supply chain thing and it's really complicated. It's a big batch job. So that's going to change, isn't it?

Alan Kerr

>> Absolutely. So we're seeing now that everything's gone essentially real-time. And so whether it's manufacturing, retail, inventory, all those kind of things, everything's real-time. But now you have to have sort of the systems and the capabilities to actually manage that. The number... How many times have we walked into a store and you go to that section where they say, "Oh, we've got this thing," and it's not there? And so we are now seeing AI capabilities in stores to whereby they can know that someone picked up that object, moved it to another shelf in another area, and put that down. And it'll alert an employee that when, "Hey, you're missing this item." The employee can go, "Oh, it's over there," and they can go get it for the customer.

>> So the physical and the digital world's coming together. People talk about digital twins and that's... How far away are we from that world? I mean, this is inside of five years where we're going to make this transformation. I mean, there's a lot of it today, I know, but it's a bell curve, right?

Alan Kerr

>> Yeah. Well, what we've seen, and part of the reason we sort of developed the adaptive cloud from a Microsoft perspective, and we collapsed in our IoT, distributed edge hybrid, all of those things under the one banner is because that was a response to customers. Customers no longer have an OT department. They have an IT department, and the operational side rolls up to that. And the reason for that is that every sensor and machine out there today got smart. And how we define that is that it was able to take software updates, so I could give it more intelligence over time and run other things as well as it had connectivity. So it's no longer just a dumb sensor sitting out there spinning off stuff. I can now manipulate things and run things at the edge, including things like security. But that's the change, is now just IT. Even though it's interfacing into the real world.

>> Security and inferencing now at the edge. And you're not persisting all the data, right?

Alan Kerr

>> Nope.

>> You're just persisting the stuff that matters that you want to analyze.

Alan Kerr

>> Yep.

>> Yeah.

Alan Kerr

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Alan, you're painting a picture that's vivid about what the future holds, and it's very optimistic about how it's making data more secure and conveyor belts more productive and more efficient. What keeps you up at night in terms of all of these different innovations?

Alan Kerr

>> To be perfectly honest, it's getting the customers to do it fast enough. From a security perspective, it's really a matter of getting them to where they need to be faster. That's my biggest concern. There's always limitations, whether it's budgeting, whether it's personnel, you name it. There's always some kind of limitations. And what you really want to do is ensure that we can get those customers on those right path, whether it's automation, whether it's security, whatever that is, as soon as possible so they can then maximize that value, whether it's through protection or through improved operations.

>> So thinking about where you are today, let's put it in the context of your partnership with HPE and AVD, what do you want to be able to say next year that HPE Discover 2025 that you can't say today?

Alan Kerr

>> Excellent question. I want to say that it would be nice if we could get to a point whereby, for example, with our AI stuff, that I've got customers walking up to me and saying, "We did this and this is how much money it saved us." "We did this, this is how much it improved our operations." "We did this and we are now... from a policing standpoint, we have now caught more criminals." Whatever it is, is seeing the fruition of the stuff. It's like anything that you build, you don't know how it's ultimately going to be used by the customer. And the amazing use cases that they come up with... This is kind of incredible. We had a situation where it was a remote area. They had employees go out there to fix things in these remote areas and one of them was attacked by a bear. And so what they wanted to do is have drones do real-time wildlife protection or detection following their employees in these remote areas to alert them to these kinds of situations. And that's a use case that came out of the blue when the situation happened.

>> Fork left, not right; bear to the right.

Rebecca Knight

>> You started this conversation answering a question of Dave's about what's the vibe at Microsoft. Now, what's it like to be a Microsoft person? And I'm curious because you described it as constant excitement. Is that Satya Nadella laying down a culture? Is it coming from... Is it top down? Or is it... How do you maintain that? Because we know that that kind of energy is so critical to maintaining innovation and remaining competitive in this ultra competitive environment.

Alan Kerr

>> It's absolutely top down, but is the idea of one Microsoft. So internally we have this idea of one Microsoft. We're all working towards the same goal. And so anytime you get a phone call about, "I need help," or, "I need this." It's like, yeah, you just do it right? And it's always in the guise of going after and helping customers, so that's... Almost everything is about customers trying to do this. "Hey, what do you think we can do here?" "How can we help them with this?" If you're a problem solver, which I like to think I am, it's that every single day. Someone presents you with a problem, you go, "Oh, we can fix that. We did a similar thing for these other guys." And watching that delight that the customer has gives you energy because now you get excited because when you get into these group meetings with other internal people and they say, "My customer has that problem," I can't wait to go and tell them about what we did, and that generates that excitement. But it is really top down, right? We've got the engineering group producing amazing stuff. We're out there talking about it to customers about what they want to do with it and how we can help them, but it's absolutely top down.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Alan Kerr, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. A great conversation.

Alan Kerr

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Dave Vellante, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover 2024. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech, enterprise tech news, and analysis.

Seamless Azure Virtual Desktop Experience with Microsoft and HPE

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone. We are in the homestretch of theCUBE's live, three day coverage of HPE Discover here in the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Sitting alongside, my co-host and co-analyst, co-founder of theCUBE, Dave Vellante. Homestretch, Dave.

>> It's been an amazing spring-

Rebecca Knight

>> It really has....

>> Rebecca. I mean, it feels like it's just getting crazier and crazier. I don't know what the fall's going to be like, but I'm excited to look back on this spring and all the changes in AI and infrastructure and cloud. It's just amazing.

Rebecca Knight

>> And HPE Discover is really the final sprint for-

>> That's right....

Rebecca Knight

>> theCube for the spring. So again-

>> The longest Day of the year.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. So I'd like to welcome to theCUBE Alan Kerr. He's the director, adaptive cloud specialist and AI for the Americas.

Alan Kerr

>> Hey, thanks for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you so much for-

>> Great to see you....

Rebecca Knight

>> coming on the show to see.

Alan Kerr

>> Thanks for having me on.

Rebecca Knight

>> At Microsoft. I hope I said at Microsoft.

Alan Kerr

>> At Microsoft.

Rebecca Knight

>> So why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about Microsoft's partnership with HPE for the hybrid cloud? Start from the beginning.

Alan Kerr

>> So we will start at the beginning. We're going to take one step back and say we've been HP partners for coming up for decades. It is a long time. So when we had initiatives like the hybrid cloud, we're really responding to customer requests. They came and said, "We want all of that chewy goodness that is Azure in our data centers, in our co-location facilities, in our manufacturing facilities," wherever. And so the very first thing we do is we go to our great partners like HPE, get them on speed dial and say, "Here's what we are thinking," because our software runs on hardware. And so why not have some of the best hardware out there co-engineered with Microsoft to deliver to those customers?

>> Microsoft is insane. It's just unbelievable to me how ubiquitous the company is. We do quarterly surveys with our partner ETR. I actually have to take Microsoft sometimes out of the analysis because it skews the data so much. In other words, you do the quadrants and it's so far up to the right, it pushes everything else down. It's just remarkable the progress that this company has made. Starting with the transformation of cloud and now with the AI play that you guys have made, what's it like being a Microsoft person these days? What's the sentiment? What's the cultural vibe? Give us a feel for that.

Alan Kerr

>> So imagine waking up every day and it's just about excitement. I mean, all the new stuff you see, we are doing it. We're actually doing what we're telling customers about every single day. And so when you're in there, it's just this positive vibe of like, "Okay, what's next? I am seeing what we're doing now. What are we going to come up with next?" And then when customers see that, they get excited. And it's about delivering that to wherever that customer needs it.

>> Well, it's funny because the pendulum swing in this industry. You go from mainframe to client server. Swings back to centralization and cloud, and now it's swinging back to the distributed edge. You're positioned for all of it, which is pretty unique in the industry. These waves oftentimes disrupt companies. It's almost like Microsoft is like, "Hey, here's another wave, let's ride it." You like the surfing champ. So what waves are you on now in your world?

Alan Kerr

>> So in my world, which is basically the Azure hybrid world... So I talk to the customers every day about what we're doing sort of on-prem in their locations, whatever that is. The big ones that we are seeing is kind of the, "Deliver that cloud experience anywhere." And in doing that, it's a matter of having sure that... well, making sure that we've got the same tooling, same capabilities, or that kind of stuff. And along with that it's things like, "Hey, you've got these services in Azure, like Azure Virtual Desktop, and we want to do that here. We want to do that." So it's a matter of delivering those kind of things. So every day, the thing I like about it, it's solving use cases for customers. They come to you with a legitimate problem: "I want to improve my manufacturing; I want to be more secure," whatever it is. And we're able to, within our own tool set, solve those problems.

>> How identical is the experience that you just described? Is it, "I don't even know," or are there still kind of nuances? Obviously, security is maybe a little bit different, but can you help the audience understand that delta?

Alan Kerr

>> Well, so this is the great thing about it. It is literally the same tool set. You go to the portal, it's all there, right? The same stuff I manage in Azure, it's the same stuff I manage on-prem. When I'm deploying a workload, whatever that may be, I just decide where to put it. Do I want to put it in the cloud? Do I want to put it? So what we're really giving customers is that ultimate sort of flexibility of being able to, not only decide where a workload goes today of whatever type that workload is, but in the future, if the situation changes or they change their mind, they can move it up to the cloud or move it down to the cloud. Because we have this one contiguous compute platform, this one container platform everywhere, wherever they need it.

>> And of course you're taking that out to the edge?

Alan Kerr

>> All the way out to the edge, the operational edge.

>> So when you think about virtual desktop, I just typically think of regulated industries or sort of controlled environments, government, healthcare, claims processing, things of that nature. Is that still the case? What are the main use cases that you're seeing?

Alan Kerr

>> That's absolutely one of the use cases but what we're finding is that... When we first invented Azure Virtual Desktop, it was really a matter of responding to, once again, like every company we were responding to customer demand. And one of those requests was, "Hey, our current VDI situation is both complex and it's expensive." And so we said, "Well, how about we solve that for you?" So what we did was we lifted the control plane of that, so the gateways and everything else that goes into the controlling and allocation of VDI into the cloud to make it simpler form. So now you can whiz deploy the entire environment in the cloud. Now that gave them access to the workloads and data in the cloud, but like anything 72% of stuff is still outside the cloud. So as part of this working with HPE and hybrid cloud movement, it's being able to... What we did was we took the AVD and then run it on-prem. So you do have those secure environments, but you also have situations whereby I'm in, not a secured environment, but I'm in an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea. And so we need to get access to those applications. And so it's really just a ubiquitous platform to put the VDI wherever that data and application is.

>> So you're putting the VDI on Azure Stack and bringing in Azure Stack HCI with your partner HPE, right?

Alan Kerr

>> Yep, HPE. And then we drop it right next to where that workload is.

Rebecca Knight

>> I would love you to be a little more specific. When you talked about the customers and their pain points and they come to you and they say, "I want to be more secure," or, "I want to get more efficient with my manufacturing," can you walk us through some of your success stories? You don't need to name the names of the companies, but exactly the outcomes that you've helped them achieve.

Alan Kerr

>> So this... We have millions of outcomes every day. I like to talk about the exciting ones like we all do. So we've had a lot of very effective situations in manufacturing. So for manufacturing, for years they had the operational edge managing the machines, and then they had the IT side, which was the traditional IT. And we had a customer very recently, we just closed this global customer in all of their manufacturing, for the first time in their entire history, had security sign off on using Azure Stack in the way we did it, to both link the OT and IT network and use the software defined network and split those in physical networks. But they've never signed off on it before, ever. But because we could bring confidential compute to it, we could bring NIST policies on-prem, they looked at it, their security team, which is the hardest people to get past and said yes for the first time. So it's things like that. It's like we are solving problems that have been there for literally ever, and now they're able to manage it all from the cloud.

>> Interesting. So when you think about the IT, the OT, the manufacturing 4.0, industry 4.0, can you give us a glimpse as to when you're talking to customers about their future, of course, AI comes into it I'm sure as well, but what are customers... Paint a picture of what that future looks like for manufacturing.

Alan Kerr

>> So there's a million ways this goes. Most of it's around modernization because if you go into some of these manufacturing facilities, they're walking around with floppy discs, updating things from 30 years ago.

>> Come on.

Alan Kerr

>> I know, right? Shocker. And so we are working quite often with the industrial manufacturers and their teams to integrate what they're doing in that factory 4.0 type model. So whereby instead of having these physical stuff everywhere, now virtualizing for the first time, but we need to maintain that sort of high availability because the one thing... And the reason this is going to be on-prem, we will be on-prem forever. As we all know, internet goes down some other kind of problem, I don't want my widget maker stopping. And so that's part of it, but they need to modernize because when you go update these locations, it sometimes takes a month to get to all these locations versus I push a button and it just updates it, which is where we're at now with a lot of these things. That, combining with things like metaverse that you've heard, that kind of industrial stuff where we can apply that. AI is another big one. We had a situation where a customer had millions of components that they manufacture whizzing by on a conveyor belt. The system that those used, the AI was determined if there's a problem, they stop it, rewind the conveyor belt for 30 minutes, scrapple that material. With our modern AI system, we're able to narrow that to five minutes. So we're now saving them hundreds of millions of dollars annually in waste in producing that stuff.

>> And I would imagine the supply chain's going to benefit from this. I always use the example, just recently we had some furniture delivered. My wife wasn't home. She said, "Dave, can you be home to get the furniture?" And there was two pieces, of course, only one showed up. This just happened again like two weeks ago. And so my wife, Deb, was complaining, "Why is that? Why are they split the..." The reason is because it's this big asynchronous supply chain thing and it's really complicated. It's a big batch job. So that's going to change, isn't it?

Alan Kerr

>> Absolutely. So we're seeing now that everything's gone essentially real-time. And so whether it's manufacturing, retail, inventory, all those kind of things, everything's real-time. But now you have to have sort of the systems and the capabilities to actually manage that. The number... How many times have we walked into a store and you go to that section where they say, "Oh, we've got this thing," and it's not there? And so we are now seeing AI capabilities in stores to whereby they can know that someone picked up that object, moved it to another shelf in another area, and put that down. And it'll alert an employee that when, "Hey, you're missing this item." The employee can go, "Oh, it's over there," and they can go get it for the customer.

>> So the physical and the digital world's coming together. People talk about digital twins and that's... How far away are we from that world? I mean, this is inside of five years where we're going to make this transformation. I mean, there's a lot of it today, I know, but it's a bell curve, right?

Alan Kerr

>> Yeah. Well, what we've seen, and part of the reason we sort of developed the adaptive cloud from a Microsoft perspective, and we collapsed in our IoT, distributed edge hybrid, all of those things under the one banner is because that was a response to customers. Customers no longer have an OT department. They have an IT department, and the operational side rolls up to that. And the reason for that is that every sensor and machine out there today got smart. And how we define that is that it was able to take software updates, so I could give it more intelligence over time and run other things as well as it had connectivity. So it's no longer just a dumb sensor sitting out there spinning off stuff. I can now manipulate things and run things at the edge, including things like security. But that's the change, is now just IT. Even though it's interfacing into the real world.

>> Security and inferencing now at the edge. And you're not persisting all the data, right?

Alan Kerr

>> Nope.

>> You're just persisting the stuff that matters that you want to analyze.

Alan Kerr

>> Yep.

>> Yeah.

Alan Kerr

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Alan, you're painting a picture that's vivid about what the future holds, and it's very optimistic about how it's making data more secure and conveyor belts more productive and more efficient. What keeps you up at night in terms of all of these different innovations?

Alan Kerr

>> To be perfectly honest, it's getting the customers to do it fast enough. From a security perspective, it's really a matter of getting them to where they need to be faster. That's my biggest concern. There's always limitations, whether it's budgeting, whether it's personnel, you name it. There's always some kind of limitations. And what you really want to do is ensure that we can get those customers on those right path, whether it's automation, whether it's security, whatever that is, as soon as possible so they can then maximize that value, whether it's through protection or through improved operations.

>> So thinking about where you are today, let's put it in the context of your partnership with HPE and AVD, what do you want to be able to say next year that HPE Discover 2025 that you can't say today?

Alan Kerr

>> Excellent question. I want to say that it would be nice if we could get to a point whereby, for example, with our AI stuff, that I've got customers walking up to me and saying, "We did this and this is how much money it saved us." "We did this, this is how much it improved our operations." "We did this and we are now... from a policing standpoint, we have now caught more criminals." Whatever it is, is seeing the fruition of the stuff. It's like anything that you build, you don't know how it's ultimately going to be used by the customer. And the amazing use cases that they come up with... This is kind of incredible. We had a situation where it was a remote area. They had employees go out there to fix things in these remote areas and one of them was attacked by a bear. And so what they wanted to do is have drones do real-time wildlife protection or detection following their employees in these remote areas to alert them to these kinds of situations. And that's a use case that came out of the blue when the situation happened.

>> Fork left, not right; bear to the right.

Rebecca Knight

>> You started this conversation answering a question of Dave's about what's the vibe at Microsoft. Now, what's it like to be a Microsoft person? And I'm curious because you described it as constant excitement. Is that Satya Nadella laying down a culture? Is it coming from... Is it top down? Or is it... How do you maintain that? Because we know that that kind of energy is so critical to maintaining innovation and remaining competitive in this ultra competitive environment.

Alan Kerr

>> It's absolutely top down, but is the idea of one Microsoft. So internally we have this idea of one Microsoft. We're all working towards the same goal. And so anytime you get a phone call about, "I need help," or, "I need this." It's like, yeah, you just do it right? And it's always in the guise of going after and helping customers, so that's... Almost everything is about customers trying to do this. "Hey, what do you think we can do here?" "How can we help them with this?" If you're a problem solver, which I like to think I am, it's that every single day. Someone presents you with a problem, you go, "Oh, we can fix that. We did a similar thing for these other guys." And watching that delight that the customer has gives you energy because now you get excited because when you get into these group meetings with other internal people and they say, "My customer has that problem," I can't wait to go and tell them about what we did, and that generates that excitement. But it is really top down, right? We've got the engineering group producing amazing stuff. We're out there talking about it to customers about what they want to do with it and how we can help them, but it's absolutely top down.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Alan Kerr, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. A great conversation.

Alan Kerr

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Dave Vellante, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover 2024. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech, enterprise tech news, and analysis.