Microsoft Ignite 2024 Unpacked | Analyst Conversation

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Bob Laliberte

Principal Analyst

theCUBE Research

Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host

theCUBE Research

Networking, AI simplification and observability take center stage: theCUBE’s final Ignite 2024 analysis

The era of artificial intelligence platformization has arrived. At Microsoft Ignite 2024, innovation and simplicity intertwined as technology leaders and vendors showcased cutting-edge advancements for AI simplification, spanning cloud and multicloud ecosystems.“You’re starting to see a greater awareness that the network is not just basic plumbing,” said Bob Laliberte (pictured, left), analyst at theCUBE Research. “It’s required for these highly distributed environments and especially when you’re going to cloud and multicloud environments

play_circle_outline Enhancing Visibility and Performance: Observability Companies and Data Platforms for AI Workloads

play_circle_outline Simplifying AI usage with Nutanix Enterprise AI running on various platforms and containers.

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Analyst Conversation

Bob Laliberte

Principal Analyst theCUBE Research

Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host theCUBE Research

HOST

The Microsoft Ignite 2024 Unpacked event focused on networking, observability, data platforms, and storage. Aviatrix highlighted the importance of secure connectivity in multi-cloud environments. Elastic and Splunk addressed observability for AI workloads, while WEKA and Dell discussed high-performance storage solutions. Nutanix introduced Enterprise AI that can run on different platforms. Varonis emphasized ease of use and production for AI applications. Oracle showcased their multi-cloud approach to deploying databases. Overall, the event provided insights ... Read more

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Rob Strechay

>> Welcome back to the wrap-up of Microsoft Ignite 2024 Unpacked. We've been unpacking all day. A lot of the ISV ecosystem. We looked at what was going on in the keynote. I'm Rob Strechay, managing director with theCUBE Research. I'm joined by Bob Laliberte, who's our principal analyst with theCUBE Research, and we're going to kind of break down what we've heard today a little bit and give a wrap-up overview, kind of juxtapose that to what we heard from Satya and the others on the main stage, and kind of just bring it to a head. So welcome on board, Bob. It's always fun to actually see you in person.

Bob Laliberte

>> Absolutely.

Rob Strechay

>> We didn't have to travel for this one, which is fantastic. But I think one of the things that I noticed was you talked about it in the keynote analysis was networking was a theme of this. We had Aviatrix on, they were kind of talking about what they were up to. How does that fit in with what's being played out in the networking space with cloud?

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. I think that really a great part to see when it comes to the cloud and so forth is that organizations and even AI in particular is that you're starting to see a greater awareness that the network is not just basic plumbing. It's actually really required for these highly distributed environments, and especially when you're going to cloud and multi-cloud environments, that connectivity is going to be critical to ensure that all the data gets to where it needs to go, that people can access the information they need to access. So it's great to see that. And Aviatrix for a long time now has been pioneering that multi-cloud networking space. They've been ensuring that secure networking is really important, and what we saw today was really, I think, how they were talking a little bit more about how we're going to have that secure connectivity, how they were going to. Again, one of the big things has always been how do we simplify this for organizations so they don't have to learn new things for every cloud they go to? And we saw that with some of the changes that are going to be going on with the egress to the internet and so forth that, once again, they're going to be able to simplify that experience and enable organizations to access the internet securely, but also very simply as well.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I think it was a great conversation and it tied in really well with, again, some of the themes there. We also had a number of observability companies on, we had both Elastic and Cisco Splunk on today, and I think one of the big themes I'm seeing out of that is how do you really observe AI? We talked about Elastic. They had already been working with OpenAI and observability for OpenAI and dove into a lot of what's going on within their Microsoft certifications and things of that nature, as well as tying into, I thought one of the most interesting things that they talked about was about how a single instance of Elastic can actually be used over multiple accounts. To me, that's an efficiency thing. What was going on with Splunk and Cisco?

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. I think a lot of this, again, highly distributed environments, you need to have visibility into those environments. So when you see Splunk and what they're doing and what they were talking about today, it's really about how do they enable organizations to make that transition more smoothly? How do you ensure that you've got the complete visibility that you need in those cloud environments when you're migrating from on-premises into the cloud? Or conversely, even back to on-premises, right? So those hybrid environments. And as you mentioned, I think certainly organizations, as they move and deploy more AI workloads, they're going to want to have that visibility into those and what's going on in the backend environment. And that's certainly another area where a lot of these observability companies can play a role.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think so. And I think, again, it was interesting. We had a couple common themes in there. Another one was around data platforms and storage. I got to talk to WEKA about how they're really looking at high performance for AI, for life sciences, and a number of other use cases. They had an EDA spec benchmark that they talked about and how performant they were. And really, how it's kind of bridging the gap between on-prem and cloud, especially in those specialized workloads as well. Another one that was on, we had Varun Chhabra who was on from Dell. We talked about APEX and how for over a year now, they've been doing APEX storage in the cloud with the PowerScale and being able to bring that to and from on-prem. They've got some neat stuff going on with the metadata. We were both down at their analyst days. I think that was good. They didn't really get into any of their networking because they're not doing that in the cloud at this point, but I know they're down at SC talking about some of the stuff as well that you had covered with that as well. I think it's SONiC or something like that.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. They've got a big play in making a big push for that back-end AI network and so forth, and also, they've been a strong proponent of SONiC, so the operating system right from the cloud. And a lot of the cloud providers, obviously Azure created it and so forth, right? Microsoft, so they're a big proponent of it. But they've been really a pioneer in that, and they've been a strong proponent of it for enterprises to adopt it. And so we continue to see them using it to try and drive simplicity and drive that scale in the hyperscaler fashion into the networking environment as well.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. And I think you touched on a really interesting point that I thought didn't come out in Satya's keynote as directly as I think he was trying to hit it, which was simplicity and simplifying AI. I think he was trying to get at that with Copilots everywhere, but I think what it missed was where's the easy button? And we started off today with Lee Caswell from Nutanix talking about Nutanix Enterprise AI, which actually doesn't have to run on the Nutanix platform. It was very interesting. They made this announcement a couple weeks or actually last week. And what was interesting about it was, again, it can run on containers, it can run on AKS or Azure Kubernetes Service, it can run on-prem on theirs. It doesn't even have to be the same services under the hood. And they're being able to then bring that storage as well backwards and forwards, which I thought was really interesting. Again, I think that led into a lot of Satya's discussion, obviously it was on AI. I thought what was interesting was some of the stuff that was missing, and I think you caught on some of this, was really around the guardrails and things like that as well. And Varonis talked a little bit about that, so.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then obviously, the other big piece that I took away from this as well from this, we didn't talk about it this morning from the keynote analysis, but I thought was super important, was the education piece, right? And there's so many organizations that are trying to figure this out. They have so many employees who are trying to figure out, how do I use this to drive productivity? So for those organizations like Microsoft that have the ability to scale those learning programs and training, and maybe even, I don't know if they're certificate programs, but being able to get organizations and all their resources educated on how to best leverage this. Because I know when I'm covering networking and we talk about AI, it's all about what's the time to comfort? Well, you get a hell of a lot more comfortable if you've been trained on it and you understand it and understand how it works and prompt engineering and things like that to get the results that you want so that organizations can be as productive as they need to be.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, no. That was a great tie-in back to what Varun was talking about from Dell is the fact that, and we got some under the covers with them a couple of weeks ago at their analyst conference, but they were talking about professional services and how really, their professional services are aimed at helping you get to day-two operations and teaching you how to do that. Not trying to do it for you per se. They will start out in that way, architecting things. In fact, Varun and I had a good discussion around architectures for AI and how, again, you can tie that back and forwards with Azure AI and some other services. All in all, I think it was a great day. Again, the Varonis stuff I thought was key. Especially when you're looking at Copilots, they talked about the ease of use and ease of getting to production, especially when you're trying to keep the right data there. So again, a lot of fun, and I think it's been a great day. Anything else you saw there or you wanted to add?

Bob Laliberte

>> No. I think the only other conversation we had today was with Oracle, and so being able to see how they are expanding, obviously just dominant in the database space, and their being able to open up their infrastructure and be able to run it across the clouds. And so great to see that ongoing partnership with Microsoft and being able to deploy their solutions on the Microsoft infrastructure.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that back up because I think that multi-cloud. And Oracle takes a different approach to Hyperscaler, and I think I got to say it, I kind of like it where they're working with everybody with AWS, with Azure. I think they have Google coming online sometime either this year or next, and they also have their own places. But they're putting their databases, which are still incredibly popular, right near where people are doing AI in these different services. So again, just a great partnership there. It's been a great day. I really appreciate you helping me out with this and us getting to interact and dive deep with these customers and prospects and understand how the real end users are going to be using these vendors over the course as part of that ISV ecosystem with Microsoft. So thanks again for coming on board.

Bob Laliberte

>> You're very welcome. Great day.

Rob Strechay

>> Yep. And thank you for watching Microsoft Ignite Unpacked 2024. It's been a great day, and I hope you stay tuned. There'll be lots more follow-up online, on SiliconANGLE, on theCUBE.net, and on theCUBEResearch.com, where we'll have write-ups and other stuff going on. Stay tuned for more as we dig in. It's kind of coming to the end of the season. Special shout-out to Ken, Cheryl, Kristen and the rest of the production team for helping us out, Frankie and everybody, because again, this one was one of those that snuck up on us, but we wanted to get this done. So thank you all. See you soon.