Microsoft Ignite 2025 | Meena Gowdar, Microsoft & Matt McSpirit, Dell

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More from Microsoft Ignite 2025

Meena Gowdar

Senior Director of Product Management

Microsoft

Matt McSpirit

Engineering Technologist & Microsoft Azure MVP

Dell Technologies

play_circle_outline Reimagining Private Cloud: Leveraging Azure Local for Evolving Customer Needs and Sovereign Compliance Solutions

play_circle_outline Microsoft 365 Local and Azure Local announced for organizations needing productivity tools with data control.

play_circle_outline Azure Migrate enables seamless migration from VMware to Azure Local, enhancing private cloud adoption.

play_circle_outline Navigating AI Workloads and Data Sovereignty in Microsoft's Evolving Cloud Strategy for Diverse Customer Needs

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Meena Gowdar, Microsoft & Matt McSpirit, Dell

Meena Gowdar

Senior Director of Product Management Microsoft

Matt McSpirit

Engineering Technologist & Microsoft Azure MVP Dell Technologies

In this interview from Microsoft Ignite, Meena Gowdar from Microsoft and Matt McSpirit from Dell Technologies join theCUBE’s Rob Strechay to discuss the strategic shift toward reimagining private cloud infrastructure. The conversation focuses on the "Adaptive Cloud" concept, exploring how organizations are extending Azure’s core principles – security, sovereignty and consistent operations – directly into their own data centers. Gowdar and McSpirit examine the growing demand for sovereign private clouds, detailing how enterprises can achieve public cloud agili... Read more

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What are the benefits and considerations for organizations using Azure Local in their own data centers? add

What recent announcement did Microsoft make regarding Sovereign Cloud and its components? add

What recent announcement was made regarding Azure Migrate and its capabilities for customers transitioning from VMware to Azure? add

What are the current trends shaping the cloud industry and influencing Microsoft Cloud strategy? add

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Meena Gowdar, Microsoft & Matt McSpirit, Dell

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Rob Strechay

>> Hello, and welcome to another episode of our coverage of Microsoft's Ignite Conference. I'm Rob Strechay, and we're going to be talking about reimagining private cloud with Azure Local and Dell. I'm excited to be joined by Meena Gowder, who's the Senior Director of Product Management Azure Edge Infrastructure at Microsoft. Welcome in, Meena.

Meena Gowdar

>> Hi, Rob.

Rob Strechay

>> And Matt McSpirit, who is the engineering Technologist and Microsoft Azure MVP with Dell Technologies. Welcome in, Matt.

Matt McSpirit

>> Hi. Thanks for having me.

Rob Strechay

>> It's great. I think this is such a topic. I was actually talking to a customer of both of yours just recently about this exact topic where they're really looking at how they're going to build their private cloud out for the foreseeable future. And what they've been doing is looking at how they're going to reimagine that. And I think this is a key critical distinction. We've titled it Reimagining Private Cloud. The first question, of course, is going to be why? Why do we need to reimagine it, and what are you hearing from customers and partners that really wants you to help them understand how to reimagine it? And let's start with you, Meena.

Meena Gowdar

>> All right. As a foundation of our strategy, we are extending Azure's fundamental principles, which are based on security, sovereignty, and a consistent operating model into private cloud. What customers love about Azure is extended through Azure Arc, and you get the same security , that that same compliance framework and the tooling and processes in the private cloud. We introduced this concept of adaptive cloud a couple years back. This is the idea that Azure services and workloads can run anywhere that makes the most sense for our customers. That might be in an Azure region, it could be in a factory floor, or it could be in customer's data center. This approach has really resonated with our customers because it meets them where they are while giving them the same consistent Azure experience. We are seeing tremendous demand and increasingly sophisticated use cases for sovereign private cloud. Organizations want public cloud capabilities, but with the guarantees around data residency, operational control, and regulatory compliances. So this is where Azure Local has become the foundation for that strategy. It's how we deliver Azure's innovation while respecting the boundaries and requirements that matter the most to our customers, whether those are driven by regulations or industry standards or even corporate policies.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I totally agree, and I think, Matt, let's throw it to you and get kind of your view of why reimagining this is so important?

Matt McSpirit

>> Yeah. It's very similar to what Meena said a few moments ago in terms of supporting organizations where they are today, where they're managing and running traditional applications. But they're getting pressure from the industry, from ecosystem, from their software vendors, from their internal stakeholders, to provide more modernized platforms to run next-generation workloads. So IT has a challenge to manage both, and it's not necessarily that one place is the exact right fit for all workloads, so some workloads are great in the public cloud, some work best on-prem to achieve a specific performance or a regulatory goal or whatever it may be. And so having a platform that can satisfy all of those different things in a consistent way, so similar to what Meena was saying about some of the workloads and bringing services down on-prem, but in also a flexible way. And the solutions that we provide, they have to meet the customer's needs around flexibility and scale, allowing them to grow and shrink as necessary, and scale up and scale down. So it's a complex set of challenges that we're looking to address with some great infrastructure solutions that we'll talk about today.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. No, I agree. I think, again, I think you hit on a really important topic of the sovereignty part, especially in the EU. There's a lot going on with that, and you have a lot of regulatory issues. And Meena, when she was talking about the security and bringing that security to bear, if CISA and others who are putting things in place that require people to have these types of environments, and I totally agree, cloud is not a place, it's actually an operating model, and so I totally agree. But based on that, where is the focus that you're going to be talking about at Ignite, and what are you doing to help organizations get to that place? Let's start with Meena.

Meena Gowdar

>> All right. So, Rob, recently, Microsoft announced this idea or our vision for Sovereign Cloud, and it comprises of Sovereign Public Cloud and then Sovereign Private Cloud, and also National Partner Cloud. The Sovereign Private Cloud is powered by Azure Local, both in hybrid and disconnected operating model, and we also announced a number of capabilities that help customers achieve this sovereignty in the private cloud. So some of the things that we're very excited about bringing to customers, and we will be announcing it at Ignite, is the general availability of Microsoft 365 Local running on Azure Local. This is huge for organizations that need the Microsoft consistent productivity tools, but they also want complete control over that data and where that data lives and how it is operated. So we're very excited about bringing Microsoft 365 Local into general availability. We're also announcing the support for external storage for Azure Local, and we're very excited to be working with Dell to bring PowerStore to Azure Local. This builds on top of the PowerFlex integration we launched with Dell earlier, so this gives customers more flexibility in using disaggregated storage solutions. Then, we're also committed to bringing AI-ready infrastructure for customers. We're also announcing the general availability of NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPU, which will be supported on the Dell AX-770 platform. This GPU is considered a universal GPU with some serious horsepower to bring in AI innovation. You can run from inferencing to language models to omniverse. It really spans across a spectrum of AI capabilities now coming to Azure Local and giving customers that ability to stay on-prem but also be in the forefront of innovation in the AI space. Then we will also be talking more about our disconnected operations, particularly for regulated industries that cannot be connected to regions outside of their jurisdiction. We're giving them the same Azure services, consistent Azure management, all to be running right locally from on-prem, so we're very excited about talking about that. And very recently, we also announced the general availability of Azure Migrate. It's an Azure service where customers can migrate from VMware to Azure Local. So again, this also adds on top of the need for private cloud, the need to keep workloads on-prem, but bringing more Azure services so that it's a lift-and-shift for customers to stay on-prem while also taking advantage of Azure capabilities. So very excited about all these new announcements and innovation that we are able to bring to our customers in partnership with Dell.

Rob Strechay

>> Awesome. Yep. Matt, why don't you double-click a little bit on that part as well?

Matt McSpirit

>> Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Meena did a great job of introducing PowerStore support for Azure Local, which is something we're announcing at Ignite. And it's a follow-up to, as Meena also mentioned, when Dell led the market as the first vendor to bring in external storage support for Azure Local with PowerFlex. And so with PowerStore, it's enabling organizations to scale the compute and the storage independently, so that gives them that flexibility we were alluding to earlier in case business needs change. And so organizations that have either investigating new external storage or they already have it, now have a great solution going forward for that option. And PowerStore brings a number of advantages, the advanced data efficiency, so keeping that always on data reduction. That lowers the storage costs without impacting performance. And that's backed by our industry-leading five-to-one DRR guarantee, so some significant savings that customers can make there in the storage area. And it also reduces the barrier to entry for tens of thousands of existing PowerStore customers like we talked about, to adopt Azure Local. So that adoption path of going from their existing infrastructure solution over to Azure Local, that's much more simplified when PowerStore is involved. So that's kind of announcement number one. Secondly, we're going to be talking more about the Dell Private Cloud and how that plays with Azure Local. And the Dell Private Cloud offers a number of benefits for Azure Local around things like automated lifecycle management, getting operations streamlined, end-to-end automation, reducing complexity, and helping to free up those IT resources. And this is backed by PowerStore, as we alluded to earlier, for that independent scale, so compute and storage independently growing or shrinking to optimize resources and ultimately optimize and reduce costs. And then finally, the Dell Private Cloud presents a very future-ready infrastructure. This disaggregated approach ensures that businesses can adapt to the new challenges they're facing for different workloads, traditional and modern, and take advantage of those opportunities without the disruption. So we're excited about these announcements and keen to share more at Ignite.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I agree. I think, again, that kind of flexibility and composability is extremely key to the requirements organizations, well, the requirements they're requiring. And I think that it's really fascinating how you've kind of done this across so many different requirements that they do have. So let's kind of double-click a little bit there. Matt, can you go a bit more into the unique value customers will get when they're pairing Azure Local with Dell?

Matt McSpirit

>> Absolutely. Yeah. And the first one is really around that full-stack support. So working with a trusted partner like Dell to give you the end-to-end supported experience, the best-in-class experience for running Azure Local and bringing those modernized workloads to reality. And so that's the server infrastructure, that's the storage, that's networking from Dell. All of that provided by Dell gives you that comfort blanket, that support that we can give you for that best experience for Azure Local. And that builds on our experience that we, Dell, have always been at the forefront for Azure Local and its predecessor by name, Azure Stack HCI, and even before that with some of the other Microsoft software-defined infrastructure solutions. We've been first with our integrated system to market, first with a full-stack lifecycle management for hardware and software for Azure Local, the first in the premier solutions category for Azure Local, the first with external storage with PowerFlex, and increasingly now towards PowerStore as well. And with the Dell Private Cloud, we're adding the first FDO or Fido Device Onboarding-enabled experience for secure onboarding of the solution into a customer infrastructure. So you can see that Dell is definitely an overachiever. We're pushing hard to be first, hand-in-hand with Microsoft, to just give customers the best experience for running Azure Local. And as I said earlier, if customers have got PowerStore already, of which there are a large number out there that do, they don't need any additional hardware to take advantage of this new innovation. So we're very excited about what that's going to bring.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I can understand that. I think customers are going to be excited as well. I think, again, it's a step forward for them. They want these services, they want all of this package, they want the easy button to get there as well. So let's kind of take a step back again and go to the final question here. Both of you talk to a lot of customers and partners all day every day. What's the best advice that you would give those customers and those organizations based on the other conversations you're having? Let's start with Matt on this one.

Matt McSpirit

>> Sure. Thank you. Yeah. We know that the pace of change in IT is incredibly quickly, and IT admins are tasked with keeping the lights on and optimizing existing infrastructure solutions and workloads. Yet they're also having to deal with the pressure of new and exciting and interesting workloads, many of which have been born in the public cloud and are now pressing to come on premises, and Microsoft are doing an amazing job of bringing down a number of services that can enable that. And then you've got AI, which is accelerating everything and putting additional pressure, "I need to be using AI. How can I manage that?" And so organizations need a flexible infrastructure that meets the needs of existing stuff and also supports the workloads of the future, which they may not actually know what those are for their respective infrastructure just yet. So having an infrastructure that locks you into a specific way of doing things like just virtualization or just containers, that's not going to give people the freedom to innovate and explore these next generation of workloads in the right way. So we, with Dell, in combination with Microsoft, want to provide that robust, solid foundation that's flexible and enables that organization to embrace that next generation of applications on a platform that can really do it all. And that's what we're very much excited about, and enabling that IT pro to manage the existing stuff and the new exciting shiny stuff that's coming down the line as well.

Rob Strechay

>> Oh, I love that. Now, Meena, your last piece of advice for folks?

Meena Gowdar

>> I like to say these are exciting times. Several converging trends are fundamentally shaping the industry and influencing Microsoft Cloud, the infrastructure, and our private cloud strategy. And as Matt said, the explosion of AI workloads and the driving demand for inferencing and language models and agentic AI combined with security in this distributed edge location is really kind of like the gravity that brings everything that we think about innovation together. And then the data sovereignty has evolved from being a compliance checkbox to a strategic imperative that all countries and industries are adopting in some shape or form. And the change is dynamic. What was the thing last year is no longer relevant now. The pace is so fast, growth is significant, and the customer's needs are evolving. And so we are seeing a shift towards a cloud-smart approach, and Azure Local sits at the intersection of all these trends and proving the flexibility and foundation for customers' cloud strategies. So we're very excited to be partnering with Dell to bring this innovation to customers and then continuing to learn and evolve based on how their needs grow.

Rob Strechay

>> No, I think that is a fantastic thing. So for those who are looking to learn more, Matt, where should they go? Besides visiting the booth on the floor at Ignite here, where should they go?

Matt McSpirit

>> Absolutely come and speak to me on the booth. That would be great. But visit our Dell Private Cloud website. There's loads of great information on there. And then in our demo center, we've got a collection of interactive demos and more for the Dell Private Cloud and Azure Local. So definitely check that out. It's a real great place to learn more.

Rob Strechay

>> Well, Meena and Matt, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you coming on board. Thanks for sharing with us today.

Meena Gowdar

>> Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Matt.

Matt McSpirit

>> Thank you. Thanks.

Rob Strechay

>> And thank you all for watching this episode of Microsoft's Ignite Conference coverage on theCUBE, the leader in analysis and news. Stay tuned for more.