Judson Althoff: Convergence 2015 (Day Two)

ANNOUNCER:  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome President Microsoft North America Judson Althoff.

(Applause.)

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Good afternoon.  So I see that we’ve got the last general session here before green beer night on St. Patrick’s Day.  So I appreciate you guys spending your time with us here this afternoon.  We have got a great hour ahead of you, and I’m thrilled to be able to kick it off, because you’re going to hear from a couple of great customers, and we’re going to show you some pretty awesome solutions that we’ve put together.  So without further ado, I’m going to go ahead and kick off.

You’ve heard over the last couple of days that at our core Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and that our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

I want to talk a little bit about what’s required to deliver against that mission, because we have three bold ambitions that underpin that mission, and we feel are critical in order to enable us to achieve this goal of empowering everyone.  The first is this notion of more personal computing, and if you sat through Tony Prophet’s presentation on Windows 10, you know that that’s where we begin our effort to bring to life computing across all form factors and to really bring the richness of technology down to the empowerment of every individual.

From there we carry those experiences through our productivity offerings, and our goal is not just to deliver productivity through Office 2015 and Skype for Business through to Windows 10 customers but to every heterogeneous platform that our customers want to use, because we want every single person within your organization to be effective no matter what their platform of choice may be.  We also believe it’s critical to deliver award-winning business applications on-premise and in the cloud to reinvent business processes and make them as productive as possible for your entire organization.

And what underpins it all is what we call the most intelligent cloud.  Again, there are other purveyors of cloud computing, plenty of them, asking for your time and for your attention.  Our primary differentiation is to empower the cloud with data, because the cloud, a system, an environment, an organization is only as intelligent as the data over which it reasons.  So providing data-driven, intelligence-driven cloud processes to empower organizations, empower industries, empower people — that’s what we’re about.  And we believe every area of our research, all of our investments in R&D are grounded around bringing these solutions to life.

I want to talk a little bit about the three dimensions of empowerment.  You heard throughout the last couple of days our focus on people, on organizations and on industries.  We’ve been working together with customers to light up these experiences.  It starts with every individual.  We had a question in a session earlier in the week, Satya and I, around how are we empowering millennials in the workforce, and at the same time empowering organizations to deliver consistent services that are secure and enterprise-grade?

Our goal is to make sure that every solution we have, every service we have, is as attractive as possible and as virally consumable as possible to empower every individual.  And that yet they’re wired together across a trusted network of services so that we can deliver enterprise-grade security and stability for the most attractive viral services, bringing together this notion of a system of intelligence.

So I’m going to spend the next hour talking about each one of these categories, talking about empowering people, talking about empowering organizations and empowering industries.  And we’re going to show you the technology that underpins all three.

So to start off, I’m going to kind of take you through a little bit of a personal journey.  I’m going to tell you a little bit about a company called Ancestry.com, and I’m going to actually expose to you a little bit of my own personal tree here in a minute, so hopefully you’ll enjoy that.

So Ancestry.com, most of you know Ancestry to be the family tree website.  And for those of you who worked with Ancestry.com personally will know that.  You sort of build out your family tree through a collection of your own experiences, and our own family knowledge of personal relationships, but the experience sort of stops there.  And if you did this exercise with Ancestry.com a couple of years ago, you maybe had a fairly short-lived experience because, frankly, after you’ve built your family tree, not terribly interesting after that.

So we worked with them to harness the power of data to build an intelligent system that’s more interactive, that’s more empowering for the individual, and that, at the same time, also provides more value back to Ancestry.com, enables them to have a stickier service so that you stay engaged rather than simply show up and build your family tree and move on.

So I’m going to show you a little bit of a marked-up family tree here that was built based on my own lineage.  And this is sort of a version of what you would have seen if you played with Ancestry.com a couple of years ago.  After we started working with them, we came to realize their chief asset was all of their data.  They have more than 10 petabytes of data across 6 billion different profiles.

So we worked with them to build a Hadoop cluster in Azure connected to HD Insights.  And we can actually suggest matches, who knew a guy named Rocky Janakowski was possibly related to me?  But based on the big data matching and analytics, we can actually bring forward those scenarios through Ancestry.com to help have a more engaging experience and suggest back to the user.

From there, we decided to work with Ancestry.com to help them roll out a brand new service.  They decided to roll out a DNA matching service, so more than just predictive analytics, we can use fact-based analysis to match up these billions of records with your DNA data, and mashup actual matches of your family tree.

So I actually went through this exercise.  My lawyers, unfortunately, said that I couldn’t show you my real matches.  So we put together a simulation of what the data comes back with.  And it shows you a heritage match of where you come from, where your family has been based through generations.  It will then actually go and give you a geographic view, again mashing up millions and millions of rows of data with what is known by you, what is suggested through predictive analytics, as well as mashing up DNA sequencing.

From there I can actually get a list of all of the folks who map through to my family tree.  And you can see through their alias and logins how much time and effort they’ve put into the research.  And you see some of them, they’ve got seven or eight people in their family tree, some of them really aren’t working too hard at it.  But if you look through this top family, they have almost 2,800 people in their family tree.  They’ve obviously spent a fair amount of time researching this.  I can also see that through DNA sequencing and matching and the power of data and this intelligent system that the confidence of that match between myself and them is this extremely high match.

So if I follow through to the link, sure enough I can find that I have a third great-grandfather, believe or not, named Neil Tap (ph) who is related to a living fourth cousin named John Levy.  And so what this does is it creates a far more engaging experience.  It empowers the individual, and it also creates a much stickier service for Ancestry.com.  No longer is it sort of a build your family tree, sort of get done and bored with that and move on.  The power of data truly ignites the experience.

From there I want to talk to you a little bit more about empowering an organization.  And to do that I’m going to bring on stage a very special guest, one of our best customers.  Grant Thornton is an independent audit and tax firm and advisory firm.  They have 40,000 associates across 130 different countries.  And best yet, they’re celebrating their 90th anniversary.  This morning we had an analyst come in and speak to a group of customers, and they rattled off a stat that 52 percent of the Fortune 500 companies that existed in 2000 don’t exist today.  So it’s pretty impressive that Grant Thornton is celebrating their 90th anniversary.

Please join me in welcome to the stage the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer from Grant Thornton Ed Novak.

ED NOVAK:  Judson, good to see you.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  How are you?

ED NOVAK:  Great, very good.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Thanks for coming out.

ED NOVAK:  Thank you for having me.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So 90 years?

ED NOVAK:  Ninety years is a long time.  Believe me, I was not a founding member of the firm.  But, we’re very proud of that.  And at Grant Thornton this year we’re celebrating that throughout the year in a lot of different ways.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s awesome.

ED NOVAK:  It’s a great milestone for us.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Congratulations.

ED NOVAK:  Thank you.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about the business.

ED NOVAK:  Like you said, we are a professional services firm under this umbrella of Grant Thornton International framework.  We do operate in 130 countries on a global basis and we have over 40,000 professionals across — on a worldwide basis.  We solve complex business issues daily, leveraging our audit, tax and advisory services professionals.  In the U.S. firm, which I’m a part of, we have about 7,000 professionals and we operate in 60 markets across the country. And I would guess that there’s a number of clients of Grant Thornton hopefully in this audience today.  In fact, I met a number of them at the dinner the other night.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Yes, that’s awesome.  So let’s paint a picture for everyone.  Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your systems and your business three to five years ago?

ED NOVAK:  Yes, so if I look back we obviously had the business of advisory, tax, audit, all those have been expanding.  And we did have a legacy CRM system in place.  And I will just be really blunt, it wasn’t good.  We had a very sporadic adoption.  We had — for the most part the people found it hard to use.  And so what you really had was pockets of people, or practices throughout the firm leveraging it, but not in a holistic way.  And so we couldn’t trust the data.  We couldn’t gain the insights at the firm level from that system.

So we knew that if we were going to change that we had to change key adoption behaviors.  And at the same time we knew that organizations across the nation were struggling with their CRM implementations.  So it really forced us to think deep and hard about getting the right adoption behaviors, and we did a lot of planning and a lot of better understanding of the change management that’s going to be needed to drive a successful CRM implementation.

So we embarked on our journey.  I’ll use that little bit throughout this time here.  And we knew that it was a long-term commitment and that commitment demands commitment from the firm before, during and after the launch.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Sure, yes.  So talk a little bit about the catalyst for change.  I know you’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of you, competing with the big four firms and delivering an integrated system that actually everybody could use and consume and get value out of pretty cheap, so the catalyst for that change?

ED NOVAK:  Well, you mentioned the big four and obviously they are very formidable competitors of ours.  They are great firms.  But, there’s a number of great firms that are competitors of ours across the country.  So we knew we had to keep evolving.  In our business it’s really all about relationships.  And where we think we have a differentiation is that clients tell us that they think our differentiating factors are the strength of our relationships, our agility and our responsiveness, and that we ultimately get to know their business better.  And we get to know them personally.

And so that’s a recipe that seems to have worked for 90 years.  But, we’re growing, right.  And we’re gaining new clients.  We’re gaining — we’re offering new and more robust solutions, more offerings to our clients. So we knew we needed a tool to help us manage that going forward.

What we really like about CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, is that we think that keeps us growing on those and empowering, the word you used, those three differentiators.  It really values the relationship and the way we’ve architected the system.  It helps us be more agile and responsive to our client.  And we think even with all the information we now have in there it helps us keep getting closer to the client.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Cool.  Can you talk a little bit about how that’s actually transformed the business internally for the different roles across Grant Thornton?

ED NOVAK:  So, yes.  We have — I would say for us internally we’re very collaborative.  So this tool had to impress us on continuing to force that collaboration.  And we have a lot of different roles in the companies.  We have sales executives, we have marketing staff, we have partners, principles, practitioners, and so what we’ve seen is that the CRM system has allowed them to gain much greater insights, activities, touch points, what customers are demanding in different areas that may influence the pursuits that they’re going after.  So the system has allowed the teams to be much more collaborative than we were in the past.

The other thing it’s given us is clarity.  So there’s really no ambiguity anymore on who is on that pursuit team, who is doing what and do we have the right messages from the client that will make us more impactful in our approach.  And so we’re really happy with the way the CRM system has become, I think, a game-changer for us in the face of the clients, because we’re now more proactive on really getting at the heart of their client issues.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Yes, so let’s talk a little bit more about the customer.  You and I have similar roles in leading large sales and marketing organizations.  What’s the experience been like with the customer?

ED NOVAK:  Let me give you two examples that, I think, to me hit home with great examples that, I think, because of Microsoft Dynamics it’s really helped transform some things that we probably wouldn’t have seen before.  And I’ll pick on a new client acquisition type of experience, where we had a partner and a sales executive in our Florida market who had started to make, approach a perspective client and really was developing and trying to gain better insight into what would be impactful for that client.  And we over the course of our implementation we put in a golden rule that says you don’t pick up the phone anymore, you don’t schedule that meeting until you’ve exhausted the information that’s in CRM.

And when our sales executive in Florida did that — I’ll give him a pat on the back — he found that one of our sales executives in Washington, D.C., had a pre-existing very strong relationship with the CFO of that client.  And so we were able to make that collaboration internally happen so that we have an exchange of ideas, what was valuable, from a historical standpoint with that CFO.  And then we ultimately ended up flying that sales executive to Florida to join the pursuit team and now we’ve embarked on a very nice relationship with that client.  Great story, it probably wouldn’t have happened in the old world without CRM.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  For sure, and then a relationship-managed business where that relationship really drives the overall success for the customer must be super critical for you.

ED NOVAK:  It is.  The second one, I’ll be brief on this one, is we do have large accounts within our firm that have a U.S. footprint, right.  And we have account teams that support those accounts.  And what we were seeing prior to CRM in place was we would cobble together all the data nationally, put a story together and have that as our plan that we would take to the client.  It would be pretty good.

What we’re seeing now with CRM and the fluidity of the information across the country going in to really understand the activities and touch points, it makes our own team much more confident and prouder to go into those monthly meetings with that account, and in fact, that client is now saying, hey, we’re really appreciative of the insights you’re telling us about our own organization that we didn’t know, so really nice stories that couldn’t have happened without CRM.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s awesome.  So the other thing that you and I are accustomed to having to do in our roles is report results.  So I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you what’s the impact to the bottom line of the results.

ED NOVAK:  Yes, this is — for me it’s a great story and thank god it happened.  And the results are hard to believe, but true.  So we’ve been on Dynamics CRM for about a year and a half now.  And over that period of time we’ve seen a 750 percent increase in the number of opportunities over our legacy system.  I think even more importantly we see —

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s 750?

ED NOVAK:  750 percent, what I really like, though, is this next measurement that says we’ve grown our average win size by 47 percent over the same period.  And we’re winning 48 percent more often with the new system in place.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s fantastic.

ED NOVAK:  So we all know that there’s a lot of great work that happens in the firm, a lot of people doing hard, excellent work to drive those metrics, but I do believe that Dynamics CRM is a key element of that progress.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s fantastic.  So I know you’re also bringing in Office 365 into the mix.  Can you talk a little bit about that?

ED NOVAK:  We are.  So, as I mentioned before, our journey continues.  And we leverage a complement of Microsoft products, whether it’s CRM, Office 365, SharePoint, Lync, Yammer, and so we continue to integrate that into the portfolio and leverage as much as we can.  And so now I kind of see that we have, I’ll call it, two paths to the journey that we’re on.  One is I’ll call it a Microsoft technology journey that says we have a team, many of them in this audience today, who are constantly evaluating the offerings from Microsoft and the releases and the tools that are coming out, it’s really wonderful, and then how to leverage that best within our firm and also globally.

The other journey I’d say is the Grant Thornton business adoption journey, which says now that we’ve gotten all these great insights, and we are impacting the metrics like I talked about, and there’s other metrics that tell great progress, as well.  How do we keep moving that more and making that into the fabric of the organization?  So our leadership, myself and many others in the firm are really looking to drive that to a much more business management tool than what it is even today.  So our transformation is energized by the possibilities of CRM and we’ll keep moving down that path.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s great, any final thoughts or comments on this after state on the journey that you’ve been down?

ED NOVAK:  Some of them are simplistic, I’d say.  It’s been very transformational.  I’ll say from a sales culture standpoint, you don’t think of a firm like Grant Thornton or other firms like this as having a selling culture and it is, because we rely on the relationships to a large degree, although it is nice to have the ability to impact clients in a much more — a better approach.

And so just something like that golden rule of no one picks up the phone until you exhaust the information in CRM that was 180 degrees from where we were a year-and-a-half ago.  And now the people embrace it and that just tells me that they’re finding value when they actually go into the system and find, boy, that’s good information there.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s right.

ED NOVAK:  We are at 1,300 users.  We want to keep driving that deeper into the organization so we’ll see that grow over the next year.  We had this great, one-and-a-half years of great data and insights that we really didn’t have before.  So my view is that the next wave for us is really in the transformation is taking those insights and driving it deeper into the business management process and instead of relying on what we used to rely on for rearview-facing metrics, this will be the headlights for us moving forward.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s fantastic.  Well, listen, we certainly also view this as a journey, not a destination and we’re super proud to be your partner in all of this.  So I really want to thank you for your time up here, Ed.

ED NOVAK:  Thank you.  I appreciate it, great event.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Thanks a lot.  (Applause.)

So I want to talk now a little bit more about empowering industries.  And you pick up on some of these key thematic elements when you hear Ed talk about the key of wiring together productivity and systems for better data, to have deeper engagement with your customers.  It’s critical that we bring the same thing to life across industries.  And you heard earlier in the week, yesterday, in fact, you saw an awesome demo done by Julia White that showed how we can make a classic sales person more productive in a traditional sales and marketing role.

What I want to show you now is how we can use the same types of technologies, the productivity tools, the more personal computing environments, the richness of Dynamics CRM when it’s built into an industry fabric, as well as the importance of that data, the intelligent data coming from the cloud, how we can really light up an industry experience.

So I’m going to take you on a bit of a financial services journey.  We built this solution in one of our Microsoft Technology Centers.  And we’re going to take you through it and I’ll tell you a little bit afterwards about how we might build the same thing for you.  So to help me through this I’d like to welcome to the stage Marley Gray, from our MTC in New York City.  (Applause.)

Thanks, Marley.

So why don’t you set this up for everybody, tell everybody a little bit about what you built, the type of solution we have here and the scenario that it portrays.

MARLEY GRAY:  Sure.  We built a demonstrable system of intelligence, if you will, for the wealth management business that coordinates three distinct roles in the organization.  One is the branch greeter.  One is the financial analyst sort of working backstage.  And the third is the financial advisor who really plays that forward-facing, face to the customer, very important role that they try to scale as many customers to one advisor to really maximize.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So the goal of the company is to make the advisor more productive, to touch more customers in an impactful way.

MARLEY GRAY:  So this system basically lets them work together to deliver a great customer experience and deliver to a better bottom line while keeping them in regulatory compliance and allow them to track the KPIs for each of those individuals to see how they’re working together.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Awesome, so let’s jump into it.

MARLEY GRAY:  Let’s do.  And we’ll start out over here in the branch.  And I’m going to bring up the greeter application.  Now normally we would run the greeter application on an 8-inch device like this, an all-day battery life.  It could walk out, you really don’t care.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So this could be a greeter working at a branch office.

MARLEY GRAY:  Right.  And their goal is basically to route customers to the appropriate place.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  OK.

MARLEY GRAY:  OK.  So this greeter happens to see that you walk in, we get this notification here, you’re a premier customer.  You first of all rarely come into the branch.  And there’s a long teller line for which you’ve just gotten in the rear.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Yes, not a big fan of big lines.

MARLEY GRAY:  So I immediately come and approach you and say, Judson, can I help you?

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Please, get me out of this line.

MARLEY GRAY:  What can I do for you?

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So how about I deposit a check, how about that?

MARLEY GRAY:  Yes, deposit, cash a check, whatever.  I can take that check for you.  All I’m going to have you do is enter your pin here.  You can type it in yourself.  Now I’ve authenticated and you would give the tablet to me, I would take that check, go back, maybe have it cashed and while I’m doing that I’m looking at the screen for opportunity.  And see this “next best actions” up on the screen there; it has what the next best recommendations are for the recommendation engine.

One of which is I want to get you back in.  So I’m going to come in and schedule an investment review and I’m going to pitch this to you.  I’m going to give you the money.  So I can get you to come back in when you’re in a better mood to be sold to.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  I see.

MARLEY GRAY:  So we can pick a date, say, like next Friday the 27th.  Your relationship manager will pull in availability, 9 a.m. with Jim Hance, who actually owns your relationship.  And if that’s good with you I can go ahead and confirm that.  And I’m going to email you a confirmation, and book that appointment.  Now this appointment gets put on his calendar and on your calendar and we’re all set.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  I’m checking my phone and I’m all set.

MARLEY GRAY:  You’re all set.  Everything is great.  Now, for most organizations that’s fabulous.  They’re really happy with that.  But, we’re going to do so much more here.  So we’re going to switch roles now to the greeter.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So this is after I’ve already left.

MARLEY GRAY:  You’ve gone, maybe gone to play golf, whatever.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  I’m off doing my thing.  So the analyst then is going to take my same record in CRM and do some work on it.

MARLEY GRAY:  Yes, so while the branch greeter scheduled that appointment, that appointment actually gets put in the queue.  So our systems of intelligence basically allow us to come in and it goes up and picks up some recommendations for you.  As an analyst I see that you’re here at the top of the queue and I see this “next best actions” for you, again, I’m seeing the same screen, but the action for me as an analyst is to do the research that is not obvious.

We see the recommendation engine has automatically put in a financial review and some regular products.  But, I’m going to dig deeper.  So to dig deeper I’m going to bring up our research tool, which we built in Excel, and it’s called the Hyper Advisor.  And in the Hyper Advisor we pulled data from a bunch of different internal bank systems and then we apply templates to them.

Now, some of the templates are market-driven, are from the marketing team like a travel rewards credit card.  So we pull up your credit card statement, then we can see that you traveled a bit.  We’re going to pitch that to you.  That’s sort of a no-brainer.  But, then the other one is I’m pulling from six different systems of record.  You have a checking, a savings data that we’re pulling, credit card, line of credit, mortgage and IRA.  And what I want to do, this is —

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  This is data from six different systems.

MARLEY GRAY:  Right, pull it all down here and I want to analyze it.  I’m looking for a pattern.  In this particular pattern we can look at a history, it’s called Capital Flight, Personal Capital Flight.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Awesome, Capital Flight doesn’t sound so good.

MARLEY GRAY:  It’s not good for us.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  OK.

MARLEY GRAY:  What that basically means is you received a large deposit in one of your checking or your savings account.  And then that large deposit, which we would have considered to be investable with us, disappears.  We have no idea where it went.  So I’m going to look and see if that has occurred in the past, if there’s any sort of pattern.  So I can peruse through these thousands of lines of data, or I could use PowerView built right into Excel to allow me to go through and identify any of these patterns.  So I’m going to come back over here.  I’m going to start to go way back at the 2011.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So this is modeling four years’ worth of data in a predictive fashion, from all of those different data sources.

MARLEY GRAY:  Right and I could play this out and see how — play it out in real time and it’s kind of hard to pick up the pattern, because it’s moving so quickly.  I can use things like I can put tracer lines on these and see if I can identify these patterns, as I move forward.  We can see as the year progresses you’re bumping up your line of credit, your Visa card goes up, and then in January or February your checking account spikes up and then it looks like you’re paying down your debt.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  I’m paying down the debt.

MARLEY GRAY:  That’s a great thing for us.  You’re paying down your debt.  We’re making money hand over fist with you.  So we’re going to continue this.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Well, it’s good for you.  I’m not sure where this benefits me.

MARLEY GRAY:  It’s the business model, and we’re looking, and you’re a really good customer.  You’re borrowing lots of money and then you’re paying it off every February.  This is great.  But now we see that you’re not building up debt.  And in February of 2013, you got a bonus and — or 2014, you got a bonus and that disappeared.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  I see.  My wife must have went shopping.

MARLEY GRAY:  Yes, or something.  That was a significant car.  But we can see as we progress forward that that money has flown the coop.  Too late.  But here we are in March, right, you’ve got your bonus, and it looks like you parked it in your savings account.  So we need to have a conversation with you about investing that money with us instead of letting your wife go buy —

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Well, the advisor is doing all of this work, preparing all of these materials.

MARLEY GRAY:  The analyst, yes, the analyst is going through that.  This is the cool part.  This is where I’m actually going to pump into that pipeline the next best actions.  I’m going to have you pitched the travel awards credit card, marketing wants to do that.  I’m going to attach the data that we just went through for the advisor to the recommendation.  So I’m going to add that to that, to the next best actions list.  And when I’m done you’ll see I’ve built the next best actions list for the advisor.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Cool.  So it’s taken all of that predictive analytics and put it right into the CRM record so that the next person who picks up me in the relationship flow knows exactly what to do.

MARLEY GRAY:  Right.  Yes, they can understand what the opportunity is and sort of what the history and the context is.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Cool.

MARLEY GRAY:  OK.  So with that let’s switch back over to the advisor, and we’re going to fast-forward in time.  So over here I’m going to come back over, and I’m going to login as the advisor.  You’ll have to bear with me for just a moment.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So this is like the day of this appointment.

MARLEY GRAY:  Right, and I’m coming in and I’m logging in to my system, and I’m going to start my day.  And it’s going to pull up my dashboard, which is basically a composite view.  It’s going to show me my calendar, eventually, all of this is coming again from the cloud.  So I get my calendar view.  I see sort of contacts.  I see research that’s begin done, my campaigns.  And then I need to basically go out — oh, here’s a reminder you’re coming in in 15 minutes.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Got it.

MARLEY GRAY:  Now I have 400 clients that I have to manage.  Now I don’t really remember you.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s not good.

MARLEY GRAY:  No, it’s not.  So I’d better do my homework really quickly.  So I’m going to pull up your profile, and I’ll familiarize myself with you.  So I can see, OK, you’re president of Contoso.  It’s a very popular company.  I can see some basic information.  I see the next best actions list.  I can review what we did last year, a very balanced portfolio.  You can see the activity feed.  I can see how you got here, you cashed a check, you scheduled a meeting, research was done, and all that good stuff.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  OK.

MARLEY GRAY:  So I get this view.  And because I see your picture, I see you walk into the branch.  I’m like, oh, here he is, let me go grab him.  I’m going to pull you in, and I’m going to try to involve you in the modeling process.

So I’m going to say, Judson, let’s go ahead and start your financial review, and the financial review we’re basically doing goals-based selling.  We’re pulling up the goals that you had last year.  You have saving for your children’s college fund; a second home in Hawaii, which you mentioned that you really wanted to go for.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Yes, that sounds good.

MARLEY GRAY:  Debt-free.  Travel to Europe is one of those things, we’re not sure.  You can slide these sliders around and adjust your goals however you see fit.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  I see, so it’s an interactive model that allows me to manage my portfolio.

MARLEY GRAY:  Exactly.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s great.

MARLEY GRAY:  So do you have any new goals in mind?

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  You know this one that is just sort of popping off the screen here is this notion of retiring at 55.  That sounds pretty —

MARLEY GRAY:  Well, go ahead and select that, and we’ll see what that does to your portfolio.  That’s going to move you to a pretty aggressive …

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  I’ve got to get a little bit more aggressive.

MARLEY GRAY:  Exactly.  So if you’re good with that, go ahead and we’ll apply the changes, and if we can just capture your John Hancock there.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  I’ll sign away here, there we go.

MARLEY GRAY:  Now, that is being done, and your portfolio will be adjusted.

Now let me tell you about this new service.  Those three goals that you had, we can map those to accounts that you already have established that you could do systematic savings towards.  Now systematic savings is like for every time you get paid, like if you get paid every two weeks, we’ll automatically deduct a certain amount towards — most people do it towards checking to savings.  In this case we’re going to do it, you can apply X amount to this goal and each goal.  So you can set default amounts.  Now this service is unique, and mostly it’s a static, when you set it up, you set it up once. In this case, we’re going to send you a notification.  When you get paid, we’re going to notify you and allow you to change how much you’re going to invest.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Every time I get a direct deposit I can decide how I want to lay it out.

MARLEY GRAY:  Exactly.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Or do you have defaults then?

MARLEY GRAY:  You have defaults.  That’s what we’re going to set right now.  I’m going to teach you how to set the default.  Now every month you can change it.  You can zero it out, or you can say, hey, I’ll just put one college savings, and then change the defaults then if you want to.

We’re just going to set the defaults now, and I’m going to go ahead and set this up.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Typically you know, Marley, the one thing I get fairly uncomfortable with is making all of these decisions without my wife here, because if I decide where to put the money and then I don’t tell her about it, it doesn’t end well for me.

MARLEY GRAY:  I get it.  So why don’t we do this, let’s Skype her in.  So we’re going to go ahead, and let’s Skype your wife in.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  She’ll be thrilled with this.

MARLEY GRAY:  Hopefully she is dressed.  What time is it over there?

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  You know, it is St. Patrick’s Day.

MARLEY GRAY:  It’s early, it’s past noon there.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  It is.  She’s busy.

MARLEY GRAY:  Oh, there she is.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Hi, honey.

LAURA ALTHOFF:  Hi, Marley.  Hi, Judson.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Say hi to a couple hundred of my closest friends out here.

LAURA ALTHOFF:  Hello.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So Marley here is trying to get me to take my paycheck and invest it, and I told him that if I went and did that without you I might get into trouble.  So we thought we would Skype you into the discussion.

MARLEY GRAY:  So I’ve given Judson the tablet and he is going to be able to adjust and model out what he thinks the best investments are.  You can run the Wood Grove, your banking app, that you have installed here, too, and join our session and share with us your opinions.  So you guys go ahead and try to model this out.  And while you’re doing it, I’m going to show you the big picture up here.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  OK, got it.  One of the things down here that I think is pretty cool is this notion of a second home in Hawaii, so I would kind of like to bump that up.  What do you think?

LAURA ALTHOFF:  I love the idea of a second home in Hawaii, but the other two options are putting the kids through school and paying our Visa.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  There you go being responsible again.

LAURA ALTHOFF:  I know, but I kind of felt that — this is a monthly bill, right?

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  It is.  And it’s every time we get paid, so it’s a couple of times a month.

LAURA ALTHOFF:  Yes, you know.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  You sure?  Like this Hawaii thing here actually to me seems way, way better, because we’re in Hawaii and Nate is pretty good at hockey, he can get a scholarship.

LAURA ALTHOFF:  He won’t be in Hawaii if he’s playing hockey.

MARLEY GRAY:  She has a point there.

LAURA ALTHOFF:  Maybe we should like get a house in Minnesota or North Dakota.  I don’t know.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  This is why she makes all the decisions.  Well, honey, thanks for your input here.  I really appreciate your involvement.  I think maybe if I do what’s wise here, I might just accept what your changes were there, and we can let Marley move on here.  But thanks, honey, for being a part of the show here.

LAURA ALTHOFF:  It was fun.  Thanks.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Thank you.

MARLEY GRAY:  Thank you.

LAURA ALTHOFF:  Bye.

(Applause.)

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  You always have to involve the boss.

MARLEY GRAY:  Consult your opinion.

OK, so the next thing I’m going to show you is something called advanced fraud alerts.  So everybody has had this either happen to you online where you’re trying to order something online and your card gets declined, and you think, well, maybe I just fat-fingered the credit card and you type it again, and it’s been blocked.  You don’t know why, so what do you do, you pull another card out and try another card.  And then maybe 15 minutes later you get a robocall, hey, suspicious activity has been detected on your card.  That’s not very timely and, frankly, for us we lose your business.

So what this does is it will send a notification to whatever device you’re logged into.  So here is your Windows Phone, if you want to just slide it up, and I’m going to show you what it’s going to look like.  I’m going to trigger this, and you’re going to get a notification.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  All right.  So suspicious charge denied.  So I’m going to go ahead and click on that.  And everybody can see.

MARLEY GRAY:  Everybody can see that? Yes.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Let me help you out here. So what it does is it’s actually pulling up an app right on my phone asking me a bunch of security questions, like do I still have the card?  So I’ll go ahead and check that off.  It’s taken me through the purchases.  It looks like Laura went to Macy’s, so we’ll check that off.  I was at the Home Depot and bought gas.  And, look, for all of the business she’s giving me about Hawaii, she’s going to the jewelry store and spending money.  Anyhow, so I’ll go ahead and confirm that.  And it goes ahead and tells me that my card has been reactivated.  So I don’t skip a beat.  I don’t have to take the robocall.  And I don’t actually have to take my money away from your bank.

MARLEY GRAY:  Elsewhere, right.  So we keep the business and do the right thing.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s awesome.  So that’s all enabled through Azure Notification Services tied right into the same solution that’s been built here?

MARLEY GRAY:  Right. So we as a bank send a notification to Azure Mobile Services, and it figures out are you on your iPhone or are you on your Windows Phone or wherever, and sends you that notification.  And you’ll be able to handle it.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Great.

MARLEY GRAY:  So now we’ll go through these next couple of actions.  The travel awards credit card was pitched.  I know that you’ve already talked about paying down the card that you currently have.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Yes.  I probably don’t need another credit card.

MARLEY GRAY:  You’ll probably decline.

And then the final one, and this one gets a little tricky, we did notice a pattern of every February you do get a bonus, and last February you didn’t call me and put that money with me, and I’m kind of hurt, actually.  So we noticed that if there’s anything you might want to do with that money this year?

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Well, I’d love to.  Why don’t we set up some time to go through that and figure out how to invest it smartly.

MARLEY GRAY:  Smartly, yes, we can look at maybe looking at expanding your business, for example. I’ll follow-up a call with — maybe I’ll have a commercial banker give you a call.  So I’ll go ahead and click that.  And we’re done here.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  You’ve cleared the action list.

MARLEY GRAY:  Yes, I’ve cleared that action list and you’re on your way out the branch.

Now, finally, for the bank, this is the home run here.  So for the bank what we have just gotten is this activity feed, this bread crumb trail.  We can come out and see, you came in, you cashed a check.  There was a referral opportunity which was taken advantage of.  So the person that made that referral gets credit for that.

Research was done, and then we can see all the actions.  I can see all the calls ever made, fraud alert was sent, and then a follow-up request was sent.  So I keep that trail.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s fantastic, really, really cool.

So why don’t we pop out of character for a minute here and you share with everybody all of the underlying technology in the solution they just saw.

MARLEY GRAY:  So the system is built fundamentally on CRM Online with Office 365, so you see the calendar and stuff, and then Azure, Mobile Services, database, and that’s all built together.  And then we used the unified application model to work on the phone, on tablets, on multiple devices.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Awesome.  You had a little bit of Skype for Business there as well.

MARLEY GRAY:  And Skype for Business as well, yes.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Fantastic. Thanks so much, Marley, I appreciate it.  Thank you.

(Applause.)

So you see what we can do to power industries when we apply all of the technology that we have and work together with you to light up solutions.

Marley works with a group that we call Microsoft Technology Centers, and we have about 20 of these facilities across North America where we can come in and apply the technology and prototype and build out these very same types of experiences for your businesses, so that we can empower your employees and empower your customers and give them a more enriched experience.  So we invite you to explore that with us and engage with us.

We can also bring some of these very same prototyping environments to you directly, but these are the types of solutions that we want to light up for you in your environment.

Next I want to bring the industry example a little bit closer to home to right here in Atlanta, and I’m going to do so by bringing a customer to stage.

I want to tell you a little bit about Delta Airlines, because they’re a fantastic partner of Microsoft’s.  Last year, if you came to Convergence, you probably heard us announce that we have lit up the airways with a cashless cabin application, with Microsoft Lumia phones connected to a Dynamics AX system that allows them to do real-time ordering while in flight.

That journey has evolved.  I actually got the opportunity to go check out Delta.  That’s me, believe it or not, in a 777 simulator, much harder than it looks, I will tell you that, for sure.

You see that in the upper right-hand corner there there’s actually a picture of a Surface that’s mounted to the inner wall of the cockpit there.  And we’re going to take you through a little bit about what we’ve been able to build together with Delta.

So without further ado, please join me in welcoming to the stage Darrell Haskins, Director of Flight Crew Systems, and First Officer Jared Hodge.  (Applause.)  Hey, guys.

DARRELL HASKINS:  Hello.

JARED HODGE:  Hey.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Thanks for joining me up here.

DARRELL HASKINS:  Thanks for joining us, too.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  What have you got there, buddy?  Wow.

JARED HODGE:  That’s what encases all of our manuals and paper charts right there, that we carry on the airplanes.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Awesome.  Sounds like the way it bounced you should put the black box in there.

JARED HODGE:  Yeah, we could do that, too.  (Laughter.)

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So thanks for joining me up here, guys.

Listen, Darrell, let’s start off with you.  You’ve rolled out 20,000 of these devices now to build out a cashless cabin.  Why don’t you show the audience a little bit about what you’ve built and how the application works?

DARRELL HASKINS:  Yeah, you bet.  Thank you for having us.

You know, actually we’ve rolled it out twice now.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  OK.

DARRELL HASKINS:  We started in September of 2013 and rolled out 20,000 Nokia 820s.  And now we just rolled out in the last few months the new Nokia 1520.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Awesome.

DARRELL HASKINS:  And for a specific reason.  The FAA thought the form factor of the previous device was a little bit too small for reading manuals, for the flight attendant.  So now we have e-docs on this new phone.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Very cool.

DARRELL HASKINS:  So a flight attendant equivalent of that bag.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Awesome.

DARRELL HASKINS:  Not quite as big.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Yeah.  (Laughter.)

DARRELL HASKINS:  Is now right there at their fingertips.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Well, I’m sure they’re happy to have their load lightened.

DARRELL HASKINS:  They are so happy.  The only time we’ve ever gotten a standing ovation from flight attendants was when we said, look at your new red book.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Awesome.

DARRELL HASKINS:  And we showed it here, and they loved it.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Cool.

DARRELL HASKINS:  We’ve also been able to add a new icon for iCrew Mobile, which allows our crew members to look up their schedules, look up their hotels, able to swap flights if they want to swap flights.  Sometimes Jared likes go to Miami instead of North Dakota, so get on here and swap it out.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Yeah, I don’t blame him.

DARRELL HASKINS:  So they can do that now right on this device, whereas they used to have to go into a lounge in one of our bases.  We only have 13 of those.  So you’d have to be in a specific place to do these things.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Cool.

DARRELL HASKINS:  So really empowered our crew members by giving them this new device, and they’re thrilled to have it.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Awesome.

So can you show us some of the underlying technology in the application?

DARRELL HASKINS:  Sure.  Something that’s coming out later this summer is this GST tile that our flight attendants don’t have quite yet.  If you tap on that, it’s called a Guest Services Tool is what that stands for. So although we fly 170 million passengers a year, we want to know who they are.  We want to personalize that experience onboard the aircraft.

So we’re giving this to our flight attendants later this summer.  This particular screen just shows them the flight that they’re on, so their origin and destination, their flight numbers, the flight time.  This one’s actually coming in 20 minutes early into Atlanta.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Always good to hear.

DARRELL HASKINS:  Delta.  The mileage, the ship number and then a codeshare.  So this one in particular is an AeroMexico codeshare on this.

And they can swipe, they can get their passenger count.  You may recall that when you fly you see the gate agent right before the door closes, they bring down a long piece of paper.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Yeah.

DARRELL HASKINS:  That’s what this is going to replace.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Oh, awesome.

DARRELL HASKINS:  And now instead of one flight attendant having this information, every flight attendant will have this information.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Cool.

DARRELL HASKINS:  They can get the passenger list.  They can look up our SkyMiles, so we can see that you’re on the flight, if you’re a premium member, a diamond member.  All that information is now right on their fingertips for them to see.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  And that’s awesome.  Fantastic.

So tell us a little bit more about the underlying technology.

DARRELL HASKINS:  So for the point of sale, you know, we use Microsoft Dynamics AX as the back office.  We have those servers on the ground.  We have the luxury of having all of our fleet connected with Wi-Fi.  So when our flight attendants get on the flight, they sign in, we know what flight they’re on, we put the right menu on.  That’s all stored on the ground.

The folks, our business partners, this is wonderful, IT doesn’t have to do this, our people on onboard services can go right in that system, change the menu, change the prices, add a promotion, add new menu items and it immediately uplinks to these devices and the flight attendants have it.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So the power of that connected system allows you to deliver a better inflight service because it’s connected to inventory —

DARRELL HASKINS:  Absolutely.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  — and they know what’s available to hand out.

DARRELL HASKINS:  You bet.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  And now we’re starting to use some analytics on that data, because we never had the data before.  So now we have all this rich data, we’re starting to analyze it and make sure that we don’t run out of the things that passengers want to have during those flights.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So you can have anything you want as long as it’s chicken.

DARRELL HASKINS:  That’s right.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s good.

You know, Darrell, I’ve been standing up here a little while, and I’m kind of hungry and thirsty.  You think we could get some peanuts?

DARRELL HASKINS:  You know, I see here that you’ve ordered some peanuts.  (Laughter.)

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  See, there you go.  Real-time systems of intelligence right here, folks.  (Laughter.)

DARRELL HASKINS:  It says here you drink a lot, too — a lot of Coke, I mean.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  First, I call my wife, then they tell me I drink a lot.  (Laughter.)  This presentation is going great.

DARRELL HASKINS:  Soft drinks.

Yeah, so we want to know more about our passengers, and this is a way to do it for sure.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s awesome, Darrell.  Thanks so much for sharing that.

DARRELL HASKINS:  You bet.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So Jared, let’s talk a little bit more about this bag.  What do you put in the bag?

JARED HODGE:  Yeah, so all of our paper charts, all of our manuals, company documents are all in this bag.

And so we’re getting rid of it, moving to a paperless cockpit, and using the Surface device to replace all that.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So you’re going to show us how you do that?

JARED HODGE:  Yeah.  Yeah, so let’s take a walk over here to my Surface, and give you an idea of what we’re using.

So currently, right now all Delta pilots on all of our flights are currently utilizing the Surface device on all of our flights.

Now, I heard you talk about that you flew a Delta simulator.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  I did.

JARED HODGE:  So since we’re going to be a crew member here, I want to make you an honorary Delta junior captain and give you your wings there.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Ah, look at this.  That is fantastic.  (Laughter.)  This is the presentation that keeps on giving here.

JARED HODGE:  There you go.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  This is great.

JARED HODGE:  So let’s dive in here.  There’s two applications that we use routinely, the flight — that looks perfect, looks better than mine.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Awesome.

JARED HODGE:  So we use the FliteDeck Pro by Jeppesen, and the Content Locker by AirWatch.

So we’ll first dive into the FliteDeck Pro, again by Jeppesen.  So this is a route — I want to say you are from Seattle, correct?

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  I am.  I am.

JARED HODGE:  OK.  So I’ve created a flight plan from Atlanta to Seattle, and this is a standard Delta route that we do every day.

So right here you can see a very good overall picture of what the route looks like.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So who’s SNUFY?

JARED HODGE:  SNUFY is a waypoint that the FAA named.  They can be pretty creative when they name their waypoints.  So that’s a route, actually a waypoint we would fly over.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Nice.

JARED HODGE:  So right here this just gives the overall picture for the pilot, and it provides a better substantial awareness, if you will, and it provides a lot of the information, so we can actually study the route better.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Cool.

JARED HODGE:  Airport information is available literally at the pilot’s fingertips.  So we can touch here and right here is Atlanta, Georgia.  I have every single chart I have for Atlanta, and I can select which charts I want to use on the flight.

So this is the departure procedure right here.  That’s gate information and where the gate’s located.  And right here is an overview of a layout of the Atlanta airport.  You can see there’s a lot of information right here that can be a little overwhelming.

All this isn’t going to pertain to the flight.  So I can actually use a highlight feature and highlight the important information I want that’s going to affect my flight.  I can also draw out what my taxi route might be towards the runway we’re taxiing to.  So that’s really neat.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s awesome.  So you used to have to do this all like shuffling papers around while inflight inside the cockpit.

JARED HODGE:  That’s correct.  I couldn’t say it any better.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  And now this is like mounted right there?

JARED HODGE:  This is mounted right there, easy access, I don’t have to look down quite often for the charts.

So back to the in-route function here, if you notice when I scroll into a certain area, more information begins to come up for the pilot.  This is on the paper chart, however, which is really nice.  I can actually declutter and only choose information that I want to see while in route, because we’re always monitoring our progress along a flight.  And if I need a radio frequency for a certain NAV aid, if you will, I have the frequency, lat/long coordinates.  It comes right there, available to me.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s super cool.

JARED HODGE:  It is very nice.

Now, one function that we love, being we the Delta pilots, that we get a big feedback on is the snap function where we’re able to view two documents at one time.  And so when we’re beginning our approach, we always do a brief, usually have one checklist and another document in my hand, but this I’m able to bring it up all at once.

So I’m going to use an AirWatch Content Locker and bring up a document.  This is an approach briefing that we do.  And while we’re doing the brief, I can also look at the approach that we’re going to be talking about or doing into an airport.  So this is Seattle.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  You can go through the guide and visualize the approach at the same time.

JARED HODGE:  Once again, exactly, that is correct.

So it’s really nice, because I can have it out there, I don’t have to take four fingers and swipe to the left or swipe to the right.  It’s all right there in front of me.

So while I’m scrolling, doing my briefing, I can scroll to all the maps that I want or all the charts.  And at the same time, I can put in different notes if that’s available.

So I made a note for yourself and all the audience in here, right there.  So let’s make sure everyone does that, right?

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Awesome.  There you go.  (Laughter.)  We’ll make sure to do that.  In fact, that’s my exact route home there.

JARED HODGE:  Very good.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So tell us what you’re doing to bridge this awesome client experience and empowering experience together with data and make it more interactive.

JARED HODGE:  Yeah, so every day Delta, we’re coming up with new ways to come up with innovative ways to push data to our pilots live.  And we’re creating new apps also.  So an app that we’re currently in beta is this Delta weather app right here.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s awesome.

JARED HODGE:  Yeah.  So what this is doing, it’s providing real-life weather information to our pilots to help them plan their route of flight.  There’s a lot of abundant information available here, but just a few.  We have a surface analysis chart, which tells us where all the high and low pressures are, and upper air and the upper atmosphere where the jet streams are located and where weather fronts are also.

But one that’s really important for the flight crew and passengers are turbulence plotting charts, which also this points out to where areas are more prone to turbulence so we can avoid it or we can actually give more of a warning for our passengers, hey, you might want to be seated.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s appreciated.  We value that.

So you’re streaming all of this data in from multiple sources like NOAA and giving real time information to pilots.  So tell me a little bit about what, like, severe turbulence actually means.

JARED HODGE:  Oh, OK, yeah.  So there’s the different severities of the turbulence.  But severe in definition is a momentary loss of aircraft control, so we avoid that one.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Loss of control.  That doesn’t sound good at all.  It sounds just slightly worse than when you say, “Hey, flight attendants, please take your seats.”

JARED HODGE:  We’re definitely saying that.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Yeah, OK, good, good.

Well, listen, it’s really awesome how you’re bringing together all of these systems to create a better experience for customers, and a more productive and empowering environment for pilots, too.  That’s super cool.

JARED HODGE:  It is, it is.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  So Darrell, tell us a little bit about the bottom-line results, because in addition to providing these better experiences, at the end of the day, you’ve got to be able to show objective business results when you invest in all of this technology.

DARRELL HASKINS:  That’s right.  I mean, obviously these are fantastic moves forward compared to that bag to this device.  And one clear result is that weights almost 40 pounds and that doesn’t.  And so when you take two of those, and some of our aircraft have as many as five of those bags, off of every flight, several thousand flights a day over every day over a year, putting that on the aircraft will save us 1,200,000 gallons of fuel a year.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Wow, just removing the bags.

DARRELL HASKINS:  Just from removing the bags and putting that on the flight deck.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Wow, that’s amazing.

DARRELL HASKINS:  So that’s a lot of gas, and not to mention the trees that we save, we don’t have to print that, because those documents change every 28 days.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Oh wow.

DARRELL HASKINS:  So we used to have to replace that paper every 28 days.  Now Jared goes in here, taps on an icon, and he gets all the updates on his charts.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s fantastic.

DARRELL HASKINS:  So it’s really terrific stuff.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  That’s great.

DARRELL HASKINS:  So we’ve laid the foundation for the future.  This is one example of an application we can put on that device.  There are many other applications we can put on the flight attendants’ Nokia 1520s.

And so the challenge to us now is to meter that out and make sure we’re putting the most valuable tools in the hands of our pilots, in the hands of our flight attendants, so that we can do much more personal interaction with our customers by knowing who you are, what your preferences are, and the results have been pretty astounding at Delta.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Well, I can’t thank you two enough for sharing your stories.  Thanks so much, guys.

DARRELL HASKINS:  Thank you.

JARED HODGE:  Thank you.

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Thanks a lot.

JARED HODGE:  Good to see you again.  (Applause.)

JUDSON ALTHOFF:  Well, Jared, don’t forget about this thing here, buddy.  (Laughter.)  Thanks.  We’ll see you.

So hopefully you’ve gathered that whether you’re in the financial services industry or the airline industry, Microsoft builds technology for one reason, and it’s to empower you, to empower your people, empower your organizations and empower your industry.

To do this, we have a culture of empowerment, and it means that every innovation, every differentiation, everything we bring to bear is about empowering you.  It’s about building better systems that make people more productive, enable them to achieve more, enable us to bring real business results regardless of what industry you sit in.

Thank you so much for your investment in Microsoft, your time with us here today. Enjoy the rest of the conference, and have a happy St. Patrick’s Day.  (Applause.)

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