Julia White: Convergence 2015

ANNOUNCER:  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome General Manager, Microsoft Office 365 Product Marketing, Julia White.  (Applause.)

JULIA WHITE:  Thanks so much.

You know, what I love about that video, and what I feel like it really highlights is the shift to the cloud that our customers are making, which is important, but really it’s about using the cloud to let them increase their pace of business and being more agile in the decisions they’re making around their business, which I love, but also that our customers are choosing a cloud platform, not just one piece, which is so much more possible now with the cloud technologies than it ever used to be from a server perspective where you had to deploy all of them individually.  So love to see that.

Moving forward, so I’m excited to be here to talk to you about what does it mean to be reinventing productivity.  So I’d like to start with the fact that the world has changed so dramatically from the productivity experience we started with Office 25 years ago.  The world of individual work in an office really is a thing of the past now when we have things like devices grossly outnumber the number of people on the planet.  We create more data than we can possibly consume in a reasonable way.

And in general the pace of change is faster than ever.  And I know we say that, but I want to kind of make it real in terms of what does that mean.

So a question for you:  Of the Fortune 500 companies that existed in 1955, how many do you think are still listed on the Fortune 500 today?  Any guesses.  Got a few out there.  Eighty-nine percent are gone.  They’re no longer in the Fortune 500.  That means only 11 percent remain of the past 50 years still on that Fortune 500 list.

Fifty years ago, the life expectancy, the amount of time we would have expected a business or had seen a business stay on that list was 75 years.  Now it’s less than 15.  That’s what I mean when the world is moving faster, the rate of change is faster, that’s how quickly businesses are changing and the agility required to stay in that kind of realm of corporations.

And there’s a great Jack Welch quote that I think really captures it, which is “if the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”  And that’s so true today, more so than ever before.

As we look at kind of what’s fundamentally underpinning that change and what’s happening and what’s driving that agility and that speed, it’s really about this network system, you know, the world being a giant network.  And that network is how we unlock and become more than the sum of the parts.

But the network has kind of fundamentally changed how we work and view our personal lives.  For example, I get all of my breaking news on Twitter.  That’s how I follow everything that’s happening.  I keep up with my friends and family on Facebook.  And I look for the people that I want to hire on LinkedIn.

And those networks work because information is shared openly; it’s transparent.  I can see all the candidates interested in a job at Microsoft.  I can see all things going on with my family.  And maybe it was yesterday or maybe it was last week, but I have access to it when it’s relevant to me, when I want to find it.  And it’s really revolutionized our personal lives.

But as we look inside the workplace, that change has just begun.  It’s happening but it’s just begun, and there’s so much more potential.  And that’s where we’re investing in that way so we can unlock that potential in a new way.

And so just to kind of step back and frame it a little bit, it’s changing how we communicate.  So if you go back to the Industrial Revolution and where we started creating these organizational hierarchies, and the idea was as organizations were getting bigger, we needed a way to manage the span of control, to facilitate the right communication to the right person.

And that was a time where we had — there was kind of a scarcity of information, and we wanted to make sure just the right people had the right information and no more.   And that was kind of the genesis of that kind of communication network within an organization.

But now as we move forward, we’re now living in a world where there’s actually unlimited access to data.  We have all the information we could possibly hope to have or use, and now it’s about how we tap into that, how we use that data, how we use that information effectively, and getting access to it in the right way and the right time.

And it’s a fundamental shift in how we can communicate based on that.  And again it’s that openness, it’s that transparency of the communication that really is that shift.

And a simple example, I think about how much interesting information there is in my inbox, which is an incredibly important communication vehicle but it’s directed, it’s closed by nature.  But it’s so useful for other people.

But I’m not going to spam my organization with my email, but instead when we share in an open fashion, people can find it, the relevant subject matters, can discover it and use it in that moment.  And it’s that that really unlocks the kind of latent potential in our organizations and our employees.

And one of my favorite examples of this is when General McChrystal went into Iraq.  And obviously the military are a very consistent hierarchical communication structure from up to down.  But McChrystal went into Iraq, and he found that he was facing a very nontraditional competitor, and he had to adapt.  He had to get out of that hierarchical communication structure and become more networked.

And so he did something very radical in the military.  He went from a need-to-know communication approach to a need-not-to-know communication approach, so the people on the frontlines communicating with each other across different locations, identifying where resources need to be in a very efficient way.

So he saw the results in things like they had a scarcity of helicopters, and so they were able to find and communicate in a networked way to get those limited resources to the right spot at the right time, and be more effective in that battle.  And when I see someone do that in the military, I know that it’s also possible in our organizations and our companies.

But it’s also not just about the way we communicate, it’s actually also permeating how the workforce itself is actually shaped in our structure.

And if you look at, you know, historically the vast majority of our workforce is fixed, fulltime employees, kind of the standard approach.  By 2020, 40 percent of our workforce is expected to be contingent staff, independent workers.  Almost half our employees in five years are going to be interdependent, contingent.  That’s a huge shift in both how we structure ourselves organizationally, but also how we have to work to make that effective.

And essentially we’re moving to this very networked approach to org where we find the right talent for a problem, the best experts and subject-matter experts around the world, and we bring them together in what we call the Hollywood model.

If I’m going to do a great movie, I’m going to get the best stars, the best producers, everyone’s going to come together for that finite, fixed amount of time, do the project, and then disperse onto the next thing.  That’s increasingly how the workforce is actually being shaped as well.

And there’s a great example, Zara, who’s a fashion retailer, as well as a manufacturer, who both brings together the kind of new approach to communications in a networked way, but also the talent pool in another way, too.

So Zara from their manufacturing perspective only plans at 80-percent capacity, which of course is ridiculous from a cost perspective to be under 100 percent.  But they actually hold that extra 20 percent to be very agile based on what’s happening real time.

So their frontline stores in Spain or Portugal or the U.S. can actually say, hey, you know what, that particular pencil skirt is selling like hotcakes, and the teams can come together and say, great, the design team, the manufacturing team and say, great, you know what, let’s do more of that, different stores, let’s add some colors.  And they can come together very quickly, put that together, and then get it in the manufacturing line, because they’ve both accounted that from the beginning, but they’ve enabled this communication in a networked way, as well as bringing the right talent together to create that moment from the manufacturing perspective.

The other area that I think actually kind of brings it home for me, too, if you think about the millennial hire, these are the people that I’m trying to retain and attract, and you are as well, I’m sure, every day.  We all are faced with this massive wave of retirement from baby boomers, and the millennials will actually be the majority of the workforce by 2020 where they’ll make up more than 50 percent of the workforce.

And as you may know, as you’re working in this area, attracting them and retaining them is interesting, because they have very different expectations.  They were born in a networked world.  That is their default understanding.

And so continuing to work in ways that don’t embrace that, that have organizational approaches to communication and org structures that don’t embrace that, are going to make it incredibly difficult to attract and retain this specific talent.  They’re just different by design in terms of the mobility, the expectations, the collaboration being, you know, you share something quickly, you iterate it, you take advantage of the subject-matter expertise around it, you never recreate the wheel, very pragmatic in the approach.

And actually one of my favorite recent examples, so we have Office 365 for Education.  It’s our free offering for schools and universities.  And so we get to spend a lot of time working with students and really understanding how they work and the things that they do and the habits they have.

And we recently at a U.S. high school, and with the research team, we were watching a young man kind of pounding away on his work on his PC.  And one of the researchers leans over and says, “So do you ever save local?”  And the high schooler kind of pauses and looks back and says, “What does that mean?”  And we were a little taken aback, and we’re like, OK.  So we described, “Well, you save to your hard drive, you know.”  And then he understood that and he thought about it again and he said, “Why would I do that?”

And I was like, you know, that’s a totally legitimate question, why would I do that?  Why would I put something on this machine, which means that when I’m going home I can’t get it on my phone, I certainly can’t get it on my iPad when I’m doing that at home or whatever other device it is.  But it’s just a good example of when something was just absolutely taken for granted, is just an un-useful concept in that way.

So as we bring all this together and kind of how is the world changing and how we want to work in the future, there’s something I call modern collaboration, and it spans all aspects of what we do, and it kind of has some fundamental aspects to it.

One, it’s about absolutely taking advantage of the cloud, taking advantage of that technology so you can work on being productive, not all the infrastructure that it requires to be able to do this.

It’s about being productive wherever you are, on every single device, in whatever way you want to do it.

And then it’s also in the style of work, the way we engage, the amount of collaboration we have.

And this picture is actually an office, Microsoft office in Zurich, that I think is a good instantiation of all the different work styles, from the traditional at the desk to sitting on the bean bag, to ad-hoc meetings, to doing virtual meetings across the world, and in a small encapsulated picture that really symbolizes all the different ways we have to be able to work efficiently.

So if we start with meetings where we spend a lot of time, I spend a lot of my time, and what does that mean in a modern sense?

So we know from research today from our Lync team, Skype for Business team, that it takes about 12 minutes on average to get a virtual meeting set up and running.  That’s 12 minutes.  That’s almost a quarter of a 60-minute meeting that you spend doing nothing but getting that meeting going, not really acceptable and certainly not modern or efficient.

So as we think about moving forward, we have beautiful devices like the Hub and Skype for Business integrated on that where you can walk into CRM or open CRM and click to call, click to video right from there, and have these really natural experiences.

And you think about a salesperson, so much is important in having that trust relationship, kind of really understanding when your customer’s with you and when they’re not.  And when you can see them in hi-def on that device, you really get that sense of, oh, I can tell when they were believing me and when they’re not, and when they’re really convinced or not, without having to get on a plane and go all the way out there.

And think about serving different geographies where you just don’t have the sales coverage you need to serve a broader geography, but you can have a really very natural, very high impact virtual experience without having to be in person.

And then simple things like the shared OneNote, as I showed this morning, in CRM.  There’s lots of meetings.  That idea that sales is kind of a lone-wolf approach is kind of an antiquated sales model.  We know it takes a village, back to that organizational structure of bringing the stars together that you need and the subject-matter experts to go and engage with the customer to bring them together, but we always maintain that information of what meetings happen, what did we talk about, what did we agree to.  Whether I was in the meeting or not, I have access to that specifically, and really making that team-selling model efficient.  And that could be a marketing campaign for marketers or a sales deal too across those things.  And again the Surface Hub is just a fantastic device for getting that done.

So then if I think about, great, that’s the meeting experience, but what about content creation itself, what does that mean in a modern networked world, well, you know, as I mentioned this morning, while email is incredibly important, and we’ll continue to have it, the idea that we use email attachments as our very best collaboration experience is just antiquated.  It’s just not necessary.  It’s about having one single file that we’re all integrating with, and we’re all accessing and authoring together.  There’s not different versions of things that we have to reconcile at the end.  It’s about having an idea and sharing it quickly, getting the information quickly from the team, getting input real time, iterating very rapidly.

If content creation not that many years ago typically meant I individually worked, I emailed it out, I got feedback, I iterated, that would take weeks, maybe months to get to the final, where now you can do that in an hour and have that same cycle because it’s so efficient and effective when you have one document we’re all sharing and can do it real time anywhere and across any device as well.

And then, of course, it’s all about mobility and being able to do that wherever you are. And as we know, we studied, people actually when they’re on their mobile phone or their tablet, 70 to 80 percent of the time they’re spending that in a native application.  We know that users prefer a native application.  Why?  Because it’s a better experience, it’s richer.  You get the whole aspect of the device, like reminders are integrated, contacts are integrated.  We know that’s the preference.

Which is why we’ve invested really deeply across CRM, as well as Office, to have wonderful, rich, beautiful native applications across all different device sizes and all different device platforms as well, so from the very smallest to the very largest in the hub.

And with 25 years of history and a billion users in Office using this every day to be productive, it’s an incredible opportunity to then extend that to all the devices and wherever people are trying to get their work done.

But it’s also not just about the collaboration aspects, it’s also being faced with this absolutely staggering amount of device explosion.  And we’ve been very focused and I think in recent years on the growth of smartphones and the growth of tablets, but really smartphones and how that’s outpaced PCs and how big that is.  And it is, it’s been staggering and incredible growth.

But if you layer on top of that the connected devices coming from IoT, Internet of Things devices, things with no screen or a very, very small screen, it completely dwarfs that whole landscape of PCs and phones and the tablets.

And if you think about the total number of devices even in this calendar year, the IoT devices will be 2x that of PCs, phones and tablets combined.  And that’s growing tremendously, as you can see from the chart.

So with that, of course, means that the explosion of data that we’re dealing with is totally overwhelming.

So I started actually with Microsoft working on our email business about 10 years ago, and back then people used to complain to me all the time about information overload and can’t manage all the stuff in my inbox.  Well, that was before we had IM and social and certainly before the Internet of Things, and we were really overwhelmed back then.

But now look at it, it’s absolutely staggering.  The volume of data is doubling every two years.  In 2020, the digital universe will have grown by 10x.  And as you see from the chart, we’re going from 4.4 zettabytes of information in 2013 to 44 zettabytes, so just absolutely staggering amounts of information.

But with that also happening the half-life of the value of that data is going down precipitously, and the example being I’m on Twitter and I see a customer tweet about something, a purchase intent.  They’re looking for a certain thing, and they’re putting their purchase intent out to the world.

In that moment, I have maybe a minute, maybe an hour, maybe two to grab that intent, respond, and direct that customer to my product.  If I later find that tweet a week later, that customer has already bought from my competitor, that purchase intent is no longer useful to me.  It’s useful in understanding that there was intent, that’s useful, but it would have been better if I’d captured it in that moment when that information was valuable, and the timing of that and the agility required to respond to that.

But all the information, we have to manage it effectively.  And one of my favorite studies actually that talks about information overload and the impact of that on human beings, because obviously our human capacity is effectively flat, but information’s growing at incredible rates, and so actually the University of London did this fantastic study of what does multitasking do to our brain, and the reality is we don’t multitask, right, we actually switch tasks.  So if you’re switch-tasking all the time, and I’m moving from email to IM to conversations and back, and they actually studied the effectiveness of our processing and our speed and effectively measured an IQ.

So if they test us humans who are always multitasking, we actually test about 10 points lower in IQ than we would without that.

But 10 points, what’s 10 points?  Ten points is actually the equivalent to smoking pot or having missed a night of sleep.  So that’s what multitasking and constantly trying to manage all this information actually does to you, which I think in a nice way is summarized in a quote from Satya, which is, “Right now what is scarce in the world is an abundance of human attention.”  That’s what’s actually the more scarce thing now.  And again, it’s about all of this overwhelming information.

So where does technology come in this world?  We can now go from being the kind of victims of all this information to in a place where we can actually take advantage of it, and this is where the technology comes in.

So our deep investment across machine learning and intelligence and our technology does the work for us, so experiences like Cortana, like Delve you saw, like our capability called Clutter that gets your low important emails out of your inbox, that’s the machine learning working on behalf of us, so we can focus on what’s most important.  CRM adding insights and help score my leads, tell me which leads to focus on, all of those are examples, and this is just the beginning where we switch from having a bunch of manual rules to keep up with incredible growth of information, to actually having the software work for us and being brought to us about what’s most important to me right now based on my actions, on the actions of people around me.  The actions of that network inform that intelligence.

Even in things like social listening and social engagement, CRM, you’re going to see this fabric of intelligent, relevant experiences, personalized experiences.  It actually learns about me and what matters to me most, and creates experiences around that.

Simultaneously is around making sure the visualization brings to light the answers.  So few humans can look at rows and charts of data, as much as I love Excel, and get any real insight out of it.  You have to put it in a visualization that brings that information to the right people.

We know today about 90 percent of people in the workforce are making some kind of business decision every day.  Yet only about 10 percent have access to the right data, and certainly presented in the right way, or have the skills to get it presented in the right way, to be able to make the right decisions.

With things like Power BI that I showed this morning and Satya spoke to as well, suddenly you have visualization that make sense, that suddenly pop with the right information and makes sense of it and help you make business decisions on top of it.

So as we’re communicating in more open ways, as we’re tapping into this network, as we’re using more data to be more efficient, we can’t forget though that it also means that there’s more security surface area that we have to care about.

And I’m guessing that all of us at some point in our lives have done exactly what this picture shows, left one of our devices on a bus, a train, a plane, wherever you might have been, and unfortunately that’s a risk exposure that we have to manage.

And that’s the sense of kind of personal security and personal management, but there’s also, of course, massive global security risks that I don’t probably have to explain.  If you’re reading the news, you’ve seen many of them recently.

And so as we think about how do we do all these things, tap into the network, take advantage of all the data, it also has to be done in a secure and compliant way.

And we have kind of four layers of security, from the identity perspective making sure the right person has the access to the information and only the right person, making sure the authentication is happening in the right way, that I’m not logging in from San Francisco and Seattle simultaneously since that’s not possible, things like that.

Then there’s the device layer, so when I leave my phone on the plane, we can wipe it, doesn’t matter, get rid of the information so it’s just a dead device.

Then at the application layer how can I use a certain application, can I use it for work or can I not, deciding that and having control over that.

And then down to the actual data level, what’s encrypted, who has access to that, making sure the right people have the access, not the wrong people.

And it takes actually all four of those layers to make sure we do it completely and comprehensively.

But we also have a strong point of view, and clearly coming from a productivity perspective, that we’ve had wonderful technology for many, many years to lock stuff down and hide it away from the world.  And the compromise of doing that is productivity, means we don’t get our job done the way we hoped, we weren’t as efficient at it.

And that worked in the past for two reasons.  One, we could get away with not being agile.  Well, guess what, that’s not the world anymore.  But also our users from an IT perspective weren’t very technology-savvy so they couldn’t work around you, where now most people will walk in with an iPhone and a personal Dropbox account, and they can share just about anything they want and then you’re in a worse situation.

So we believe there has to be a really strict balance between making sure the user understands what’s happening, has a voice in the process, is directed in the right way, versus just being blocked from getting their work done.

And you see this in this policy tips, and you’ll see it in the presentation, the demo in a second, too, of making sure the user knows what’s happening and can be directed correctly, so the vast majority of the time actually keep the data in the right place, in the right way.

All right, so to show you this a little bit, I’m actually going to introduce Ben now, who’s going to give you a sense of kind of as a marketing person running a marketing campaign, and what that looks like using our technology today.

So with that, I will welcome out Ben.

BEN:  Other side.

JULIA WHITE:  Other side.  Oh, surprise.  Thanks, Ben.

BEN:  Thank you.

So, hello, everyone.  Thank you, Julia.  It’s great to be here.  And what I’d like to do today is I’d like to build on the demo you saw earlier in the keynote around Marston’s Pub and Brewery.  And as a marketing manager from Marston’s Pub and Brewery, I want to continue to build on the sales campaign we had going there around bring a friend and get a free beer.

Now, the first thing I want to do today is around sharing the information that I have with my manager, Julia, and we’ve had great response to this campaign to start off with.  So what I’m going to do here is I want to send this information off to my manager, and I’ve got some great stats and some information sitting in an Excel document I want to share.

So let me just go and get this email up here, and I’m going to CC myself in here as well.  We’ll say, check out the response.

And so what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to attach a document that I have sitting on my personal machine here.  I’ve got a list of all the people who have currently responded to our free beer campaign.  And I want to go and send that off to both my vendor to go and follow up and get those vouchers out, but also off to my manager.

Now, one of the things around email, it is a great way to work and it’s the way we work day-to-day.  It still drives business, no matter what we’re doing.  But the problem with email is that it’s also one of the key places where information can leak out of the organization, either maliciously or inadvertently.

And so what we’ve noticed here is as I’ve attached my Excel document onto my email, I’ve had what’s called a policy tip from our Data Loss Prevention engine come up and notify me that there’s sensitive data sitting within this document.  And so this allows me to continue to work as I normally would.

Historically what would happen is I’d end put getting that blocked at the boundary, and I would take something like this, a USB key, put my data on there, and then go to where I wanted to to share it.  And the problem is, once data sits on this, it’s no longer secure.

But with the DLT engine in Office 365, our policy team have set the policies and rules on what we do with sensitive data and allowed me to make the decision on what I’m going to do.  So at the top, you can see I have my policy tip.  And as I expand that out and put in my — or show the details of that, you can see it’s picked up a number of reasons why we don’t want this data to go out.

First of all, we can see that Joe is outside my organization; we really shouldn’t be sharing with him.  I can also go and learn more about what data has been picked up.  And for some reason, there is credit card information sitting in this Excel spreadsheet, and that’s been picked by our rules engine.

But there’s always a reason that there needs to be an exception to the rule.  If I can’t trust my manager with this data to see what’s going on, then who can I trust?  And so there’s points where I do need to override the rules.  And the beauty here is that as I override that there’s a couple of things that happens in the background.  First of all, a report is sent, it’s tracked, and we know that it was my decision to go and override that data.  But also the message itself is then encrypted and has rights protection applied to it so that as that message goes out, the right security is being applied to it, and it’s being kept secure as we go through.  So protecting me from my own decisions if they do turn out to be not so correct.

As you see, that email has come back to me.  I’ve got my Contoso rights management applied to that.  It’s confidential information.  No one can forward it or copy it or do anything with that.  So I’ve been protected in the way I work.

So now that I’ve got that taken care of, I want to go ahead and actually check up on my social engagement platform and see how my campaign is progressing.  So you can see I have my social engagement dashboard available to me.  And if I actually come in and check out my Pedigree brand beer, we can see that it’s trending pretty well, once we have that refresh.  I’m just going to bring that back up again.  I’ll go and check my Pedigree brand beer, and we can see it’s trending well.

It’s a couple of points down, which means my campaign started out pretty well, but I really don’t want this to stall.  And so as a marketing manager, what I’m going to do is go and create a Sway to go and amplify this campaign.  Now Sway is a new product to the Office family.  It’s the first full-fledged product we’ve had since OneNote, and it’s a way for me to create rich interactive Web canvases that will render on any device.

And so here you can see Sway.  And I’ve got my Web-based canvas up and ready to go.  It’s all touch-enabled, so it’s very easy for me to scroll across and see all this content.  Now, the beauty of Sway is not just the fact that it renders on a browser or any device with a browser, but it’s also around the intelligence that drives Sway.

So as I open up my storyline from the left here, you’ll notice that I don’t have control over specific positioning of elements or where things sit. I build a storyline.  I start with a title.  I put in pictures and content as part of that, and Sway figures out the best way to represent that information for me.

So what I would like to do here is I really want to go and insert some additional pictures.  And as I do that, you’ll notice that Sway is actually suggesting content for me based on the text that I have within the current Sway that I’m running.

Now I have some high-res images that I want to put in myself.  So I’m going to open up my dropdown here and pull in my content from another location.  And as I do that, you’ll see we have other locations that we can pull content from, OneDrive, OneNote, Facebook, et cetera.  I actually want to upload from my local machine.  And so I’m going to come into my pictures, and one of the things with our campaign here is we’re going to make an update to this and allow people to be able to claim this free beer with a friend while they’re at the cricket.  But to do that I’m going to go and put in my cricket glass for the campaign, and as I do that what you may or may not notice, we’re going to reupload that one.

As we go and upload that picture — we’ll go and upload my picture again, as we upload that you’ll notice in the background that my Sway is actually updating in real time as I go.  As I come out of my storyline, I can see the changes that are made effective straightaway within there, and I can see exactly what that looks like.

Now this looks great, but I really want to have a little bit more product placement.  So I’m going to go and put a second image in there.  And it’s really easy to add new elements. We have this nice little addition checkbox here, and it’s simple for me to go and open that up and put in whatever I want.  So I’m going to go and put in another picture, and again I’m going to upload from my local source, and I’m going to go and just get a bottle of their Pedigree beer in there as well.

And once again, you’ll notice that updates in the background for me really quickly and easily.  So it’s really simple for me to see what those changes are in real time.  And, again, still fully touch-enabled and really easy for me to work with.

Now, as I said, one of the things around Sway is that it works on any endpoint.  And most of my customers while they’re out are not using a PC, they’re actually using an iPhone.  So as I switch over to my iPhone here, hopefully that switch will happen for me, there we go.  As I switch over to my iPhone, you’ll see I have my same Sway that you just saw on my PC running via the browser on my iPhone.  And again, I may be on a smaller device, but I still get that great look and feel of my Sway available for me on the iPhone, really easy, really simple to make my way through.  I’ve got my link up to my website to register.  I’ve also got my terms and conditions there, all up and ready for me to go.

Now, as a marketing manager I also like to keep my Sway up to date and fresh, so that things aren’t getting stale out there in the field.  So with my Sway app on iPhone I can also go and edit that existing Sway and make changes to it.  So what I’d like to do here is I’m going to go and add some content.  But, what I thought would be great is, given the fact that it’s a beer-with-a-friend campaign, I thought what I’d like to do is actually get a photo of my beer with just a couple of my closest friends here.

So what I’m going to go ahead and do is add in a new section to my campaign.  I’m just going to hit add.  And I’m going to open my camera and with that what we’ll do, I’ll try not to make you all dizzy as I do this, but I think a nice big cheers to everyone here looks good.  There we go, perfect.  And everyone smile, beautiful.  Cool, we’ll use that one.  And so what will happen is I’ll get that photo, put it right into my Sway there, all ready to go, so really simple, really easy for me to update and work with.

So I have my Sway sorted and the next step in my campaign here is to actually go and review this with my manager.  So what I’m going to do is make my way into the meeting room over the side here, with this great Surface Hub that we saw earlier.  It’s an amazing productivity device.  And you see I have my Surface Pro 3 hooked up here, and I’m already projecting and ready to go.  And so what I’m going to do is just bring up my Sway.  And the great thing here is that I can actually go, and I’ll just hit refresh on that so we get updated content as well.

I can actually go and review that with my manager.  And so Julia is out here to help me, and I’d love to get your feedback, Julia, on what you think about this and how you think it’s flowing at the moment?

JULIA WHITE:  You know, I like this navigation here, but I kind of think, especially on the phone, I think I’d like to go vertical.  Can you switch all up and make it go vertical?

BEN:  Yes, I think we can do that.  And so one of the beauties of Sway is that it can reflow the content that’s in there and make it really easy for me to do.  So I can simply hit my design tab and you can see I can very easily change this from a left-to-right scrolling to top to bottom.  And you’ll notice that in the background, again, Sway updates and changes all of its content to match.  I’ll close that one up.

JULIA WHITE:  There we go.

BEN:  And so as you see there now my Sway is being changed completely.  All of the content has been reconfigured to make sense in that up-to-down scrolling.  So really easily, I’ve done that all live, all up to date, and it doesn’t matter what platform I’m on, it renders beautifully.  So with that, I’d like to hand it back to Julia.

JULIA WHITE:  All right.  Nice job on the campaign, Ben.

BEN:  Thank you.

JULIA WHITE:  All right.  So it’s great to see the technology, but also like to hear about it from our real customers.  So I have the pleasure to invite a couple of guests.  I’m going to start with Jason Grey, who is a Senior Vice President and CTO of Life Time Fitness, to come and talk to us about how they’re using our technology, what they’ve done with it and some of the lessons learned on that front.  So with that, I’ll introduce Jason.

Thank you, all right.  Great to see you.

JASON GREY:  Good to see you.

JULIA WHITE:  All right.  Now at Life Time Fitness, you have 114 centers across North America, U.S. and Canada, and 24,000 employees and many of them sitting front line, working with your clients, trainers, that type of thing.

JASON GREY:  Yes.

JULIA WHITE:  Great.  And previously you kind of had a lot of legacy technology, kind of tough to support, some unhappy employees on that, as well.  And so kind of help me understand your decision to go to Office 365 and how you’re using it today?

JASON GREY:  Yes, and so not only do we have 24,000 employees, but we also have a heavy proportion of millennials, as well.  So they’re used to working digitally, so much so that because we didn’t have a centralized solution for document sharing, or collaboration they would go use a lot of other tools, Dropbox, or Evernote, things like that.  And so we really wanted to provide something to our employees that would serve their needs, but also allow us some amount of oversight and control.  And so that’s why we started looking at the Office 365 Online Suite.

JULIA WHITE:  Got it.  I remember in talking to you before kind of one of your strategies and your goals of this was to kind of bring people together in your organizations, since they’re so distributed in different areas.  So I’m curious how the technology has helped in that way specifically.

JASON GREY:  Now that we’ve rolled it out everybody has sort of the same fabric.  They’re all in the same system, and so they’re using Yammer pretty effectively and also SharePoint.

JULIA WHITE:  OK.  As an example, how are they using Yammer, sharing best practices, or ideas, or what’s happening?

JASON GREY:  They use it for all sorts of things, everything from best practices to sharing — doing shift changes, like, hey, can you work my hours, or even sharing a lot of video sharing, you know, look at how I do this dead lift, that type of thing.

JULIA WHITE:  That’s great.  Now I understand kind of working with your executive team and you had a COO who wasn’t kind of working in modern ways, but you had some good wins there, I would love to hear that story.

JASON GREY:  Yes.  And that’s been a pretty common story where we have executives or other groups using email, versioning documents on their file system, or even their local machine, and so in the case of our COO, we set up a site so that he could have all of his direct reports deliver their project updates and status reports to a SharePoint site, and now he can go to one place and see everything.  It’s a much better experience.

JULIA WHITE:  Good.  It’s good to have fans to talk to.

JASON GREY:  Yes.

JULIA WHITE:  Now, I know you’ve kind of done a custom CRM experience that you built on top of Force.com, and I know you were going down the path of moving to Salesforce, but then you’ve actually just chosen Dynamics CRM.  So tell me about what led to that decision and how it’s working?

JASON GREY:  Yes.  So as we were doing that analysis, we kind of midway through, a little bit later in that game, we decided we wanted to look at what else was out there and ended up looking at Microsoft Dynamics as well as a few of the other competitors.  Dynamics CRM was really the only true competitor to Salesforce as far as feature-for-feature matches.  Obviously they do a few things differently, but we thought that it was very competitive from a feature set point of view. It offered a great price.  And then my favorite thing about it was it integrates with the Office 365 Suite of tools, which not any of the other solutions really do that to the same extent.

JULIA WHITE:  Got it.  So really it was kind of looking at it as a platform choice versus individual pieces.

JASON GREY:  Yes.

JULIA WHITE:  It makes sense.  Now, you have a lot of peers here in the room and virtually a few who are underway on this decision or thinking about how to use the cloud and what it should look like.  So I’m just interested in what you would share as peer advice in terms of best practices, lessons learned in thinking about your journey and what you’d want to pass on?

JASON GREY:  Yes.  So first off, I wouldn’t try to boil the ocean.  The way, for instance, that we rolled SharePoint out, we didn’t do a huge amount of analysis up front.  We didn’t try to make it into a big project.  We simply redid the basics of our intranet, and then we allowed sort of that organic discovery and growth sort of business group by business group or executive by executive.  And so when we see those opportunities, we just sit down personally with the user, teach them how to use it, and they love it.

JULIA WHITE:  Got it.  So really it’s been a partnership with your users on how to both deploy and roll out the experience.

JASON GREY:  Yes, and we certainly learned that as well through our CRM rollout is another word of advice would be to spend significantly more time than you think you need to on that user adoption side of things, make sure your users are comfortable with the new tool, give them the training they need, make videos, do whatever you can ahead of time to prep them for that rollout.

JULIA WHITE:  Got it.  Makes sense.  You know, I think that’s increasingly a topic of conversation I have with people like yourself; I have great technology and it’s always up to date, and now it’s really about making sure that my employees are taking advantage of it in the right ways.

JASON GREY:  Yes.  I’m a big advocate for housing the user-experience group in technology, because we can create that good collaboration.

JULIA WHITE:  Makes sense, absolutely.

So last, I know it’s not been too long, but any quantifiable results, or how do you look and kind of measure the success so far of the technology adoption?

JASON GREY:  So with regards to CRM, as an example, we measure our customer satisfaction with a Net Promoter Score, and I can’t share definitive numbers necessarily, but we have seen an uptick in our Net Promoter Score that was along the same timeline as our CRM rollout.  And I would assume as we continue to roll more data into there, get more of our employees using the system more effectively, tie it in with Office, I expect that to continue.

JULIA WHITE:  Yes. That’s fantastic.  So a wonderful success story, and great in terms of both working with your users and kind of really rethinking how you’ve been doing IT.

JASON GREY:  Great.

JULIA WHITE:  With that I’m actually going to introduce the next customer, who is Kennametal.  I’m going to run a video to kind of introduce them, and then we’ll bring them on stage.

(Video segment.)

And I’m very honored to have joining me on stage Steve Hanna, who is the VP and CTO of Kennametal. Great to have you here, Steve.  Thank you so much for being here.

STEVE HANNA:  Thank you.  My pleasure.

JULIA WHITE:  And as you saw from the video, they are a leading material science and manufacturing company with 14,000 employees across 60 countries, so quite a span on that front.

Now, I know from talking to you before, some of the drivers you had in terms of making a technology shift was around bringing products to market faster, but I want to understand the catalyst for this change?

STEVE HANNA:  Yes, Julia.  I really go back to about 2009, actually, and the economic downturn that hit everybody.  Our revenues were going down precipitously.  We had to drive costs to match the revenues. And so truthfully we went after costs, and unfortunately it resulted in us taking out 20 to 30 percent of our headcount across the organization. And it really did two things, it broke a lot of the processes, business processes we had, but more importantly there were a lot of connections, people connections, that because they retired or they left, we just lost those connections.  And we needed to do something to fix that.

JULIA WHITE:  Got it.

Now tell me a little bit about kind of the infrastructure you were coming from before you moved to the cloud and kind of what you were dealing with when you went in?

STEVE HANNA:  Yes.  So you know we were a Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino shop.  We used Quickr, all those kinds of things.  And it was older technology.  It took us about three years, two to three years.  Every time we’d get a release from Lotus, we would have to test it, we would deploy it, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people in the audience that have gone through that.  And so it took us forever.  And we were really trying to change the organization, plus we had to fix those people connections a lot faster.

JULIA WHITE:  Right.  Now you’ve chosen to go Office 365.  You’ve been on it for a while, but kind of you looked at lots of other players as well.  Interested in what kind of the process, the before and the after, has been for you?

STEVE HANNA:  Let me take just a second, if I may, I want to go back.  We looked at Lotus and we thought, OK, the product they have today really wasn’t where we wanted to be.  And then we went to Cambridge, and we sat down with them, and it was such a convoluted and complex solution we said this won’t work for us.  So unfortunately for you, we went to Google next, and we thought they had some great technology, but they weren’t enterprise-ready.  And this was a couple of years ago.  But, quite truthfully, I wasn’t sure and I’m still not sure that they’re really focused on the enterprise.  And our friends at Microsoft really, really know the enterprise and how to work for us.

So around the time that BPOS was being phased out and Office 365 was in a beta test, we looked at that.  We thought it was a great solution, and we decided that we wanted to go down that path in partnership with you.  And it was a terrific, terrific implementation for us.

JULIA WHITE:  Great.  Now I know you had a very rapid migration.  In fact, I think I heard you say you pulled it in, it was going so well, something of the sort?

STEVE HANNA:  Yes.  So right after the beta was complete, we tested it internally for a couple of months, and then we went out, and we deployed it.  We originally were going to deploy it to 8,000 users in four months. After the first two months, everybody said, give it to us now, because they liked the capabilities, they liked — it was fast to response time, it was a more user-friendly interface.  And when they saw SharePoint and Lync and the things we could do with that, they demanded that we pull that ahead.  So we got the whole thing done in two months.

JULIA WHITE:  Amazing, amazing, all right.  So you’ve had it implemented for several years now.  How has it transformed your day-to-day work and how you and your employees work?

STEVE HANNA:  Yes, it’s really incredible.  So I kind of go through the list of products.  SharePoint, for example, one of the first things we did is converted our Internet to SharePoint.  And what that did was it opened up all of our employees’ access to company information.  In the past, we had about 5,000, 6,000 employees that work in manufacturing facilities and they would have to go to a kiosk.  And it had to be on our Kennametal network to see the company information.  When we went to SharePoint in the cloud that was available to them any time, any device, mobile devices, at home.  And so we now have all the employees, all the manufacturing employees, all 14,000 employees contributing.

In fact, I’m working on a functional excellence program, and we just sent out a survey and asked people what was the one thing you can do to help the company, and we’re already getting terrific response from our manufacturing team, who before never really had access.  So SharePoint was a big driver.  Yammer from a social network has been terrific.  And we actually were deploying PLM and new CAD software across the globe for an engineering team.  We set up a Yammer group for engineering, and we had issues that would come up in different geographies and the community would self-heal.  They would identify fixes to that.  They didn’t have to come back to the IT team, the central engineering team.  So we resolved issues a lot faster.

Then OneDrive is such a great way to share files responsibly.  Then my favorite is OneNote, quite truthfully, it’s just a hidden gem, and I was so happy to see your demonstration this morning.  It’s terrific that you have those meetings and it automatically goes to meeting notes.  So our CEO has adopted it.  We do all of our staff meetings on that.  And it’s just been adopted by the entire team.

JULIA WHITE:  That’s fantastic.  I know I’m a big OneNote fan, if you’re not surprised to hear.  Now, from an employee perspective, it sounds like it’s a huge impact.  But, also from a customer perspective, how has it shown up in being able to serve them better, being more agile to them?

STEVE HANNA:  Yes, so again one of the things that’s helped us is SharePoint where we take our engineering team, and they post solutions that have been accepted by customers, and then we share that across the globe and apply those to other customers.  So an example I would use, there’s two really big airplane manufacturers, one is French, one is in the United States.  So we’ll get a win in France with Airbus, for example, and the team immediately posts what they did, how they won that, what things that Airbus was looking for.  The folks in Boeing that work on the Boeing account, they have that information immediately, and we close deals a lot quicker.

The other thing that’s happened is we use Lync a lot of times, and that’s really helped us.  So in a couple of cases, for example, Lync — how many people have folks out in Asia, China, India, big geographies, right?  And for drive time, you just lose tons and tons of hours driving to some of those remote locations.  So we now use Lync with our customers, and we have meetings with them over the phone, over video, share that information when it’s really important we go see them.  But, we save tons of drive time, windshield time, as they call it, and that’s made us more productive.

In addition, we do custom engineering solutions, as I mentioned, and where we get a drawing for something that they would like us to engineer and build we would go — that drawing would go back and forth through email three or four times.  It would take on average three to four days to do.  Now we have a Lync conference with our customers.  They look at the drawing.  They mark it up.  We do it right there with them on video, and it’s done in an hour.  And it’s dramatically improved our turnaround time, and as Jason said our Net Promoter score has gone up dramatically because of that.

JULIA WHITE:  That’s awesome.  That’s a good example of the best practice use in that area.

Now I know you just recently signed a deal for Dynamics, as well.  So kind of what’s next in that area?

STEVE HANNA:  Well, this is a terrific win for the Microsoft team.  I’m a little embarrassed to say we had gone down the road, we had picked Salesforce.com, and we were going to deploy that as the new fiscal year came around.  We got a new CEO in November, and he was a previous Salesforce customer.  He came in, and he’s a voracious reader, and he had read some Gartner report about Dynamics and said, “Hey, this looks like a competitive product, did we look at it?”  Unfortunately, we hadn’t.  So he gave us a week.  He said drive this to ground and make sure that we’ve got the best solution for the company.

I’ll tell you, Microsoft, eLogic, they’re a partner of yours, they came together in a week, amazing job.  We’re putting together demonstrations, integrating some of our data.  And we actually had existing Salesforce users on our team that liked Dynamics much better, because of the integration, the Outlook integration, the process with Lync, and some of the things, again, you showed this morning really, really exciting.

So we just finished the configuration workshop last week.  We’re doing a pilot in May and then after the pilot is done, we’re doing a two-month pilot, then we’ll deploy it globally from there.

JULIA WHITE:  Fantastic.  Thank you. That’s a great story and kind of both how you’re using it internally and how it’s affecting your business externally, as well.  It’s so great to have you here.  Thank you so much.

STEVE HANNA:  Thank you. (Applause.)

JULIA WHITE:  So thanks to both Jason and Steve.  I really appreciate those stories that make it come to life for real on that front.

But, it’s not just those two customers who are certainly benefiting from the transition to the cloud.  So a little while ago, we actually commissioned Forrester to look at their CIO Panel Survey, as well as talk to and interview about 60 enterprise customers to understand how the shift to the cloud has helped them, what kind of savings they’re getting, very specifically from a total economic impact perspective.  As they kind of create a composite organization out of the CIO panel, as well as the organizational survey, they got back kind of the profile that showed a $5.6 million MPV over three years and an estimated seven-month payback.  So it’s certainly a kind of — from a purely economic perspective paying off time and time again.

But it’s also not just the economics of it, kind of back to how rapidly the world is changing, how the workplace needs to be modernized and quickly.  It’s also about the benefits of cloud service are about keeping up and making sure that you’re not finding yourself in 2015 using technology that was built in 2010, which is not sufficient in that moment and always having the latest and greatest.

And that’s maybe the thing we haven’t talked about today is the beauty of always making sure you have the productivity tools that meet today’s productivity requirements in the marketplace.  And these on the slide are a few things we’ve been doing very recently, but it’s certainly not where things stop.  And so kind of to close, I’m actually going to show a video that brings to life a bunch of concepts that are very much in work today, but you’ll see come in the future a little farther out than just 12 months, but kind of give you a glimpse of both what we believe the world will look like, but also the technology that we think is going to take us there.

So with that thank you so much for your time, and enjoy that glimpse into the future.  (Applause.)

(Video segment.)

END