Satya Nadella and Curt Kolcun: One Government Cloud Fireside Chat

CURT KOLCUN: Thank you, Satya. Thank you for being here, Satya.

SATYA NADELLA: It’s great to be here.

CURT KOLCUN: It’s awesome. So our government customers today are very focused on moving to the cloud. Many of them have moved e-mail, applications to the cloud. Can you talk about what you think about when we articulate mobile-first, cloud-first vision, what that means to you?

SATYA NADELLA: When I talk about mobile-first it’s really the mobility of the human experience with computing resources more than the device and its mobility, because it’s really not about any given form factor that we know today as the high-volume form factor, is it four-inches, five-inches, six-inches, 10-inches. The reality is on any given day we are going to come across more computing power and increasingly so. It could be the sensors in the room, it could be the large screens, the small screens, this ubiquitous computing is all going to run general-purpose compute applications.

And all of these applications are not only going to be there in all of these computing form factors, but it’s going to be intelligent. And that intelligence and that mobility comes about because of the cloud. And that’s one of the reasons why I talk about this mobile-first, cloud-first as the coming together of the two real secular forces. And going beyond any one device.

And so that’s really the vision we have of how do we enable the consistency, the management, the security of a world that increasingly is going to be a world where computing is ubiquitous, the experiences exhibit ambient intelligence, and that’s what Microsoft’s job No. 1 is, is to build the software and the devices for that world.

CURT KOLCUN: Great. When we think about sort of that mobile-first and ubiquitous computing, and then we sort of tie that or talk about the most complete cloud, sort of how does that fit in?

SATYA NADELLA: One of the things that I’ve been very, very focused on is what is Microsoft’s core identity in this mobile-first, cloud-first world? And if you think about it, we’re going to be 40 years old next year. That’s, in this business, there’s no such thing as longevity, it’s all about being able to reinvent yourself each year. And for us, as I think about our core identity, for the first 40 years it has been about being able to take that software capability and express it in new ways as technology paradigms have shifted. So clearly we are now talking about a mobile-first and cloud-first world but the core enabler of this new world also happens to be software. It’s new conceptually, but the core capability is software.

And for me Microsoft’s real job is to be able to help others realize the benefits of this digital transformation. So that’s why I talk about productivity and platforms, that’s what we do for a living. That’s what we want to be able to provide to others, in this case government organizations, to be able to take advantage of the digital transformation to change their own processes, their own citizens’ services. That’s at the core.

And when you sort of say that’s the core, you have to come at the cloud part of that, or the cloud platform with the comprehensiveness. There are multiple dimensions to me. One, for example, is the support for hybrid. You have to be able to deal with the reality that you are going to have your own data centers, and you’re going to use public cloud, and you want to be able to compose these two things together, orchestrate these two things together. You want mobility of workloads across this. So hybrid cannot just be left for others to figure out, it has to be built into the core of the architecture.

A second element, of course, is the hyperscale aspect of the public cloud. In our case, we have scale economics. We have over 100 data centers. We have close to a million machines. And that gives you the hyperscale capability. That means the economics of public cloud are not sacrificed.

So you get the benefits of economics of hyperscale, you get the flexibility of hybrid which is the reality that we live in, and then the enterprise grade SLA. We’ve lived ‑‑ we’ve built this capability by supporting large government organizations, large enterprises. That’s the core of what Microsoft does.

So that coming together of those three attributes, hyperscale economics, enterprise grade SLAs with true hybrid support is what makes Microsoft Cloud offering a more complete cloud.

CURT KOLCUN: When we think about that today and sort of our approach and our historical approach with this audience, and we’ve had a public sector and federal focus since 1985. And you remember when we had the focus from the Windows Server operating system and its predominance. And now as we take this move to the cloud and today’s launch relative to our government cloud, how do you apply those principles to those things that we’re now seeing today?

SATYA NADELLA: One of the things that, and I’ve worked since ’92 in Microsoft in what has now become a lot of our server businesses, and so I’m very attuned to that feedback loop, the government organizations have always pushed us when it comes to both availability, scale, security, and that’s what led us to successes in the enterprise and so that’s been a virtuous cycle that now is at play in the cloud.

To me, in fact, we just talked about some of the dimensions of what makes us a complete cloud, but the thing that I am most excited about is how we are bringing together not only the platform in Azure, but the applications in Office 365 and Dynamics. Those three things together architected well together, not just architected together but with the openness. The thing that we have learned, especially the Windows Server reference is interoperability, or living inside a heterogeneous environment is just a must.

And, in fact, you look at the Windows Server interop surface area, it is actually the best interop surface area. You compare it to any Linux distribution, we actually can interoperate with more Linux distributions than Linux can ‑‑ any given Linux distribution can interoperate with Windows. And I’m saying that mostly because we have had to sort of go through the school of hard knocks to learn that. And that’s the sensibility that we want to bring as we talk about serving our government customers well.

So openness matters deeply to me, because that’s the only way to do business. Actually, it’s just self-interest. I’m not even sort of saying that there has just been a sudden change of heart. I’m just saying that that’s core to our business. And that’s why at every layer of Microsoft where Linux is first-class on Azure. We want to support Linux as a first-class distribution. We want to support .NET and Java. We want to support multiple applications. So, for example, you can use Azure Active Directory as your control plane for even any services you have on the Amazon Cloud or on the Google Cloud. So being able to interoperate on each layer has been very, very important, and it’s a lesson that we learned when we got our server footprint inside of your data centers, because you gave us pretty concrete feedback that you’ve got to have an interop surface area. And that same principle applies now to us in the cloud on every layer.

CURT KOLCUN: Yes. And we’re seeing it today for customers like the state of Texas or Navy Reserves that are moving to Office 365, and the predominance of the customers that have Active Directory today and how pivotal that is to this vision, and sort of how it enables your Azure implementation of Active Directory.

SATYA NADELLA: The Active Directory piece is an amazing asset. One of the things is, you all have deployed it and used it as the control plane for identity. And what we want to be able to do is to help amortize that expense, that cost, and to get more benefits out of it. So the combination of Active Directory and Azure Active Directory, for example, now gives you access to all of the SaaS applications. So that means you can do the provisioning and the deprovisioning of an individual and their access to any SaaS applications in one control plane. That’s where it’s not even about just the Microsoft Cloud. We wanted to make sure that the Microsoft Cloud composes with other clouds. And Active Directory is a huge element.

Another piece of technology which I’m very, very excited about is our Enterprise Mobility Suite. In fact, I noticed over the last at least I would say three years that there’s just amazing amount of complexity that’s being propelled to CIOs by the combination of device management, identity management, and data protection, because as there is proliferation of devices, and things get more distributed. The only way to make sense of it and reduce the complexity is to bring these three things together, device management, how do I set policy, how do I manage identity and how do I protect data assets.

And you don’t want to do it twice, because if you do it twice where the policies are being set twice, and you really, in fact, will make all kinds of blunders in it. So we have brought it all together in this Enterprise Mobility Suite. And it works for Android, works for iOS, works for Windows devices. And it leverages off of the Active Directory investment you already made. It works even with the System Center investments you’ve already made. So those are things which are very, very important and being reconceptualized. This is not about us saying let’s just go back to sort of the old style Windows management. It’s about taking Windows management and taking identity to a new cloud and mobile world.

CURT KOLCUN: And that’s great, because we leverage their existing investments, their skills, their IT department’s skills and knowledge, as well as the experiences from our partners that can help tie together those hybrid environments in the most secure way.

SATYA NADELLA: Yes, I mean the partner involvement ‑‑ I mean one of the things that quite frankly this is something that’s true as a platform company and especially as I travel around the world even, when I sit in roundtables with partners and customers, that’s when it strikes you that there are two things that are true about us. One is that we are about enabling others, i.e., our customers, to be able to achieve the transformation using the power of digital technologies and to do that we have had to build a partner ecosystem. And that’s what to me is the manifestation of being a platform company.

For example, one of the things I always think about is how do you bring the interests of end users, IT organizations, and developers together and harmonize them, because that’s really when magic happens. That’s what creates platforms. And we’ve made our share of mistakes along the way when we over-index on one constituent it always creates unintended issues for the other. But, being able to create thriving platforms means bringing those three constituents together so that they can achieve their objectives and goals. And that’s super-important.

And we’ll always be partner-led, and especially when it comes to the government area, we’ve had a tremendous investment that we have made in developing the partners, and investments partners have made on Microsoft technology and that’s coming true even in Azure. I mean it’s fantastic to even look at the number of partner solutions on Azure. I mean the majority of the people in the early access programs as we are launching Azure are all people who have enterprise-grade or mission-critical workloads that address government needs on Azure already.

CURT KOLCUN: Now we’re very excited about it and you heard my comment before you came out that we have a multitude of partners here today and we’ll be demonstrating some of those solutions. It’s truly amazing. Part of that, relative to the partner base, as well as our customers, and you talked about our openness and our focus, we’ve really doubled down as a company in that area, relative to sort of the tools, as well as our approach across the board. And I’m wondering if there’s anything on our focus on making sure that if you talk a little bit more about sort of the focus on Linux and open source and why that’s so important to us.

SATYA NADELLA: Yes, and it’s just important to us from just being able to address our customer needs. I mean you live in a world where your workloads are spread between Windows and Linux. And so if you talk about a complete cloud you need to have first-class support for both. I mean it turns out that we are the only cloud that has first-class support for both. I would love for other clouds, as well, to have great support for Windows and that will be great. But, to me the last time I checked when you sort of say you’re open you’ve got to support both. And so that’s what we do.

But, it’s not just about Linux. It’s quite frankly about being able to support the entire open source stack that has evolved around Linux. So we have Chef and Puppet, and any of the new ‑‑ in fact, take containers. It’s fantastic to see that Docker is first class on Azure already. And we want to stay on any of the container technology, not only that, we’re also going to learn from some of these places in the open source community and make sure that Windows interoperates with it, so the Docker APIs are what we will support even in Windows. That’s what we have now talked about in terms of containers on Windows.

Same thing with Hadoop, we have done a lot of work when it comes to big data, because after all we have had a lot of fantastic proprietary data technology, but the ecosystem has spoken that Hadoop is where people are growing the ecosystem. So we want to make sure that Hadoop ecosystem interop is there. In fact, the interop is there right in Excel. I mean you can run a Hive query from Excel in order to be able to make sense of big data.

So really taking the interoperability and openness to address the real-world needs that customers have, because that’s to our advantage to be able to serve you well is the approach we’ve taken.

And one thing I must mention is it’s about, of course, the workloads that you have today that are on Linux, or on Windows, but increasingly it’s the workloads that you are building and a lot of the new things that you are doing. In fact, one of the things that’s exciting to me is even take the surveillance and public safety area, and some of the investments that many of you are making and some of the solutions from an image recognition or computer vision, or speech, one of the core capabilities of the Azure cloud is around this machine learning, or another tool like Power BI, which is in Office 365. And these are new capabilities that I think will compose well with your existing investments, but also give you new insights and new things that will enable your own organizations to be that much more successful in offering citizen services or reducing cost, or gaining insights.

CURT KOLCUN: It is sort of that evolution to the types of services and the ability to pull that together in a complete cloud environment for government I think is phenomenal in the opportunity that it brings. One of the things that you mentioned, Satya, and I think it’s a unique perspective for us and one that you brought from your previous role, as well, is sort of you highlighted our learnings from the cloud continue to go back into our Windows Server operating system and allow us to continue to not leave the systems that are on-premise and in that hybrid environment, but continue to allow them to evolve in this rich world.

SATYA NADELLA: Absolutely. I mean one of the fascinating feedback loops for us has been ‑‑ in fact, a lot of people ask me, hey, you really kind of sucked in hypervisors and suddenly you got better, how did that happen? And there’s no magic to it. We suddenly started running Azure using our own hypervisor, which is like around close to four or five years ago, and once you start running a million-machine, that is million physical machines and you can imagine the number of virtual machines we have, on Hyper-V it turns out it’s the most scaled Hyper-V environment. I mean most scaled virtualized environment out there in the world. And that feedback cycle, guess what, is in Hyper-V. So that means when we ship a Windows Server it is, in fact, reverse integrating the code that we put into Azure.

So I actually do not think of hybrid as some kind of a transitory phase. I don’t think of our server as some legacy. I actually think of the server as the edge of our public cloud. Of course, you are in control. You can always have the edge connected or disconnected. I mean one great example of this is what we did with our databases. In SQL 2014, which is an amazing release for us, we now have the capability of the database to have high availability by automatically using Azure as the back plane. And so we built that feature into an on-premise product to take advantage of the public cloud. Same thing with disaster recovery, same thing with backup, these are things that are capabilities that an on-premise server can take advantage of in the public cloud.

And the reverse of that is also going to be true, which is the fact that you can, in fact, do dev test and then move the production workload into on-premise ‑‑ or you can take even any kind of workload and split it between your public and private cloud and orchestrate the front end, back end, those are the kinds of scenarios that we want to enable. And so therefore to me supporting true hybrid computing where it’s distributed is, I think, the real future of cloud computing.

CURT KOLCUN: That’s great. I mean clearly you’re here today because of your support for government and investments we’ve been making. I mean I think you understand and appreciate how some of those things are coming to life with the customers that we have in the room and sort of the focus areas that they have.

SATYA NADELLA: Yes, I mean I think the thing that I’m excited to see is when the state of Texas and what they’ve done with Office 365 and now the increasing use of Azure, that’s a fantastic example of being able to support the needs of a state government that actually has the needs of hybrid computing and yet the scale economics of the public cloud helping them and Office 365. That’s a great example.

The state of Alabama and their Medicaid program I think is all built on Azure. That’s another great example. Some of the partners here have built some of these surveillance applications on Azure. That’s, I think, something that we’re going to talk about later on. Even the federal agencies, the Department of Agriculture, they’ve been an early pioneer with us in giving us the feedback cycle.

And so we have lots of these examples, I think, that are great to see. And the fact that we now have all of the general availability we want to move into the mainstream and really get the push, because it’s the feedback cycle from the public sector that has helped us actually build our enterprise business and I think that that’s going to be true even in the enterprise case, I mean in the cloud era, as well.

CURT KOLCUN: Well, for these CIOs, as they’re thinking about sort of their approach to cloud, sort of what are the top things that they need to be considering in that move?

SATYA NADELLA: I mean I would say there are probably a couple of different things. So first is, of course, the place where you have pushed us the most is security and privacy, because you have pretty stringent requirements when it comes to security and privacy assurances. And so that has led us to do all of the certifications. But, it’s just not the certifications. It’s the operational security posture that we collectively have as you move workloads into the cloud.

So that to me is perhaps the most important dimension, even connecting up log data, or how do you have your SEM processes, where you can do incident management using even the data that is being collected in the cloud, being able to transport your virtual appliances around security to the cloud. So that’s I think a very important dimension.

So any cloud provider that you’re taking to like us, that’s a place where it’s a huge consideration for CIOs and we absolutely are building to that.

The second one is hybrid. We talked extensively about hybrid, because that’s the reality for you. You want to have the flexibility. You don’t want to move something to the public cloud that you can’t move back. You want to have the ability to tier the private and the public cloud. So that’s another element, true hybrid-computing support. It just can’t be someone else does hybrid for us. That just cannot be the case. It has to be designed in. And some of the rhetoric in the industry is sometimes painful to listen to, because it’s not like distributed computing is going to get locked up by three hyper-scale folks. The fact is there is going to be hyper-scale, but there are still going to be lots of servers that you will deploy for a variety of different reasons in your data centers and they need to work together.

Another dimension is data. In other words, where is the data, what is it being used for? That’s another huge element of I would say real interest for you. That’s a place where we want to make sure that we work with you to truly support that. I mean, say the last one I think is the openness piece, which is interoperability and the openness of every layer, because we’ve grown up even in Windows Server recognizing that you will define what layer you will use and what layer you will use someone else.

And so therefore providing that flexibility, you know, starting at the metal so that basically at the hypervisor layer to the runtimes of Linux and Windows, Java and .NET, and the applications, SAP and Oracle or whatever, all of those are things that we want to make sure we have interoperability and openness.

CURT KOLCUN: That’s great. And, you know, one of the things, Satya, I’d be curious to get your feedback on is we talk about the accelerated pace. And in areas like Azure I think, you know, we announced and Scott announced with you back in October, we had 300 major announcements in 12 months, if I remember correctly. And sort of, you know, I think sometimes in the government space we for security reasons think about, OK, I’m going to lock this down and I’m going to forget about it for a while. And in some cases, based on the type of system, that may be the way that they have to go.

But could you just share some of your insight relative to how Microsoft thinks about development and sort of that pace of change and what’s happening?

SATYA NADELLA: You know, the paradigm of how one goes about building products and yet ensuring quality of the products is changing. But sometimes even, you know, inside of Microsoft I want to make sure that we don’t take the wrong lessons. I mean, agility doesn’t mean you just put stuff out that doesn’t work. You’ve got to really make sure that the quality assurances that we have historically made are, in fact, getting made with increased assurances as opposed to decreased assurance. So that to me is paramount.

Now, are there new techniques to introduce quality? And that is what’s happening. You know, take the cloud. You know, we used to have lots and lots of what I would call test environments before we propped into code into production.

It turns out that there is no way to simulate the Internet, right? I mean, you can keep on testing, and yet, in fact, there’s a lot of — you know, one of the things that in Microsoft we talk about is, hey, we run all these test cases all the time on all these builds, and when was the last time any of these automated test cases found a bug? They never did. But we do find bugs in production.

So the question is, how do we make sure we get into these real-world situations, quickly get an understanding of where are the sort of edge cases, and then have remediation. That to me is the new frontier of quality assurance.

And so what we want to be is at the leading edge of figuring out how to have increasing levels of quality assurance, even some formal mechanisms, because the distributed computing, let’s face it, as things get more distributed, things get more complicated. And in order to be able to test things that are more complicated, you have to have more formal mechanisms to be able to understand even the dependency change.

So these are actually going from what used to be, you know, research problems to, in fact, real solutions that we are getting deployed in order to increase our assurance on quality, is leading to even changes in workflow or culture.

One of the things that we have talked about, oh, we’ve got to move quality upstream. And guess what, that is the only way to assure quality. So design is a place where these formal mechanisms can actually help a lot. So we are putting a lot more focus on getting the architecture right, getting design right, and then increasing quality.

CURT KOLCUN: That’s great.

You highlighted sort of ubiquitous computing and we think about it, and you mentioned briefly machine learning. Could you talk a little bit more about what Microsoft’s focus is there and potentially some of the application areas for government?

SATYA NADELLA: Yeah, I mean, one of the core new capabilities that cloud computing enables any of you and any of your applications is the ability to reason over large amounts of data. So you collect this exhaust from your applications, from your machines. I mean, Internet of Things of course is a big phenomenon. And you want to be able to reason over all of that data.

Now, the techniques of reasoning over that data is where when you have lots of data it’s not about rules on data, it’s about statistical reasoning on top of that, and that’s really what machine learning is.

And in our case what we did was we took a lot of the tooling that we developed for our own first-party needs — at Microsoft we have speech that got great because of Kinect. In fact, vision and speech got good because of our Xbox efforts. Our Web understanding, so basically text mining got good because of what we have done in Bing.

And so those capabilities, we’ve had to invest a lot to build tool chains and algorithms. But it’s really the tool chain because the algorithms themselves are novel but there are many of them. It’s the experimentation harness that you need in order to do applied machine learning at scale. And that to us has been where we’ve spent a lot of energy building the tools to make our own engineers productive.

Now you are going to have the data science departments, you’re going to have people in your world who are going to want to have the same kind of capabilities that a Bing engineer or an Xbox speech or vision engineer wanted.

And so we’ve taken all of that and put it into a service called Azure Machine Learning or Azure ML, and I’m very excited about that service because it democratizes, because people talk a lot about machine learning but they mostly mean, OK, you’ve got to be a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in order to do anything. And that works if you are a risk capital funded company in the Silicon Valley, but for the rest of the world you’re not going to have access to that talent.

So the point is how do we really democratize the tool chain so that we can make machine learning a runtime service and a tool chain that everybody can take advantage of? And that’s really what — you know, if you go back in history and you say what we did with Visual Basic and really made client-server computing easy, that’s what I envision us doing with the Azure ML and the tool chain around it so that every application you build can have the next level of intelligence, the next level of machine learning capability.

CURT KOLCUN: That’s great. And I know one of the focus areas for you and recently announced was sort of our focus about reinventing productivity. Can you expand on that and sort of how you think about it?
SATYA NADELLA: Yeah. See, the way — I mean, Microsoft you could say has always been focused on productivity. We were first a BASIC interpreter. That’s what Bill and Paul started the company, you know, 40 years ago. And then we became an apps company, and then we became a platforms company. And to me productivity is at the core.

So we’re doing lots of different things. So first is we are taking even the what I would call the classic applications, take Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and making sure that they’re available on all devices.   So the work we have done to take Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, have them supported on iOS, coming to Android, obviously you have great applications on Windows, really obsess about what it means to think about e-mail triage on now four-inch, five-inch, six-inch screens, these are new form factors that you need to rethink and re-conceptualize even the traditional notion of productivity.

In many cases it’s companion usage, right? You can probably be using the PowerPoint cues from here to control something on a PPI screen. So really the multimodal, multidevice scenarios have been important.

But beyond just what I would call our traditional applications re-conceptualized, reinvented, we also — I mean, in the last year think about all the new applications we have built, Cortana, which I’m very, very excited about.

Cortana is our intelligent agent. It has the ability to reason over your personal data and professional data. So it will help me even, for example, understand what time to leave a meeting to catch my flight, given the traffic conditions, so that ability to be able to look at all of my digital information, my work and my life information to help me with my time, because it turns out the more computing you have, the only scarce commodity is your time and attention. And so how do we use software, in fact, to get you back in control and get you to be empowered to get more out of every moment of your life is the real vision.

We have another tool that I’m very, very excited about. It’s called Delve. If you look at the amount of information that gets circulated in Exchange or in SharePoint, but the issue is discovery. How do I discover the relevant information?

One of the things that I do often is go to Delve to check out what my direct reports are working on, because it’s beautiful, because it gives me a view of all the presentations that they are viewing. And that’s actually a much more powerful signal than any set of emails you sort of send to them about any given topic.

What we are doing with Skype Translate, I mean, the ability to use machine learning or a deep neural network in that case to solve one of the oldest human problems of how two humans can communicate using two different languages simultaneously translated, to me Delve, Skype Translate, Cortana, these are examples of reinventing productivity by really rethinking how do we empower individuals to get more out of every moment of their life.

CURT KOLCUN: Well, another big focus area for us obviously is Windows and Windows 10. I’m wondering if you can share sort of the latest on that with the audience.

SATYA NADELLA: Yeah, I mean, you know, hopefully people inside of your organization are already part of some of the Windows 10 early access programs, because it’s, you know, for me Windows 10 is not just another release of Windows but it’s really the beginning of a new generation of Windows, built for these mobile experiences.

And so three things that I would say stand out in how we’re going to go about Windows 10.

Before I get to the three, the culturally even we want to build this in a much more cooperative way with our customer feedback cycle. So this Insiders program is a super important one, and so your early access feedback is what’s going to govern, in fact, how we even bring this to market.

But there are three dimensions to Windows 10, which I would believe are fairly fundamental. The first one is this consistency of the experience. We’re going to have Windows on Internet of Things to 85 inches or 90-inch screens. This doesn’t mean you have one metaphor or one way to think about the user experience or the shell, but it’s the consistency between all of this. So that’s actually a huge element.

The second one is the developer platform. We have this notion called the Universal Platform, so you have as a developer the ability — and, in fact, we are the only platform — I mean, if you look at it, there is Chrome and Android, there is iOS and Mac OS, whereas in the case of Windows you truly have a universal application platform that spans the gamut. And you can do obviously device targeting.

And so that power of that Universal Platform, mixed in with our traditional strengths like tooling in Visual Studio I think is another point of strength, especially since there’s more application development that each one of your organizations does.

The last one is the IT control plane, the fact that Windows will come with the IT control plane for you to be able to set policy and manage these devices all the way from Internet of Things to 85 inches, from identity management to data security to device management.

Those are the three dimensions of Windows that make it fundamentally a big, big release for us.

And we are very squarely focused on organizational adoption of Windows with Windows 10, and so the feedback cycles matter a lot.

CURT KOLCUN: That’s great

Well, we appreciate your time. As we wrap up the time with you, I just want to personally thank you for your commitment, your long-term support of this customer and recognition of their importance into IT. I mean, your investments over the years have helped facilitate this day and sort of this great announcement of our Government Cloud. I want to thank you for that.

SATYA NADELLA: No, absolutely. And first of all, I want to thank all of the partners and customers in the audience, because to us and to me having grown up in what is our server business, we wouldn’t be where we are if it was not for the feedback cycle from all the government organizations that we have worked in, in the United States.

And you’ve really pushed us. Believe me, there are many times when I get on the phone calls with many of you talking about things that you would want us to do more. And that is one of the places where I think you set high standards on many of the dimensions that matter to other customers. And that feedback cycle is something that we take to heart, that’s something that’s first order priority for me, and we want to continuously learn.

And as we go into this new era of the cloud, we’re excited about what we are doing but most importantly we’re excited about sort of what it means for you to be able to use within the context of the transformation goals that you have and the feedback from there.

So thank you so much for the opportunity to come have a chance to talk today.

CURT KOLCUN: Great, thank you, Satya. (Applause.)

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