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J.P. Morgan Global TMT Conference
Mark Murphy: OK, good morning everyone. I'm Mark Murphy,
software analyst with J.P. Morgan. Very pleased to be hosting Corey Sanders,
CVP of Microsoft Solutions. Corey, thank you for joining us.
Corey: Thank you for having me.
Mark: You got it. I'm going to kick it off with a
handful plus of questions. We can also take questions from the audience. You in
the audience, you would do that by clicking the Q&A button at the bottom of
the screen. Then you can type in your question and I will relay that to Corey.
Corey, welcome again. It means a lot to have
you here with us. We're going to discuss many key growth vectors for Microsoft.
We would love to start off with your background and what you cover in your role
for Microsoft.
Corey: Absolutely, yeah. Thanks, Mark, and thanks for
having me. This is a lot of fun.
I've been with Microsoft 16 years. I started actually as an intern, as a
developer in Windows. I started fixing bugs in Windows in the core parts of the
platform, and did that for about five years.
I moved to Azure in 2009, in the product team, and designed some of the
original services. Virtual machines, I actually wrote the first spec on virtual
machines for Azure, and what it would...it was about a 100-page spec on how it
would work and customers experiences around. I ended up running the Compute
Team actually, for many years, back in Azure.
Then about a year and half ago, I moved to this current team, which is called
the Microsoft Solutions Team. One of the things that I realized when I was in
Azure was I really enjoying going out and working with customers on what are
they trying to get done, what problems are they solving, what is their digital
transformation, and learning about their industries and their scenarios.
I moved to this role to get a lot closer and make that my full-time job. I'm
now responsible for sales and customer enablement across all of our commercial
solution areas.
Data and AI, apps and infra, business apps, which includes of course Dynamics
and Power Apps and Power Automate. And then modern work, which is Teams, M365,
etc. And security spanning across all of them, of course. That's my gig.
Mark: OK. A pretty good idea in retrospect, that
Azure compute engine that you invented in 2009. I'd say you did a pretty good
of that.
Corey: Yeah.
Mark: Thank you for that overview. I want to ask you
about the sales organization, Corey. We have seen this Microsoft sales engine
has been firing on all cylinders for quite some time now. Very robust bookings
growth, in fact since the reorg a few years back.
Since you oversee that commercial solution seller organization, maybe you can
explain to us what is unique about the structure of that group, how it's
organized, maybe touch on how it works with the rest of the company, and just
how sales have evolved for Microsoft over the last couple of years.
Corey: Yeah, absolutely. It's evolved and continuing
to get this focus here, even in this coming fiscal year. A few key areas. One,
I think, deep technical expertise or we call it technical intensity inside the
company.
Making sure that all of our sellers have the knowledge, the expertise, the
depth in our products and how customers would use them, from start to finish,
across the entire process. It's an ongoing journey, because our products are
constantly changing and expanding and growing.
Making sure that the latest and greatest information is deep with our sales
folks is really important. It's something we really focused hard on last year
when it came to Azure, just being one of the more technically challenging
areas, sort of the depth of networking and security in compute and path
services and so on.
Making sure our sellers could really have those conversations in depth with
customers. That's a big area of focus for us. It leads right into our customer
success conversation. One of the big things that we have changed and
continually focused on is making sure our sellers are actually compensated on
customers using and being successful with our technology.
It's no longer a "sell the license and move on" conversation. It's
how do we make sure that they are actually leveraging it. That spans all the
solution areas. That spans Power Apps. It spans Teams. It spans obviously
Azure, and making sure they're actually using it is a big part of our story for
each one of those motions.
We've also given a lot of industry focus. This is something that I have
actually really expanded even going into FY21. I think we're seeing an even
greater focus on industry. This is something especially with the COVID-19
crisis.
The need to give that industry focus is quite high, because every industry is
doing things in a little different way. Digital transformation doesn't mean the
same thing for every industry. Retail is going to be different from
manufacturing, going to be different from health, from public sector, etc.
That focus is really important, and that means skilling, and that means
understanding those industries in depth. Then maybe just a couple quick final
points. We are continuing to expand our digital selling. It's an obvious thing,
especially now, being able to sell remotely.
This is something that I think we are already on this journey. COVID-19
actually accelerated a lot of our focus there. Thank goodness we have amazing
tools to help us do that. Then a partnership conversation. We continually focus
on our partners and making sure that they're lined up for success in these
end-to-end motions.
Mark: Corey, your sales teams have applied those
learnings and that expertise so successfully into the realm of digital
transformations. It's become such an enormous topic. We've seen Microsoft win
multi-year strategy deals. We've seen Walmart. We've seen AT&T. We've
Kroger. We've seen others.
On the earnings call we heard Satya actually call two years of digital transformation
that happened in the past two months. We've taken many questions on that. What
does that mean? Can you walk us through, what does that mean from a customer
perspective, how investors should think about that statement?
Also, I just wanted to ask you on that topic, what inning are we in with
digital transformation US and global? Is the pandemic impacting any of the
deployment, any of the large budget discussions? Sorry, that's about four
questions in one.
Corey: Four questions in one, yeah. I'll go through
them here piece by piece here. The first question around two years of digital
transformation in the past two months. One of the things that the most
important step for digital transformation is passion and energy and excitement
top down from companies on making the shift.
That can be either deciding that you're going to become a much more remote
workforce, that you're going to leverage remote based solutions. It can also be
opportunities for creativity improvements in automation, being able to take
digital services into your manufacturing plants, using IoT to be able to be
smarter about how you approach things that are running for many years, and
whether you need to repair them and so on.
The big step with digital transformation is the push from the leadership, that
it's the right thing to do and we need to do it now. When I think about the
progress that we had been seeing, that typically, that step is a hard
conversation. It takes work.
Typically, there's cost involved, and you have to think about your workforce
needs to change to get there. When I think of this shift here from COVID-19,
we've seen a lot of those conversations dramatically accelerate.
It's suddenly become, "My goodness, this new world, either from a
financial perspective or from a remote perspective, I need this to happen
immediately." When I think of this shift, it has really paved the way and
accelerated those conversations.
It's also accelerated those customers who were already underway. They were
already seeing this go, and they said we need to move a little bit faster. When
I actually think about what this means, and how we're thinking about it,
especially in a post COVID world, there's multiple phases to the COVID-19
challenges. That recovery is going to see a lot of these digital
transformations.
The obvious short term is just business continuity. We are seeing an uptake in
all sorts of remote based experiences and services and solutions. Some obvious
ones, Teams have seen a huge spike. Windows Virtual Desktop has seen a huge
spike.
Then perhaps some of the less obvious ones. Our ecommerce solutions with
curbside pickup, kind of an interesting one. Or remote assist being used with
HoloLens. You can support people in factories to repair things without having
someone looking over your shoulder, and you can do it from a remote and safe
location.
Even things like remote sales has really picked up, for obvious reasons. People
still need to make sales, and being able to take advantage of that.
The next waves, certainly we'll see this hybrid period for recovery, part
remote, part back in the office, and enabling solutions and automation for
that.
Then the real exciting places that we're seeing energy around digital
transformation really accelerate is the structural changes, and things I've
already mentioned. Some of the automated factories, smart buildings, being able
to understand who is in the office when and how.
Being able to do fraud detection, and being able to take some of these
solutions that we've got digital twins, and really apply them to longer term
changes. Those are not going to happen overnight. As much as I would love those
to happen in two months, they're going to take work to go deliver.
Going back to maybe your original, I think I covered everything except your
last questions, which was, what stage are we in? Then how has it impacted
deployment and large budget discussions?
What stage are we in? We're in the early stages. I think that was an important
point. I think customers deciding they want to do this clearly is the early
stages of the motion. I think there's a huge amount of opportunity that we're
going to continue to see growth around this.
Then, just short term conversations. We've seen a lot of gives and takes when
it comes to deployment and large budget discussions. The energy is there.
Sometimes the desire to give a whole lot of upfront money as part of it may not
be as strong there.
How do we enable longer term growth and opportunity with perhaps reducing the
short term expectations that we have of customers, across these massive digital
transformation motions?
I think I got them all, Mark, but if I missed anything, please bring me back to
it.
Mark: That's great depth and perspective, and it's a
good reminder of some of the areas that we overlook at times. E-commerce,
curbside pick-up, we're not always mindful of that.
You also said something along the lines of, "My god, I need to do this
immediately." Satya had talked about the concept of remote everything on
the earnings call. Can you walk us through what that is going to mean from a
customer perspective, both in the near term and then looking out over the
longer-term horizon?
Corey: Yeah, absolutely. There's a few places that
we've seen immediate impact from remote everything. Certain obvious ones, Teams
and usage of Teams, the realization that you must set up this type of
environment to be able to continue to do either teamwork or learning. That's
been an obvious one.
Then actually Windows Virtual Desktop has been a very vast and exciting growth
area, again for similar reasons. You need to be able to work in a secure and
remote way.
Security has also been a really important concept, just part of that remote
everything. While it doesn't necessarily elicit the concept of doing something
remote, a lot the structure of our security solutions like Azure Active
Directory conditional access enables you to work in a remote way while still
being secure, based on whatever policies or principals that you have on
premise.
I think those are big ones, and really near term, fast twitch solutions. Some
of the other ones that are longer term are fundamental changes in the way folks
work. I think the best examples may be digital sales and customer service.
Being able to do a sales motion fully remote is definitely challenging for
folks. I think it's a new experience, and being able to have the tools and
solutions to do that.
Similar with customer service. There are many cases where those expectations
where people on site, and at this point those limitations, it makes it harder.
That's where services like Remote Assist become much easier to leverage.
One of the interesting things that I'll say about it that we're seeing again
interest, as customers are taking advantage of some of these remote
capabilities, they're actually learning the benefits of being remote.
This is something that I think has shocked some people. We even talk about it
internally as an in-person sales force will actually be at a disadvantage to a
remote sales force in the future. This is because of the intelligence that can
be brought into.
With a solution like Customer Insights and Dynamics, you can actually bring
live intelligence as part of your remote selling, where you can understand what
is the customer going to ask, what are they thinking about, what should be the
pitch? It comes up right on your screen, and enables you to do it in a live
way.
Similar to customer service enabling virtual agents. Again, using AI and
intelligence to really take customer service, improve it, reduce cost, and
increase stats. The longer-term conversations I actually think are very
interesting, because they're a little bit more work. They're going to take a
little bit more effort on the customer side.
The value is much greater than just, I can do it remote now. It's actually
adding incremental value on top of it, thanks to the AI and intelligence that
can be layered in.
Mark: Corey, I want to come back to that in about
five minutes. I want to drill down more into Dynamics, because we're interested
in that topic. I want to ask you as well about spend consolidation potential
during the recession here.
We looked back on this, and we think Microsoft has played offense extremely
well during the economic expansion. Our view has been that eventually there
will be some point where budgets come under pressure in recession.
Maybe you have customers trying to reassess some of the value that they're
getting from other premium priced alternatives that they've been using. How
well positioned do you think you think Microsoft is going to be to convey a
higher ROI or a more cohesive architecture versus some of these point products?
I'm thinking of markets. It could span everything from collaboration,
communication, security, file sharing, or other areas. How do you think that
will behave during this economic period?
Corey: Absolutely. This is a very common conversation
that we're having with customers. I'm sure you all understand and appreciate
that. It really is a TCO conversation that we're having. I think it's going to
have a set of interesting impact in different places of our business.
Certainly M365, Microsoft 365 is actually very well positioned for a great TCO
conversation. This is around typically a vendor consolidation discussion. Being
able to say, you have seven different security solutions or three different
compliance solutions.
Some customers, I think I just knew a customer that had 43 distinct security
solutions that they were using. I was shocked that they could keep track of all
of them. The opportunity to take a subset of those solutions, consolidate, and
leverage a single solution for a single price, the TCO is really quite powerful
there.
That is a very common conversation we're having across the board, and certainly
an opportunity for us. Similar with Teams, certainly Teams is a really
expansive platform. It's chat, collaboration, meetings, voice, application
hosting platform that again becomes an opportunity for consolidation.
Instead of having one platform that's really good at meetings and one platform
that's really good at collaboration or chat, and one maybe your application
platform you can suddenly bring them all together. Again, I think we're really
well positioned for those types of solutions.
I think Azure is going to be an interesting one, because I think Azure is also
a really valuable TCO conversation. I think that has actually a short term
negative impact actually on our revenue, not just transparently.
I think we're going to see customers' opportunities to be able to reduce their
spend. Actually, we're passionate about helping them. We've built out some
checklists for our sellers to go through and say, "Here are all the ways a
customer can reduce their spend."
Not removing workloads, but right-sizing their VMs, making sure they're using the
right size, and paying the right price. Making sure they're scaling up and down
versus just a static usage like they used to do on prem.
Then using some of our cost savings options, reserved instances. We're actually
making sure that our sellers are all pushing this much cheaper ability to buy
computer path services. Those are areas where I think we have actually really
powerful TCO conversations that we can have with customers.
I think it has a short term headwind for us, just transparently, but a longer
term opportunity as we build that trust, and prove out the value prop much
precisely for customers as they think about their TCO.
Mark: You're doing the right thing for these
customer relationships in the very long term. Part of that is going to be just
helping them get the most efficient use in areas, including the actual Azure
consumption and usage. Is that a fair way to say it?
Corey: That's right. We have places where a vendor
consolidation to a single product will give them cost savings. I think we have
ways of helping even our product usage, reducing the way that they're using it
to get the most out of it. I think that's right.
Mark: Now Corey, and I'm going to come right back to
Teams, because I'm very interested in that. I wanted to ask you as well, going
back to the last earnings call, Amy commented on seeing some weakness in the
SMB market.
We're wondering, if you think about this trend in digital transformation and
the IT spend discussion, if I were to ask you, how do you think it's going to
play out by customer segment in this environment?
Corey: One of the biggest partitioning that we've
looked at for the impact has actually been industry. I think actually the
industry segmentation has shown a lot of distinction on the impact that this is
playing out.
We've leveraging a little bit the Gartner list of the high impact, medium
impact, low impact, with some caveats there. Education I think is in the high
impact. Education is actually a very positive growth area for us. I think
there's an opportunity even there.
When we look at some of those high risk industries across both enterprise and
SMB, we're going to see some challenges, I think. Existing workloads, we'll see
some of the cost reduction efforts that we looked for. We may see a slow down
in some new workloads.
I think that is going to impact both, I think. SMB is likely to see a higher
amount of impact just by the nature of their business being a little less
fungible, a little bit less expendable cash, etc. We'll see those industry
slices happen, and I think we'll see impact be greater, the smaller the
business is for a lot of obvious reasons.
This is of course countered by the fact that we're actually seeing a massive
growth in some other areas. It's interesting. Retail's been an interesting one,
where we've seen massive growth in the retail places that have established
online presence for obvious reasons.
For those who are struggling with online presence, we've seen less usage.
There's a little bit of even that give and take within industry. A good amount
of industry that's we've seen healthy growth, public sector education, retail,
etc., and I think those are helping. By the way, that's helping and driving
growth in both enterprise and SMB alike.
Mark: Very helpful. Very logical, and obviously no
one has quite the global scale and reach of Microsoft to look across all of
those slices.
I did mention, I wanted to come back to Teams. We went back and looked at some
of the quotes actually from our own recent survey work. I want to read you two
of these. "Teams is basically Zoom and Slack together. You can make
arguments that Zoom and Slack standalone are better, but Teams has it all in
one. It's consolidated, and also if you use Outlook, it's fully
integrated."
The question I have for you is, how are you viewing the unique value prop of
Teams, and how are you thinking about how it stacks up competitively?
Corey: Yeah, absolutely. You covered it quite well, I
think, frankly. Look, I think what we're seeing from Teams and the way people
using Teams is really quite inspiring. It is becoming basically the hub for all
collaboration engagement and work.
This includes chat. It includes meetings, calling, file collaboration, sharing
workload, etc. It's also becoming a platform. It becomes a platform for new
applications, whether it be third party applications or Power Apps based
solutions that are being built.
This, I think, is actually quite exciting, because in some ways it's a meta OS.
It's becoming basically a new place for people to work day in and day out.
We're seeing both of these play out in very interesting ways, culturally,
frankly in the ways remote work is happening.
One of the interesting things that I've seen from Teams and talk with customers
is that the combination of meetings and chat side-by-side is enabling more
voices to be heard in meetings. What we've actually heard is that sort of
unique way of communicating is actually expanding out diversity.
Because people who are comfortable talking and yelling at their screen or what
have you, they talk, and they continue to talk. They would have talked in
person, and they talk in the remote meeting. I happen to be one of those types
of people.
Then the people who were maybe less comfortable just injecting, they now have
another forum to go interject, and drop in chat their questions, comments,
feedback. With this dichotomy of offering both the collaboration and the
meeting, it creates unique ways of integrating and working together.
Same thing with the platform structure. I met with a customer just last week.
We were talking about going back to work, Power App work that we're doing,
enabling contact tracing and so on.
His big push was, "Please make it integrate with Teams, because I've now
pushed Teams on to everyone's device. Every phone has Teams. Every laptop has
teams. I don't want to go and install another app. Just make the app available
in Teams."
These are the unique things that are becoming not only possible, but actually
required by our customers, as we look at the fact that this Teams solution is
all in one.
Now, certainly, from a competitive point that you mentioned, we feel really
good about the technical quality. Certainly, impressed with some of our
competitors out there, as well. They have good products, too. I think we happen
to be using one now for this actual meeting.
We do feel like the opportunities around bringing all these components together
is very, very unique, and will be very, very hard for our competitors to
emulate, whether it be bring phone systems, audio conferencing, chat collab,
etc., all into one thing.
Mark: I like to yell at my screen as you describe,
but I love to be able to attack people from all angles, including that.
Corey: Exactly, multitasking. It's a powerful thing,
exactly.
Mark: Now Corey, just a quick follow-up on that.
Some of those competing products that have a partial overlap with Teams, they
had recently suffered from some scaling issues, some security issues. I'm just
wondering, has there been a benefit to Microsoft from the publicity, to try to
highlight the differentiated architecture in Teams?
Corey: I think that the big opportunity that we have
with Teams, in addition to the points that I just mentioned, is the full
end-to-end connection with security. I do think it is a unique opportunity that
we have. I think that customers are really looking for this.
As more and more folks work remote, they also realize that there's more
endpoints that they're exposed to, and more potential surface area of risk. I
think Teams offers us an opportunity.
When customers look at Teams, they come back and say, "Hey, we'd like to
buy some of your security solutions on top of this to make sure we're enabling
that type of end-to-end protection." I do think we have benefited from
consideration from customers.
Look, I think outside of competitors and challenges competitors may have in
those areas, it's a really important topic of discussion for customers, that
I'm working remote. I have more frequent endpoints and more common endpoints,
less control.
How are you helping me secure this? Whether this be with identity, it be with
endpoint protection, or other such security solutions and analysis. Absolutely,
it's been an ongoing conversation.
Mark: OK. We've had a couple questions coming in the
Q&A. I want to try to get to them in about five minutes. Before we do that,
let me just finish up on the Teams discussion here. Can you help us understand
maybe how Teams plays into the broader strategy around Microsoft 365?
If we're sitting here looking at this exponential usage increase in Teams, can
you help us think through how it translates financially?
Corey: Yeah. There's a few places that I think we're
going to see the opportunity there. Certainly, it's a part of our M365
conversation. It's got the integration with Office 365.
Even just within that component, and within the Teams component, there are
upsell opportunities, so adding telephony, adding voice, these types of
solutions. There is actually upsell revenue opportunity just from a baseline of
consumption.
I already talked a little bit about there are security opportunities there that
also is an upsell opportunity. Taking some of that baseline usage of Teams, but
being able to add, whether it be like Azure, the directory-based security
solutions, whether it be endpoint based security solutions with connecting
entities.
Or even the integration with the Office based security solutions as part of
Teams. Being able to secure documents when they're moving around, and
leveraging them in the collaboration environment. These are all upsell
opportunities as we look at the M365 suite, and why Teams being a part of it is
actually so part and parcel to that business.
Then the third one that has been kind of a late blooming one, but a very exciting
one, is again that platform conversation. Being able to take Teams and build
platform solutions on top of it using Power Apps and Power Automate now creates
a licensing opportunity for those solutions as well, as customers use them and
get excited by them and their seats as well.
There's quite a few, taking that base usage and expanding out to where
customers are excited to buy more and expand as they continue to use the
solution.
Mark: Now Corey, that's extremely helpful. I wanted
to come back and touch on Azure. Again, you were involved and instrumental in
it from the very, very, very beginning. We heard this comment you made a few
moments ago about there could be some short-term impacts.
I think we understand that. It did perform very well in the March quarter. I
think it was 61 percent growth in cost and currency. Part of that we know was
this work from home spending wave. Can you help us understand that wave? Which
elements of that do you think would be more enduring versus temporary surge?
In other words, where is this uplift going to be structural? Even as we slowly
begin to reopen and return to the office?
Corey: Yeah, absolutely. We have seen and continue to
see a lot of customer excitement and growth when it comes to the business
continuity requirements and the work-from-home requirements.
Look it runs, a big range of things, whether it runs from again supporting
applications, running in Teams. Windows Virtual Desktop has seen a very large
growth. Security based solutions.
Even just the need to leverage fungible infrastructure, because their data
center may not be accessible. They may not be able to make the changes they
want to go make or expand their data center, and so they need it for fungible
agile usage.
There is certainly quite a bit of that hybrid-based deployment and remote work
based deployment. That continues. We do see that continuing. From a structural
perspective, I think some of that will actually continue forever.
There are aspects of people having learned now that remote work is possible.
They have learned that they can do it, and they've done the work to set it up.
We will see a good amount of that continue, whether it be applications to
support remote work, even Windows Virtual Desktop.
We'll continue to see the desire for disaster recovery solutions to be ready to
go in case that they need to use public cloud for that. Then I think that
there's also net new applications that have built out in scale, whether it be
new AI-based solutions bots that have been spun up to respond to some needs,
things like telemedicine, education.
All signs are pointing to that continuing to be used and continuing to be
changes that we see here for many months, frankly. It's a very interesting
time, because as I mentioned, we got this big reduction in TCO, this big
opportunity for customers to save money, coupled with just the spike in demand
and expectation that the cloud becomes this hybrid extension to a data center.
A lot of gives and takes that we're seeing across the Azure business.
Mark: Now, if we think about what you're describing,
and we try to look at it from a product perspective, if we do this drill down
within Azure, is there anything that's starting to bubble within Azure, that
you would say, "You know? You might want to pay attention to this as
potential to become a much larger topic maybe a few years down the road?"
What I mean Corey is, we know you have Azure Sentinel. You have Azure Stack.
You have Azure Cosmos DB. You Azure Edge Zones, Azure Arc. Azure Active
Directory obviously has been there a while and is a big one. What do you think
we should hone in on?
Corey: Yeah, it's great. A good list of services that
you mentioned there. I think I'd probably say a few areas. One, hybrid. We've
been talking about hybrid a lot, certainly, but I think when you think about
digital transformation, hybrid opportunities, especially when it comes to
edge-based solutions, I think that we will see a lot of energy in that regard.
I would combine even a few that you mentioned. Azure Arc offering a single
control point for managing environments both on prem and cloud. Azure Stack
Hub, to be able to deploy into hybrid environments, and be able to support
those solutions.
Azure Stack Edge as well, and bringing those pieces, all three of those
together, I think a lot of digital transformation, again. I mentioned it
already, some of the reworking manufacturing plans, and thinking about IoT with
analytics.
These are going to be the components that fuel all of that and enable a
disconnected experience, while still enabling a cloud experience. Whether
again, manufacturing, remote sites for energy, retail locations. All of that is
going to be, I think, pretty exciting and a big part of the digital
transformation story.
A couple last ones here. Sometimes I get really caught up when I talk about
Azure. Azure Sentinel, you mentioned Azure Sentinel. Absolutely. I think this
is something that there is just so much customer energy around this.
When you think about the M365 usage and the security bridge between that and
Azure and having a single security analytics platform between the two, Sentinel
has become a really positive environment.
A couple of you didn't mention GitHub. Remote development has really picked up.
GitHub has been really an exciting part of this collaborative development, even
remote, especially layering, again, some of the security solutions. I think
that's going to be a hot one.
Then Synapse, our analytics platform, also going to be a really exciting one to
drive some of these outcomes.
Mark: Corey, I took my eye off the clock. We're down
to about two minutes here.
Corey: Uh-oh.
Mark: Let me see. Maybe you can give us a one-liner.
I don't know if you can or not.
Corey: A challenge.
Mark: Yes. The Power Apps biz, one of the keys to
even faster growth is discovery and applicability to the broad range use cases.
In a post COVID work-from-home environment, has that discovery process
accelerated for no code apps?
Corey: Discovery. The one sentence question, yes,
absolutely it has. I think what we've actually seen that's been really
interesting is Power Apps is such an open-ended platform, which is really
what's so powerful about it. Oftentimes you need for the first one or two to
get ideas.
You need, what's the example app that I'm going to go build? What we've
actually launched as part of the response to COVID is both a crisis response
app. We've launched sort of a healthcare support application for tracking
supplies. Like I said, we're working on a going back to work application.
These templates are not only solving customer problems, but they're enabling
people to understand and discover, as you called out in your question, the art
of the possible. What's possible with Power Apps?
You start with this template, and then you can start saying, "Wow, if I
can do this with that, now let me look at these six other things." Those
scenarios, those templates are becoming really quite powerful to deliver that.
Mark: Now, that's excellent. Very well done. Corey,
in our final maybe one minute, just looking back on this discussion that we've
had around sales, digital transformation, what do you think we'll see in the
next couple of years.
In terms of Microsoft's customer dialog, the go to market motion, the evolution
of all the customer relationships? Is there any way to sum that up in terms of
what we should be looking for?
Corey: Yeah, I think the most exciting thing for me
with my team, and this may be my perspective, is the opportunity to sell and
enable customers across these solution areas.
Some of the examples that I gave even today, of being able to offer remote
assist with HoloLens, with Azure Analytics, and being able to bring these
components together. These are some of the things that get me really excited,
because, one, we're super unique in this.
Two, customers have problems and they want a solution. They don't want a
product. And so, how do we help people enable those solutions, crossing our
team's platform into Azure, and crossing Dynamics and Power Automate.
The components are coming together in ways I think we've never seen before. I'm
super excited to fuel that because I think it's going to drive a lot of our
growth and a lot of our unique opportunity with customers over the next year or
two.
Mark: Corey, we can hear your energy and enthusiasm.
It comes across very clearly. It's very infectious. I want to thank you so much
for taking the time to be with us at J.P. Morgan TMC Conference, and letting us
into your home location in New Jersey. Thank you so much, and look forward to
the next time.
Corey: Thank you so much. I had a blast, and come
back any time. Appreciate it.
Mark: Take care.
Corey: Thanks.
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