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Citi Global Technology Conference
Who: Corey Sanders, CVP, Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Global Expansion Team
Event: Citi Global Technology Conference
Date: Thursday, September 8, 2022
Tyler: Hi everybody. I’m Tyler Radke. I co-head the software sector here at Citi, and welcome to day one of our Technology Conference. We’re excited to have Microsoft, although joining from Zoom not Teams, I see, Corey. Corey unfortunately had a run in with COVID, but I hope you’re doing well. I really appreciate the flexibility and shoutout to the AV team for making this work.
Corey, thanks for joining us. I thought maybe we could kick it off, just if you could touch on your background, your experience within the Microsoft organization. I think you’ve worked with a number of leaders over the years, but just at a high level, what do you do on a day-to-day basis?
Corey: [audio issues] at Microsoft about 18 years [audio issues] my full-time job [audio issues] and did that for about five years. It was a lot of fun. [audio issues]. I then moved to Azure [audio issues] I joined Azure before Scott was there [audio issues]. I helped write the original presentation for [audio issues] infrastructure for our support for Linux for the container [audio issues].
It’s a really fun opportunity to work with partners for the first time on Red Hat and Docker [audio issues]. I did three years after [audio issues]. So, had really a blast [audio issues] all that work, but now I can help with my technical background. And now I just recently moved back [audio issues] with Scott [audio issues]. Again, [audio issues].
Tyler: As we think about the segments that Microsoft reports to investors and kind of the segments you look after, kind of fair to say commercial cloud is your big focus area?
Corey: That’s right. The first [audio issues] work with cloud, and then back with Scott [audio issues].
Tyler: I’ll throw out all my gaming questions I was going to ask you.
Corey: [audio issues]
Tyler: With the macroenvironment being top of mind with investors, we’d love to get your perspective. Obviously, you’re seeing it from the lens of industry and a massive Azure business. How would you just compare and contrast the demand environment that you’re seeing now versus what you saw at the beginning of the year?
Corey: [audio issues] across all of their [audio issues] transformation [audio issues] as well, and so how they approach sort of being able to use the clouds [audio issues]. Certainly our [audio issues] last quarter record mid-December [audio issues]. But as I work with [audio issues] meeting their needs, and we’ve seen across the full spectrum, and sometimes different by industry sort of where the customers are and what they’re looking to solve, but it’s typically looking to solve problems with technology, trying to find simpler, faster, easier ways to lever technology.
And again, that can either be for massive digital transformation, being able to get new learnings, new insights, and drive new businesses. But it can also be for optimization, being able to take advantage of the scalable cloud and taking advantage of a migration from on prem to cloud to be able to reduce the capex investment they may have. And so, the opportunity to look at both and the full range of our services has, I think, put us in a good spot to be able to help customers do more with less as we frequently speak with them about _____ expand, consolidating in our M365 security products or leveraging AI and ML to build new products that they’re shipping to their customers.
Or even sort of optimizing their developer resources by taking advantage of low-code/no-code platforms to be able to expand how many people can develop. Which in some ways, as we look at resources across all of our customers, it spans from obviously both the macroeconomic environment, but even the job market and the developer market and the ability to do more with less. And so, across all of these facets, I’m pretty excited about what we have to offer.
Tyler: Great. Maybe we could ask that question more specifically on Azure. Cloud consumption has been a big topic among investors. Some of your peers and partners that you work with in the marketplace have talked about some customers optimizing cloud spend. We’ve seen some slowdown in cloud consumption, even on the Azure business this most recent quarter.
Can you just talk about the consumption trends you’re seeing in Azure and how are customers approaching this managing or optimizing cloud spend topic?
Corey: I mean, in general I think the conversation with customers that we have is first of all, looking across the full Microsoft Cloud and sort of looking across all of the capabilities that we have and how they think about both their spend in an on prem way and spend in a cloud way. And so, when we think about sort of Azure specifically, it also equally intertwines with Office, with Teams, with our Security suite, D365, and again, like I mentioned, Power Platform.
As we work with customers, oftentimes it is a conversation over what is the most optimal way to leverage the services, again, taking in account what they’re already running, what services they’re already using, consolidating some of those with some of our services, and then, of course, reviewing their services with us and understanding if they’re optimizing across those services.
It is a common conversation that we have, but it’s very much focused on the customer and the solutions they’re trying to drive. While certainly optimization is a hot topic, it is always in the context of the business goals that are being achieved. It’s rarely in sort of the optimization for the sake of optimization. We do have that opportunity, that differentiation at Microsoft to be able to put solutions together, to be able to put those products together to be able to drive the right end state for a customer.
Whether it be sort of the reduction side and the expansion of another side or sort of the opportunity to leverage all the services and perhaps remove some of the point services that may be increasing their overall costs. As part of that, what I think has been really exciting, as our role has really sort of changed as we work with customers on this because we have this breadth and because these conversations are coming up pretty regularly, our opportunity is shifting from less of an IT vendor and much more of a strategic partner.
We have the ability to sort of solve some immediate needs while also partnering on longer-term strategy changes, which many customers are obviously still thinking about. That changes how we sell, and I got to be a part of this on the front line with Judson on just how we think about selling the full Microsoft Cloud versus selling point solutions. The opportunity, of course, when customers look at that full Microsoft Cloud is broad savings as at first looking sort of point by point at potential savings therein.
It also sort of changes a little bit of what we’ve built, and that’s sort of again where my new team comes in, and sort of what I’ve been excited to build is around leveraging the combination of these services and solutions, again, to be able to drive value by getting the best of these services spanning left to right, and that opportunity then certainly reduces their overall spend by being able to take advantage of that and sometimes and frequently improves their top line as well by being able to create new value by putting these services together.
And so, this is where I do think we have this unique opportunity, this unique role, to be not just a seller of solutions and thus get into the deep conversations over price per core, but actually also have the opportunity to really be the strategic partner for these customers and work through what are their goals, what are their strategies, and then what services do we have that can help them get there. And that’s, I do think, where the breadth of our services puts us in such a better spot to have these conversations and drive the right outcomes for customers.
Tyler: If we think about the numbers that you report on Azure, I think the last time we saw a more a notable slowdown was during the pandemic in early 2020. How would you contrast those conversations with customers and the drivers of that slowdown then versus what you’re seeing now, and how are you thinking about the trajectory of Azure throughout the rest of the year, fiscal year?
Corey: I think the slowdown at the early part of the pandemic was certainly a bit more of a knee jerk reaction, I would say. I think that there was sort of immediate reactions and immediate taking stock of the situation which drove some quick responses and then changes in plans were necessary. I think given this is, to your point, a pretty different conversation because it is more of a macro conversation, this is, there again, the conversation is slightly different for us.
It is a lot less about immediate opportunity because of immediate anxiety, but more again around that long-term strategy. What are the benefits and stages that the customer needs to go through? What needs to happen in the next 12 months? What needs to happen in the next 12 years? And that is where I think our conversation becomes much more interesting because we can actually, as mentioned, drive those broader strategic conversations. Customers are not looking necessarily for quick fixes. They’re looking for the ability to have that partnership to be able to drive the longer-term change.
That’s where sort of all of our opportunity across Microsoft Cloud, how we sell, how we build, all become quite advantageous to us and our partnerships with these customers, and that’s, I think, a little bit of how I would equate them to being different. I think the fear of the initial one was very different then I think sort of the strategic approach that I’ve seen from customers today.
Tyler: If we think about what you’re seeing by region, obviously different parts of the globe are in different stages of cloud transition. They have more datacenters versus cloud. How are you seeing the regional performance differ? In regions that may be seeing more of a slowdown from a macro perspective, are they prioritizing cloud more or less? Just give us a little bit of regional commentary in the context of cloud versus on premise.
Corey: From my role, I haven’t seen necessarily a specific regional shift or specific regions who are seeing notably increased slowdown from others. One of the interesting things about the global business and the fact that so many of our customers are global customers, they end of having sort of a global deployment strategy then global deployment enablement. We do still see quite a bit of demand pretty much everywhere in the world.
I do think that’s been interesting. As, of course, this macroeconomic environment continues, it’ll be something for us to watch. But there’s not been a notable region shift from my perspective. I will say as you mentioned the on prem point there, one of the big opportunities in places that we spend a lot of time focusing is around enabling value for customers on premises. In some ways, our hybrid and edge strategy really focused on this where there are good reasons for customers to deploy and continue to deploy in an on prem environment that sort of are agnostic, I think, to the macroeconomic environment, and this is where I do think some of the benefits that we’ve really focused on in the team with our hybrid solutions, one enabling customers to operate their on premise environment as an extension of the cloud.
That being simple policy, simply security controls, and consistency between their on prem and their cloud environment. It allows them to continue to take advantage of their on prem investments and even sometimes expand their on prem investments without necessarily sacrificing some of the benefits that the cloud can bring. We also see a lot of focus on edge as part of this, and so, again, separate maybe from the macroenvironment, but probably more aligned to some industry specific areas where we see edge and proximity needs are actually increasing how we define on prem spend by putting additional servers in either storefronts, I always joke the server on the oil rig, to be able to take advantage of some of the cloud power, whether it be AI/ML or solutions running analytics at the edge and still take benefit from the cloud capabilities behind the scenes.
This is, again, where some of services like Azure Arc or Defender for Cloud can really offer that unified support security. The last one that were actually seeing from an on prem perspective – and this may be more of a regional push, frankly – has been certainly on the government side. This is where when we look at sort of our recent announcement from a Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, which we just announced here a couple of months ago, the focus is around enabling governments to be able to deploy in any way that makes sense for them.
Government spend and government digitalization has been on the rise, which is exciting. And so, offering opportunity to be able to take advantage of public cloud where it makes sense and some of our sovereign capabilities and our policy and governance controls, while also taking advantage of on prem where it makes sense and being able to put it into their environments and being able to leverage cloud capabilities, again, like Azure Arc to manage it.
That’s been one where we’re seeing a little bit of both, and I do think we’ll continue to see that as part of a, again, a sovereign and a government-based deployment. Certainly, there’s more regions where that’s growing and of greater interest. Certainly, Europe has been a very hot area for that type of deployment, but we are seeing that globally as well.
Tyler: I think the on prem piece is interesting in the context. I mean, we also just heard from Michael Dell in the keynote who talked a lot about edge computing, but we have actually seen really robust on prem server growth at Microsoft. It’s remained in positive territory despite the really strong growth in Azure. I guess, how do you think about the steady state of that growth? Is that, given that we are going to be in this hybrid environment going forward, and to your point, some industries like government are really investing there, is that a sustainable rate or do you think as Azure gets bigger, that business starts to decline eventually?
Corey: At this point, I think there’s no indication of it necessarily declining. And obviously, if Michael Dell talked earlier, I don’t want to disagree with him. There’s no indication of it declining. I think as we continue to see sort of customers, they’re expanding the amount of solutions and digital transformation that they’re doing. They’re expanding the amount of technology and digital capabilities that they’re purchasing, part of their budget.
That certainly means that the on prem spend I believe will continue, especially when you look at some of these unique deployments, and in fact, even expand in some of these deployments. As we look at the opportunities, I’ll use edge as the example because, again, my focus being on the industry side, as we look at some of the opportunities with front line workers, the opportunities around checkout lists, storefronts, etcetera, there’s actually more technology that’s being shipped to these edge locations, to these storefronts, to be able to drive business and drive value for their end customers.
And of course, that’s retail, but it does span pretty much every industry and every business where edge has become a really critical component for growth. I think that’s going to drive a lot of these purchases and a lot of this additional on premises spend. Certainly, sovereignty and the desire to be able to have data or servers within proximity is also continuing to see growth. And that is of course governments, but there’s also industries that are regulated and thus also follow some of the requirements of those governments, and we’re seeing those opportunities, too.
This is where I feel like even with partnerships like with Dell, the opportunity for us to bring services to be able to support that management in a consistent way, to be able to offer security in a consistent way, this is what actually is one of the most important aspects of hybrid is consistent security, and this is where services like Defender for Cloud or Sentinel offer that level of consistency. And then even bringing our cloud services to be able to run in an on-premises way. This is something we’ve invested pretty heavily to offer PaaS services that can then run in those environments and on that on premises-based solution.
I think that we will continue to see that on prem server usage, and I think actually we’ll be able to take advantage of it, or customers will be able to take advantage of it, with more advanced and enhanced services and capabilities.
Tyler: I do want to talk on industries in a moment, but maybe just starting high level, because you talk a little bit about the commercial bookings strengths that we’ve seen in the last few quarters, really robust numbers, I guess from your perspective, what are some of the product or packaging or maybe go-to-market tactics that have helped drive these large commercial bookings and large contracts? I think last couple quarters you’ve seen north of 30% commercial bookings growth on pretty tough compares, which has been pretty impressive. What’s driving that?
Corey: I think even just adding a little bit to some of the points I mentioned earlier, a lot of it is around us working with customers as that strategic partner, as we sort of work with them on how we’re reshaping their future through digital transformation. Those large commercial bookings are almost never sure IT conversations. Certainly, they involve IT conversations, they involve the IT spend priorities working closely with the CTO, but they almost always also involve conversations around business development, new business opportunities, new solutions that are being built.
That, again, is where our positioning as strategic partner allow us to have that broader conversations that spans, again, that full set of workloads. This is also where our go-to-markets shift, really focusing, and this is something that I think Judson’s done amazing work from a go-to-market perspective as our Chief Commercial Officer, focusing on the full Microsoft Cloud. There’s no customer that we want to focus on just one of our products, and that go-to-market push I think has driven a lot of that opportunity on commercial bookings, where it be a combination of Azure and Teams and Office and Security and D365, that bringing these things together has been really powerful.
And it drives back into engineering. This is where sort of, again, the opportunity in engineering to bring these components together. Each of these teams are constantly looking for ways to add value to the others’ product, because we all know that sort of collection is really what bringing real value as customers put these products together to solve their problems.
I’d also maybe add one key point as well, is as we look at all those products and look at how we sell and how we build, I do think the flexibility as well of contracts has helped. This allows customers to be able use this, their commitments on a wide variety of services and deployments. The Azure commitment allows you to course these Azure services, but it also allows you to use key partner services like Azure Databrick and Azure NetApp Files.
And even supporting a recent announcement from Power Platform that is integrated now directly into the Azure experience and offering a pay-as-you-go model. This type of flexibility is really quite powerful for customers. It allows them to, again, look forward as that strategic partnership over the potential to use any of these services to be able to achieve their outcome.
Tyler: I do want to hit on the partners in a moment, but maybe we could talk about the verticals and industries, because that’s in your title. So, here’s a good question for you. Maybe help us understand what is Microsoft’s industry verticalization strategy, both how you’re building products maybe that are built specifically for certain industries, and then how you’re organizing your go-to-market team to go out and sell those products to those industries.
Corey: The biggest thing with our industry strategy is around accelerating the time to value for customers. This is really a pivot for us as a company, and I’ve been super excited to be on the front lines of this. They really are about taking that Microsoft Cloud vision that I’ve talked about but bringing sort of engineering and marketing and sales together to offer true vertical solutions that will enable companies to unleash their value. It’s about changing the way they approach some sort of long-standing problems or challenges that they have.
We have six industry-specific clouds to date. Those include healthcare, retail, financial services, manufacturing, non-profit, and sustainability. We also have additional industries that we work deeply on like energy, telco, and mobility. The whole goal behind the industry clouds is they’re sort of extensible on top of our horizontal services. They allow you to bring together multiple horizontal services to add value and solve industry problems. Given a combination of our collaboration and our business apps and then of course our infrastructure and data, we have a great array of problem-solving solutions that sometimes need help to put together to be able to offer that end-to-end value for those business leaders in a given company or industry, and that’s, I think, where the industry cloud comes in.
It’s also a big focus on – and I know you said we’ll talk about it later, so I won’t go too deep now – but it is a big focus on ISVs and partners as well and being able to enable partners to add industry value directly with us for end customers. Some of the examples of work that we’ve done that I get particularly excited about, Patagonia is a good example. They ended up closing all of their operations at the start of the pandemic to keep employees safe. When they reopened, they ended up using the Microsoft Cloud for Retail to launch a new way to engage with customers, and again, bringing services together.
They brought D365, Dynamics 365, and Teams to basically create more advanced connection points with their customers and offer more seamless customer experiences that they could deliver. This included distributed order management, sometimes local stores, they turned into mini warehouses and bringing together some of the challenges that we see from retail as an example of their online business and their in-person business and enabling employees to continue to work while also reducing maybe their in-person businesses into support for their online business.
That opportunity to sort of switch and quickly tweak things was a power that was added as part of the partnership that we had with them. And of course, Teams being connected across all those stores, offices, and warehouses and coming together to offer that value. Another good example that I’ll call out is a company called Grupo Bimbo which is work that we’ve done on the sustainability side. This is a recent GA that we announced for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. And if you’re not familiar with Grupo Bimbo, they are an international producer of baked snack goods. I’m sure if you’ve been in Latin America, you’ve certainly seen this available all over the place.
Their goal is that they only use renewable energy and eliminate their carbon emissions and waste entirely, which of course, as a producer of snack goods is quite challenging because they certainly have lots of trucks that are going around and delivering their services. They adopted the Cloud for Sustainability to be able to collect, track, and analyze their emissions so that they can develop solutions to be able to reduce and understand all of the emissions impact that they have, and basically had immediate impact without much extensive training to be able to make changes and tweaks to support their goal of reducing and eliminating carbon emissions. It’s been a great partnership as well.
But those are examples of really taking the technology we’ve got and enabling vertical-based capabilities to solve those end business goals of which those customers are really striving to solve, different based on industry and based on timeline.
Tyler: I wanted to just ask you about two industries in particular before we move on to partners, but one that I think is topical is healthcare. Obviously with the Nuance acquisition, maybe if you could kind of articulate your view of the healthcare industry. Are you expecting future M&A there? And then secondly, some of your partners have actually called out a digital native cohort, which I know Microsoft is more known for traditional old-world enterprise, but how do you kind of see Microsoft serving these newer startups, VC backed companies, digital natives going forward, and is that an area of focus for you?
Corey: Great question. From a healthcare perspective, I think the Nuance acquisition and the opportunity that I’ve had to work with the Nuance team has been fantastic. I think that both their depth in healthcare specific knowledge solving healthcare problems coupled with their deep understanding of AI and ML and voice recognition and transcription and so on has been fantastic. They’ve been a huge asset to join the effort and I have great respect and opportunity to be able to learn from them.
I think all up from a healthcare perspective, we have a lot of opportunity. A lot of opportunity both to help build upon these solutions that Nuance has already built, but then also lots of partnerships, lots of opportunity to grow and expand existing partnerships that we have in healthcare, especially as well look at, certainly the pandemic feels like it’s coming to a close, I say ironically as I sit virtually because I have COVID myself. But certainly, I think the focus on the pandemic has diminished, but I think some of the expectations on healthcare have not.
The expectations for virtual care, the expectations to be able to get doctors to support you without having to drive into their office and a lot of the shifts around surrounding experiences whether it be hospitals or direct patient care and so on. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to continue the digital transformation. This is where one of my favorite partners that I talk about when I talk about healthcare is Teladoc. Teladoc, if you’re not familiar, Teladoc Solo is a leading provider of virtual health solutions, and they are a great partner that I have the privilege to get to work with.
They have basically built their entire communications platform entirely on Teams as the underlying platform. This is such a great example of where our solutions, our horizontal capabilities can empower and enable industry specific solutions that would be built on top. And so, the combination of Teladoc and bring together capabilities like Nuance, and then of course our horizontal and industry specific solutions, I think healthcare has a great opportunity for us to continue to expand and then of course grow our partnership.
That’s maybe a longer answer than you would have expected on healthcare, but there you go. You mentioned M&A. There’s no announcements around M&A at this point in healthcare, but I think we have so much opportunity and partnership at this point that I’m just really excited about what we can do there.
For your second question, absolutely. I think, and this gets a little bit into a deeper discussion on partners. One of the things that when we look at industry specifically, certainly I feel good about the Microsoft Cloud being industry leading when it comes to horizontal technology solutions. I feel when you look at each one of these spaces that we’re in across Microsoft Cloud, whether it be business apps or infrastructure or data analytics, AI/ML, certainly market leading and I’m bullish on the capabilities we have.
But I also have a huge amount of humility for the fact that we are not experts in every industry. We are not experts in understanding exactly what’s needed across each industry, and our ability to do partner to partner with technology providers and technology solutions, whether classic technology solutions or existing companies that are shifting to becoming technology companies or as you mentioned, startups and digital natives who are offering net new technology solutions, our ability to go partner with them, learn from them no matter where they are in the spectrum of size and value and be able to support them with our horizontal capabilities, be their digital COGS while they expand and build out their vertical solutions for end customers, it becomes such a great opportunity for us to build those relationships and those partnerships.
That again, spans our full range of Microsoft Cloud capabilities, whether Azure, infra, Security is a big one, offering our Security service to these partners is a great opportunity as well. Two examples to give you that spectrum, you had mentioned startups, one example would be Schlumberger, who is a massive provider of services in energy and oil and gas, which we’ve done deep partnership with in building out solution capabilities to offer experiences for their end customers and it’s been a wonderful partnership and excited. But of course, they’ve been in the industry for a very long time and of course have that expertise.
And then there’s AiFi, which is a-i-f-i, if you’re looking for the spelling, which is actually a newer company than Schlumberger for sure, in the retail space really focusing on checkout-free technology. That’s another one where we’ve basically been able to go deep with them and partner deeply on their technology, their solution and support them with whatever horizontal capabilities they need, again, whether infra, data analytics, etcetera, even aspects of the user experience with the Power Platform.
Those types of relationships are fantastic. They are now powering 80 stores with this new computer vision technology that they’ve built out and we’re super excited to be able to support them as part of that launch and that, to me is, again, a great example of a digital native for sure, and being able to enable their business to grow with the shared partnership we’ve got and the ability to take that to retail. Very long answer. I hope that was…I get wound up about industry.
Tyler: A lot of industries to cover. Talking about partners, I know we only have a few minutes left, I guess maybe the best way to ask the question, because obviously you’re working with ISVs and you’re working with the big SIs around the world and you have a huge marketplace of partners, but I guess where are you relying on them the most? Where are they adding the most value in terms of helping you close deals and digitize these customer environments?
Corey: The two probably big examples I’d use, well maybe I’ll use three examples, there’s certainly partnerships that we have at the horizontal level, and so this is just a great ecosystem of solutions offering joint value for places that maybe we don’t offer or have different services and based on customer choice, we love to be able to support the full range of capabilities. We recently announced an expanded partnership with Oracle, great partnership with SAP, Adobe. I mentioned already Azure, Databricks, and NetApp Files, the abilities to bring these partners in and offer based on customer choice the ability to build your app the way you want to use our platform and using our services.
That’s been, I think, a cornerstone of our overall vision, again, going back to even a little bit of my early days of working on Kubernetes and being able to bring Kubernetes as a service to light. Of course, now, in hindsight, everybody’s got a Kubernetes service and it’s obvious, but I think that focus on customer choice and enabling partners has been a cornerstone of our platform, which has been really fun to be a part of.
I also think industry is a really big, and I would say I run the industry engineering team and I think we talk more about partners than we talk about our own native built services. I think we talk more about how we’re enabling partners in these industry solutions simply for the reason that I mentioned before, they have the expertise, they have the knowledge, they have the ability to focus on those very specialized industry requirements. I think approaching industry with humility is a secret to our success here, where I think if we go in with the understanding that we need these partners to be able to bring this value to our end customers, and we want these partners to bring this end value to our customers and are excited about being able to support them in any way that makes sense.
I think that’s sort of the second one. The third one along the same lines, and actually pulling back from a previous conversation is sovereignty. I think our sovereignty opportunity is very much partner led. Microsoft Cloud for sovereignty is a partner led solution, and like you mentioned, GSIs and SIs within country really leaning in on understanding the local partners who understand the requirements of that government much better than we do. How do we work closely with those partners to be able to deliver that value and be able to deliver that outcome. I think that’s another area where we’re very heavy partner focused and need the partners to help us achieve the goals we’re looking to achieve.
Tyler: I know we only have a couple minutes left, but I figured I’d ask a question just on the data and the analytics business because obviously that’s been one the company’s called out in recent quarters as an area of strength. How should we think about the Azure offerings? You have Synapse and obviously the Power Platform. In the context of your close partnerships with things like Databricks and Snowflake, what are the key differentiations and how are you positioning all that to customers?
Corey: Power Platform has such a unique position in the market, and so its integration with all the other services, it’s just value add for customers. I think Power Platform, whether it be with other services on Microsoft stack or partners, the opportunity for customers to leverage our low-code/no-code is quite valuable regardless. That includes partnerships, things like Power BI, working across all of the data providers. This is something that we continue to work on and continue to engage on. Power Apps offerings, that very simple building of developer experiences with data sources that come from any of these data capabilities and that support it.
From a Power Apps perspective, just given, again, the developer shortage that’s out there, we’re just seeing an unprecedented demand for companies to be able to expand out and leverage Power Apps as part of a broader movement within company to be able to add more applications and more solutions on these various data sources, again, whether they’re partners or whether they’re Microsoft first party. And then of course, Power Automate to be able to take all of that and then be able to sort of automate the experiences. That, being integrated with Teams, has created a bunch of opportunity around front-line worker experience where again, you can extract away the complexities of the data platform, complexities of whose data platform, instead just offer that value in an automated capability at the top.
I do think the Power Platform is such a great addendum to any data and analytics story that a customer may have, and it doesn’t matter the analytics requirements that the customer has underneath and the services that they’re using, the Power Platform offers value on top and it’s just such a great story with customers to be able to analyze, act, and automate on top of it. I think when we look at our overall data and AI and machine learning, one of the things that’s been really great with the partnerships, like you mentioned, Snowflake and Databricks, but there’s a broader range of these data partners that we work really closely with, is again, it comes back to customer choice.
There’s such a wide range of value that we can offer with our services at Microsoft, whether it be, again, AI-based services, ML-based services, security-based services. Partnering with these key partners, these key data partners, but then enabling those additional services around it, I think we have a great spot to be able to, again, give customers choice and be able to continue to bring value to our platform and to their scenarios.
Tyler: I think a couple minutes over, but I appreciate the time, Corey, and it sounds like you’re doing great, so hopefully you continue to recover quickly and really appreciate you coming and supporting the conference virtually.
Corey: Thank you so much for having me, and again, I wish I could have been there in person, but yes, I’m definitely pushing a lot of energy right now. I’ll go take a nap after this and see where we get.
Tyler: Take care.
Corey: Thanks a lot, everyone.
END
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