Azure Stack Hub Partner Solutions Series – Salt

We need cool backgrounds as well Thomas. We got to have matching backgrounds. >> We’re innovating all the time guys. >> Welcome everyone to another one of our videos about the Azure Stack Partner Solution Video Series. Again, I’m joined by Tiberiu Radu from the Azure Stack Hub team. I hope he’s doing fine again. Tiberiu, who I’m going to talk to today? >> Hello Thomas. Hello everyone. Today we’re going to talk with a Caribbean partner.

00:34 - They’re a service provider offering a managed services offering to their customers. As we’ve seen before in our series, from an Azure Stack Hub perspective, we have various partners across the globe offering different levels of service. That means they are either partnering with other ISVs or they are offering a managed service themselves that the customers will use to build a solution on top. I’ll let Blair to go through these. >> Awesome. Thank you very much Tibe. We’ll switch over to Blair. Blair, first of all, welcome to our video. Secondly, I hope you’re doing fine and I just talked with Tibe a little bit about it. He explained a little about the company.

01:26 - But can you go a little bit deeper on who you are and also talk a little bit more about the company itself? >> Sure. Good morning both of you and good to see you. Thank you for having us. SALT is as Tiberiu mentioned, is a Caribbean based Microsoft Partner. As you can see by our cool backgrounds, we won partner of the year this year, that’s three under the four last years. We’re the only ones in the Caribbean offering a multi-tenants Azure Stack offering.

02:02 - We’ve had it up and running for about a year and a bit now in Cayman, Bermuda came online right in the middle of COVID. Actually their equipment arrived two days before lockdown and we built our Azure Stack offering in Bermuda during lockdown, I think it was the first time anyone had done that all remotely. That’s from HPN Microsoft and, of course ourselves. We’re happy to say that we just ordered equipment for Jamaica. We have quite an extensive roadmap on rolling out throughout the Caribbean and we work in that partner ecosystem.

02:35 - Clients can obviously come directly to us, but we found that there was a niche for companies such as ISPs or service providers to be able to or want to consume Azure type services within the Caribbean for data residency and low latency concerns. We took the initiative of building these out. We do not focus just on the IaaS and all the number of people initially had rolled out Azure Stack Hub using just the IaaS services we’ve chosen to go down the path of offering the full suite of software from one end to the other. We’ve been committed four years old now and yeah, that’s who we are. >> All right. That sounds pretty cool. Not only the location sounds pretty cool, but also the solution you are offering.

03:26 - You mentioned you’re working in a partner ecosystem, can you explain little bit more who your clients are and or your partners are and how they work with you? >> Sure. We are off the offset, as many of us know. Each stamp has its own interface. It’s only provisioning engine. We realized very quickly that we’d have to create our own API to be able to manage us as we plugged into the ecosystem. Our clients are everyone from distributors in the US. We’ve got [inaudible] to come online and you’ll be able to within the next couple of weeks, be able to provision right through their interface, their platform, services with us all the way down to some of the ISPs. We have them here in Cayman and Bermuda, Jamaica that we’re working with where they wanted to add value to their clients.

04:22 - I think a big thing around this was that a number of them already have Cloud platforms. One of the big selling points for us is obviously security and compliance on Azure Stack, it’s a closed system. It’s not your traditional private Cloud where it’s a hypervisors reach up and theoretically touch the BMs and do as you wish with them, it’s closed. As the solution provider don’t have access to that data. The security and compliance, I think is a huge thing that even when we’re approaching some of the ISPs and partners that already have a Cloud platform, they could see the benefit that there’s areas where there were clients that would want to consume these types of services.

05:01 - It was complementing their offering rather than competing with their offering. I think that’s one of the things really important to highlight. >> Now that’s a good thing to know and how it all fits together. Obviously, this is about Azure Stack Hub. What I usually ask is, why did you choose Azure Stack Hub and how does it fit in your solution? That is one thing. But then on the other hand, I also want to ask you, why do your customers choose Azure Stack Hub? >> Vic has been with me for throughout this journey.

05:37 - I’m the owner of the business Vic is a Technical Director. We started this journey with a view to being a Microsoft shop down the Caribbean. We have a lot of places that are jack of all trades and nothing against them that Vic and I have been in that business for many years before I went to solely being a Microsoft shop. We built up this solution, thinking and knowing about Azure Stack was coming. We thought we were going to be able to install it on our own hardware.

06:05 - We built S2D datacenter with many, many servers and we played around with, and that was our first version of Cloud that we had. Think that have a lot to do with why Microsoft chose us to be able to give us the exception, because in the Caribbean you need an exception for every single location you go. We have to write to Microsoft. We have to prove that we’re the business case. They do interviews. It’s not just I want to purchase it and you’re on your way. We have to do a lot justification to them.

06:31 - But we knew that all along, we’d heard about Stack and they come in, this is the perfect Cloud solution for us, it’s Azure, but down here. It same interface, same CSP billing model, same marketplace, the APIs, all these things, the DLLs, the versions, it’s all the same. He had a vision from day one on extending Azure outside of the regular data centers into our regions. >> That is awesome. Again, I love that and that is also why I wanted to have main reasons. The app Azure Stack to actually expand Azure, not just in our own regions, but to regions where it’s just not available.

07:13 - >> We were talking a little bit about the why and how it fits in. I’m also super interest in what platform or how we are using the platform to deliver value to your customers? >> Yeah. I’ll take that one on Blair. As Blair mentioned, we started off by running our own Cloud platform, very common in the region. One of the big things we were doing with those Azure Stacks was taking clients who had a heterogeneous top design and saying, well, this gives you a bit of standardization. With the Azure Stack, these customers can’t leave these regions for a variety of reasons.

07:54 - Could be data sovereignty, regulatory control. What we wanted to do was start their journey by moving them out of there onto the Azure Stack. IaaS was a big part of that initial roadmap. That’s a lot easier said than done. Right in the beginning, we came up with our own data box solution. We stall shamelessly from Microsoft’s portfolio. We could help our clients to take those big data workloads that they’ve got sitting in the datacenters. We could help them to securely ship their data using our backup solution, take that, bring it into our datacenter, give them high-speed access to the Azure Stack and then be able to upload their virtual machines and their data in a time that’s reasonable. The Internet is great, but It’s not great when you’re trying to move 10 or 20 terabytes worth of infrastructure into a datacenter. IaaS was absolutely the start of our journey and, of course, the head that half identity. Those clients who couldn’t move MANO workloads out into public Azure, they were already aware of how to get their own templates and running a terraform, running how to get those things going.

09:07 - Really that was the start of our journey doing a lot of IaaS. The other thing that we started doing from the very beginning was offering virtual desktop solutions, which is actually really interesting with the Azure Stack. We eventually built up those virtual desktop environments to almost dozens, if not 100 or so as concurrent today. When we went to Azure Stack, that was another thing that we’re really excited about, was the ability we could take what we knew about that and give clients the Windows Virtual Desktop experience on our Azure Stack, but using the session host model, and we did that. We found ourselves in that place. We had clients, here’s your application servers, here’s your file servers, all running on IaaS.

09:52 - Now we give you the Windows Virtual Desktop experience. Of course, through the power of Azure Active Directory, and we have clients who were on the first partners in the Caribbean to sell the E5 licensing suite. We could give them all the security of Azure Stack SOC 2 datacenter, absolute Azure Stack Security. Now they’ve got their tendencies, they’ve got their virtual networks into there. They’ve got their infrastructure bringing the virtual desktops in, and we really saw that explode with COVID.

10:21 - Unfortunately, as more people had to work from home and they were able to scale those out so quickly on the Azure Stack platform within their regions for low latency. Then as we’ve moved forward, we’ve obviously now finding that we have clients who are very savvy and they slip that problem. They can’t leave these GOs for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s even just a DO concern, like a hurricane comes through, takes the telecommunication links with them, they still got to operate. This really opened the door for us for the past solution.

10:52 - As an organization, we’ve always been very aggressive with keeping up the ASDKs, the Azure Stack Development Kits. We will always try to stay on the edge of that. Now we’ve gone in and put our SQL solution in, which is actually extremely popular. We have this issue now with clients reaching end of life on a 2008 R2. Thanks to Microsoft, appreciate it guys, we now have the option to extend the patching and the service life with the Azure Stack, which we’ve done.

11:22 - We’re offering pairs SQL, which is the cheapest way to consume SQL compared to try and run the licensing models yourself. That just a small insights into how we’re starting to leverage this product from a technology perspective. >> To realize that it’s very awesome. There are many different things you just put out there. >> Yeah. >> Which I really love. Starting with just migrating the IaaS and bring IaaS features but then also remote desktop. Also I liked that you mentioned the offering with Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, which customer, if they move it to Azure or also Azure Stack Hub, they get free extended security updates for this.

12:10 - Again, you mentioned also then the modernization part. You’re not just taking them and just leaving them just virtual machines, you also help them to modernize and go forward. A bunch of different things and awesome things here. I just took out and I find it super interesting. With that, that brings me to another very important question, but I’ll let you first go and add something to it. >> Yeah. I wanted to talk about a little bit more about the past solution. We had a customer, we’re under NDA with their customer. We’ll talk about it in a very general term. But we had this customer approach us and they’re doing amazing things with IoT. They have a model that they’ve built up for themselves and it’s been doing the job, but it’s becoming very expensive for them.

12:58 - I’m very proud that, with the Microsoft roadmap we now have all the benefits of IoT hub, all the web apps features. With this client, we’re very proud that they’re actually developing their next generation platform directly on to the Azure Stack. It’s not often that you get to look at the Azure reference libraries, the architecture patterns, and actually apply those in places like this. We’re very excited that we’re going to actually have a client who’s going to have all these telemetry sensors uploading directly into the Azure Stack. We were doing the hard computation. Then a lot of that data will then flow up to Azure to make use of Azure Search and Cognitive function. It’s a really advanced use case.

13:42 - This is something that’s really exciting because SALT actually had a case study where we worked with a client that was doing Artificial Intelligence, and we helped them to achieve that platform in public Azure. For us, it’s really rewarding to not only have these solutions being built now for clients who can achieve public Azure, but those who are now going to be in the Caribbean as well. >> Now that’s awesome. I love that you’re bringing these Azure services to where the customer actually need them. Again, many different services and I love how you build that whole Cloud journey, if you will, and help customers in whatever state they are and whatever actually they need on that. That puts me up with a question, which I want to ask you.

14:26 - During that journey and obviously also the journeys you see with your customers, where they are in, do you want to share any lessons learned or something you learned during that process or that journey? >> I think there’s a couple of things for it. I think as part of us learning about the Azure Stack, we had a lot of tremendous support from our partners in Microsoft to do that, and we’ve overcome, a lot of that was learning barriers. When it comes to the most important people to ask who are our partners, these are our resellers, these are guys who are making the journey possible for their clients and their GOs. What we’ve really learned is that we need to listen a lot more. What’s really exciting is they can come to us with their particular use cases, and we can apply those within the Azure Stack.

15:17 - For example, what do they doing with networking? We’ve had to learn a lot about how to integrate people into the Azure Stack and more about networking partners. In the beginning, we found that in the marketplace, for example, there were very few, handful of telco or networking providers that had the virtual appliances in the marketplace. That was very interesting. We have to challenge to go to a client who might be running, let’s say a Cisco product and say to the client, “Well, Cisco isn’t yet in the marketplace. You need to use a product that we have.” The beautiful part about that though, is that we build such good relationships with the people who are in the marketplace. That’s really helped us to continue to get those solutions out there.

16:06 - The other one was, we had to essentially, if you think about the clients we have who can’t leave these regions, that limits our options for backup. Think about that, because we can’t just go and use a lot of the Azure Top Backup solutions, which we’d like to use, but they’re not really oscillated. We learned a lot working with our strategic partner to build a high-speed DR and backup solution within the islands so that we can’t say to the client, “Well, are you going to run on the Azure Stack,” and that’s great, and you’re going to be in public Azure. But you also have a bring your own key secure backup solution that’s high speed running in our data centers as well. As Blair said, you can see from the theme, it’s end-to-end, right? Our challenge is to find out clients and understand what their customers are trying to do because a lot of our clients are partners.

16:58 - Give them the Cloud Solution Architecture experience, and then help them to shape and reform a lot of the perceptions and technologies in their client’s environments to fit within that model. >> Yeah. >> If you don’t mind, I’m just going to add two things that I think when we started this journey, we came out and we talked about this Partner Network. Our managed service is actually Azure Stack. Azure Stack as a service whether you’re consuming it as an intake client or whether we’re running and operating for you in your own datacenter, however you choose to consume it. But I think for quite a while, there was creating that perception or having a number of conversations with our partners, and we’re not going to compete with you.

17:44 - Think of us like an extension of Microsoft, we’re here to help you. We have the engineers, we have the sales team, we’re not going to compete for the office licenses running out. We are looking for people to consume Azure Stack and let us help you build those solutions for your clients and that continues to be quite a challenge. People go, “Are you really serious. You’re not going to come in and bid on this one?” No I promise we’re not. But the other one was, as we know, what it says on Azure Stack on paper.

18:13 - As with anything, I think it’s any product. When you read it it says, “This is what it can do.” We’ve found some of those limits and barriers actually don’t exist. It’s what built-in so if you use third-party products they could just mention around checkpoint or other light firewalls. Your VPN throughput gateways and these things that goes away. Your 200 meg limit and these types of things. It’s all based on what your connectivity coming in, but it’s also about, Victor touched on a couple of there being the backup and some of the other solutions. The other one was ExpressRoute. That connectivity. We’ve created our own quasi express route equivalent to be able to allow clients to get them. Again, every day you’re asking their lessons learned. We mentioned before we go to the call. Every day we learn something new. There’s a new challenge that we have to come up with or doing.

19:02 - That’s just part of being on the forefront of technology. You get to be one of the ones who sit there and go great. We have another challenge today. Building was a huge one. I actually been able to build more than just IaaS. If you’re wanting to build against the entire platform and be able to offer that to clients. I don’t know how many providers we went through or people we’ve partnered with. That it just didn’t work. We now have a working solution. We’ve got a great partner working with.

19:29 - Every day there’s new challenges and that’s we’ve enjoyed as you can see. Vic and I wake up each day we’re like, “Great. What are we on today?” >> That’s true. >> What challenge comes today? >> That’s what I was about to say, a big Microsoft fan boys. I think that really takes us to the other part of it, which is, we want to make sure that people, we’d want to drop Microsoft consumption. We’re desperately passionate because we know how good it is.

19:53 - We drink that through let ourselves every day. I think part of it as well as these people have relationships and they are trusted people, that’s really great. Well I really love our position as being able to go in and give them a skilled head because this is all we do to actually make that experience. We’ve had they come back and they’d say, “Our clients are really loving this. The stability is great and the performance is awesome and their costs are coming down and they’re getting to reuse a lot of what we sold them before.

” 20:24 - That to me is honestly why I wake up every day. I think that that is beautiful and the Azure Stack is what’s allowing us to do that because if the Azure Stack wasn’t in the Caribbean, what you’d find is you’d find, okay we’ve got whatever plan that we have and we’re trying to shoot them in. But because it’s fully integrated with the Microsoft journey, that experience, that fidelity is there and it gives them a seamless pleasant experience from the moment we meet until their clients are done at the everything is in support and they’re just using the system reliably day-in-and-day-out. >> No, I love that to be honest, and I love the energy and especially how you use that and actually not like you really believe in these products and you really know they’re working, but then you’re taking that knowledge and that experience you have and enable others, to help their customers as well. I think that is a really powerful thing to do.

21:18 - I think it really important especially in these times, right? >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> I agree. >> Obviously there’s a lot of exciting things we just talked about and I’m sure there’s much more we could talk about. But if people who are watching this video and they want to know more about you and your solutions, where should they go? >> I think in this day and age, it’s a website so salt.ky is our website. Obviously, I think you guys are going to share the contact information for our team so we’d love to hear from them. Door is always open. They can also, if they are in our region, come into our office, have a coffee. We’ll do our social distancing.

22:00 - We’ve got the all the desk facing the chairs. We’ve got a test kit if you want to have a test. >> Awesome. Now thank you very much, Blair. Thank you very much, Victor. Thank you very much, Tibe. >> That’s our feature. >> For adding and connecting me with SALT. Was absolutely fun talking to you and a lot of exciting things are happening and you’re doing. People definitely check out the link. We will put it in descriptions so you can learn more and contact SALT, to learn more about how they can help you with that.

22:31 - Thank you guys for watching and hopefully see you in the next one. >> Thank you very much Adam. >> Thanks guys, bye. >> Have a good day everyone. .