On this episode of The Six Five Webcast host Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman discuss the tech new stories that made headlines this week. The six handpicked topics for this week are:
- MS Ignite Update – Mixed Reality and Azure
- Zoho Days
- Zoom boom continues with latest earnings report
- HPE earnings beast projections
- Marvell has fourth consecutive growth quarter in latest earnings report
- MS Ignite Update – Teams and Dynamics 365
For a deeper diver into each topic, please click on the links above. Be sure to subscribe to The Six Five Webcast so you never miss an episode.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Welcome to this week’s edition of the Six Five Podcast. I am your host today, Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst, Founding Partner at Futurum Research. Joined by my always esteemed, always ready for the TV, lights, camera, action. Mr. Patrick Moorhead. Pat, how are you doing today, my friend?
Patrick Moorhead: Doing well. Doing well. Thanks for asking. I would say this is the first time I feel a hundred percent, first week. I had COVID five weeks ago. But, doing great. Doing great. Just excited to be on here. And one of my favorite things to do for the entire week is do the Six Five Podcast. I love it. I like doing it with you. And our audience kind of likes it as well.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. It’s great to have you back. It’s great to have everyone here that’s with us, both those of you that are live in our stream and those of you that are watching and listening to us later. We appreciate our listeners, supporters, fans, tech geeks, and fellow analysts, market-makers, and everyone else that listens to our show in all shapes, sizes, forms, and on any platform whatsoever.
So listen, we have ignition. This week was a big week for Microsoft. The Ignite Conference. We’re going to talk about that quite a bit. But we have several other topics. Some big earnings. An event last week for a company that’s talked less about that we find super interesting. So we’re going to do all that here in this show. And we’re going to try to keep it to six by five. The format, six topics, five minutes each, or so. It sometimes ends up being more like the seven six. But we try. We try to keep it on pace.
So, all of that. Just before we jump in, quick disclaimer, this show is for information and entertainment purposes only. And while we may in fact talk about publicly traded companies during our show, please do not take anything we say as investment advice.
All right. Mr. Morehead, Ignite, the biggest, at least one of the biggest Microsoft events of the year. All virtual, like everything else. Tons of announcements, like every Microsoft event. We picked a few. What do you want to talk about first?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So we’re going to cover MR. The cross between AR and VR is a huge goal for Microsoft and that could drive goggles on our face, in our car. It’s being used in a few headsets today. An announcement called the Microsoft Mesh that was a, I’ll call it a layer cake of MR. And this is Anshel Sag’s article from Forbes. But all the way from the app layer, which includes partner apps, through the toolkit, offering middleware like spatial maps, multi-user sink, down to the core platform and multiple devices. Harder than, let’s say, what Apple is trying to pull off, because they’re trying to create an entire ecosystem that encompasses Windows and iOS and Android.
And it took me a while, Daniel, to really get through the, “Hey, what was different from what I saw two years ago,” when I saw an iPhone and an Android tablet and a HoloLens all looking at the same piece of content. And I think this is a little bit beyond Microsoft just being a good citizen. It’s a huge business opportunity because getting people to use Azure is a huge business opportunity, even if they get 20, 30% market share of that.
So that was really the highlight. I think they spent a little bit too much time in the keynote going through this. And I didn’t actually have a headset, Daniel. You did. And Anshel did, which I think gave a little bit of extra credibility or credence to the experience. But I think it’s safe to say that for businesses, Microsoft has the lead over anybody out there. And I have a hunch that Apple is going for the same space. We’ve seen a lot of startups flameout, but Microsoft really is in the forefront of XR, just as Anshel says.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. The overall launch, Pat, was cool. Look, I’m not a gear head in the sense of I’m not a guy that spends my weekends in my dark room playing with virtual reality, but I do love tech. And I had the opportunity to have both the HoloLens 2 and the HP headset. I set it all up and it was cool. I mean, I walked down a hallway into the room to watch Alex Kitman and Satya do their keynote. I mean, you start to feel like, heck, this is achievable for anybody, to attend an event, to be in a space. And I’m impressed, directionally, with where it’s going. I mean, I like the idea of having visibility. I’m still not one of the people that loves being fully masked up. From a sensory standpoint, I don’t like it as much. Kind of why I like the HoloLens, is you still have some visibility. But overall. I thought that was pretty cool.
And so you covered a lot of Mesh. I think we’re going to hear a lot about this in the coming weeks and months and years. This is going to be a platform that Microsoft is going to build this whole ecosystem around. So we’ll be coming back to this more and more in future episodes.
I do want to touch though, too, because we’ve got basically two segments on our Six Five focused on Ignite. And so, in this one we’re going to talk about the XR. I also want to talk a little bit about Azure here. And then we’re going to spin down later and we’ll talk about Dynamics and Teams because there was so much to cover. And look, Azure we could spend an entire 30 minute show on, Pat. So I’m going to kind of keep it short.
There was a ton of announcements. It was AW-esque in the sense of having a massive number of announcements related to everything from ML and data, to applications, to containers and services, to new edge offerings, to migration tools. It was loaded. And I have an op-ed, and I’ll put it in the show notes. It’ll be coming out later, to talk about this.
Just a couple of things on cloud and Azure I’m going to mention here, because again, not enough time, Six Five. But Pat, I liked Satya’s sort of new, broader Microsoft cloud direction. The way he’s expressing it. There’s a great slide. Talks about five things. Ubiquitous and decentralized compute, sovereign data and ambient intelligence, empowered creators and communities everywhere, economic opportunity, the global workforce, and trust by design. And really the way I saw it is this. More investment in the edge, more investment in making data accessible and easy to enrich. Citizen developers all the way through experienced coders are going to be welcomed into Microsoft cloud ecosystem. The cloud is an opportunity to spurn and create jobs. And the company is going to layer zero trust, security, and privacy into all of its layers.
Patrick Moorhead: Wow. That’s deep man. That’s a lot of corporate speak, Daniel. What does that actually mean?
Daniel Newman: That’s it. That was my analysis. No. In all serious, though. What I like was that he is kind of telling an evolved story. Less about what, more about why. So those were all a bunch of “why’s”. Why the cloud matters. Why Microsoft and the investments it’s making an Azure are important. And why maybe somebody should consider choosing it.
One more thing I noted, too, Pat, was there is a consensus now with both AWS and Microsoft acknowledging hybrid and multi as the future, between the containers and the architecture… And you’re laughing at me. I’m not quite sure why yet. But there was an early indication that people thought that people would pick a cloud and they would do everything in that cloud. And so there was new tools through synapse, through synapse link, through synapse pathway, migrate, that are all about making things easier to move between clouds and prem.
And so early on, the cloud companies kind of were indicating, yes, they do hybrid, your prem and our cloud. But now it’s your prem, our cloud, and their cloud. And that’s becoming more pervasive. So there was eight or nine new offerings, and we just don’t have time to get to them all here, Pat. But they were very interesting. And one that really caught my attention was Percept, which is focused at the edge. And I’ll let you quickly touch on that before we move on to the next thing.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, by the way, I wasn’t… I was more admiring you, not laughing at you on that.
Daniel Newman: Well then, thank you.
Patrick Moorhead: One thing that nobody agrees on… Well, the one thing that AWS does not agree on is multicloud. They definitely agree with hybrid cloud, but not multi-cloud. But was interesting, is they actually introduced, AWS introduced their own Kubernetes orchestrator there. So they didn’t say it, but they actually did.
Daniel Newman: Actions speak louder than words, Pat.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Yeah. Although Andy Jassy was very deliberate onstage, basically making fun of the whole multicloud thing. But I digress. Yeah. Azure Percept is really interesting because not only is it a way to run machine learning at the edge, it actually comes with real hardware RDKs for audio and vision. Which by the way, is kind of very similar to what AWS did in creating this. And the reason that you would, in addition to services with Percept, you would introduce hardware is really just time to market. It’s like showing up, “a dog with a bone,” is the expression that you hear sometimes.
Now Microsoft can come to its customers and say, “Hey, we have a complete solution. Albeit, the hardware is coming from partners, because Microsoft, aside from surface doesn’t really want to be in hardware, to say here are these incredible workloads. And Daniel, you and I have talked about this before. Some of the biggest edge workloads are around cameras and microphones. So hence we have Azure Percept audio and Azure Percept vision.
But anyways, very impressive stuff. Building out the opportunities. And oh, by the way, all of these devices automatically, auto-magically connect to Azure IOT hub, which is the orchestrator for all of this that is either in the Azure, cloud, on-prem, or in their public cloud.
Daniel Newman: I love me some auto- magic. How we could have spent 30 minutes on that topic. We probably did more than five. So let’s jump to the second topic, though. Ignite almost deserves its own episode. Maybe we’ll have to come back to some of these things here, then.
Patrick Moorhead: We’re doing two little mini episodes here. So hang on if you want to hear about Teams and Dynamics 356.
Daniel Newman: We’ll be back with that. You just hold on now. So last week there was two days for a interesting company that you and I work and cover and advise, Zoho.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: Zoho, you may see their very colorful logo occasionally. I know when I travel out of Midway Airport, I see their logo. Company actually has a big presence down in your neck of the woods there. Soon to be our neck of the woods, Austin, Texas.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Daniel Newman: And it’s really a very successful growing platform that takes the entire stack of productivity, back office, front office, collaboration, meet, even event tools, not to mention some chip stuff, but don’t want to say too much, all in one company based in India. And we got to spend two days hearing about the whole company, the whole stack, its whole dev path. And so, just wanted to take a couple minutes on the Zoho days. And again, another company there’s really a lot to talk about, and we really do need to make a habit of bringing more Zoho news and stories to our show, Pat.
But most interesting thing for me, now there’s a ton of products and services, but since I only have about two minutes, was the presentation given by their CEO, Sridhar Vembu. He talked about this company. So the reason many of you maybe haven’t heard much of Zoho was, it’s a private company. And in these days, big software companies aren’t private. They tend to go public, and tend to be talked a lot about in the business media. But this is a company that has, I think, nearly 10,000 employees now, global locations, over 50 different applications, manages all of its own data centers.
And when I was listening to Sridhar talk, he tells this long and passionate story about a boy who grew up in India, who wanted to build a business from scratch. Company has no debt obligations. Has no shareholders outside of the firm. Its entire story is all about building a business organically. And it’s impassioned to do things for the greater economic in India where he’s from and, of course, around the world. Big investments in farming and in sustainability and ESG. And it’s so interesting to listen. Because nowadays the whole model is usually you get a certain amount of saturation, you take the company public, you get massive injections of cash, you drive the market cap up based on speculation, and it’s all about how big can you get. And so this company has gotten really big. It keeps developing. I think, Pat, it was 45 apps last year. It’s now over 50 apps this year.
Patrick Moorhead: Let me float something up here. This just gives you an idea. I mean check out the number of products that this company, that Zoho has. It is staggering. Okay? And you can talk about… You can put your finger on one of these and say, Oh, Salesforce has that. Or, that’s Tableau. Or, that is Microsoft or somebody like that.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. All the way across the board. You can do, Oh, there’s Teams. Oh, there’s SAP. Oh, there’s your Data Lake. Oh, there’s your CDP. And on top of that, this company is absolutely steadfast and dedicated to data privacy. Has built all of its systems to be able to natively not include any sort of privacy invasive technologies that are used in most CX and CRM stacks in order to get to customers. Now you may say, “Well, that’s bad.” But the company fundamentally believes that privacy is a right, and it stands by that. And even if it costs the company revenue, it said it would not go down that path.
So Pat, lots of new product services, an insight into the growth revenue, all very positive. But I just had to say, I walked away from Zoho day saying I’m very impressed by the integrity of this organization.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: And it has a really nice market position, in that mid-market and small enterprise. But it’s solutions really can scale all the way from a small business that needs one or two apps to the larger enterprise, which is very impressive for a company with their approach, to be able to compete with the giants of applications, back office, and CRM.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And by the way, one way they do this is through a common platform. And, it’s so funny. You used to have to explain this four or five years ago, but now having an integrated platform is all the rage. And our friends over at Constellation even talked about this, the new platforms that are out there which, of course, you and I talked about before. But from an integration standpoint, and it’s not just having software that’s integrated. Let’s say it’s more like an Apple way of doing things where all the way from the operating system… Well, first of all, they call this the “operating system for the business,” which I think I had coined like two or three years ago, but we’ll talk about that later. But it goes all the way through, and you can see the stack there all the way down to the data center itself. They have their own data center. So they basically have their own IIS paths and SAS. And they even do some of their own hardware, like FPGA programmability.
But by being able to do this you… Well, first of all, you get business benefit because you have a better in-context. So for instance, if you are reading an email from a customer and you have to drill down into and figure out what their issue is by instantaneously linking to your CRM, and then instantly linking over to your customer help desk, you’re not going from screen to screen or tab to tab. The information is just there. And that, really, when I look at what Oracle is trying to do, what Salesforce is trying to do, and quite frankly, what Microsoft is trying to do, it’s trying to get to the place that Zoho is today. And one of the ways that they’ve done this is by having a very consistent top to bottom platform.
By the way, this also helps you with security and the performance of the overall application, because it’s all integrated and you’re relying less on unreliable types of APIs.
Daniel Newman: The long and short there, Pat, because you said a lot, all of it, very, very relevant, the company’s done a lot of things right. And it definitely has been built for scale. It has the benefits of not trying to be too big and being able to really be committed to its path. And by the way, going back to my story about being private, has the rights to grow at a pace that’s comfortable with.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: And I think sometimes that is a narrative, and it makes it a fairly compelling offering for smaller businesses that are looking for something that really is inclusive and streamlined to meet their needs.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And by the way, I just… One little factoid I want to put out there is, you’re wondering, “Hey, does this company have growth?” And you look at the last five years, they’ve had analyzed growth of 28%, which isn’t the 80% sometimes we’re expecting from unicorns. But again, self-funded. Only working on things that they feel like they have to work on as opposed to what Wall Street is trying to jam down our throats.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely. Neither good or bad, but both can be good or bad. All right. Well, let’s jump to the next topic. A couple of quick earnings beats here now, Pat.
Zoom, the boom continues. So I had the chance to dive deep into Zoom this week. But listen, what happened next was the big moment. The Zoom boom continued. The company absolutely destroyed expectations and came in almost 50 cents over on EPS, blew out earnings, 369% growth on a year over year basis. And basically, the third consecutive quarter in the upper 300% growth rates. Unbelievable finish to the year.
The demise of tech, in terms of pricing on stock, is over spoken at this point. All different things are spooking people in the marketplace. It’s not the lack of growth. Tech is growing and that’s exciting. One thing that did catch my attention was the company is expecting a little bit more of a normalized growth in the next year with COVID sort of playing down, Pat, with starting to return to work, with our kids starting to go to school, with life looking a little more normal. I’m not even going to take the risk of the wrath of proclaiming that we’re going to be normal, but more normal. The company is looking at potentially seeing some of the growth slow.
A couple of key numbers from the quarter, 467,000 paying customers with 10 employees now. 470% up from the same time last year. 1,644 customers now. Over $100,000 a year in trailing 12 months spend. And a huge 130% conversion of their net dollar expansion. That means their freemium model is working at a really good rate. And that’s what people need to pay attention to. The growth is strong. They launched end-to-end encryption, Pat, which is something… The company got really beat up for some security woes in the past year, the Zoom bombings, the China white listed servers. Company did manage to really overcome a lot of that. You don’t hear much about it anymore. Their security updates have been put into place. So, that’s strong.
Where am I worried, Pat? I’m worried what the heck the market’s going to say when they only grow 40% in the first quarter? Only grow 50% in the first quarter? It’s insane. But we are become such an emotional unstable group of people at times that we say, “Oh, wow. They grew 300%. That should happen forever.” That’s not realistic. But the company overall has really been able to be successful in the wake of big competition from big names, Cisco, Google, of course, Microsoft, and we’ll talk about that later. But the results are in. The growth is in. The profit is in. The company’s on its own. They’re sitting on a mountain of cash. And I want to know who Zoom might acquire, because that’s what I’m seeing next if the company really wants to become a competitor to Teams, and Teams and Google, it’s going to need to expand.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I really thought that they were going to go, at some point, go after Slack. Do you remember? Slack was valued so much more than Zoom, and then Zoom came in, and then Salesforce gobbled up. I wouldn’t be surprised though, if there was a bidding war between the two, Salesforce using cash and Zoom using equity leverage to be able to do that. But I think that unless it wants to gobble up some productivity platform and try to take on Microsoft, they’ve got to go one way or another to keep that going. There was a little bit of a magic about Zoom and then, it just felt so easy to get connected. Now early on, it ended up to be some security challenges and privacy challenges. And they spent a year kind of figuring that out.
The big question is, is when people do go back to their corporate work, let’s say they had standardized on something like Cisco WebEx, will they… Everybody will be back on WebEx? Or will there be crops of people that IT will enable and allow to go elsewhere? Zoom has created a new market, I think, which is giving people, the smaller businesses, and even people like governments, small governments, who hadn’t typically done a lot of video, who were forced to do the whole govern from home thing. So whatever it is, it’s super interesting. And although the pandemic sucked, it did increase innovation in this collaboration space. Probably advanced it five years in one.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely. Well let’s flash through two more big earnings. HPE, Pat, took the lion share of Zoom. You want to kick us off on this one?
Patrick Moorhead: Overall, the revenue they brought out, which was $6.8 billion, was above outlook and was stronger than typical seasonality, sequentially. If you look at the growth businesses, 11% is very respectable. High performance computing and MCS, which is typically these nonstop types of systems, was down. I think people might look odd at that, but there is a story there in that it’s a very lumpy type of business, particularly HPC. These are big deals that didn’t materialize because of COVID. Compute, big backlog there. Same thing with storage. HP was having some challenges getting all of the components that it needed.
And Daniel, what do you do when you’re not necessarily hitting the top line is you focus on if you got profitability. And they knocked it out of the park. Right? Up 30 basis points a year on year. What seems to be the highlight of the show here are things like GreenLake and services. And you can see the numbers there. Those are really good numbers. And when you’re doing a services deal like this, it’s natural that your product revenue will be a little bit lower than you want. But this page. To me, I believe represents the future of HPE. And I do believe that next year… Sorry, next quarter, we will see overall HPE growth. And that is what everybody wants.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely, Pat. And you covered a lot of it. And we are a little bit, we’re doing the six sixteen today. We’re just covering long. I’ll make a couple of quick comments because I want to get onto the next one.
Big quarter, important moment, inflection point for the company. It is in this process of Antonio Neri’s multi-year plan to move everything as a service. That is happening. The 25 plus percent growth of its GreenLake business, and it’s recurring revenue is the number to watch. That’s the big number to pay attention to. Company’s also really carved out a niche with its intelligent edge products. And it’s been consistently in the black, in the growth, with that particular product. It did see a quick ticker up in the last quarter, year over year. Was not able to repeat that, but was able to get on top of expectations for both top and bottom line, which was a solid feat overall for the company.
Let’s not forget, headwinds were big for the big infrastructure, hardware manufacturer, servers, storage, networking. You will see a lot of consistencies with HP’s numbers, with Cisco and Dell, and others in that space. That’s going to continue. But like I said, Antonio Neri has a strong plan. It’s to take what the cloud has been able to do for recurring revenue and do it on prem. The company is showing a good trajectory there. It’s bookings as a service are solid. A lot to feel encouraged by over at HPE. And Pat, we’ll come back to that statement. We’ll see if you were right. Did the company grow year over year and the next quarter? That’s what we are all going to want to see.
All right, Pat. Marvell, not the first name that rolls off everybody’s tongue with chips. But a really important company that, by the way, has performed really, really well this year. Fourth straight quarter of accelerating earnings growth for the company. The top line did slow a little bit, but again was up, once again, overall. Earnings rose 71%. Sales rose 11%. It was kind just a business as usual. Strong results. Strong top bottom line. Listen to the earnings call. CEO Matt Murphy reiterated a really important point that I think everybody that’s thinking about Marvell needs to hear. He is not feeling overly concerned about the pinch right now in the chip space. So for a fabless that’s playing in some really key spaces, 5G, cloud, data center, automotive, the pinch has not really slowed the company at this point. And that’s something that he’s really feeling good about. That has also driven that networking business, where a lot of that semiconductor revenue comes from, up 22% in the current quarter.
A couple of things that are floating out there that are momentum makers for the company, the Ihphi acquisition, which really is the company’s big bet on NG all the way 800G and the fabric in the data center. Basically, we’re going to connect computers quicker. So all that power that’s going into each machine needs to be able to transfer machine to machine. They’re making a big bet on that technology, both the semiconductors and optical. And when that deal closes, that’s going to strengthen Marvell a lot like the Cadmium deal did, especially under the new leadership.
The guidance for the company is bigger growth, 15%. So it’s going to continue into the next quarter. There’s a confidence in what’s looking ahead, Pat. And I’ll just kind of sum it up like this. In my opinion, it all amounts to a really solid quarter and a solid finish to the year for Marvell. That’s a company on the rise. They’re aligned to the best markets, 5G, cloud, automotive. I mentioned that. I’ll mention that again. All poised to grow. And the company is in a prime position to both grow its top line and to potentially take market share.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I just want to end with Matt Murphy and team. They’re doing a kick-butt job over there. And let me just flash up the slide. Up 290% since he took the helm. Yeah, they’re down today. They’re down today, I think, around 12%.
Daniel Newman: Everybody is.
Patrick Moorhead: Everybody is, but the management team has done some really exceptional, exceptional stuff.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. Good stuff. Congratulations, HPE. Congratulations, Marvell and Zoom. All the earnings companies we covered today had relatively two great results this quarter. Pat, let’s circle. Ignition. We are on. Let’s finish this show. Let’s talk Dynamics 356 and Teams. Do you want to go first?
Patrick Moorhead: Yes. So first of all, Teams is more the chat tool. Microsoft is using it as a overall platform to pretty much connect to everything. Even saw how Mesh, how they tied it to Teams. Right? We are tying Teams to everything inside of Microsoft. Low-code, no-code. But I’m going to talk about it as a separate product here. And Daniel, you know, particularly with D 356, talk about its integrations there.
But so my favorite of the bunch was how they’re integrating Microsoft PowerPoint into Microsoft Teams. And by the way, I know some of you do an eye roll when you talk about presentations, but there are visual learners, me, who, I, quite frankly, that’s the only way I can learn. And the ability to change views, the ability to optimize a myriad of presentation styles. Oh, by the way, Daniel, because we love looking at ourselves so much, there can be a presentation with our face in front of it. Right? It does edge detection. Kind of does the reverse where it uses the slide as your background. And you can see how many instances, or how that could be an improvement.
The other thing is this thing called a dynamic view, which automatically adjusts the layout of a Teams meeting as attendees join, initiate video, or speak, or present. Microsoft needs to be really careful with that to not get into where it’s changing all around. But I have to tell you, what a great way to potentially eliminate fatigue in there.
And the final thing I’ll throw out there is other Teams. There were new Teams integrations with partners. Video conferencing monitor from Dell, which we had talked about for CES. A new video bar from Poly that I think we both got as tchotchkes, and a camera from VER that improves lighting. So this wasn’t the big explosion of features for Teams as Teams, the chat and video tool. But Daniel, we heard a lot about Teams and integrations into other places, and also some cool stuff that they’re doing with Dynamics 356.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, absolutely. There’s so many things, Pat. Again, Ignite really deserves a ton of time. We hopefully gave you enough Ignite, enough ignition here. And there’ll be so much more. We’ll make sure we put some links in the final show notes, Pat. Dynamics 356. I’m actually going to do the Teams thing with Dynamics 356. One of the big announcements was essentially a deepening integration between the two. So look, it’s time to stop thinking Microsoft Teams as a meeting tool.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right.
Daniel Newman: Even a collaboration tool. It’s an operating system for remote work. That is how I’m positioning it. The Teams integration is basically being placed inside of every application that your business runs so that you can talk to customers through a customer experience app. You can see customer insights and be able to engage immediately with team members who are working on that customer. You can work within the Dynamics of the ERP system and see others that are involved in a project, others that are involved in a workflow, and without ever leaving the app. And that’s really important.
There’s two reasons to me that that’s really important. One is we need to be able to do our work where our work is. Popping between windows maybe, Pat, makes sense. Jumping between apps might work for people like us, when you got two, three monitors on your desk, you’re well set up with multiple compute, the right graphics cards. Average remote knowledge worker, Pat, working off a single laptop with maybe a 13 inch screen. I’m supportive of everybody’s situation. And if you’re working inside of a CRM system or an ERP platform, you want to be able to get your work done without closing app, opening app, minimize, maximize. And that’s one of the big things I think is really happening here, is you bounce between collaborating with your team and the people on it, and working within the application. So I thought that was a really big part of the integration, Pat.
A couple other things that I did note, they added voice and video triggering. So you can actually not only do a chat, but you can actually immediately right within the platform, pop out into a video or voice meeting. If you need to call a customer, provide support, or if you needed to talk to someone on your team to be able to keep getting work done. Also, furthered the LinkedIn integration. Everybody kind of forgets quickly, but LinkedIn, if you’re watching on LinkedIn, hello, is actually owned by Microsoft. And while the company has kept the APIs pretty fresh in terms of being able to integrate with all platforms, it has enhanced the capabilities of D 356. You can track your contacts with Sales Navigator. You can see insights right inside on a particular customer person, employee, right inside D 356. So it’s been broadly deployed to work within Dynamics and the biz apps ecosystem.
And one little side note, by the way, was just… And this is more of even a team’s thing. But E2E also was launched, announced by Microsoft. So that company is also for point to point, one-to-one calls. The company is also launching end to end encryption. So I realize that kind of circled back from Dynamics to Teams. But I had a note about that, because that’s a really important sidebar right now with all the focus that’s going into privacy, compliance, and data. And with all the industry clouds and all the companies trying to deliver verticalized solutions, both for CX and ERP, being sure that you’re going to be in compliance and governance and handling data and handling privacy is going to be really important to finance, healthcare, gov, all those different things.
So Pat, overall, big slate of announcements. We didn’t quite hit our Six Five target, but we can’t leave you wanting more. We’ve got to give you all the info. But in all serious, Pat, good show. I mean, look, I look forward to going back and doing these live. I’ve got to admit, it is hard to sit in front of your computer all day and watch these. But Microsoft had a lot of content and kept us moving very quickly. I can think of at least five other things that we could be talking about.
Patrick Moorhead: Sounds good. Sounds good. Yeah. I appreciate everybody. And thanks for hanging in there. If you like what you’ve heard, click that subscribe button on YouTube. Thanks so much, and have a great week and weekend.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
