Transforming Your Business with Paul Maher

[MUSIC PLAYING] Now introducing your keynote MCs this morning Quest Platform Management Senior Director of Product Marketing, Mr. Steven Phillips and Quest Strategic Advisor and former CIO, Jay Gardner. Good morning, everybody. How's everybody feeling out there? Hey, I'm what are your hosts this morning, and proud to be here and welcome you to TEC. I'm your other host and we're pleased to have you at our reboot of TEC. So it's been seven years since the last TEC. The conference started in 2001. Gil Kirkpatrick, has he made it in? I don't think-- maybe not yet. Gil will be here. He's actually speaking in the AD track. He was one of the founders of The Experts Conference. It was really built around, honestly, how do you handle this Active Directory environment back in 2001. And what's amazing is after Quest was acquired by Dell, TEC went away, and there wasn't a year that we were not at Ignite. Microsoft Ignite-- everybody familiar with that conference-- where people said, when are you bringing TEC back? So think about that. Even though the conference went on hiatus, there was still a demand for it. And that's what we're here today for. And if you think about that video of what you just saw, there is never a better time than the present to bring everybody together to learn from subject matter experts. And we have a great agenda. There is no vendor pitches, no product pitches, no shopper stalkers. This isn't a furniture sale. We're not going to try to make you buy stuff. What we want you to do is learn from each other and learn from the speakers. And that's really what this conference is all about. And Steven, do you know that the first TEC ever was actually held here in Charleston? Are you sure, Jay? Yes. In fact, this was the southernmost city of the British colonies, also one of the most vulnerable for entry and intrusion. The colonists worked together to come up with best practices to share in how to build up their defenses. In fact, they built a wall to keep out unwanted outsiders and fortified their shores to constantly monitor threats. So now I'm drawing the parallels. If you think about the experts of people coming together to figure out how to do something, how to stop something from happening, that's really what that was all about, and I totally get that. We're able to bring TEC back, and we're really pleased to announce the sponsorship of TEC by Microsoft. In fact, they'll be sponsoring the evening reception out here in the Grand Hall. We hope you'll all join us. We're pleased to have the support of Microsoft for this event. Many of you are going through mergers and acquisitions, as an example. Much of that integration work falls-- that burden falls on your shoulders. So let's think about the M&As. Raise your hands if you're in IT, and you're brought in on a merger and acquisition before it happens. Right. Most of you guys just get told, this is happening. This is what we have to do. And if you think about the workload that's there, we know that that is challenging. How do you handle these environments? How do you handle the integration of all the systems? It definitely can be a challenge. And on top of this, you're tasked with moving to Office 365 and deploying new collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. And we know that your workload never gets lighter, so we're here this week to address many of those issues. To set the stage is our first keynote speaker, partner and General Manager of Industry Experiences in the Cloud and Artificial Intelligence for Microsoft, Mr. Paul Maher. Named a cloud influencer by CIO Review, Paul helps enterprises move to the cloud, and today he's going to discuss some of the latest trends which have the potential to transform your business and the key technology use cases driving those trends, and also how Microsoft's cloud strategy makes all this possible. Paul. [APPLAUSE] Good morning, everyone. I'm just getting the fundamentals of how to move the slides forwards. So I appreciate the introduction and the music. Quite an illustrious opening. But who's happy to be here? [APPLAUSE] Come on. Is it-- I think I heard seven years. So it's back. So my name is Paul Maher. I'm a general manager at Microsoft, and let's just kind of drill into that a little bit. And in this session here, as you can see, we'll be talking about transforming your business with the Microsoft cloud strategies. So let's begin a little bit about myself. So I lead a team in Microsoft digital engineering, so this thing you call a cloud. I actually worked within the engineering team. I lead a team called Industry Experiences. And very simply, myself and my team work with partners and customers all around the world, helping them move to the cloud and moving to our commercial marketplace. I'm dating myself a little bit at the end, but I've been involved in cloud since 2005-- yeah, 2005. And for those of you who've been tracking Microsoft in our cloud, it was codenamed Red Dog. And so back then, in 2005, I got the opportunity to talk to analysts and talk about this thing called the cloud and how it could be the future. Anyway, fast forward to today, I think that the world is a very different place and that perspectives of cloud are very, very different. And I also get to work with some of the largest companies around the world, helping them move to the Microsoft digital cloud. So you could say I was born in the cloud and I'm absolutely all in on the cloud. So here's my goals for today, and hopefully I achieve them. So we'll start with digital transformation and disruption, and I'll throw a few slides up there in terms of