Microsoft Corp. and Dell Technologies Inc. have been developing a collaborative cloud offering through Azure, and they’ve recently begun to unroll their new Azure Stack, which is a hybrid cloud offering for both cloud and on-premises deployments. As Dell EMC tells it, partnering with Microsoft for this rollout was easy.

“From a Dell EMC perspective, it’s a no-brainer,” said Paul Galjan (pictured, left), senior director of Microsoft hybrid cloud at Dell EMC. “Of the big public clouds, Microsoft is really unique in their hybrid cloud approach … Microsoft is the only major cloud vendor right now bringing the cloud to the work, and it’s just a no-brainer from that perspective amongst most cases.”

Claude Lorenson (pictured, right), senior product marketing manager of the cloud and enterprise platform at Microsoft, agreed that the feeling is mutual. “For Microsoft, working with Dell EMC has been a natural,” he said. “We’ve worked on a solution like this for quite a few years, so it makes the making the sausage part easier when we work with Dell EMC, because we’re a trusted partner for quite a while on these solutions.”

Galjan and Lorenson spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed partnering together for Azure Stack and what customers are experiencing so far using these features. (* Disclosure below.)

Collaborating on Azure Stack for hybrid cloud

As customers demand more flexibility for hybrid cloud and on-prem scenarios, Azure Stack has been a great way to meet customer demands. “For Microsoft, the thing that surprised us a lot is … the amount of things that [customers] want to do on it is just like mind-boggling,” Lorenson said. “So we are constantly asked to add different things to the base services.”

The most common use cases so far for Azure Stack, according to Lorenson, have been the gas and mining industries, where remote work and poor latency with the internet are common problems. “They want to run some of their application that they usually run on Azure, but they want to run it in the mine shaft, for example, or they want to run it in a drilling platform in the ocean,” Lorenson explained. “The disconnected scenario is very, very big.”

It’s not just latency that’s an issue; it’s simple data gravity, according to Galjan. “If you’re generating petabytes of data on a daily basis out on an oil rig, you’re not going to be able to get that into [Amazon Web Services] or [Google Cloud Platform] or Azure,” Galjan said. “So you can process it, upload results, filter results back to Azure for further processing. It’s a really common use case.”

As Azure Stack expands, challenges and lessons are expected with the partnering between Microsoft and Dell EMC — but so far, it’s been relatively smooth sailing, according to Lorenson and Galjan.

“We have been building these integrated [systems] together for a long, long time,” Lorenson said. “So we know their engineering team. We have a well-oiled machine in terms of testing. So it’s easier in some ways there.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE