Remarks by Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela at Convergence EMEA 2015 in Barcelona on Nov. 30, 2015.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Well, good afternoon, everyone. And thanks so much for being here at Convergence EMEA, our premier business event. It’s a real honor to be with you here today along with Jean-Philippe.
For me this notion of modernizing your toolset and modernizing your mindset is really the core notion that brings us together. We’re here to help you with your business transformation, and we’re here to learn how we can do a better job on that. We’re also here to connect business leaders from every industry, from many countries around the world to share best practices and learn from each other.
Now it’s amazing to think about how technology and business have driven each other to be better. When we look back at when PCs became very ubiquitous and servers became very ubiquitous in the client-server era, we see that together we invested in what we consider to be this notion of systems of record where organizations were busy becoming far more efficient on internal processes driven by enterprise resource planning. HR, manufacturing, supply chains, all of these became far more efficient through the implementation of these ERP systems. They were the system of record for every one of our business processes. And it was a major step forward.
With the advent of mobile computing and the Web and the Internet, we started to add processes and efficiency that went beyond the boundaries of our own companies. And they extended out to our customers and to our partners. And we started to understand how to track the engagements we had with them as well. And these systems of record also were added to with new systems of engagement, tracking all of the engagements we had with our partners and our customers. Again, a major step forward in efficiency for all of our organizations.
At Microsoft, we believe in talking to customers we’re really at the dawn of a new era of business systems and business solutions. With the advent of cloud computing an explosion of data is now available at all of our fingertips. And it’s up to us collectively to harness the power of the cloud, the power of ubiquitous data to create what we call systems of intelligence. And as we talk to customer after customer after customer, they’re looking at ways to create far more intelligent systems that aren’t a third set of systems. These are literally just reasoning over the systems of record and the systems of engagement that customers have already implemented in their enterprise.
These systems of intelligence are leveraging predictive analytics, machine learning to real-time make important business decisions that affect their internal processes and affect the way they work with customers and partners. We’re busy trying to provide the technology platform to enable you to transform your entire business to create these new systems of intelligence.
And at the show, as you’re talking to other customers, as you’re going to the exposition, as you’re listening to these speeches, keep in mind this notion of building a system of intelligence that uses big data that leverages the cloud that connects to your existing systems of record and systems of engagement. And I think you’ll see it, it takes both a modernization of the toolset that you have, but more importantly it actually takes a modernization of your mindset of the business that you’re in.
Now at Microsoft, our entire mission is around empowering you to transform your business. That’s literally our mission, is empowerment, empowering individual people and organizations, empowering entire organizations, empowering entire industries to transform themselves.
And we have three ambitions that you see on this slide that we know are going to take us many, many years to realize. But every single solution we build, every single engineer at the company is working on one of these three ambitions.
The first ambition is this notion of just creating far more personal computing than we have today. If you look at the devices we use today, they’re still relatively impersonal. But we’re hard at work to make our devices far more personal. Cortana, which Jean-Philippe mentioned, a personal digital assistant that gets smarter about how you work, that helps you proactively is a nice example of more personal computing.
When we think about mobility, we think about the mobility of the experience, not the mobile phone or the tablet. It’s not about the device. It’s about you being mobile and having devices throughout your life that you pick up at different times of the day that are all smart about what you need in that context. More personal computing is a huge ambition for us. Windows 10 is an important product in that direction, but we’re by no means done on that ambition.
A second ambition for us is to build the Intelligent Cloud. We know there’s just a massive opportunity for us to help you modernize your datacenters to build the most pervasive cloud compared to any other company out there that recognizes the diverse rules, the diverse policies — policies that Germany needs. We want to do that around the world to have the most ubiquitous cloud that supports hybrid computing where you run your own servers and you combine those servers with what we have in the cloud, and a public cloud infrastructure, if you want to depend on that completely, et cetera, et cetera. Scott Guthrie will spend a lot of his time tomorrow on stage talking about our ambition around building the Intelligent Cloud and how it can help you with your business transformation.
For my time today, in addition to introducing this notion of a system of intelligence and these big, bold ambitions that Microsoft has, I wanted to focus on this notion of reinventing productivity and business processes, our third ambition that we think is just fundamental to business transformation.
What are we talking about when we talk about reinventing productivity and business process? Well, we’re talking about a few things. At the core, we’re talking about making every one of your employees far more productive than they are today. We’re talking about giving them the tools that they need to marry the unstructured work of your average employee with the very structured work of business processes.
The most important work inside an organization today happens in a very unstructured way. It’s the productivity, it’s the collaboration, it’s the communications, it’s the creativity that employees bring to their jobs every day. We want to marry that with the very structured work that a system of record requires, that an important business process requires. And we think there’s a lot of innovation left. The way people work today is far different than the way people worked just five or 10 years ago.
By 2020 the majority of employees on the planet will be millennials or younger people. They work in a different way. We need to modernize the toolset for the way people work every single day. We think there’s sort of four notions to what we’re doing when it comes to reinventing productivity and business process. The first notion is that everything needs to be built for teamwork and for networks of people to work together. The days of people working individually alone in their office, or on a document all by themselves are really gone. We’re moving from an attitude of “me” work to an attitude of “we” work.
We find that more and more groups of people from different organizations will come together to work collaboratively on a project. That might last two months. The project is done and they go back and sort of split up again. We need to create tools that allow that to happen in an incredibly seamless, easy way. So we talk about building for teams and building for networks as a core part of our mission.
We also know that your average worker feels more stressed out today, more busy today, more overwhelmed today than they’ve ever felt before. The need to work before the workday starts, the need to work after the workday ends, the amount of email they’re getting, the number of meetings they’re invited to, there’s a huge amount of stress and strain that we are placing on the individual worker.
So we think it’s important for us to create tools that allow an individual worker to get insight into their own personal productivity and the organizational productivity that can help them work smarter. We’re introducing tools with Office 365 that just analyze the data that’s already in Office 365 to help every single worker understand how many meetings are they going to, are they being productive in those meetings, how much open time do they have on an average week, how could they change the way they structure their time to be more productive, less stressed out, more efficient in their daily work, and that’s very important.
We’re also working very hard on our adaptive systems, systems like CRM, systems like all of our different line-of-business solutions that we’re bringing to market. We want them to be adaptive. We want them to be flexible, predictable, predictive so they can actually use machine learning to help you be smarter every day that you come to work. We want them to be specific to a particular role in the organization. We talk about that as adaptive systems.
And then finally we have a huge investment in security as a company. Every one of our bold ambitions has security built right in. Security and trust are paramount to the future of our company if we’re going to help you transform your business. When it comes to reinventing productivity the key to our approach, as it relates to security, is that it’s very much focused on how your average worker already does their job.
We talk about this as people-centric security. We’ve built security into our average worker technology. They shouldn’t have to change the way they do work. They should just be able to do their daily job and know that what they’re using is secure. If they send an email that has an important word in that email, the codename of a new product, that email should automatically get digital rights protection applied to it, as one example. You shouldn’t have to use a totally different suite of tools to be secure. So we talk about that as people-centric security.
This ambition is one of the boldest that we have, reinventing the way people work is not at all easy. Today I wanted to focus on some of the things we’re doing around built for teams and networks, and adaptive systems. And let me start off with built for teams and networks.
As I mentioned the way we see people working together, it’s incredibly collaborative today. Ad hoc meetings happen all the time. One of our biggest investments is around meetings and voice. How do we reinvent the meeting? How do we make meetings something you look forward to? How do we make meetings something that gets decisions made, action items are easy to follow up on, people who didn’t attend the meeting can attend the portions of the meeting afterwards that they missed out on that they should have seen.
These are all the questions that we’re asking. Frankly, I feel like Microsoft is investing in meetings and voice in a much bigger way than any other company that we see. Now this is all part of Office 365. But, there’s a particular product that we think is absolutely critical to that, and that’s Skype for Business. Now many of you may know that Skype for Business is just our Lync product rebranded to Skype for Business, because we’ve adopted the Skype user experience, which is far easier to use and frankly far more familiar to many hundreds of millions of people.
So you should think of it as the evolution of Lync. It’s called Skype for Business. It’s included with a variety of our Office 365 SKUs. And tomorrow we’re introducing a whole bunch of new enterprise value inside of Office 365, part of which is a new release of a whole ton of Skype for Business value that I wanted to show you.
Now, before I start the demo I wanted to make a couple of things really clear. Everything I’m running here is live. There’s live code. There’s nothing fake. There’s nothing mocked up. We are just using the regular show network here. There’s no sort of extra fancy network that we’ve layered on. And everything that I’m about to show you is hosted in the Office 365 cloud. There’s not a single on-premises server. Everything is cloud-based. Let’s go ahead and take a look at the new Skype for Business that we’re going to share with the world tomorrow.
So the first thing that you’ll see is I’m running Skype for Business and Office 365 on this Surface Book right here in front of me. And one of my favorite capabilities is how easy it is to join a meeting. I’m going to go ahead and I see I have a meeting reminder to join this meeting. I’m going to literally do one click, click Join Online, and it’s going to go ahead and kick off the Skype meeting.
Now we know at most corporations it takes roughly 12 minutes to get a meeting started, 12 minutes to get one of these conferences going. With Join Online, that single click, we’re up and running very quickly. I’m going to go ahead and maximize this window and you can see I’ve got a few different attendees here. You can see some of them are live video in the back, like Julian. I’m going to go ahead and start my video by clicking this. It will preview what we’re seeing, and I’ll choose Start My Video and hopefully the folks in the back will be able to see me. I’m sure they can hear me. I’ll do a quick wave. There they are. That’s fantastic.
You’ll notice that a couple of people I have live video for, but you see I have a couple of other people that are dialing in from a regular old phone line. They’re not using a smartphone. They’re not using a PC or a Mac. They’re literally just using a traditional phone line. That’s because the new Skype for Business supports PSTN conferencing. So I can dial somebody from the meeting. I can bring them in by dialing their regular old phone line, or they can dial into the meeting using a regular old phone line. This capability alone we see saving our customers millions and millions of euros and pounds and dollars, because it’s built into Office 365. You don’t need another audio conferencing provider to make this happen. It’s just built right into Office 365, which is really cool.
So I can see that they’re there. But we also want to make this more than just live video and live audio. I also want to be able to collaborate. So I’m going to click right there and as always I could present a PowerPoint file. I can maybe do a shared whiteboard. But, brand-new to the new Skype for Business is the ability to co-author Office documents. So I’m going to click on that and in a minute I think you’ll see my screen on one side and you’ll see one of the other Skype callers, you’ll see their screen as a split screen.
I’m going to choose a Word document and I’m going to go ahead and click open. This is going to launch Word, the new Word, on my machine, and it’s also going to launch the new Word on everybody else’s machine, too. And now as we watch people are going to start editing this document and I’m going to see their names pop up. The new Word supports real-time coauthoring. So as I’m typing something they can be typing something, too, and I see their little name pop up and I know who is editing what portion of the document.
We think this type of simple, easy ‑‑ there you go, thank you. (Applause.) We think this type of easy, simple collaboration really does bring teamwork to a new level. We’re really excited about this.
Now, this is a meeting that has six or seven people in it, which is great. It works for many, many thousands of meetings inside of any kind of large company.
But we also know that lots of our customers want to have very large meetings. For the past five or six months, I’ve been using a new technology called Skype Meeting Broadcast to do my meetings with 2,000 marketers around the world.
Skype Meeting Broadcast allows me to broadcast a meeting to up to 10,000 other Skype end points. So I can reach a huge number of people, which is kind of awesome.
Now, I’m going to switch over from my Surface Book to a Surface Pro 4. This Surface Pro 4, we’re actually already broadcasting this exact speech as a Skype meeting broadcast.
And if I pick up the tablet, you’ll see probably over my shoulder what the average end user who joins this meeting is going to see.
This is the speech. And one of the cool things you can see, if I do this correctly, is at any point, I can tap to any different part of the meeting. Maybe I was late to joining the meeting. And, sure enough, I went to the beginning of my speech and just hit play. And now I’ve joined the beginning of the meeting, and away we go. I can get to just the part that I want.
That’s really cool. This is the attendee experience. It looks just like a regular Skype meeting. I can go backwards in time, I can fast-forward, et cetera, et cetera.
Also on the screen, we can split the screen that you guys are looking at. You’re going to actually see the producer view of the Skype meeting broadcast. Because if I’m the producer creating the meeting, I want to be able to have controls over starting the meeting, stopping the meeting, maybe choosing to have a live video feed side-by-side with a PowerPoint presentation. And I believe you can see that here as well.
So Skype meeting broadcast is a new type of meeting that allows you to have very, very large scale. We have about 5,000 people in this conference room today. All of you could be attending this Skype meeting broadcast with just the regular Office 365 technology. Really, quite amazing.
Now, I’ve shown you Skype running on a Surface Book. I’ve shown you Skype running on a Surface Pro 4 or tablet. It’s important to know that Skype works across many, many different types of devices.
We have Skype for the Mac, we have Skype for Business for the Mac. We have Skype for Business for Android. We have Skype for Business for iOS.
So if I go ahead and show you — let’s start with perhaps the iPhone. I’m going to go over and pick up my iPhone. And I think you’ll be able to see this as well. If I go back to my home screen on my iPhone, there’s Skype for Business right there. I have some Outlook unread messages, I’ve got Power BI, I’ve got Delve, I’ve got all kinds of stuff on the phone.
I’m going to just tap Skype for Business. And, not surprisingly, you can see my upcoming meetings, my recent chats with different people. I’m going to click on the FY16 planning meeting. And just like I showed you on the PC, with one tap, I can go ahead and join the meeting.
And we’re going to kick that off. Ben has joined me on stage and he’s using the Surface Hub, a very different type of device than the iPhone, much bigger. That’s a beautiful 84-inch, 4K display. It’s got an amazing set of technologies on it.
And you might have noticed that he tapped with one tap of his finger to join the Skype meeting. I’m here on my iPhone. I’m going to tap to start my video feed. And I think you can see that I’m live on my iPhone connected into this meeting.
You can probably see my video feed, which is cool. And in a minute here, we’ll go ahead and get that up on the Surface Hub.
Meanwhile, Ben has just picked up the pen and he’s started to ink on that beautiful whiteboard. I’ll be able to see that shared whiteboard and be able to work with him on it, which is really cool.
This device comes with a pen. It has two incredible cameras, one on either side of it. It’s essentially got Wi-Fi, it’s got Bluetooth, it’s got NFC, it’s got all that built directly into the device. All he needs to do is plug in the power cable. He gets it on the network, and away we go.
So I’m going to put the iPhone down. And I’m going to ask you to come over and take a look at this other phone on the table here. This is a brand-new phone from Polycom. It’s called the Polycom Trio. This phone is a custom-built phone for Skype for Business. Obviously, from one of our great partners who knows Skype for Business incredibly well, Polycom.
This device will be available later this year. It’s, obviously, a conference room-type device. It’s very small. I can put it in the middle of a conference room. And the audio on this device is not something I can demonstrate here to you today, but it is quite amazing.
I can go off to the side of the conference room and talk and this device will pick that up. I can hear incredibly well. We’re really excited that Polycom is bringing the Trio to market.
So what you have is everything from an 84-inch device to a regular old phone that can dial in to a beautiful, fancy phone from Polycom, to an amazing smartphone, could be running Android from Samsung, could be running Windows, could be running iOS, to tablets, to PCs, et cetera. Skype just has an incredible range of devices.
Now, everything we’ve talked about so far is about meetings. How do we make the meeting experience better? But we’ve also gone a major step forward with Skype for Business. And that’s to basically create a cloud-based voice solution. Where, with Office 365, you literally are getting dial tone to provide to all of your employees.
That means you can assign them phone numbers. And those phone numbers are numbers that your IT department just claims. And then as part of their Office tenant, they can assign out to employees.
Let’s take a look at what you see on my screen here. I’m back to my Surface Book. I’m logged in as the admin or an IT person inside the Office 365 console. I already have a whole slew of phone numbers.
Now, originally, when we go out tomorrow, this voice capability will only be available in the U.S. But soon thereafter, we’ll be bringing it to many, many European countries.
If I want to claim new phone numbers for new employees, I hit the add button. And then I’m going to go ahead and select the state. Obviously, we’ll update this as new countries come online. And I’m going to select the city where I want these phone numbers.
I’m going to ask Office 365 to maybe grab me 10 new phone numbers. And I’m going to choose the Add button. And very quickly, I will just add 10 brand-new phone numbers to my Office 365 tenant. And I can go ahead and show all those numbers. And, voila, there they are.
Now I can assign one of those phone numbers to a brand-new employee. And they literally have a phone number that travels around with them. They have dial tone that travels around with them. It shows up in the Exchange address book. They pick up a new phone, as soon as they log in with their Active Directory credentials, that phone number shows up on that device.
This is an amazing step forward. No other vendor, no other provider is doing everything we’re showing you here. Instant messaging, audioconferencing, webconferencing, the PSTN conferencing that I showed you, all of the voice capabilities across all of these devices, all hosted in the cloud without you needing a single server on-premises.
So when we talk about reinventing productivity, when we talk about building for teams and networks, Skype for Business is a core component of that.
Now, about a year ago, I was introduced to the global CIO at a really, really impressive company. Over the past year, he and I have spent a lot of time together helping him learn about Azure, helping him teach me about how this company is using Skype for Business. And I thought this would be a great moment to sort of share some of the amazing work that Accenture has done with Skype for Business.
We’re big users of Skype for Business at Microsoft, many, many million minutes of audio conferencing is done all the time. But Accenture takes it to a new level.
So I’m happy to introduce Andrew Wilson. He is the global chief information officer of Accenture, and he is joining us today, of course, via Skype. And he’s joining us from the United States, I believe Andrew may be in Florida. Andrew, how are you? (Applause.)
ANDREW WILSON: I’m great, hello. Good to see you, my friend. I hope Barcelona is going well.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Barcelona is beautiful. The weather is incredible, and we’re off to a good start. I think the audience can see that this is just Skype for Business, the Skype for Business client running on a Windows 10 machine.
I’m just going to go ahead and maximize your view and everyone can see that I’ve got a live video feed. It’s kind of — Convergence is spelled backwards, and Microsoft is spelled backwards. As the CMO, that’s very annoying to me. So I’m going to minimize that, and now we have a live call.
Andrew, can you educate all of us a little bit about how you at Accenture are using Skype?
ANDREW WILSON: I certainly can, Chris. Accenture is powered by Microsoft in the cloud, in our datacenters, but there is no more important service in Accenture than Skype for Business. We’re over 400,000 people on Office 365. The majority of those spend most of the day in Skype.
We are a hugely collaborative and consuming organization. We onboard 105,000 people a year. We operate in over 50 countries. And we are connected virtually almost the entire time through Skype.
We have continued to hyperscale and surprise ourselves. We’ve just broken through the 200 million minutes of audio each and every month level, and we’re still climbing. It’s a function not only of our scale, but it’s a function of the fact that we do more and more and more of our day-to-day business connecting teams, connecting individuals around the world.
We’ve done this, really, over a seven-year journey. We were early adopters of the original Communicator. We have traversed through two or three versions of Lync. But we’ve moved quickly to Skype because, as you say, I think the form factor and the fact that our post-millennial generation of workers are already trained and conversant with the interface and expect us, candidly, to have that sort of technology in the enterprise. So giving them Skype, which we’ve done very quickly, is a natural next step.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Fantastic. I mean, the scale that you’re talking about is kind of staggering: 400,000 people, 200 million minutes of audio per month. You must have encountered maybe some cultural barriers, but certainly technical barriers, challenges. Can you give us just a flavor of a seven-year journey that I’m sure was rife with barriers to overcome? What have been some of the examples?
ANDREW WILSON: I think the first barrier to overcome is getting everyone comfortable, conversant and ultimately programmed in their DNA with collaboration. And that doesn’t happen overnight.
Secondly, I think people have to become comfortable with being on video. I spend the vast majority of my time on Skype on video with more than one camera on. We’re very much a broadcast culture, which is why I think your new innovation around broadcasting within the medium is going to be central.
Teams don’t want to read emails. They don’t want to write emails. They want to consume video, talk and do it in a rapid, agile way. And so the enabler needs to do that.
Candidly, though, there’s some under-the-hood stuff we had to get right. This is such a massively important service, we needed to get segregation, we needed to set its capacity, and the network performance is critical as well. And so as global CIO, I’m responsible for all of those aspects.
And then I think after that, we really need to think about how we make ourselves effective and efficient. So the tight coupling with calendar and Outlook, the one click to join. The fact that the phones no longer ring anymore has become a progression. And, in fact, now when we refurbish new facilities, we don’t put phones on the desks because the collaboration medium is there on the laptop.
And I think the next evolution that we’re also seeing, and you referred to it earlier, I’m speaking now on my Surface Pro 4 on Windows 10, but increasingly we see tablet and phone experience because a lot of our workers are mobile. A lot of our workers want to connect informally and as groups, not in pre-scheduled conferences.
And so all of these things are coming together as we, I think, move to the next level of being that digital workforce on the road using Skype.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Yeah, for me, this notion of, you know, you’ve got the toolset of Skype as a tool to implement, but your notion of you actually have to modernize your mindset as well. And just the notion of video is something that you’ve sort of raised my own personal bar on because when we first did our first call, I joined in audio and you were, like, “Hey, where’s your video?” And I had to go run around and, like, find a little webcam and plug it in and see if my office looked OK for video.
And now when we jump on a call, you know, that’s just something I’ve gotten used to. So there’s a toolset, but there’s also a mindset to modernize here as well, that I think you’ve really been a leader on internally at Accenture.
What’s next for you as you think about rolling things out on such a global scale?
ANDREW WILSON: I think we’re going to see cooperation and cross-collaboration in the cloud as the way we work by default. So authoring in the cloud, reviewing of materials, not just sharing the content, but actively producing content.
I think it’s also going to become much more of an open activity. So it’s all well and good talking about Accenture and its teams and its millions of minutes, but our clients out there are partners like yourselves.
We need to collaborate together equally as well as we collaborate internally within the organization. So I think that’s a trend.
I think everyone’s going to become more savvy of digital workers. I mean even the positioning of a camera, the quality of the audio experience. It’s one thing to get your own experience right, but your personal brand is out there in the ecosystem now on Skype. And so I think we’re going to see more self-awareness of how to enrich the overall collaboration experience for those people you’re collaborating with.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Fantastic. Andrew, thanks so much for your leadership. Obviously, thank you for joining us from Florida. It’s great to have you here today.
ANDREW WILSON: Look forward to seeing you soon. Thanks, Chris. (Applause.)
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: See you soon. Thank you, Andrew. (Applause.)
So pretty incredible, the scale at which he’s operating. And I find that every time we see an organization adopting a technology that is transforming the way they work, it takes somebody inside that company to be that progressive leader, to push that envelope on how we’re going to transform the company.
You can implement the tool, of course, but if you’re not able to change the mindset, then that tool is going to lie fallow and not really realize all of the benefits. And that takes, obviously, real personal leadership, and Andrew’s been fantastic on that front.
Now, I’m excited to announce, I’ve already mentioned it, that starting tomorrow is a whole slew of new enterprise value that we’re adding to Office 365 in a new tier of our SKUs.
I mentioned Skype Meetings and Skype Voice, which we demonstrated today. In addition to that, we’re adding incredible new tools for business intelligence. Power BI is coming to Office 365. Tools like Delve that provide you insight into the way you work and the way your organization works, to give you that sort of personal and organizational insight, is coming to Office 365 tomorrow.
Advanced security and e-discovery and threat analytics are coming to Office 365. When I get an email now that has attachments, we actually have Office 365 look at those attachments, detonate those attachments in a detonation chamber in the cloud to make sure those attachments don’t have an executable or malware before that email gets delivered to my inbox. So new levels of security that are just there, I don’t have to do anything different. We have those all coming with Office 365, the new tier of enterprise value, literally available tomorrow. You can go to Office365.com, we’re very excited about that.
Now, let me transition and talk a little bit about adaptive systems. For us, adaptive systems, I immediately, of course, think of our line-of-business systems. I think of CRM, I think of Dynamics AX, I think of so many different tools that we’re bringing to market.
We want these systems of record to be adaptive. We want them to be smarter. We want them to leverage the cloud. We want them to leverage Azure Machine Learning to proactively suggest a great next product to offer to our customer.
We want them to be predictive so I don’t have to do that work to have the system be smart about what should happen next.
We want them to, obviously, be incredibly easy to use and to be incredibly mobile. So when we say “adaptive systems,” these are some of the things we’re talking about.
Now, tomorrow is a big day for Office 365. It’s an equally big day for us because we’re announcing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016. And there are a couple of things that I would call out for you.
The first thing is we think about this not just as a sales tool. We think about it as an intelligent customer engagement tool. We can engage with the customer at every life cycle of our relationship with that customer around sales, around support, around marketing, around social engagement.
So it’s much bigger than just sales force automation. We’ve got deep Office 365 integration, which Eric and I will show you in a moment. For the first time ever, CRM is leveraging Azure Machine Learning to predictively, proactively suggest the next best product for a particular customer.
We’re enabling fantastic offline — for the first time — mobile experiences with a brand-new mobile CRM app available on Android, available on Windows and available on iOS.
And as I mentioned, end-to-end customer service. So to learn more, Microsoft.com/Dynamics, but Eric is joining me here on stage, and I’m going to walk you through a little bit of a day in the life to showcase some of these new CRM 2016 capabilities.
Now, we mentioned deep Office 365 integration. Let’s start in Outlook. We’re going to switch over to a Surface Book, and we’re going to take a look at the Outlook inbox, if we can. There it is.
You see a message on the screen from Alex Wu. Alex is one of our customers and he’s asking us in this e-mail about new information about accessories for a carbon-fiber printer that we have available to us.
Now, we’re in the regular Outlook experience, but now integrated into every one of our Outlook experiences is Dynamics CRM. So when Eric clicks on that, it’s going to go into the CRM system, it’s going to know that this mail is from Alex, and it’s going to pull in a bunch of information about Alex and about the account right inside of Outlook.
I can see the next activities that I have with Alex. We have a meeting later on today. That’s coming from Exchange. I can also see on the far right-hand side, sales opportunities that we’re tracking in CRM. And right in the middle with that purple square, I can see customer support calls that we have with Alex.
At any point in time, Eric can click on maybe the sales opportunity. And we’re going to launch CRM 2016, in this case in the browser.
Now, of course from here, I can track everything that’s going on with this particular customer at every part of the sales cycle. And that’s pretty important to us.
So we can see all the information we’d expect, a summary of the account, where we are in the sales process. It looks like we’re in the close stage.
Now, we’ve deeply integrated this into Office. We saw Outlook integration. Eric is going to show us groups integration.
He’s going to go ahead — actually, go to product detail, thank you — let’s go ahead and take a look at the product line details right there. And we’re going to see the Azure Machine Learning in action. This is integrated into CRM.
So when he goes ahead and clicks on suggestions, this list of products is not something that Eric or I pre-populated. This list of suggested products is literally coming from Azure Machine Learning that’s going to go ahead and look at all the data we have on this customer, and it’s going to suggest an accessory bundle for that 3-D printer.
We can go ahead and just add that accessory bundle to our list of products that we’re working on. And, sure enough, it’ll show up right there.
It’s pretty subtle, but that Azure Machine Learning component is a first for any CRM vendor, and we’re really excited to bring it to market.
Now, we want to work with the team of people that are helping us with this account. So we’re going to show off our groups integration. Eric’s going to click on Office 365 groups, which is a set of people that have their own calendar, as you can see on the left-hand side, we have a threaded conversation that’s just with this group of people, just focused on this particular customer.
We have a shared OneNote notebook just for this customer and this group of people. We have a set of documents just for this customer and this group of people.
Since this customer asked me for some information about the 3-D printer, Eric is going to go ahead and type in a quick message to our group. And these threaded conversations stay there. These aren’t like emails that may go away.
So if someone joins our group later, they can see the long history of this conversation. He’s going to ask for a little bit of help putting together the final PowerPoint presentation. And now everybody inside the group can see that and get to work helping us there.
Now, Eric and I, it’s time for us to leave the office. So we’re going to move away from our laptop or our desktop that we might have had in our office, and Eric is going to pick up a Surface Pro 4, the tablet that he’s going to bring on the road.
The cool thing about Surface Pro 4, and you may not have seen this, it happened very quickly, is that this is running Windows 10. And he literally just had Cortana automatically pop up, our personal digital assistant. And not only does Cortana know about all the consumer things that you’d expect her to know about, but with CRM 2016, we’ve integrated CRM into Cortana so she’s now very smart about our CRM solution.
And in that list, the Cortana cards, we have cards for CRM. I see the meeting that’s coming up. I also see my sales opportunity pipeline. Looks like it’s at $8.6 million, it’s trending green and growing, that’s obviously very nice. And I can see my updated accounts that I’m working on, all within Cortana on my Windows 10 tablet.
We can scroll through these accounts. I might want to click on one of them. Let’s maybe pick Alex. Let’s maybe pick the meeting details here. With just a tap of my finger or tap of Eric’s finger, I should say, we’re going to drill into more information.
Here, you can see we have the final presentation coming up here in Barcelona in a little while. I can see who the attendees are. Most importantly, of course, I can see the documents associated with it. I can see the support calls. I can see the sales opportunities. And I see that that PowerPoint file is right there. If I want to tap on the PowerPoint file that’s been updated by the team with one sort of tap of my finger, we can go off and do that. Very, very cool. Eric, go ahead and take us through it.
We’re going to tap on Northwind rather than the document. We’re going to see the map for where we have to go. We can tap into the Northwind opportunity. We can see it’s right here in Barcelona, which is kind of cool.
Now, we’re launching the actual Dynamics tablet app. This is the brand-new mobile app. It runs on phones. It runs on tablets, on Windows, on iOS, on Android. All available tomorrow.
Now, this is the tablet app that works offline or online. And, again, we’ve got the details of the Northwind opportunity. A little bit like what we were seeing in the browser, but now it’s built into a smaller-screen device that’s available offline as well.
And you can see all the same details. The summary information, we’re at the closing stage with this account. I see my open activities. I even see my documents. Tap on the documents, I see the long list of documents that are available, we can tap on the sales proposal, PowerPoint, it’ll ask if we want to open that, and sure enough, in split-screen mode, here’s our PowerPoint presentation on our tablet. We’re able to present it to Alex during our meeting. And it’s very, very simple. Very easy for that sales person to work with this on the go.
Now, finally, the meeting is over. The last part of our day is to update the CRM record, something every sales person loves doing is just updating all their CRM records.
We know this is drudgerous work. We know people don’t look forward to this. We redesigned our user experience to be much more of a task-based experience.
In the bottom corner, Eric can tap on that little check. And you see that the experience, you have a tile there that says, “after meeting.” When he clicks on or taps on “after meeting” it’ll bring up the list of meetings that Eric has in his list. He can pick the Northwind one we were just at.
And now, sure enough, we see the attendees, we see the notes, he can add a little description here. He can also specify any new information we learned about the meeting. Perhaps the date that Alex needs to make a decision by for this sale. Perhaps we enter that date in, it looks like it’s going to be on Monday. Hit done, and with a few taps, thanks to this mobile app, thanks to a task-based experience, we’ve done the sort of drudgerous work that now everybody gets to see the benefit of because they’ve got the latest information available.
That’s a quick look at CRM. Eric, thanks so much for joining us on stage. We’re really excited about this product. (Applause.)
So adaptive systems, adaptive systems, really, really critical to us.
Now, I had Andrew joining us, or I asked him to join us to talk about reinventing productivity as it relates to teams and to networks. I’d also love to showcase a customer who’s done some amazing work with their adaptive systems, leveraging Office, leveraging CRM. Let’s start off with a quick video of the work that Heineken is doing around sales automation. Let’s roll the video.
(Video Segment: Heineken.)
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Fantastic. Please join me in welcoming Ghislaine Prins to the stage, who is the head of digital sales transformation and marketing. Ghislaine, thanks so much for being here. (Applause.)
GHISLAINE PRINS: I’m very happy to be here in person live on stage because I think drinking beer in our industry, it still requires some personal connection.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Face to face is always great, without a doubt, and beer goes well with that for sure.
I mean I think everybody here, of course, knows Heineken, an amazing global brand. But why don’t you give us a sense for the scale of your company?
GHISLAINE PRINS: I think you have to realize that Heineken still is a family-owned company. It’s about the fourth generation of Heineken people that are really, truly involved in the company. We’re trading in about 70 countries.
But for today, we’re reporting about information for the sales force. We’re talking about 35,000 sales reps that today visit about a million outlets across the world.
Most important, as well, is that 70 percent of the consumer decisions is made at the point of purchase. So we want to be excellent at execution. That’s where we need to win.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Makes total sense. I saw a little bit of the video that you’re leveraging Microsoft technology, but can you tell us, you know, how you’re doing it or what tools you’re using?
GHISLAINE PRINS: You must realize, I’m from the business. So I try to help you here. What I needed is I needed a sales force automation tool. I needed something to give to my sales reps to make their lives easier.
I wanted to empower them, to really make sure that they were executing all our strategies correctly at the point of purchase.
I actually didn’t want CRM. I have my bruises of CRM implementations in the past. But I got Microsoft Dynamics and together with a partner, we implemented it.
But that’s not enough. It’s not enough to win at the point of purchase. The sales reps need to have the right information, to have the right conversation with the customers at their fingertips. So we needed to have SharePoint to be able to start sharing documents. Not only to the sales reps.
What is amazing is with the technology, how you can impress the customer with having not just a glossy brochure, but really some interactive material to share about new product launches, with Heineken being very innovative, as hopefully you’ll know.
Having information is not enough. And I think you touched on it already today. It’s about insights. It’s about action ability. I want the sales rep in the store to do their thing, but then also start a conversation with the customer. They need to have actionable insights, and we get that through Microsoft Power BI.
And behind all of that, there’s technical interfaces and things. But I think those are the three major products that I’m very glad we adopted.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Fantastic. And I love the way you said you’ve sort of had your pain in the past around CRM implementations.
GHISLAINE PRINS: Yes.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: But when you’re able to use it in a particular way for a particular solution, you’re almost hiding the fact that it happens to be a CRM solution because, instead, you’re just focused on, hey, here’s the business problem, we have a solution for it. Who really cares about what tool you happen to be leveraging?
GHISLAINE PRINS: No. It’s easy and hopefully looks very sexy for them.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Totally. Now, give us a sense for how broadly this particular tool is being used. And, again, like Andrew, there are challenges. There are tough barriers to overcome. Can you give us a flavor of those?
GHISLAINE PRINS: Well, the challenge starts with skill because I had the nice question of our chief commerce officer, “Ghislaine, create a global tool.” And we’re talking about all the sales reps are just finishing. But I’m very happy that even after one and a half years, we have 1,500 sales reps live operating companies in different channels. Modern trade, traditional trade, they’re all working with the same tools.
We can excel to the challenge because I need to tell sales people and account general managers that, in fact, what they’re doing is not so different from the rest of the world. To really adopt a template is quite challenging in a commercial environment. But we’ve managed to do so.
And, of course, technology, it’s really cool. And I’m really excited by all the opportunity. Honestly, to have an in-the-cloud, agile, mobile solution to really make it happen in a little bit old-fashioned company sometimes was quite a challenge. I think we’re getting there.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: That’s great.
GHISLAINE PRINS: But it’s about the people. It’s about culture. It’s about a mindset. It’s about doing things differently. And I think most of my time and my team spends on making a change happen, making sure that a sales rep knows what he needs to do in a different way than he used to in the outlet. And that’s what we focused on.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Fantastic. Now, you know, you talked about some of — you’ve got these different operating companies that you’re kind of working across all of them and trying to encourage consistent tools. Tell us a little bit about how you measure success. Because I’m sure you’re held, you know, to some standard of delivering some sort of return on this. Give us a sense for what that is.
GHISLAINE PRINS: Yeah. I guess you all want to hear a number. And we do it. We want to make sure that our local countries, they get the business benefits out of the tools and out of the new ways of working. So we do a business case process before we go into a new country.
We talk about revenue-enhancing opportunities. We talk about what does this tool do for your productivity? Can we have sales reps visit more stores? Can we actually increase our coverage?
There’s one country, I won’t name it, where the sales rep actually had a day in the office every week. Can you imagine what it does to your business if you can increase your sales rep being in the field 20 percent?
But also, I truly believe that the CRM tool enables differentiation. It enables us to have different choices, different pictures of success in different outlets that the sales rep never can remember by himself just from his head.
So the opportunity for revenue is really into executing the strategy in the point of sale.
Of course there is cost reduction. I talked about administration time that we reduced. But I’ve seen also some countries that can make the business case by only reducing printing cost. So getting that out of the system is already paying for the full implementation.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: So you’re doing a different model, or you’re measuring per country or per op code because you’ve got some uniqueness.
GHISLAINE PRINS: Yes.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: And you mentioned revenue, you mentioned cost. These are essentially the hard metrics that the technology has to help you deliver on, essentially?
GHISLAINE PRINS: Yeah. It really delighted me, unexpectedly, when I was walking through the small streets of Athens. And he told me, “I’m really so happy to have CRM in my hands because I now have a small backpack with just my tablet in it. And I used to carry two bags full of paper. And you know what? When I’m home at night, I can really focus my time on my family because I used to spend two hours doing my admin.” So that’s what’s truly delighting.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: That’s fantastic. And that’s really why we put the business process together with reinventing productivity because we see that opportunity not just for the revenue, not just for the cost savings, but also really that personal productivity improvement that we think is really core.
So what’s next? You’re in a bunch of countries already. Lots of people are using it. But where will you go next with this?
GHISLAINE PRINS: If I only would know. And you guys keep on exciting me. Even today I saw some more opportunity, so who knows? I don’t know what I don’t know.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Yeah.
GHISLAINE PRINS: But I’ll keep an eye on that. So, of course, I’ll add new capabilities. But I guess for the next year, year and a half, I need to also remain with the core. I need to increase my capability around planning. I need to really, truly use reporting. I need to make sure that my sales reps are able to take orders. And who knows then? What about the social media? Leveraging Facebook data from the outlets. I think there’s endless opportunities that are yet unexplored.
But it’s about the people. I need to make sure that they use all these opportunities because what I feel now as I go get them truly excited, that they sometimes use only a small piece. So I need to make sure that whatever we offer, it’s truly leveraged. And through internal Heineken communities, as you have indicated earlier, I think that’s where I’ll make the biggest success.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Fantastic. Ghislaine, thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Obviously, hope you can leverage some of the knowledge from the other folks here, too, as well as sharing yours. So thank you very much.
GHISLAINE PRINS: Thank you very much.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Thank you. (Applause.)
I think with adaptive systems, you get the notion of where we’re taking our line-of-business solutions. But we actually see an unmet need with these line-of-business solutions that we’d like to try to fix. We know today that it’s very, very hard for somebody to build employee-facing applications that tap into lots of different data across different organizations. And that’s something we think we can fix.
There’s a huge backlog inside of IT for applications that employees want. Take their phone on the road, they want to be able to fill out an expense report. They want to be able to see their CRM data combined with data from a social network. These things today are very hard to stitch together, and they’re very hard for anybody to do unless you are a developer.
So we’re very excited to introduce today a new product from Microsoft that we’ve never talked about publicly before. It’s called Microsoft PowerApps. And this is an easy-to-use tool for a power user. Somebody who’s very comfortable in Excel, perhaps writing lightweight macros in Excel, we think is the key user of a Microsoft PowerApps tool.
This PowerApps tool allows you to easily create new employee-facing applications that connect to your existing organizational data from different line-of-business systems securely.
We make it incredibly easy for that power user to not just create the PowerApp, but then to share that PowerApp with anybody inside their organization.
So we think there’s the potential for everyone inside a company to be using PowerApps that these power users build.
This is a new cloud-based service called Microsoft PowerApps. We’re introducing it in a preview starting today. You can go to PowerApps.com to submit an email and essentially add yourself to that list. We’ll be letting a few people into this preview. And we couldn’t be more excited about introducing a tool for power users to build simple, quick applications that combine multiple data sets and produce a mobile app that’s incredibly easy to use and incredibly easy to share.
To give you a little bit of a taste for it, I’d like to introduce Nicole Herskowitz from Microsoft, who is a senior director on the team, to give you a demo of PowerApps. Nicole, take it away.
NICOLE HERSKOWITZ: Thanks, Chris. (Applause.)
Well, I’m super excited to show you PowerApps for the first time today. PowerApps makes it easy for you to create, connect and share new business applications that run on any device.
So let’s show you PowerApps in action. Here I am in PowerApps. And there are multiple ways to get started. One way to get started quickly is to start from a template.
PowerApps comes with a gallery of templates that you can take advantage of. And what’s great about these templates is that they were created by learning from our early adopter customers and the types of apps that they actually built.
Right here, you can see the various templates. I can see descriptions of the templates. I can see images of what these templates look like. Each template is also backed with sample data to help you get started quickly.
But more often than not, I need to build an app based on data that I already have. So, for example, before coming to Convergence, I was thinking how great it would be for me to have a list of Microsoft hardware or devices that we have, how much they cost, and any discounts that I could offer to my customers.
So this information is stored in a SharePoint list. But I need this information on the go when I’m connecting with customers at an event. So with that, it turns the power of PowerApps. It allows me to unlock the data in my existing system.
So I want to go right back to PowerApps. And this time, I’m going to select creating an app starting from data. And what you’re going to see on the left-hand side are the data connections available to me.
Now, PowerApps comes with built-in data connections to cloud-based systems like Office 365, Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, in addition to on-premises data systems or data in systems such as SQL databases, Oracle databases, SAP.
And the developers in my organization can also create connections to other business systems. Access to all this data, all these systems can be securely managed by my IT team.
But as I said, let’s go ahead and create this first app from SharePoint. This is the actual SharePoint site that I showed you. And here’s the list in SharePoint. What PowerApps is doing, it’s connecting to that SharePoint list and it’s creating an app that understands my underlying data. It’s going to make intelligent decisions about the default layouts and controls to integrate into my app.
So now you can see the app has been created. But what’s great about this app is not just the app itself, it’s the experience that I have, which is very familiar to me. This is a Microsoft Office experience.
So at the top, you see that ribbon look that includes controls that I can interact with. On the left-hand side of the screen, you can see the various different screens that were created for my app.
And, once again, these app screens that were created were intelligent. They were created based on the data in my system. So PowerApps knew that I had images. So it created a layout that took advantage of images.
But I want to further customize my app. So I want to go right here to see how I can change from a one-image layout to a two-image layout. And with just a couple of clicks now, you can see how I’ve been able to customize my view for my app.
Now, I may also want to change the theme. I prefer red over blue. I actually prefer purple, but PowerApps doesn’t ship with that yet. And then I can go into other screens in my app.
So here I’m going into a detailed product screen for my keyboard. I can see the price, I can see the discount percentage. But this data is static, and I want it to be interactive. When I come to events, I may find a customer that I want to provide a higher discount to because they’re one of our top, top customers.
Well, with PowerApps, I can actually make this data interactive. I can come right here and change that percentage right here. One-click switch to a slider view.
And then the next thing I’ll want to do is add a button so that I can kick off an approval process to my manager, Chris, to see if he’ll approve a higher discount for one of my customers.
So now my app has been created, but I need a workflow beneath it to be able to automate the business process. So here’s a workflow that I previously created. It’s very simple. I made it with just some basic clicks. And what will happen is if I click on that button to send a mail to Chris for a discount approval, he’ll then receive an email. Then he’ll make a decision whether or not to approve or deny that discount request.
If he approves it, I receive an email. Also, a new record is created within Dynamics CRM so I can track it within my opportunities. And on that off-chance that he doesn’t approve it, I get an email as well.
Anyway, let’s go back to my app because I just want to wire it up with that workflow. And once again, this is very easy, it’s just some clicks. So I’m going to find that workflow that I created, and it’s right here, and I’m going to go ahead and be able to add the data from my screen right onto this app.
And right here, you’re going to see on this function bar, just like you’d see in Excel, I’m going to fill out each of these fields with the information from my app. So Chris is the approver. I want to send some information about the discount percentage and about this specific product. And, voila, as Chris would say, the app is ready to go.
Now, this app was designed to work on mobile devices. So now let me switch to my iPhone. Our apps work on any device, so this would also work on Android or Windows Phone.
Here you can see that app up and running. I can drill into any product. And here you can see how much it costs, what discounts I’m able to offer to my customers. But I may want to increase that discount percentage and then request an approval.
An email has now been sent to Chris and he will then respond and let me know whether or not I can offer it to a customer, offer the discount to my customer.
Now, I think this app is great. And I think everyone on my team would value having it while they’re at Convergence. So I want to show you how easy it is for me to share apps that I’ve created in PowerApps.
I’m going to go right here and just click sharing. And sharing an app is as easy as sharing a document. All I need to do is send an email.
So I’m going to find one of my coworkers, Case. I’m going to go ahead and click share. And now Case has access to that application as well.
I’ve been able to show you very quickly how easy it is to create, connect and share new business applications that run on any device. I was able to do this within a matter of minutes without any involvement from IT. Now I feel empowered to create more business apps that work the way I want to work, that’s the power of PowerApps. Thank you. (Applause.)
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Great job. Killed it. (Applause.)
So we’re just super excited about Microsoft PowerApps because we think we’re going to be putting this power in the hands of so many people inside an organization to create applications that can be shared with literally everybody inside the organization.
Now, today I talked a lot about the notion of reinventing productivity and business process. Tomorrow, Scott will talk about building the intelligent cloud. And when you put these ambitions together, we really believe that there isn’t an industry on the planet that won’t be transforming itself using these types