June’s live Cloud Wars Expo event featured dozens of industry leaders allowing the Acceleration Economy team access to the inner workings of the greatest growth market the world has ever known. In this News Desk interview, which was recorded live on-site at Cloud Wars Expo, Principal Analyst Aaron Back welcomes Matt Hughes, the U.S. High-Tech Industry Leader for Microsoft, to discuss the Metaverse, cybersecurity, and the Microsoft Power Platform.
Highlights
00:15 — Aaron introduces Matt Hughes from Microsoft. Hughes expands on his prior experience at Cisco and Adobe, including playing a major role in the Adobe-Microsoft partnership as Adobe’s VP of sales.
02:41 — Microsoft has developed an internal community of 1,000-plus experts who understand the industry-specific challenges of their high-tech customers.
04:00 —Every role and every industry is impacted by data. “Where do I make sense of data?” is the question everyone needs to be answered. Microsoft is in a unique position to make data actionable.
06:20 — Data is most powerful when it’s made available outside of traditional silos. High-Tech is the “center of excellence,” which informs all other industry clouds.
08:25 — Hughes explains why more mature enterprises are actually less compliant with security measures than startups born in the cloud. Under zero trust, hacking events are inevitable.
09:29 — Hacks are a $10-trillion problem that cloud vendors are trying to solve.
11:48 — The vision for the Metaverse is nearly 30 years old. It is real, but still undefined. Virtual experiences and Metaverse use cases are expanding the interaction introduced by Web 2.
14:00 — Hughes suggests that Microsoft will define its role in the Metaverse “mostly by what we don’t do.”
15:28 — Immersive virtual training, customer experiences, and employee experiences are all primary use cases for Metaverse applications.
17:42 — Hughes details the changing functions of Microsoft Power Platform and plans to collaborate with the ideas coming from the developer community.
Want to see more from Cloud Wars Expo? On-demand video from the event is available now, with more than 40 hours of cloud education content featuring 100-plus speakers. All content is free to Acceleration Economy subscribers with an on-demand pass.
