Tequila, Tech, and Turbulent Travels: AI Innovation in the Cloud Ecosystem

Mark Smith: 0:01
Welcome to the Ecosystem Show. We're thrilled to have you with us here. We challenge traditional mindsets and explore innovative approaches to maximizing the value of your software estate. We don't expect you to agree with everything. Challenge us, share your thoughts and let's grow together. Now let's dive in. It's showtime. Okay, we're back for another round. It's post Dynamics Minds we're pumped're back for another round. It's post-Dynamics Minds we're pumped. We've been together, we've shared each other's breath in the last week or so Already.

Andrew Welch : 0:37
We're off the rails already.

Mark Smith: 0:39
Essence, life force. You know all that kind of. We've energized each other, right.

Andrew Welch : 0:44
And, in Mark's case, a lot of tequila.

Mark Smith: 0:47
I had a shot or so, a one or two, and that was all you know. Chris Huntingford's encouragement, or should we say Will Dorrington and AJ's encouragement. But I digress, I'm going to hand to Andrew. I think you're the one that's probably got the lead for today.

Andrew Welch : 1:04
Oh man. Well, so first of all, speaking of dynamic minds, dynamics, minds. I think we need to talk about the episode that we recorded live, which, by the time this recording comes out the one I mentioned will have been out for a week. So we received the final cut of that and Anna had just picked our daughter up from school, from nursery, and I popped the thing open and we start the thing and Alexandra, at first she takes an interest in it, watching YouTube, and I should say does everyone know who Miss Rachel is? We're all parents here. Does everyone know Miss Rachel? So, chris, are your kids like? Did they miss Miss Rachel? They might be a little too old. I do not know what this is, anna. What is Miss Rachel?

Ana Welch : 1:51
Miss Rachel is an institution. Miss Rachel teaches you about life.

Andrew Welch : 1:56
And numbers.

Ana Welch : 1:57
And numbers and shapes and colors and songs, and the more we get together, the happier feel yes, but that's like, but that's bluey.

Chris Huntingford : 2:08
You know, that's exactly what bluey does miss.

Andrew Welch : 2:12
Rachel is different miss rachel is a youtube phenomenon and and anyway, so. So alexandra, our daughter, watches the ecosystem show for about a minute and she's very intense and then, as if she's finally decided, she looks at us and says I want miss rachel, miss rachel, miss rachel. And she just starts very, very, uh enthusiastically demanding this rachel.

Ana Welch : 2:37
So I would say that, uh, the ecosystems show almost as good as miss rachel, but it's not miss rachel or bluey I think that if it gets as good as miss rachel, we'll all be rich, because she's very rich after recording these videos that woman is fabulously wealthy, yeah she's very, very wealthy after recording a few little sing songs and yeah so another one to look at is danny go, that's my kid's go-to.

Mark Smith: 3:07
And this was some dude, I think he was in walmart in america, got laid off with the covid or something like that, recorded a few songs in his garage and in his what they're in his garage in his garage in his garage. Yeah, all right. Just let him be Andrew Elch, sorry sorry, the Queen's English has never flowed all the way to the. You know the ends of the colonies.

Andrew Welch : 3:36
I think it flowed more to New Zealand than it did to America. So I mean you know?

Mark Smith: 3:43
Actually just a digression. Do you know why american butchered english? My the telegraph. Apparently the telegraph surface was why? Because you paid by the character back in the day. That's why characters and stuff and words were changed around to make words shorter and stuff like color, for example, c-o-l-o-u-r. If you know, you know, if you're proper english, we're american right. C-o-l-o-r was it saved money on? Yeah, you're surprised. I can spell two words.

Andrew Welch : 4:09
That's why we have math instead of math.

Ana Welch : 4:11
I'm surprised that they needed to write the word color in a telegram to begin with. Like, what motivation would you have to write the word color in a telegram?

Andrew Welch : 4:25
I think that's homework. That's homework for someone here, beige.

Chris Huntingford : 4:29
We're going to paint the ceiling the color beige. There we go. That feels like that.

Andrew Welch : 4:34
Yes, Actually, there's this great video that Anna sent me yesterday. I was in the city yesterday and it's Alexandra saying I love you, daddy, but she didn't say I love you daddy's. Alexandra saying I love you, daddy, but she didn't say I love you daddy, she said I love you daddy. And it was the first. It was the first evidence that I had that my daughter is going to have a, is going to have an English accent with this video. So back to the point here. Back to the point um reflections on dynamics minds. Or, as I said in a LinkedIn post, dynamics minds is um the Microsoft world's combination of burning man and Davos. But uh, where did uh, where did you guys land with it? How was it Epic? Oh, I loved it.

Chris Huntingford : 5:19
I thought, I took, I took, I took leave for that conference, man, because I don't think you can do that conference with any other distractions, because, holy shit, there are so many distractions there already. Like, it's just some of the stuff.

Ana Welch : 5:34
You did well, like you were smart. You were very smart, and Mike was actually telling me that he also doesn't take like work calls and stuff during a conference, like that, yeah, I did a lot of work calls and, yeah, next year no work calls.

Chris Huntingford : 5:51
Especially at Dynamics Minds. I think, sure, like EPP, yes, fine, but not Dynamics Minds, and I just think that there's so much to see and do there. And the other thing that was really good, right, like the first one.

Ana Welch : 6:04
So many smart people.

Chris Huntingford : 6:06
Yeah, the first one we didn't really adventure out, Like we didn't really quest. The second one, we quested. Like you know, there was a lot of questing happening. Yeah, there was questing. There was lobster as well, which was weird, but it was great.

Andrew Welch : 6:18
Chris befriended a lobster shortly before its demise yeah, shortly before its demise yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 6:24
Cyril, I thought it was a fantastic conference.

Chris Huntingford : 6:26
The content was great. It was also cool to spend more time with you guys, because last year I felt like I just floated around a bit, but this time I actually hung out with people that I really wanted to hang out with, which was cool.

Andrew Welch : 6:39
You know, there is this kind of and this might be a little kind of Microsoft community inside talk, but one of the things that I've noticed over the last couple of years, again in Microsoft world right, so Microsoft is a huge corporation and there are hundreds of thousands of people more so, I'm sure around the world that specialize in the technology itself right, but it's actually a pretty small community.

Andrew Welch : 7:07
But when you get sort of on the ground at one of these events, it is easy to feel very overstimulated by all of the people that you can talk to and that you can have a drink with and you can share ideas with. But one of the things that I found over the last couple of years I would say kind of since we came out of COVID, is that I have a circle of friends and I look forward to spending quality time with fewer people who I've sort of chosen to have be part of my life, and that's, I think, a big, that's been a big change for me when it comes to these big tech events since we came out of COVID.

Mark Smith: 7:42
Yeah, I liked the Burning man meets Davos, just brilliant. I was speaking to Anna and I'm going to sorry Anna, make a mistake of your last name but Gugli Gojavec, who is? She's the lady that invented the whole thing, right? Yeah, she said to her husband who we met on the first day there here's my idea and of course, the rest they say, is history. And you know, what I loved in one of the comments we had backwards and forwards was she said we want to put on a highly professional conference, but with a festival feel. You set an intention like that. Don't you create a totally different event, right, rather than I'm just wanting to put on a conference, but just that spin with a festival feel. And I think they really achieved that. I mean, each night party night. Anna, I know that you're going to have to have a hotel back from the main hotel next year because of the, the noise late into the night I feel, like I'm old, I'm still, I'm still tired.

Ana Welch : 8:45
Like the party was on until like 2 am and throughout the day and like then the the, because they had likea professional band every day and professional bands like rehearsed before the event and then they had a very non-professional band you did, did very well, andrew. The biggest karaoke night that you've ever seen that was really cool.

Mark Smith: 9:07
Yeah, it was cool, man, and kudos to you, man, getting up and going hard with your Sweet Home, alabama song.

Andrew Welch : 9:14
It was American Pie, but not very. I meant that, I meant that.

Ana Welch : 9:18
It was the best American one that came to me Quite literally the same thing, wasn't it?

Mark Smith: 9:25
Bye, bye, bye, miss American Pie, but in the key of Madonna.

Andrew Welch : 9:29
Yes. So I thought I was about to karaoke the original Don McLean version and as I'm climbing up on the stage, someone pulls me aside and says by the way, the only version we have is the Madonna version. So off you go, and there I am on stage in front of a thousand people singing a song in a version that I had never heard before and that is about half as slow as the original and where madonna chopped out half the words, because you can't have a successful seven minute song nowadays. So, um, anyway it was.

Mark Smith: 10:01
it was quite an experience very good, very good, um, absolutely. I will go back next year if, if invited, probably, if not invited, so anyway, it was quite an experience. Very good, very good, absolutely. I will go back next year if invited. Probably, if not invited, I would still go back, even though it was a. My flight home was 24 hours in a tin can a lot of that sitting on the tarmac at one location.

Chris Huntingford : 10:20
Ryanair.

Mark Smith: 10:22
I just want to throw it out there.

Andrew Welch : 10:23
Yeah, the ecosystem show has come out strong in our opposition to Ryanair as an institution.

Mark Smith: 10:30
Yes, yes, I think we're just joining the rest of the world in that respect, though.

Andrew Welch : 10:34
Yeah, it's not newsmaking.

Mark Smith: 10:36
But yeah, I would definitely go back. It was such an epic event. But absolutely the highlight was hanging out with you guys, without a doubt, because that was the first time I was back in Europe in what six years, since pre-COVID and it was just epic. Hanging out with you guys eating lobster. I shot the lobster and shenanigans.

Andrew Welch : 10:57
It was excellent, hey, speaking of tin cans and tin cans in the air from a very different perspective. But Anna and I have recently gotten into this amazing show on Apple TV plus that you have to watch. It's called masters of the air. It is mind blowing in its depiction of the um, of the, the multi-year battle in the skies over Europe in 1943, 1944. And it is so artfully done, and I will admit that the episode we watched most recently made me cry. But it's, it's, it's, it's an, it's an absolute work of art and I highly recommend you watch it.

Mark Smith: 11:38
Oh, check it out, I'll check it out.

Andrew Welch : 11:39
So onto, onto the tech. Now we're onto well. So we had at Dynamics Minds we did a panel, the five of us, and in characteristic fashion we spent half the panel sort of bullshitting with one another and with the audience, and then we spent half the panel. What Rambling Say rambling, yeah, rambling.

Ana Welch : 12:02
The man doesn't have to cut you out. Okay, we need to't have to cut you out?

Andrew Welch : 12:05
Okay, we need to be kind to our editor, but yeah, so, chris, I think we have some questions that went unanswered in the panel that we need to. We want to pick up with, yeah, some questions.

Chris Huntingford : 12:17
Yes, some questions, some questions, some questions. Yes, we do. So I'm going to ask you a couple of things. There were some folks that came up afterwards and they're like so there was one particular question which is not oh, it's very specific. So we're not going to start with that, right? We're going to start with something that we can create a discussion around. Then we'll get to that one. We're going to have a warm-up question here. Yeah, yeah, warm-up question is okay. This is something we didn't answer, but we alluded to anyway. How important is, or will be, co-pilots in the cloud ecosystem?

Andrew Welch : 12:55
Hmm, who wants to take that you ecosystem? Who wants to take that you Me. I thought I was the moderator today.

Mark Smith: 13:02
No, Chris is the moderator.

Chris Huntingford : 13:03
Can we just ask you the question, Joe?

Andrew Welch : 13:06
Oh, I didn't realize you were asking me. I mean, I have opinions. I was just trying to be polite and kind.

Chris Huntingford : 13:10
Okay, I'll tell you what. Let me warm you up, right? Okay, I think that it's not going to be. It's not really a question of how important it is going to be. It's going to happen, right, like so, this is not how important is it. It's going to happen whether you like it or not, okay, so let's figure out, not how important is it, but how important actually is it that you work now to start thinking about adopting it?

Andrew Welch : 13:38
How important actually is it that you work now to start thinking about adopting it? Yeah, and I think that. So one of the things that I think that has bewildered me about the co-pilot discussion over the last year or so has been this idea that co-pilot is a discrete thing, right? I remember at one point when Anna was still at Microsoft and Anna keep me honest on this when you were still at Microsoft, you had a colleague who was sort of assigned the portfolio right to work with partners on the copilot, and to me that even underscored Microsoft, or at least folks in the field.

Andrew Welch : 14:13
Lack of understanding about what copilot is there isn't one copilot, right. Understanding about what Copilot is there isn't one Copilot, right. Copilot is a thing, is a thread that is pulled through many, many different Microsoft products, right? So you can't have the specialist in the Copilot because there's GitHub Copilot and there's Power Apps Copilot and there's M365 Copilot and Fabric Copilot. And I believe in my last conversation with Donna, which happened a week ago, donna Sarkar, it was that there are 101 co-pilots as of now, including a loop co-pilot. It turns out it's okay. It's okay, yeah, I mean fine.

Ana Welch : 14:52
So my colleague Dan I was just returning from mat leave and he was assigned the co pilot. The co-pilot like back then. He was like I feel like this is very naive and he was like he's a very diplomatic person and like the just the nicest guy you've ever seen.

Andrew Welch : 15:13
We're talking about Marco here, by the way, for for reference and Marco borrow, so he's like friends.

Ana Welch : 15:20
here at Microsoft, there were 47 co-pilots. Which do you want me to take on, because I see that I also have a target on Power Apps. So what do you want me to do more specifically? But no one knew. So, yeah, it was very interesting.

Andrew Welch : 15:41
But I think the point here of and I love that story because it drives home that co-pilot or something like co-pilot that co-pilot is our current incarnation of how many many people are interacting with AI inside of a cloud ecosystem. So Copilot or a Copilot-like thing is, I think, really just going to become part of the air. Right, we don't even show Copilot on the reference ecosystem because Copilot is embedded in so many, many, many things. So, yes, you know, yes, I think there's a, there's an adoption of Copilot and teaching people how to use Copilot and making the most of that investment. But I also think that Copilot is, is, it's already a lot like air and it is only going to become more so.

Ana Welch : 16:31
I think there it's. It's a problem of adoption, as it was telling people to adopt fields and forms. It's like they didn't have a choice right. If they wanted to create anything, they had to use fields and forms. Copilot is exactly the same how do we do, chris?

Mark Smith: 16:49
I. I think one other thing is that, rather than air, it's like electricity. We don't think about how we can use electricity or not. It's like I plug in, I charge my devices. It's ubiquitous to everything we do, and I think that ai to say you know there's a hundred and something, sorry, co-pilots, right? It's just like do we count how many people there are in the world? For you know, it's like it's going to be everything and especially when you go to agents, right, agents are going to amplify that there's going to be. If you want millions of co-pilots, as you would expect, if there's a co-pilot per person, what that means, what? Eight billion co-pilots will probably end up being available yep, I think.

Chris Huntingford : 17:31
No, I think you're right. All right. Next question okay, so so that's a wrap. Uh, so yes, there was one question in the panel that just said hmm, and it's definitely after something. Mark said right, so we'll see I know that for sure.

Andrew Welch : 17:51
Well, since we don't know what it was that Mark said, should we talk about the infamous LinkedIn post?

Chris Huntingford : 17:57
Should we give that some time.

Chris Huntingford : 17:58
No no, no, no, no, no. That's it, yeah, that absolutely actually no, no, okay, no. So the next one is I like this one and I think, actually let's talk. I think, anna, actually you'll be a good one to kick off with this, right. It's like how do you define the boundaries of an ecosystem? Is it as simple as Microsoft versus non-Microsoft, or do client requirements set the limits? So kind of, while you think the way that I'd seen this happen and this happens a lot is that people perceive a digital ecosystem to be like it's vendor-specific or it's like is it a Salesforce thing? And I loved your ecosystem design diagram. So I'm going to leave it there and let you hit this nail on the head.

Ana Welch : 18:42
I think that ecosystems are different and they mold exactly on our customers' needs and desires and current reality. I think you can create an ecosystem out of everything. The Microsoft ecosystem, or the cloud ecosystem as we call it right now, doesn't really stop at Microsoft. In fact, oftentimes in our diagrams we start with SAP or Workday or whatever our customers have start with, like SAP or Workday or whatever our customers have. An ecosystem is a way to nurture, to breathe life into our customers' needs and to make it all happen without really being too strict in our technology choices. I think open-mindedness is a technology ecosystem unless you don't perceive that as being too wacky, but it's just the way I feel ecosystem architecture should be. Because we have so many technology options, we have the luxury of choosing that for our customers.

Andrew Welch : 20:00
I will add to that that I think you can certainly build a thriving cloud ecosystem without you can build a thriving cloud ecosystem and have it not be Microsoft centric. Now, the expertise of the people on the you know, of all of us who host this podcast, and probably the expertise of most of the people who listen is very Microsoft centric. What I will say, though, is that Microsoft is the only one of the technology vendors that is going to provide an option for almost everything that you would want to put into your ecosystem, right, everything that you would want to put into your ecosystem, right. So the most obvious way to think about this is that you could go with AWS for your cloud infrastructure or for your data platform to some extent, but Amazon does not have a productivity or a modern work suite. In fact, I believe Amazon might be Microsoft's largest Microsoft 365 customer on the planet.

Andrew Welch : 20:56
I read that maybe a year ago, so they're right up there. You could use a combination of Salesforce and Workday and SAP for your core business systems, but those providers don't have a cloud infrastructure offering. You can use Google for your productivity, and Google likes to think that they have a cloud, a cloud infrastructure offering, but so I think that you know. When we talk about ecosystem architecture, yes, you can absolutely piece a cloud ecosystem together from across many different vendors, but you're not going to find another vendor that is able to source all of the components the way that Microsoft can.

Chris Huntingford : 21:35
Good, Mark any thoughts?

Mark Smith: 21:37
No, no, I see we're running out of time and I just don't want to add something to everything.

Chris Huntingford : 21:42
Okay, so the one and Mark, this one's for you, actually, because I've been saving this one for you, and, andrew, I know you wrote something on this, so we'll end with you. Okay, mark, what do we need to do to be ready for AI? Now, the one thing that I've started to realize with this whole process is that AI can't just be co-pilot. There has to be a bunch of things that live in there, and the other thing is that it can't just be. We need technical guardrails, there's a culture shift and a whole bunch of things that have to happen. So do you have any thoughts Like there's a culture shift and a whole bunch of things that have to happen.

Mark Smith: 22:18
So do you have any thoughts? So a couple of things. And it's something I've been working on with my wife, meg, which is, I think, everybody's digital literacy, and therefore AI literacy, needs to come up at least 30 percent. Everybody, no matter what role, it doesn't matter if you're a hairdresser, a cleaner, it doesn't matter if you're an executive for a Fortune 100 company and not in a CTO or CIO role your understanding, your use, personal use, needs to come up at least 30%, and so I always suggest five prompts a day, no matter what, five days a week you should do a minimum of five prompts a day, whether it's with image creation, whether it's text to anything type creation, whether it's multimodal, etc. But a minimum of five today. Five a day, I think, will get you into the frame of not asking questions but having a conversation with ai and notice the nuances of that and how, just like in any conversation, how you ask questions changes the outcome and how you converse backwards and forwards and realize, ah, you didn't quite get what I meant, so I converse again. So I think everybody needs to be it's on everybody to learn this because it's going to be so, so, so important. I think it's already so important, but that's because we're in technology.

Mark Smith: 23:43
But I think for people not even in technology, there's going to be this need to not just self-educate but by doing, but as an, it's a real practical thing. You need to engage with AI, so your level of comfort and kind of like you know just how you, when you sign something, you know you have your signature. You don't think about the cursive that you put on the words or the shape of them. If you've been signing all your life, it comes second nature. You kind of got to get to that point, I feel, with with being able to engage with ai. And yeah, by the way, I don't use Copilot as my main tool. I actually use ChatGPT and I have flirted with many other tools. Like, I have a full subscription to Perplexity. I have a subscription to the image generation one, what's it called MidJourney? But interesting, I'm about to cancel both my Perplexity and MidJourney tools because I find now that OpenAI's ChatGPT achieves all of those combined, and so I'm actually going to remove those subscriptions and just stay with my pro subscription of ChatGPT.

Andrew Welch : 24:52
That's wild, that's wild. I'm really interested in that, mark, and that's maybe a different conversation for another time, right? Because when I've been mostly a co-pilot user and my rationale at the time this was a year ago maybe my rationale at the time was that, listen, I am with the exception of my MacBook that I carry around religiously I am all in on Microsoft technology.

Mark Smith: 25:22
Totally.

Andrew Welch : 25:23
So I'm going to use the thing that I think is most likely to integrate with the other things that I use, but I do have a perception that there is more to be discovered if I spent more time with ChatGPT versus Copilot, so I'd love to compare them better copilot, so I'd love to compare them better.

Mark Smith: 25:46
It's the what I. I suppose my only aversion to copilot is that being that Microsoft owns it. There's a certain level of risk aversion that they have to apply, and therefore there is too much of. Rather than the answers being truthful, they are truthful in the context of sanitization of the truth in many situations.

Andrew Welch : 26:06
So so you're saying chat gpt is edgier, right, it's gonna, it's yeah it doesn't, it doesn't.

Mark Smith: 26:12
So you know, I'll give you an example in hospital with my wife, medical condition um, if you ask for medical advice, it's straight out hard gonna move away away. Like I can't give you advice, go see a medical practitioner. You ask a legal thing. Oh, I can't give you legal advice. Go ask when. If you say, listen, if I gave you this hypothetical situation, imagine somebody is this age, blah, blah, blah. And then it's going to. It will give you, oh, and like for that example, I said I'm already at the hospital. And like, for that example, I said I'm already at the hospital, I'm with doctors, et cetera. But if I gave you all the facts, what do you think the situation could be?

Mark Smith: 26:47
And what blew me away was I realized how much AI is going to support doctors going forward and people in the medical industry, because they're so stressed out, they're dealing with so much and they see someone present with symptoms. They're only dealing with what's on their peripheral or radar. Right now, what AI does is looks at all your blind spots, which is what I love, and so in this case it was a stomach condition. It came back with five other things than what the doctor mentioned, because the doctor was already two hours over their shift. They were stressed, they didn't have time to read all the notes, so they just did a skim of it and make a call and I'm like man, ai is going to so stop a lot of things being misdiagnosed, I feel. So still having the whole co-pilot, right the doctor in the loop, but, yeah, changing the game.

Ana Welch : 28:08
I use chat GPT more simply because I feel like it knew me better, quicker, if that makes sense, like it knows my style. So, and it got to know me quicker for for things exactly like you're saying, or for buying something, or for scheduling things, or in general in my day-to-day life. And I think it's really, really funny because Andrew pays for it, I'm using his credit card.

Andrew Welch : 28:38
I mean we have joint finances.

Ana Welch : 28:41
We are in fact married, it's true, but it's still funny. I'm not hard enough about it.

Andrew Welch : 28:45
I'm not hard enough about it.

Chris Huntingford : 28:48
Okay, I think there's one more question I want to ask to kind of wrap this. Okay, and this is important, right, like this is something that I really wish we had seen in the session, and this may be we have to pass on some of it to the next session, right, but I love this question. I have been working in ERP for too long. Where is the best place to start with tooling and techniques needed to build an ecosystem? You guys talk about it, but I need to build one. So anyone want to take that one? Because I can categorically tell you there is nothing labeled ecosystem enablement. That's freeware on the planet, on the internet, anywhere. We came up with the concept, right, so you're not going to find it there, and the next thing is you will find pieces that are close to it, but it's never going to be the full picture. So do you guys want to maybe share some of the places where you go to get bits of information that form our practice?

Mark Smith: 29:44
so, before we go there I've, one of the discussions that I've had is perhaps we need and with with Andrew, to actually put a formal course together, especially off what happened in dynamics minds, where I think you've got a five out of five evaluation of 15 people that went through. I can highly condensed three hour version, which shows just the value that it creates, but I think I've always believed where you're only going to engage a mass audience. If you go to a distribution platform, right, you need to go to something like a, an online digital training course, and there might be some complementary live pieces with that um. But I think we're going to have to corsarsify what Andrew and Anna have established or built out here and, as all our ideas come together, put it into a highly consumable format.

Andrew Welch : 30:38
Yeah, so on that we did at Dynamics Minds, we did the three-hour pre-day workshop, like Mark said, and Anna and I taught that together and, by the way, I was Anna, I think also we were we were blown away. There were 18 people in the class. It was by far the, I think, the most registered for of all of the pre-day workshops. We had eight. Eight people submitted, submitted feedback and all eight of them submitted five out of five.

Andrew Welch : 31:10
So listen, I I was personally quite nervous about it because we'd never actually taught this in course form. We had way too much content for three hours. Credit to Anna, I think, for some of the style of the content. So anyway, I thought that it went very well and we have an outline actually where I'm looking for this, the. So, right at the outline as it stands now, we would have taught one of the five blocks that we need to prioritize, probably after we get through the Microsoft year, which ends at the end of this month, that we need to prioritize turning this into a course that can be consumed online, virtually, and also, you know, we could go do as a full blown course in person. But yeah, this needs to become a priority.

Ana Welch : 32:09

What I'd like to add to that was the fact that most of the people in that course did in fact, come from ERP backgrounds or business central backgrounds. So they were like very open-minded and they really, really wanted to know how to do ecosystem architecture. And then it was not the most signed up, for course. There were more like to appoint courses, such as lisa crosby's course, and you know where you actually learn, you know something that you can adopt immediately.

Ana Welch : 32:48
This is strategy, and it's really really hard to put it into practice back home, especially after just three hours. So the way we structured it was in a few handy tools, let's just say that you can just use in your day-to-day life life. And the last thing that I would like to say is that this is a very scary area to go into, and within our course we only had one lady and I thought that we were over that now. I thought that everyone is more or less, you know, diverse, and we talk about all sorts of diversity within the Microsoft community, but when it comes to stuff that you actually have to do, it did feel to me that we still need to work hard in order to achieve that diversity of thought.

Mark Smith: 33:48
So important.

Chris Huntingford : 33:48
Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

Mark Smith: 33:53
So if you just want to get up to speed right now with what is out there Cloud Lighthouse, go there. There's a ton of white papers. There's a ton of essays. There's a ton of resources already there. Go check them out, Read them. Spend the time. There's a lot of gold there before the course is built out.

Chris Huntingford : 34:12
That's it.

Ana Welch : 34:13
Yeah, definitely.

Chris Huntingford : 34:14
Wonderful. So I'm looking at time. We've got a couple more that we can hit on the next one.

Andrew Welch : 34:19
Yeah, let's do that Perfect.

Chris Huntingford : 34:20
I definitely think that those were good responses. The one thing that I'm just hoping that we can all start thinking about is that when we're talking about ecosystem architecture that is a piece of the enablement program Okay, so that is a piece of it there are still people, there's still process we need to think about and how these all snap together. So it's important to get the architecture right up front, but there's still a whole other layer to this set of layers that we all need to think about, right? So, again, we can probably tap into that on one of the next podcasts.

Mark Smith: 34:51
Nice yeah.

Chris Huntingford : 34:52
Yeah, man, it feels weird doing this without margaritas.

Mark Smith: 34:56
Yeah.

Ana Welch : 34:59
Oh it's been a long week.

Mark Smith: 35:02
Anything else we're covering today before we wrap.

Chris Huntingford : 35:04
That's it. I think we're good, awesome, cool, all right, well, folks, thank you very much.

Mark Smith: 35:11
It's been great and we'd be keen to hear your feedback. So like, don't be shy. What we don't want is people just to agree with us. We want people to have diverse opinions, different perspectives, so feel free to engage, particularly on the LinkedIn posts that we do with. These is often a good place to comment. We're all reachable on LinkedIn. You can private message us if you want to. We don't want it in the public domain.

Andrew Welch : 35:41
Not if you are a recruiter or a staffing firm, though you may not private message me if you are a staffing firm, to be clear.

Mark Smith: 35:50
I love it. I love it Alrighty.

Andrew Welch : 35:53
Thanks everyone, Thanks you may not private, message me if you are a staffing firm, to be clear. I love it. I love it Alrighty. Thanks everyone.

Mark Smith: 35:57
Thanks everyone. Bye guys, See you later. Thanks for tuning into the Ecosystem Show. We hope you found today's discussion insightful and thought-provoking, and maybe you had a laugh or two. Remember your feedback and challenges help us all grow, so don't hesitate to share your perspective. Stay connected with us for more innovative ideas and strategies to enhance your software estate. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries and creating value. See you on the next episode.