Malek Khazen, Principal Architect at Microsoft

In this Sage Spotlight, we sit down with Malek Khazen, Principal AI and IT Architect at Microsoft. Malek delves into his multifaceted role, which spans data analytics, AI, large language models, generative AI, governance, and security. He shares his experience with Sagetap, highlighting how it streamlines the discovery and evaluation process of new vendors, making it a critical tool in his arsenal for staying ahead in the fast-evolving tech landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Malek's Role at Microsoft: His responsibilities encompass a wide range of areas, including data analytics, AI, large language models, generative AI, governance, and security.
• Discovering New Vendors: Malek emphasizes the efficiency of Sagetap in discovering new vendors, saving him a significant amount of time by providing a consolidated view of emerging solutions and major players in his areas of interest.
• Strategic Vendor Evaluation: Through Sagetap, Malek can quickly identify potential vendors for internal use or partnership opportunities at Microsoft, facilitating a strategic approach to vendor evaluation and selection.
• Impactful Solutions: Malek shares insights on utilizing Sagetap to find solutions that address performance issues with SQL, Oracle, and other databases by introducing more powerful storage solutions to handle the ever-increasing data volumes and database sizes.
• Efficiency and Productivity Boost: Sagetap's platform has been instrumental for Malek in making informed decisions efficiently, allowing him to focus on adopting technologies that offer the most significant impact for Microsoft's infrastructure and partnerships.
• Vendor Highlight: Malek notes the effectiveness of Lightbits Labs, discovered through Sagetap, that has helped enhance Microsoft's database storage capabilities.

Full Transcript

 Malek Khazen: I am a Principal Data, AI, and IOT Solutions Architect at Microsoft.  I focus on multiple workloads such as data, analytics, AI, large language models, generative AI, governance, and security. So this is really at a high level.

Sahil Khanna: So a lot of different areas under your purview, probably looking at a lot of vendors constantly to adopt and evaluate, right? So how do you typically go about discovering new vendors at your organization?

Malek: So first of all, I love Sagetap because the platform is so easy to understand. You have so much visibility on new solutions. Whenever I join in and I log into my profile, I see so many new vendors that I'm not aware of.

It saves a tremendous amount of time because instead of me going to learn who's the new vendors in this area, I just log into my profile and see who is focused on this area. I can see who are the major players today, and then it's very easy for me to identify the competitors of these vendors and to classify these vendors as big differentiators or not.

And secondly, it has a great impact because some of the vendors, we can create partnerships, and some other vendors, we can onboard them in our corporate solutions.

Sahil: Got it. So you're using Sagetap to see both who can you use internally at Microsoft or partner with?

Malek: Yes.

Sahil: So you've taken quite a bit of meetings. Are there any vendors that come to mind that were particularly interesting or exciting for you in the work that you're doing?

Malek: Yes, of course. Lightbits because when you have performance issues with SQL or with Oracle or with databases, it allows you to increase our database speed because we know that data is exploding today and databases are becoming much larger and larger. So you need to have much more powerful storage. And this is what Lightbits does. Much more powerful storage that can deal with this financial amount of data that we need in this. And I see them also an amazing partner to us.