Podcasts about alysa taylor

Tune in for a replay of The Six Five Summit's #SaaS #Enterprise #Software Spotlight Keynote with Alysa Taylor, CVP, Industry, Apps, and Data Marketing, Microsoft. The world has changed in every industry. Discover how transformational forces like the push for sustainability, the challenges of our global supply chain, and the rise of the attention economy are requiring organizations to adopt new solutions and remain agile, to thrive in the face of constant change. In this session, Alysa is live discussing five trends reshaping the world – and how agility is key to helping organizations respond. The Six Five Summit is a 100% virtual, on-demand event designed to help you stay on top of the latest developments and trends in digital transformation brought to you by Futurum Research and Moor Insights & Strategy. With 12 tracks and over 70 pre-recorded video sessions, The Six Five Summit showcases an exciting lineup of leading technology experts whose insights will help prepare you for what's now and what's next in digital transformation as you continue to scale and pivot for the future. You will hear cutting-edge insights on business agility, technology-powered transformation, thoughts on strategies to ensure business continuity and resilience, along with what's ahead for the future of the workplace. More about The Six Five Summit: https://thesixfivesummit.com/

Alysa Taylor is Corporate Vice President for Microsoft's Industry, Apps, and Data Marketing team. Leading three teams at Microsoft directly empowering global customers and partners: the Business Applications product marketing organization, the Data & AI product marketing organization, and the Industry marketing organization.

If you want to learn how this forward-leaning leader is driving the future of work then you won't want to miss listening to this amazing interview. I have been fortunate to know this guest since early in her career and I am absolutely stoked to welcome her for this frank and inspiring discussion. My guest for this episode of the podcast is Brea Starmer who joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering for a far-reaching, big, and bold interview focused on how one leader inspires others to achieve what we all thought was just potential. Brea Starmer is the Founder of Lions + Tigers, a courage brand driving workforce innovation and building bridges to the future of work. Microsoft, Google, and other tech-industry organizations call on her team to transform how they work in two ways: by helping leaders change organizations from the inside to build a culture of inclusion, and by enabling part-time and flexible work for high-impact consultants to ensure everyone is operating in their highest and best use. Lions + Tigers won the prestigious Microsoft “Diverse-Owned Supplier of the Year” award in 2021, recognizing their work for workplace inclusion. Brea centers underrepresented communities in her work which is why Lions + Tigers employs 75% women, 70% parents, and dedicates 30% of their billable hours to the BIPOC community. By offering a flexible way of work untethered from traditional full-time employment models, Brea empowers her team of nearly 100 consultants to measure success in impact over hours. Brea believes in “parenting out loud” and often invites her three kids under six to join her work meetings and invites her community to show up authentically without fear. Brea's work has been featured on King5, by Geekwire naming her “Geek of the Week” and recognizing Lions + Tigers as a finalist for Workplace of the Year in 2021, as well as features in Seattle Business Magazine, and the Puget Sound Business Journal as a female leader and as a “Best Place to Work”. An alum of Washington State University and the 8th female student body president, Brea currently sits on the Marketing Advisory Board at the Carson College of Business.   She is a writer and speaker on the topics of flexibility, working parenthood, and the human side of workforce innovation.  In this episode, you will learn how this woman founder applied courage and grit to a dark moment in her career to propel her path forward and shape her destiny. Now she is shaping the future of work and helping leading technology organizations define their future state of work during this time of change and transformation.  What you'll learn in this episode: What is the future of work.How organizations need to think differently about culture.OKRs and how her organization uses them to frame and organize their work.Here driving force - how she propelled her career and shaped this amazingly innovative organization. I hope you are as enlightened and inspired as I was in this interview with Brea Starmer. Other Amazing and Related Episodes That Might Interest and Inspire You. Melissa Mulholland's most recent https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/episode/110-one-bold-ceos-passion-for-technology-partners-and-future-focused-leadership/Gavriella Schuster's most recent https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/episode/79-passionate-leadership-focus-and-commitment-to-make-the-invisible-visible/Alysa Taylor https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/episode/88-agility-and-customer-centricity-driving-forces-for-success-in-2021/Miri Rodriguez https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/episode/optimize-for-success-2021-put-storytelling-at-the-core-of-your-marketing-focus/Chaitra Vendullapalli https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/episode/84-optimize-for-success-in-2021-a-focus-on-a-purpose-driven-and-inclusive-mindset/Lani Phillips https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/episode/65-an-authentic-conversation-from-co-selling-to-the-impact-of-social-injustice/ Links & Resources

The Big Themes:Extremely unique in the industry: It's not just about verticalizing one aspect of the cloud service – it's bringing verticalization across the cloud services in a unified and seamless way.Tech intensity: That is about having the tools at hand to build a strong digital foundation, to allow you to be resilient and future-proof.The digital factory of the future: How do you have a rapid response for the supply chain – bringing together Azure HoloLens, as well as Dynamics 365.The end game: What you want to provide for your customers, and then what are the set of processes that you need to develop for that outcome. The Big Quotes:“This is a multi-year strategy, because we've heard from our customers that they need us to be a digital transformation partner and to help them continue to rapidly evolve and be future-proofed.” This episode is brought to you by BMC Software. 

James Phillips, the head of engineering for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, that we all either use, or make a living on, recently tweeted "The name changes will continue until morale improves". It was a joke people!!! Relax My inbox blew up with people asking me what "morale" issue James was referring to. Jimbo was paraphrasing an old quote that I used for the title of this post. In fact, Jimmy is not even responsible for naming as far as I know,  that merry-go-round is operated by Alysa Taylor's team. I think JP was acknowledging the angst of name changes in a humorous way. So.... relax... morale is fine. But for some, there are legitimate concerns with certain motions other than naming. ISVs on Edge Despite James' public insistence that Microsoft wants to be a platform company, his product engineering teams are continuing to crawl up-the-stack. It was not that long ago, that the position expressed by Microsoft was, we will never go vertical, that is for our partners and ISVs. It feels to me like the recently launched "Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare" is pretty darn vertical. I also assume this is the first of more "Industry Clouds" to come. Microsoft's message to ISVs? "There's plenty of opportunity for ISVs here".  I'm not convinced yet. Keeping up with the Jones' This is most likely a Microsoft reaction to similar motions by Salesforce. I do understand the competitive forces in the marketplace, and reacting to them is necessary. But one of the reasons I moved from a Salesforce Consultant to become a Microsoft Partner 10 years ago, was the "Partner First' ecosystem. "Partner First', or 'Partner Led" have never been part of SFDC's lexicon. At the moment, I am struggling to reconcile Satya's words with some of these motions. You will eat it, and you will like it Historically, Microsoft provided the platform, and some relatively generic applications, that were then extended by SIs and ISVs to meet the specific requirements of verticals, including healthcare. It has been the meat of a business application partner's business. It feels to me that these Industry Clouds scrape much of the meat off partners' plates, and onto Microsoft's. It feels like we are left with mostly vegetables... and I never liked vegetables. Get on, or get out of the way None of us can say that Microsoft has not been crystal clear in their guidance to Partners and ISVs in the last few years: Get Vertical! Seeing the huge vertical opportunity, maybe Microsoft just got tired of waiting for us all to come around. So "Partner Led" becomes "Partners Follow", I can't say that I blame them, I'm not a particularly patient person either. Looking at a vast unmet opportunity, and sitting on your hands waiting for partners to see and act on it, would probably drive me to eventually elbow past the stagnant herd also. Seeds were planted I hate to say "I told you so"... but I did. I saw this coming with the initial launch of the first "Industry Accelerators", free data models with "example apps". Again, not enough of us bought into the accelerators, so "Industry Clouds" built by Microsoft on top of them, was an obvious next step. "Example Apps" evolved into finished, supported and SKUed applications from Microsoft. Impact on ISVs and SIs? It's too early to tell what the impact will be from these motions. Clearly if you had built extensive healthcare IP, there will be an impact, you may even find yourself competing with Microsoft in some cases. If you were thinking about building IP for Healthcare, you may have to focus on the vegetables now. For SIs, what you may have charged historically to build out a healthcare solution, will likely be less for extending a pre-built "Industry Cloud" solution. Who wins! This motion will be a win for the customers of course, by potentially lowering development costs, and having more direct support from Microsoft for Microsoft-built stuff. But I really feel that Microsoft will be the biggest winner. I have written before that Partners are simultaneously Microsoft's biggest asset, and biggest liability. While opening every partner presentation with the obligatory "Thank You Partners!" slide, there have been distinct moves to reduce their dependency on partners from Microsoft's first stepping into the cloud. "Citizen Developers" for one obvious example. I'll conclude this post by saying that, no business model is immune from disruption, and that includes Partners.

I recently wrote a post with suggestions for Toby Bowers, the new Leader of the Microsoft ISV Program. I assumed he had read it, but just to be sure, I ambushed him on the phone. If you are a Microsoft Business Applications ISC, this is the guy who will make or break you. We had a great discussion about his plans for ISVs. We also chatted about my latest undertaking, ISV Connect ED, he acted like it was the first time he heard about it, but I already know that it has been chatted up in the halls in Redmond :). Enjoy! BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Tuesday at 4PM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays! Transcript Below: Toby Bowers: Hello, this is Toby. Steve Mordue: Toby, it's  Steve Mordue. How's it going? Toby Bowers: Steve Mordue. It's going well. How are you? Long time no see. I have a suspicion on why you're calling. I read one of your recent posts, called Suggestions for Toby. Is it to talk through that? Steve Mordue: So, before you talk too much, I got to let you know, the record button is on and I'm going to publish whatever the heck we talk about in the next few days on my podcast, if that's all right. Toby Bowers: Ah, okay. Okay. I've heard about these calls, Steve. Yeah, no. That's fine. That's fine. I've been looking forward to talking to you. Steve Mordue: All right. Cool. So, news. Guggs is headed out the door, and he did the mic drop and you've picked up the mic. Toby Bowers: Yep. Yep. Steve Mordue: Which is a new role for you, but you've been in the periphery of this ISV, but you're now the guy, right? Buck's stopping at your desk, for ISVs and ISV Connect. Toby Bowers: Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm excited with the opportunity. Yeah. Guggs is retiring for the company, and just with the turn of the fiscal year here at Microsoft, we took the opportunity to sort of reorganize a little bit. But as you said, Steve, I'm not new to the ISV strategy or the ISV Connect program. We've been, myself and my team, have been working really closely with Guggs and his team over the past year. Just to sort of explain where my team fits in. So, I work for Alysa Taylor and the product marketing group. We have all of our field sales enablement for all of our sellers and marketing teams around the world. We do our partner strategy all up, not just for ISV. We do customer success. We're focused on usage and adoption and migration. And we also do community work as well, for both first and third party community. So, ISV has always been a part of my core team charter, but as you said, I'm just sort of picking up the mantle with Guggs, and we'll get more actively involved. Steve Mordue: Is it a little intimidating? Toby Bowers: Oh, yeah. No, it is. I mean, obviously this is incredibly critical for us to get right as a company. Such a huge opportunity for us and for this business. I joined the dynamics team about three years ago, and we started talking about this, Steve, because we really didn't have a modern SaaS ISV program, ISV strategy. We were still coming off the old legacy days where, of course, ISVs are critical in this business in driving success with our on-prem business. But we weren't able to sort of effectively translate that into the cloud world. So, really, really important for us to get right. Why it's important for Microsoft is, to be honest, this is just a massive market. I mean, we did some sessions at Inspire recently in fact, this is a $200 billion market. It's a very fragmented market, Steve, as you know, so the better we are in building out an ISV ecosystem and driving those ISV's growth, the more share we can take in this market, and attract ISVs to build on our platform with great solutions that help solidify it in the customer base. Steve Mordue: Was that kind of an eyeopener for you guys a little bit to see the results of that study you commissioned around ISV? I mean, I know you guys had always kind of, in the back of your mind, assumed there was importance in ISVs, but was that an eye opener for you guys as well? Toby Bowers: It was. It was. I mean, the fact that over half that addressable market is going to be driven by ISVs and the cloud in the business applications market was bigger than I thought, to be honest. It's also, Steve, it's interesting. It's split pretty evenly across the sort of the medium business space and the enterprise. So, there's equal opportunity across both customer segments, but for us, the real opportunity, Steve is... And I'd love a chance to talk about the opportunity I see for the ISVs, but for us, the opportunity to take share and reach new audiences through ISVs is something we really talk a lot about in our conversations. Acquiring new cloud customers, the fact that ISVs can build vertical and sub vertical solutions and reach BDM audiences that we're just not that great at it, Microsoft, to be honest. Just represents a huge opportunity for us from a customer acquisition perspective. And then, the last thing I'd say, Steve, is we still sort of have this tactical opportunity to continue to help the remaining customers we have on on-prem dynamics products get to the cloud, and ISVs are obviously critical in doing that, in helping them sort of move their IP from the legacy stuff over to cloud. So, yeah, there's a big opportunity for Microsoft in it, but I also feel like there's a big opportunity for ISVs, just choosing us over someone else in the industry based on just the innovation we're building in and the growth that we're seeing in the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform business, Steve Mordue: Well, they're choosing Microsoft to start or adding Microsoft, if they're already established elsewhere. Toby Bowers: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Both of those are good motions. There's a huge ecosystem of ISVs for Salesforce and some of the other applications out there. And I don't expect them to just drop that and come over here. But you reach a point in any business where you're kind of plateauing, right? You've got your market share and you're maintaining and you've got your steady growth, but if you're looking for a new opportunity to create brand new growth, I mean, nothing like jumping into another sandbox. Toby Bowers: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's definitely part of it, and it kind of comes back to where we are in our journey with this strategy and this program [ISV Connect], Steve. I think back with the transition from Guggs, we sort of spent about a year in the design mode, and I know we worked with you to bounce ideas off you as a sounding board during that phase, back in the back of the day. And then last year, our fiscal year '20 was really the launch year. And obviously, we launched it at Inspire in July, but then it really didn't become operational for a couple of months. So, the bulk of last year was really helping our existing ISVs onboard and get enrolled in the program, and really the focus that we had on cleaning up app stores, getting everything all nice and certified and enrolled in the program for our existing ecosystem. And we feel pretty good about the result, that we got over 550 ISVs, 1200 apps. We have a good base now, but to your point, now we can sort of transition into going after recruits, right? And not only making our existing ISVs successful, but continuing to build out that ecosystem with new ISVs who are looking at multiple platforms to your point. Steve Mordue: I've been, I guess, probably the best way to put it would be "optimistically critical". I mean, I am an ISV, so obviously I'm bullish and have high hopes for success of the [ISV Connect] program, but the program has had its challenges. I think it's been passed around a lot. Hopefully, you'll hang around for a while with this thing. That's one of the reasons I was asking about the survey, was that it seemed like for years prior to that, like I say, there's been kind of a, yeah, we know ISVs are important, but it wasn't particularly believable messaging, you know? Because I don't know that a lot of the folks inside Microsoft had a clear picture of what that means. It's was just Salesforce is doing it, so we should be doing it too. But I was thinking that study kind of would have really opened some eyes and poured some gas on this motion. Toby Bowers: Yeah. I mean, it really has, Steve, and you're right. And look, I'll acknowledge we've had fits and starts with ISV strategies across Microsoft for several years, and I've been there to witness it. I'm a 20 plus year vet here at Microsoft, and I've worked in pretty much every side of the company from sales to marketing out in the field in different countries, and now here in product marketing working on BPOS and Office 365 in the early days, and then Azure in the early days, and now Biz Apps. We've gone through several evolutions that are related to our ISV strategy, and we've changed course and made some missteps, to be honest, here and there. I think my whole goal, again, in sort of stepping in and taking a little bit more responsibilities with this program in particular is to deliver on the value, deliver on the promise we made to partners. Last year when we launched, we talked about things like access to our field sellers in the premium tier, access to our partners, access to our customer base through app stores in the marketplace, access to platform capabilities. We've delivered some of that, but we still have a long way to go to deliver on the full promise. And so, I'm a partner guy. I had lots of partner responsibility in my previous roles at Microsoft, and I just think if we deliver on that promise and we support our partners' growth, we're going to grow. So, that's my number one goal. And we can talk about some of the specifics in it, but I hear you. And I think we need to stay the course. Now that we're in market, this is the year to really mainstream the program across the Microsoft machine and really deliver on the value that we've talked to ISVs. Steve Mordue: I think one of the challenges with the ISV Connect... well, any of the programs in there is Microsoft is a huge machine, and you've got to get a lot of parts lined up in order for anything to happen, parts that are within your control, other parts that are not in your control. I mean, it's a challenge to get all those things lined up in a groove. And I know that effort has been ongoing. We talked about AppSource as an example of something that Biz Apps doesn't own AppSource. They kind of own their door to it. And so, some things that are kind of in your control, out of your control, some things you can influence, not influence. I guess a lot of it would probably be driven by such as interest in the success of the Biz App side of the business, which is certainly higher than any of its predecessors, right? Toby Bowers: Yeah, absolutely. We have huge sponsorship, not only in support, not only for business applications like Dynamics and Power Platform from the senior leadership team, Satya and his LT down, but even the ISV strategy within that, Steve. I mean, we get a chance to get in front of that leadership team twice a year. We often talk about this ISV strategy, the ISV Connect program, what we're doing. So, it's well known across the company. And I think to your point around the matrix here at Microsoft, and what I would say is I've been around again for a long time and I've worked in most of these teams that are going to be critical for the success of this program, whether it's Nick Parker coming in on the global partner solution side and Gavriela [Schuster], Casey McGee, or on the engineering side, James Phillips and Charlotte Yarkoni, who actually leads our commerce engineering team, including our marketplaces with Azure marketplace and AppSource. So, we've got high awareness, high prioritization to focus and improve in some of the areas, Steve, that we'll probably talk about, we know we need to focus on and improve. But the last thing I'd say in this vein is when we launched last year... Again, you probably know the way Microsoft works. I mean, we kick off Q1 in July. Everyone goes in a little hole for it for a month, takes a couple of weeks of vacation, comes back out, and we quickly get into planning mode for the fiscal year, to sit down and build the pipeline we need, think about the right plans and investments around the world to be successful. And the difference between this year, this fiscal year and last fiscal year from an ISV Connect perspective is we now have this great stable of ISVs and apps ready to go. So, we had 500 ISVs enrolled in the program on day one, July 1. We have 1200 apps. We've got a great set of premium tier apps that we're now working with our sales teams to align to their account and territory planning process. In fact, just earlier this morning, Steve, I was looking at a spreadsheet and you can imagine not to share sort of all the gory detail, but we have these things called sales plays, which are how we enable and align our sales force to go and talk to customers about our workloads and solutions. And we have six sales plays for business applications. Then, we have an industry focus. We have these industry priority scenarios. We have 13 of those. Then, we have 14 areas, we call them, around the world. These are countries and groups of countries around the world. So, if you think about a big spreadsheet with all of those, what we've done is we've mapped our ISV solutions to each one of those to say, "hey, if you're looking to focus on supply chain in the manufacturing industry in France, here's a set of ISVs that are enrolled in ISV Connect", perhaps have an app in the premium tier that you should align to your account territory planning process, so that you can go and engage with them to build pipeline. Steve Mordue: Wasn't that previously like the... What was it? The catalog? The CSP? No, what was it? Toby Bowers: That, yeah. It was the... Well, the OCP catalog is what we used internally. Steve Mordue: OCP catalog. Toby Bowers: Yep. There's a Co-Sell Solution Finder. That's more reactive, Steve. If you're talking to a customer and say, "Hey, do you know a partner that has a solution on X," you can bring up that tool and find one. What I'm talking about is more proactive, actual territory planning with the sales teams to sit down with ISVs and do that sort of engagement, to build joint pipeline, identify joint accounts. So, I just bring it up because we didn't have the opportunity to do that last year, because we were just launching the program. So, I'm optimistic, as you say, critically optimistic that that'll make a difference for us this year, at least on the Co-Sell side. Steve Mordue: When Guggs came in, I was actually pretty excited, because that's really the first time that someone who had been with Microsoft for a long time, had some clout, knew how to work the machine internally came on board, and he was on board for, what? About a year, and then retired. And I thought, "Uh-oh. Now what?" And so, hearing that you took over, I was once again, very excited. I've known you for a long time now. Obviously a completely different personality than Guggs. You are much less of a risk taker, I would say, and much more of a... You're a much more mellow kind of a guy. You seek consensus. Toby Bowers: Thank you, Steve. Steve Mordue: I've always thought you seek consensus more than... Certainly Guggs wasn't big on seeking consensus. I think that's going to be critical to your ISV success. I think... And I admit, I'm not blowing smoke up your butt. I think you're the right guy at the right time for this now, just knowing you the way I do. And obviously, a lot of ISVs will be listening to this. So, I don't want to... I've kind of gotten caught in the past of sounding overly optimistic, and then things not stepping up. But I'm feeling as optimistic as I ever have about you stepping into role and being able to really make it work for everybody. We've got some very successful ISV stories out there, but there's a lot of them that are struggling to get there. I think democratizing the process a little bit, because we definitely over-index on the big ISVs, which I get. We need to... But big ISVs didn't start as big. We need to have motions that bring all people, raise all boats. Toby Bowers: Yep. Steve Mordue: What are you thinking about, now that you're brand new in role? Although you're not oblivious to what's going on. You've been in the periphery there of this thing fairly deeply for a while. What are you thinking about things you want to try and attack right away that you think you can get some traction on right away? And then, maybe things that you want to focus on a little more long-term, so we can kind of see what we can expect quickly, and then what we can kind of expect down the road? Toby Bowers: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that your sentiment, Steve. We have known each other for a long time, and I know you're a straight shooter, and you're also just a great champion for the broader partner ecosystem. So, I would just say, just to put everyone at ease, I've been around almost as long as Guggs and have been behind the scenes, like we said, on this for a long time. So, I don't want anyone to feel like I'm going to come in and start cracking around and changing things up. I think to your point around risk taking, this whole design launch mainstream phasing that I talked about, the program is sound. I truly believe we have the right program in place for the long game, with the revenue sharing model, the different points of value that we need to provide to our partners. Like I said, we just need to deliver on that promise now. So, I'm not going to come in and change things drastically. I'm going to take what we have, and do my darnedest to make it successful Steve, because I truly believe it is set up for success if we have the right focus and attention. So, that sort of leads me to the way I work. I am a collaborative guy. I've got a lot of good relationships across the organizations that will be required to make this program successful, whether it's the partner team or the sales team or all the folks out in the field who are closer to where the rubber hits the road. So, I feel pretty confident about the amount of focus and energy, and what I can do to really push it forward from here. As far as short term, long term, to answer your question, Steve, and I loved your blog. I read it. In fact, I listened to it. I was out walking the dog, and I listened to it. So, thank you for reading it out loud. I don't know where you found that picture by the way. That's about a decade old, so thank you. That's very flattering. Steve Mordue: Send me a new one. Toby Bowers: Exactly. But there's a couple things. I would say to some of your suggestions around... Let's just take the first one around equalizing. We probably did over-index a bit on the Co-Sell side of things last year with our premium tier, especially, and getting those partners enrolled and engaging with our field around Co-Sell. That's what, to be honest, a lot of the larger partners were most excited about. And there's been a couple of really good examples of success there, Steve, and companies like Seismic. We just had Inspire. We talked about a few different ISVs and sort of success stories, but Seismic is a great example. Sales enablement solution, three clouds, Azure, us, Teams as well. They really got plugged quickly into the Co-Sell motion. And they talked about pipeline growth of 5X in the first 90 days. That's a smaller group of ISVs that are in that premium tier app, and they've just seen a ton of success. Sort of taking a page out of the Azure Co-Sell playbook, and now applying that and extending it to ISV Connect. So, we're going to continue to focus on that. Like I said, we're able to kick off our fiscal year with this set of ISVs. And so, I feel pretty confident about continuing to push on the Co-Sell side. Where we need to focus more, Steve, is to your point on a couple of the other value points that we talked about. First is access to our ecosystem, right? We've got massive partner ecosystem, all shapes and sizes. SIs, local SIs, regional SIs, the big guys, resellers, CSP partners. Today, we've got some partner to partner benefits, kind of matchmaking benefits as part of the program, go to market program. We've got such an opportunity in the future to tap into those channels in a bigger way. You think about incentives or our transacting partners reaching into new markets and geographies around the world. That's going to be an area of focus for me going forward. And then, the other piece around AppSource. You had some great feedback on AppSource, and I know you've been giving us feedback on AppSource, for years. Steve Mordue: Yeah, since it launched. Before it launched, actually. Toby Bowers: Yeah, exactly. This is going to be a real short term focus for me, Steve. The fact is we've been on and are on a little bit of a journey with AppSource, but we've got eyeballs in there. It's got a monthly active usage of 4 million users, right? And growing. So, what we've done in the last quarter with AppSource is really worked on some of the plumbing underneath. It was just not where it needed to be when it came to search, discoverability of apps, just block and tackle, basic stuff. So, we worked with the engineering team to really focus on just fixing up that plumbing underneath. This next few months where we're going to focus is the overall user experience. So, the website itself, focusing much more on the solutions themselves, merchandising the right apps, really helping customers who are going there find what they're looking for quickly, not just from a search perspective, but an overall user experience perspective. And that'll happen literally in the next few months. And then, from there, Steve, you know where we're going to go. We're ultimately going to light up transactability of third party IP through AppSource. That'll come together with the ISV Connect program, so that partners can really choose how they transact. But we do feel like for the right apps and the right partners, that'll really light up this big Microsoft install base of customers as a new way to sell and transact their apps. So, that's where we're going. Steve Mordue: I think that would be particularly critical for the startup ISV, or the one who's coming over from another platform. Toby Bowers: Yep. Steve Mordue: Because it's a big enough challenge to build a worthwhile solution, but that's only the beginning as an ISV of getting where you need to get. you've got to build some sort of a licensing construct to protect it, and you've got to build some sort of a billing platform to get paid for it. So, to the degree that you guys can offer some sort of plugin capabilities on those sorts of things, I think that's going to open up for a lot more ISVs to engage, because you've just lowered the bar of entry to really, if you've got a good solution, if you've got good IP, you can jump in here. We'll take care of more of this plumbing for you, because it's definitely, I think, kept some folks on the sidelines or a lot of people have ended up just making apps free, because they don't have a way to protect or sell them, which isn't what the goal was. Toby Bowers: Yeah, totally, Steve, and look. I'm going to be honest. We got to get better in this space. This is an area that I just see a huge opportunity for us to focus on and improve. We've seen some success there. I talked to Trevor [Nimegeers] at this company called ITRAK 365. It's like a safety management app for waste management. Again, talk about vertical focus. Yeah. But he's getting leads from AppSource. He's going... Canadian based company. He's cracking into New Zealand and winning some deals over there. And just the infrastructure that can enable that geo expansion through a marketplace like that has a lot of promise for a lot of our ISVs. But you mentioned something important as well, which I missed earlier. So, in addition to the marketing benefits, the go to market benefits, the Co-Sell benefits, we're still working really hard with the engineering teams, whether it's Charles [Lamanna] and his team, or the marketplace team on platform capabilities. So, obviously, we've got tools and stuff today with ISV Studio. We've got telemetry. We've got install telemetry today. We'll have usage telemetry tomorrow. We'll have licensed management capabilities tomorrow. That'll flow into transactability. So, a lot of those platform investments that we can make from an engineering perspective ultimately come together to sort of paint a nice picture for ISVs who are looking to tap into that. And again, strong focus and sort of commitment across the engineering teams to do that. Steve Mordue: And when you say tomorrow, so everybody is aware, you don't literally mean tomorrow. Toby Bowers: I do not mean Labor Day. That's a very... No, no, I don't. Yeah. I mean, I don't have, and I can't share specific dates, Steve, but we are on this biannual release cycle with James and his team. Obviously, you know our release cycle there with October and April. The commerce and marketplace team is on a biannual cadence as well. So, we just fit into those engineering cycles to continue to champion for what ISVs need to be successful, in that long list of work that those teams will do to just get it higher and higher on the list. And we're really moving in the right direction. Steve Mordue: And I see a little bit of a parallel with the ISV Connect motion and really the whole Power Platform motion. My last call with Charles Lamanna when I was asking him about what are the big things that they're planning next? He said, "Actually, we're going to focus on making everything we have work better." Toby Bowers: Yeah. Steve Mordue: We have all the parts that we need and they're all out there. They're not necessarily wired up as ideally as we'd like, and you can't just keep launching, launching, launching. At some point, you've got to take a look at the pile you've built and make sure that it's organized and sorted and working, well oiled. And I kind of feel that way about ISV Connect. All the parts are there. We don't need any new, necessarily any brand new things, some add-ons here and there. But it's really just making that whole pile of components work like a well oiled machine. Toby Bowers: Yeah. I think the table's set. We just got to get people eating. Like I said before, I think the program is sound. The elements, the business model. It's a self-fulfilling business model. The more success we have, the more we can invest and grow together. And I do think that we stay the course. It's all about execution and delivering on that promise. Now that said, there are a few things, like we were just talking about that we need to add quickly or fix, to be honest. Things like getting AppSource where it needs to be, some of the benefits. You and I have talked a lot about internal use rights, and that is a benefit. We just need to get that done. I know we've been talking about it for too long. There's a broader Microsoft dialogue going on around ISV and programs and IURs. I'm just going to move forward with the right IUR strategy for ISV Connect, because that's just something we have to deliver on, Steve Mordue: Just put your head down and crash through. Toby Bowers: Exactly. Exactly. So, that's a big one. Steve Mordue: So, I recently started a new venture myself kind of on the side, towards this ISV Connect motion. I don't know if you'd heard anything about it. Toby Bowers: No, I haven't. What are you doing? Steve Mordue: ISV Connect ED. Toby Bowers: Oh, nice. I like the play on words there, my friend. You should be in marketing. Steve Mordue: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm adding an ED to the end of it, but essentially, it's... We don't have a good external resource. I mean, you can go to Microsoft, and you can read all about ISV Connect and just read stuff, but there doesn't seem to be a community for ISVs to compare notes and... Not so much, I don't want to create a place for people to go bitch and complain. I want to create a place where people can go and learn what works, what doesn't, how to be successful, and see if we can nurture some stuff around there. So, hopefully you'll be hearing more about that. Toby Bowers: Well, that sounds intriguing to me, Steve, but yeah, I'd love to learn more. I mentioned one of the other things my team is responsible for is our community strategy. And I know you are an active member of our MVP community, our Partner Advisory Councils, our sort of partner community at large. So I'm all for what you do with that initiative, Steve. I think, to me, community, and I know we've caught up at user groups and things like that. It's just such a great listening mechanism for us. We can do all the research we want, and talk to our field and talk to partners, but that partner to partner community engagement to sort of identify common themes, and then have multiple voices bringing that back to us is just so important for us to be focusing on the right areas. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Toby Bowers: And I'm just a huge advocate. I mean, this is... In my career, I spent so much time out in the field with customers and partners, and I just feel it's so important for us to listen at this point. Again, I feel like we've got the right strategy in place, the right program [ISV Connect] in place. We need to listen to what's working and what's not working, and then act quickly that. So, I love it. I love that you're pulling that effort together, and I'd love to stay connected with you on it as far as opportunities to engage or just understand what you're learning. Steve Mordue: Oh, I'm going to lean on you, buddy. I'm going to lean on you. Toby Bowers: You can lean on me anytime. In fact, I was going to say that. Steve Mordue: One of the things that Guggs did, he kind of disbanded the ISV PAC and kind of went to that broader... But I think you definitely lose something when you've got... It's funny. When we go to any of these events, when there's a room with like 20 people in it, everybody's happy to talk. When there's 200 people, nobody says anything. Toby Bowers: Yeah. Steve Mordue: It's like the group gets too big, and then who was it? Tony. You remember Tony de Freitas? Toby Bowers: Yeah, I do. Steve Mordue: He made a comment on one of my more critical posts recently. And he just said, "Feedback is a gift." Coming from someone who used to be on the inside of Microsoft, I know you guys are desperate for the feedback. I mean, it's all... Give me the feedback, tell us what's working, what's not working. And it doesn't help when nobody says anything or they just complain. Getting that feedback is critical, and that's part of what I'm hoping to try and accomplish here is to help you guys get some of that feedback. Toby Bowers: Yeah. Absolutely, Steve. I mean, we can't do this in a vacuum. It's a new program. It's a new model for us. And so, feedback is critical, and there's multiple ways to get that feedback. The good news on the PAC is we're getting the band back together, so we're sort of re-establishing as we move into this next horizon. But yeah, in fact, I was going to offer, Steve. I think me coming in now, I would love to do this connection with you maybe in a few months as we sort of round out the calendar year to see what progress we've made, and you can keep me honest and I'd keep you honest. And I would love to engage with this community that you're thinking about building. Steve Mordue: Well, I hope that... I had Guggs on about once a quarter to just kind of talk about what's up. Toby Bowers: Okay. Steve Mordue: I definitely feel like you are a person who is more amenable to the feedback. Toby Bowers: Yeah, yeah. Steve Mordue: More interested in hearing it, and will definitely act on it. So, anything else you want to say to folks about you coming in here, and taking the role? I mean, I'm feeling very positive. I think everybody should feel very positive. I think everybody needs to give you a fair chance to take some action, but I'm feeling very confident about it. Toby Bowers: Well, I appreciate it, Steve. No, I appreciate the call, although it was a bit unexpected. I'd just wrap up with my number one job is to deliver value to our partners. That value will come in the form of growth, plain and simple, because if our partners are successful, we're going to be successful with this. So, that's what I'm going to be maniacally focused on for this next six months. And yeah, I look forward to catching up again soon and hopefully talking about some of the mutual successes that we've had. Steve Mordue: Sounds good, man. I'll be pinging you soon. Toby Bowers: All right, Steve. Well, thanks again for the call. I appreciate the opportunity to have a chat. Steve Mordue: All right. Bye bye. Toby Bowers: Bye bye.

Full show notes available here: https://www.nz365guy.com/216

In this episode of "Steve has a Chat", I catch up again with Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft, to get the latest from the Queen of Marketing for Microsoft Business Applications Group. We chat about the success of Virtual Events, Customer Insights, Power Apps vs Power Apps, and touched on SMB.  Enjoy! BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Tuesday at 4PM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays! Transcript below: Alysa Taylor: Hello? Steve Mordue: Alysa. Steve Mordue. How are you? Alysa Taylor: I'm doing well, Steve, how are you? Steve Mordue: Well, you know why I'm calling, right? Alysa Taylor: I have a hunch. Steve Mordue: Yes, yes. I've got the record button on and I just wanted to see if you had a few minutes to talk about just things. It's been a while since we caught up. Alysa Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. Would love to spend some time and just chat. It has been a little while. Steve Mordue: So we just came off Business Applications Summit the first pivot over to a virtual conference. And at least from the rumors I hear the attendance was off the charts compared to an in person conference. Alysa Taylor: It was off the charts. It was actually our first Microsoft virtual, we classify events and this is a tier one event, so it was our first one that we executed as a first party tier one event in a virtual capacity. So we were both nervous and excited. We had over 50,000 people registered. So it really was... And it's a very different format. We condensed two and a half days into a half day. But I would agree, we were very pleased with both the online turnout. And then I think, from what I heard from the community, the format worked well. It was a nice mix, we did a prerecorded keynote, then we had live sessions that were moderated with subject matter experts. And then we were able to do some networking and fun interstitial type activities in between the programming. Steve Mordue: You know, I would have to think that if I were Microsoft, having done in person events for so long and the expense of doing those and the coordination of putting those together, because it's a production when you guys do those. And then looking at the number of attendees there were able to make it because of schedule or cost because of getting approval by their employers and versus now suddenly a virtual event at no cost. I mean, there was no limits to anybody being able to get into that. And while we might lose some of that in person networking amongst one another, from Microsoft's standpoint getting the information out to as broad an audience as possible seems like this is a better way to do it. Alysa Taylor: You know, my team and I have talked a lot about that and I think in the post COVID-19 world, because we're learning so much about virtual events, I think we'll end up, and no timeline on this, but we'll end up probably in the future in some kind of a hybrid type scenario. Because I do think there is always that benefit of face to face, being able to network, shake people's hands, see old friends. So I think that in person will never completely go away, but I think we're learning how to do virtual events that will compliment the in person. And so I think, and again, this isn't an official statement, but I think there'll be a world of probably smaller, more intimate events. And then the big scale events will be virtual because at the end of the day we've had over 150,000 views of our content from Microsoft Business Application Summit, compared to we do 7,000 to 10,000 in person. So it's a very different scale. Steve Mordue: Yeah. It really is. When you think about the ability to touch just so many people that way and the expense. I think that, obviously, we all got thrown into this virtual event motion when we weren't quite ready for it and our tools weren't quite built for it but ready or not, here we come. And I was, I can't remember the earlier virtual event that you guys did that I... Oh, I think it was the launch maybe? Alysa Taylor: Yes, we always do the virtual launch event. That we've been doing for a long time. Steve Mordue: And that was pretty good, but then you still thinking about as a large scale event, which we've historically done in person, how does that translate in a way digitally, virtually that it feels as valuable to the people? Not withstanding the fact that we've now got 10 times as many people that can see what's there, but that the event feels as much like a live in person event. And I think the tools are getting... Obviously you guys are tweaking the tools for just that kind of experience, like you said, with some of the networking and we're kind of figuring it out, but as we get this stuff figured out, and these tools for virtual events are just 100% rock solid and exactly the way everybody would want. And I don't know, it seems like the future of live events across, not just Microsoft, but industry-wide, is going to be tough. Alysa Taylor: Well I think the thing that we're learning is how to do programming to your point. Because when we did the virtual launch event, it's our engineering leads and our product marketers doing content and then demos. Content, then demos. And I think what we learned with the Microsoft Business Applications Summit is that how much that programming matters, the back and forth, being able to do moderated forums, because it keeps people engaged. And we do it in much shorter segments. Like the virtual launch event is two hours. We were doing 35 minutes segments in the Business Application Summit. And yes, so to your point, I think doing the right programming allows us to have virtual events that are engaging. And then we get the benefit of being able to scale to such a degree that we can't do in person. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Obviously time zones will be a challenge for anything like that because you're going to have people doing multiple versions of their session at different time slots to be able to capture everybody. And that's a trick. I think one of the things, some of the feedback I heard from some of the folks was that they thought the sessions times might've been a little short because oftentimes the presenters were pressed right up to the time limit with their content and there wasn't much opportunity for questions. In those live events we're just peppering the person with questions throughout the whole thing. So that would be an interesting one to... Alysa Taylor: We got that feedback as well. And I think that's right. I think that's good that we spend a little bit more time and we're learning as we go. And I sort of said that, so I think that is one thing you will see us is more Q&A time. I think the presentation time was probably the right amount of content, but then allowing for more Q&A is important. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I thought it was nice in the new, whatever the platform you guys were displaying all that in, that, typically at a live event, I'll walk into a session and five minutes into it I might decide, "You know what? This isn't what I thought." And I want to bounce out and go down the hall to another one. And the virtual equivalent of that to be able to drop out of one and see below it, "Here's the other ones that are going on right now." And just click a button and bounce from one to another, I felt like we're getting closer to that kind of experience with the tooling and stuff now too, which is handy. Alysa Taylor: Good. I'm glad you had that experience. That's great to hear. Steve Mordue: Yeah. And of course they're all being recorded and available immediately or as soon as possible, is just huge. Because then you don't feel... Like I can remember at live events feeling like there were three different things I wanted to see, but I could only see one, and since they weren't necessarily all recorded, you just had to miss some content. But now, of course, they can all be recorded by default and you have no excuse to miss anything today. So I think it's pretty cool. Looking forward to see where that goes. Steve Mordue: So what are some of the exciting things in your mind? Because you look at this through a different lens than some of the other folks, because you look at it through that marketing lens. And so you would see things differently than maybe Googs or Phillips as interesting or important. What are some of the things you think we should all be really paying attention to? Alysa Taylor: Well, I think there's probably two things and I think James and I would say the same probably on both, which is, I think we've continued to bring some pretty remarkable innovation to the portfolio. And when you see things, products like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, that has been one that's just been phenomenal to see the customer adoption on this. And I don't know if you saw like Chipotle was a big customer, wall-to-wall sales floor shop that is adopting Customer Insights. We'll announce here Walgreens is doing the same. Alysa Taylor: So the customer data platform and being able to have a 360 degree view of the customer, even in times of crisis as people are moving to digital selling and remote service, knowing your customers is even more important. And so it's been very exciting to see the innovation that's been built over the course of the last couple of years in market and seeing the customer adoption on that. And then I think the broader vision of how Dynamics 365 in the Power platform fits into the Microsoft Cloud. Alysa Taylor: You see very large customers like Coca Cola that are moving their entire IT and cloud infrastructure to the Microsoft Cloud. That's inclusive of Dynamics 365 and the Power platform and doing some pretty cool things with it. Power platform, just even in the recent environment, we released a set of crisis response templates that have just gone like wildfire throughout healthcare organizations, first responders, organizations needing to be able to get in touch with employees, with volunteers, with those that are on the front lines. So you see the direct impact that it can have and it's pretty incredible and pretty inspiring at the same time. Steve Mordue: I mean, I think we're all pretty amazed at what citizen developer has been able to do when given some tools that could actually do things with, which they never had before and I'm continuously seeing citizens building apps to solve problems that they have in their department or their area that there never would have been budget approved for a partner SI to come in and build something like that, or go buy an ISB solution, all these problems that have gone unsolved forever, it seems like suddenly are getting solved and they're getting solved quickly and easily without great expense. Steve Mordue: Problems that never would have been solved. They just had no other way they were going to get solved before this. That's been phenomenal to see the change of the platform, frankly, just in the last couple of years, that huge pivot towards that citizen has just opened up so much. You're talking about Coca-Cola. I mean, that's a lot of what's driving that there I'm sure is department heads, line of business people, seeing something that's accessible and fiddling around over a weekend and creating a solution to a problem they've had for years. Alysa Taylor: Absolutely. And we have the Unilever executive team in to meet with [Sati 00:12:04] and his directs. And they have done this whole movement to empower their frontline workers with the Power platform to give them the tools to solve problems. And we always say the value of the Power platform is putting tools in the hands of those closest to the problem. And Unilever is just an incredible story of creating a digital factory of the future that is completely from bottoms up, it's from frontline factory workers that are giving input, using Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI to automate manual tasks that would take them way too long to do, to have insights and analytics to the health of the supply chain and the factory line, having a digital command center that they could access through a power app. Alysa Taylor: So you see all of this. And then the great thing about the Unilever story is they've been really working to empower their frontline workers with these tools. And then as COVID-19 happened, they actually just took that same rapid innovation model and use it to do things like pivot to being able to scale up production and ventilators because they had, if you think about their IT their traditional IT and developer workforce is everyone. It's not just limited to one department or one set of individuals. Steve Mordue: Yeah. That's still a challenge for Power Apps. I know in big organizations, we're frequently running up against the wall known as IT that is resistant to almost anything in a lot of organizations. Sometimes they're very intransigent to get them to think about new things. You know, the, oh, it's escaping me now, the name of the enterprise management tool that you guys released for templates... At any rate- Alysa Taylor: You talking about EMS? Steve Mordue: No, the stuff that was released by the team to help enterprise manage Power App growth in their organization. Alysa Taylor: Oh, yes. Yes. So yeah, within Power apps, absolutely. And that you saw that Toyota is a great example of that. They actually use that enterprise management, so enabled their organization, all of their employees, to train them, enable them with Power Apps as a technology, but then they have within the IT department, to make sure they can do things like handle confidential data sharing, they used a set of control mechanisms with Power Automate and Power Apps. And so this gives the IT department that final sort of go, no, go on what gets published. But you still have the empowerment of the citizen developers across the organization. Steve Mordue: Center of Excellence. Alysa Taylor: Yes. Steve Mordue: That's the term I was thinking of. So, Center of Excellence. Yeah, I think that was key to really having this thing takeoff because before the Center of Excellence, I know that there was some concern with IT about, "People are going to go crazy out there with our data. We don't know what's going on." And that Center of Excellence toolkit really should allay a lot of those concerns. It seems like it has. And we still have a couple of challenges in the market that I know I hear a lot of partners and I struggle with around licensing. Steve Mordue: And I know licensing is a necessary thing, but man, does it ever get challenging. And it seems like, I guess, it's just the downside of having lots of innovation is every new thing that comes out we need to figure out, "Okay, now how're we going to license this?" And we end up with lots and lots and lots of licensing conversations with customers trying to figure things out. It's one of those things, they sit back and say, "Microsoft needs to solve that." But then when you think about it, it's not an easy problem to solve having lots of different models of licensing. Alysa Taylor: Well, we have lots of products. I will say, our design principle is on simplicity. And I think we have, if you look at what we've done with Power Apps in particular, we reconstructed the licensing model to be on a per app per user. It used to be, if you remember, based on feature, right? What was canvas versus model driven application development, which is incredibly hard for an organization to figure out. And so we've really worked to try and simplify the licensing, but at the end of the day, we have a lot of products. Alysa Taylor: In licensing, I always tell our internal teams this, licensing, we go for the 80-20 rule, we designed for 80% of the scenarios and there's always going to be the 20%, and we actually strive to do 90-10, can we hit 90% of the core scenarios? But there's always going to be very unique scenarios that we can't solve for, which is why we do different custom type deals. But our licensing, our principles are simplicity, customer centric and designed for as much scale as possible. Steve Mordue: Yeah. I've started to take the position with other partners that are complaining about the old days when we only had like three licenses to sell, and now there's maybe 100 different or more SKUs out there, that this is just a new part of your practice. This is something that you need to be proficient in and competent in, just like anything else that you're doing, and that is how to help a customer navigate the licensing. To make sure they're not over licensed or under licensed, that they're using licenses the right way. It's just a whole new motion that we didn't have to worry about before that you're just going to need to learn and understand. Have somebody on your staff that understands the licensing or can reach out and get answers because it's part of the business now, it's just part of the business model. I think the worst thing that happens is a partner just gets lazy. And frankly, we saw this even with Microsoft seller, just go in and sell the enterprise plan to everybody. Alysa Taylor: [crosstalk 00:18:19] Yeah, when I started three years ago, we sold two things. That was it. We sold the customer engagement plan and the finance and operations plan. We'd two things that we... There was maybe six standalone SKUs under those two things, but everyone just sold the plan. And so yeah, going from two to a number significantly higher than that, I do have empathy. We've ramped and changed a lot in three years, but I think we are at a place right now where we think we have the right model for how we bring new products in and we're trying to drive for consistency now. So we don't have a unique pricing, I had this meeting with my team yesterday, we don't want to have, three different types of pricing models for the insights line. We want to have one. And so we're trying to now strive for consistency across the different product lines. But yeah, you're right, going from two to 100 is a leap. Steve Mordue: Yeah. And then ditching the plan, I think, was great because not just Microsoft sellers, but you know, partners and SIs, it didn't require any thinking about what kind of license the customer needs, just put everybody on the plan. But that wasn't in the customer's best interest. They're paying for all this functionality that this particular user doesn't need. And just because somebody didn't want to go to the effort of figuring out, "You know? That user could probably get by with some lesser license or some other license." Or something like that. And it's forcing us to have to do more work to figure it out. But I think the winner at the end of the day is the customer. They're just not overpaying. Overpaying doesn't help any of us because if they're over purchasing, then they end up churning because they don't see the value. So we want to put them on the right SKU that gives them the right level of value and then they won't churn. So I think it's definitely important. Alysa Taylor: Yeah I mean, that such a huge thing. When I say the principles are simplicity, customer centricity and scale, having a plan where you're... I don't know, Steve, if you've ever met a human being that's a marketer, a salesperson, a customer service person, a field service person, all in one, but I haven't yet, that'd be a superhuman, I think. But that's how we sold. We sold a per user license with five different job descriptions against it. Steve Mordue: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because it's also changed the landscape of the partner community, because as you guys launch new products, these are new skillsets. Alysa Taylor: Right. Steve Mordue: And almost each one of these is deep enough that, with the exception of maybe the largest partners out there, you're just not going to find one that has the skill set across all of these different things. AI on the insight side and development of Power Apps, the canvas apps and flow. There's just so many different pieces that we really, as partners, are having to look at how we build our organizations differently. "I need a Power Automate expert. I need an expert in this. I need an expert in that and the other thing." Whereas before, everybody was an expert in everything. Now there's just too much. Alysa Taylor: Right. Yeah. Now it's got to be deeper. Deeper levels of expertise. Absolutely. Steve Mordue: So one of the things that's not... It's not negative, I'm not going to go negative on you, but one of the things that has concerned me and I still see confusion in the marketplace is about Power Apps. What I call Power Apps versus Power Apps. Alysa Taylor: Oh, interesting. Say more. Steve Mordue: Well Power Apps started out of the Office 365 side with canvas, mostly on SharePoint, embedded in the Office 365 licensing, all these enterprise customers using Power Apps. And then Power Apps also became a name used for something that technically was completely different, right? Model driven Power Apps. And there still is confusion, consistent confusion, among partners also, but mainly among customers, about the difference between these two things that have the same name. I know we've talked about converging them, and there is some convergence going on, but not at the license level, right? That Office 365, that customer who thinks they have Power Apps licensing because they have Office 365, they can't build a model driven app on CDS, that's a different Power Apps license. And how do you think we can make that story clearer to end customers that there's two things called Power Apps, essentially? Alysa Taylor: Well, I think we're a little early on this podcast because we'll provide some clarity in July to the market. But what I would say is today, what is seeded in Office is exactly what you're talking about. Which is Power Apps the maker, but it does not have the common data service underneath it. And so it's effectively the head of Power Apps without the CDS back engine on that. And so you have a lot of people that are using Power Apps, but they're their data source is SharePoint list. We'll release in July what we are doing to make that a more seamless story. And I think you'll be pretty excited. But we're just a little early for me to talk about it. Steve Mordue: Understood. Well, good to hear there's some thinking about it. Alysa Taylor: So it's coming. And it's coming very soon. Steve Mordue: Obviously I come from the CRM world, so I'm a CDS guy and I think model driven, but I don't have anything against, or any problem with, canvas apps on SharePoint list. I think there's tons of scenarios where that makes perfect sense, but there's tons of scenarios where the customer would be infinitely better off having built that on top of the common data service than on top of SharePoint. And right now I think there's a lot of customers out there that think they're using Power Apps. Steve Mordue: I mean they don't have any reason to think that they're not using all of Power Apps when they're just building on top of SharePoint list and kind of making some things much more difficult or much less effective than they could be, and not realizing that, "Hey, there's a whole other side here that is way more powerful, depending on what it is you're trying to do that you should be looking at." And I continuously find myself having that customer conversation. "Well, we already have Power Apps. We already know all about Power Apps." And then pulling up a demo of a model driven app. And they're like, "What's that?" "That's Power App." So looking forward to the clarity. [crosstalk 00:24:58] Looking forward to the clarity in July. Alysa Taylor: Well, and it's not negative. Know that your feedback and the MVP community, our partner community, the feedback that you guys give us is what allows us to be able to learn and adjust, and that's what we're doing. And so I think you'll be pleased in July. Steve Mordue: So one of the other customer segments that we've focused on for years, and is still an important segment to us is that SMB customer. And I go back and forth from feeling like Microsoft is very concerned about that customer to Microsoft is not very concerned about that customer. Almost weekly I see motions that seem like they're helping and then motions that we've got such a revolving door with some of the folks that have looked at SMB. How do you feel about that SMB customer? And how we should be attacking that customer base? Alysa Taylor: Well, it's an incredibly important customer base for us. And I think that we have a model in which we have a workforce, in my mind they're sort of two discrete workforces that work with our SMB customers. So we have a digital sales team that allows for both inbound and outbound triaging of those customers. And then, as you know Steve, we spend a lot of time making sure that our partner workforce has the right incentives, offers, skills to be able to service that community as well. And so I think those are the two facets in which we deploy against our SMB community. Alysa Taylor: And we've seen some really phenomenal customer wins that are in the SMB space. And so we want to make sure we've got the technology and the right resources for that customer base. But there is a very, very high commitment through our partner channel and through our telesales team to service that customer segment base. And I think in our world we say SMB, but there's managed and unmanaged really. Because there are some very, very large customers that we would classify historically as SMB, which I've always had a little bit of heartburn about because they're [inaudible 00:27:16] they're a big business, they're just not managed under our management. Steve Mordue: Well you got a whole rack of levers. Alysa Taylor: I'm going to have to wrap here in a second. I have, speaking customers, a customer meeting that I need to attend to. Steve Mordue: Perfect. Perfect. All right. Well, I appreciate the time and look forward to catching up with you again soon. And maybe seeing you again in person some point in the future. Who knows when that'll be. Alysa Taylor: Yeah. We don't know when, but definitely. So thank you, Steve. Thank you for everything. Steve Mordue: Yeah, thank you very much for the call. Bye. Alysa Taylor: Same. Bye.

This is the Power Platform Daily Brief for June 6, 2019 (brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic). In today's daily brief: Preview: Common Data Service storage capacity http://ppdb.news/common-data-8746d D365 Storage Calculator http://ppdb.news/e997e Super Duper DeDuper http://ppdb.news/8b06f Export To Excel Tracking http://ppdb.news/export-excel-b8e46 Alysa Taylor speaking at the BoA Global Technology event http://ppdb.news/webcasts-baml-b6d98 Music: www.purple-planet.com

The photo with this post was from a short-lived marriage that I called the "Can't we all just get along" phase in the Microsoft/Salesforce relationship. This love fest came to an abrupt end when Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, in spite of vehement efforts by Salesforce to block it, leading to irreconcilable differences and a hasty divorce. Since then the two behemoths have been circling and sizing each other up in the ring. David vs. Goliath? In the cloud business applications space, Salesforce.com is sitting somewhere around a 20% market share, Microsoft sits around 4%. You have to wonder why Microsoft came up as a subject so many times at Salesforce's just concluded Dreamforce conference. You might think that it would be better if Salesforce co-CEOs Benioff and Block, just ignored Microsoft and continued to marginalize their efforts. But Microsoft is not "Joe's Software Company", they're freaking Microsoft! In the grander landscape, according the Forbes list of the worlds largest companies, Microsoft is #20, and Salesforce comes in at #856! Even if you have a 5x larger share of a particular area, you simply can't dismiss a competitor who is almost 43 times your size. If Salesforce is the 800-pound Gorilla in Business Applications, Microsoft is the 34,000-pound Elephant who is starting to pluck bananas off their tree. So who is the David, and who is the Goliath here? Nadella is Salesforce's Kryptonite Before Satya Nadella took over the helm at Microsoft, Salesforce really didn't have much to worry about. Nadella's predecessor was more interested in buying things like mobile phone companies, and the Dynamics business group was just one of many things in the stable. While it is true that Balmer sparked the charge to the cloud for Microsoft, it was Nadella who poured the gas on the fire. Guess what? Nadella was previously a Business Applications guy! Uhoh. Since the day Nadella took over, Dynamics started becoming a part of the conversation at Microsoft. He replaced the boobs that were running Dynamics with a proven leader, James Phillips. Today, Dynamics 365, and the more recent "Power Platform", is part of every conversation that Microsoft has with customers. We're Number 1, We're Number 1! Sure, Salesforce can crow today. I too am number 1. I am the world's most successful, and most read, blogger... "who is named Steve Mordue". Salesforce's worst nightmare is Microsoft actually focusing on their space. Remember Lotus 123, or Word Perfect, they too were number one, until Microsoft decided they wanted to be there. Salesforce has stepped up the rhetoric lately, particular at their DreamForce conference with slides like this one presented to investors: An interesting claim... "Most complete portfolio in the industry". It's looks to me, like in addition to ignoring Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing, and Microsoft's Industry focus, they also conveniently left off a few dozen columns. We've seen this before Amazon (Forbes #53) also landed in Nadella's crosshairs, and based on all of the trajectories I have seen, it looks like Microsoft may overtake them in the not too distant future. Salesforce has reason to be concerned. If #20 can cause so much disruption for #53, imagine what they could do to #856! And now the turret is swiveling around towards them. There is seldom a public comment made by Nadella today, that does not have Business Applications mentioned within it. The Snipers While Nadella has elevated Microsoft Business Applications in the grand scheme, the people that Salesforce needs to be the most worried about, are actually James Phillips and Alysa Taylor. These are the two snipers on the hill overlooking the Salesforce camp, and Nadella has authorized unlimited rounds for their rifles. After he took over and got the Azure pathway cleared, Nadella turned to Business Applications. As I said above, one of the first things he did was get rid of bumbling leadership, and install these snipers. Phillips has methodically cleared out all of the Keystone Cops under the prior regime, many of which are now at Salesforce. It is kind of ironic that Salesforce eagerly snapped up, and put into leadership positions, many of the people that Phillips determined were "not good enough". Phillips inherited a losing hand, but instead of playing it out, he just threw the cards away. Planned Burning Let's face it, before the Nadella/Phillips/Taylor focus, Salesforce had little to be concerned about from Dynamics. It was more like a fly that occasionally needed swatting. The Dynamics BG looked a little schizophrenic, a bunch of random smoldering piles seemingly lit by tossing matches willy-nilly in hopes of something catching fire. Phillips and Taylor poured water on a bunch of these, and then strategically injected gas onto others. In addition, with a specific plan in hand, they lit whole new fires, and have been methodically concentrating all of this raging flame into a blowtorch aimed directly at Salesforce. Based on Salesforce's reactions, they clearly feel the heat. Salesforce's Achilles Heel There is no question that Salesforce has great products. There is also no question that for CRM, Salesforce is a better known brand than Dynamics 365. There is also no question that Salesforce has a huge following of loyal fans. But Salesforce has some gaps, and Microsoft is uniquely positioned to fill those gaps in ways that Salesforce could only wish to. For one, the relationship of Business Applications to Productivity Applications. Seriously... Quip? WTF is that? Salesforce's announced integration with Google apps, might have been a big deal, had Office 365 not blew past Google Apps like they were standing still, a few years ago. Einstein? A thrown together pile of first and third-party parts vs. Azure? Microsoft "owns" AI today, and their Business Applications are being plugged directly into that "universe". The Secret Share One of the segments of the Business Applications market that Salesforce should also worry about, is the on-premise market. Obviously they understand the opportunity, hence their acquisition of Mulesoft. But when you look across the on-premise market for I.T. all up, Microsoft is the far and away dominant player. Where Salesforce has Cloud Business Applications loyalty, Microsoft has decades long loyalty in the on-premises business. Microsoft continues to shift this legacy cache of on-premise customers into their cloud, led by Azure and Office 365. There are also a significant number of legacy Dynamics deployments in many of these on-premise troves. Probably not enough to eclipse Salesforce's 20% market share alone, but they will make a significant dent. In almost every one of these cases, Microsoft is in competition with their own legacy, Salesforce is not even in the mix. Keeping up with the Joneses Facing the market leader, Microsoft has spent a lot of time "catching up" to Salesforce. But we are seeing a shift to tit-for-tat. Einstein was in direct response to Azure AI by Salesforce. Microsoft Learn is a direct response to Salesforce's Trailhead. Salesforce's "Flow" is a direct reaction to Microsoft's leading the charge for "Citizen Developers". Both companies are looking for opportunities to launch the "next big thing", but given the huge palette that Microsoft has to work with, they could soon be the ones that Salesforce spends all of their effort catching up to.

There are a lot of opinions floating around the Dynamics 365 channel today. Talk to any partner and they will say things like "If it were up to me, I would do this or that... but don't tell anybody I said that". Seems to me, if we don't tell anybody what we think, we should not be entitled to complain about any results! "Microsoft wouldn't listen to me" This is the most common response I get, when I suggest to someone that they should share their opinions with Microsoft. Whispering to each other in the corners is not going to accomplish anything. If you have built a practice that is dependent on Microsoft, you have an obligation to yourself and your company to make yourself heard; and I have found that Microsoft is not just willing to listen, but is usually eager to hear! That does not mean that they will act on your particular suggestion, but as a Partner Led company, partner opinions are core to everything they need to accomplish. If they built some thing that no partner liked or agreed with, then no partner would sell it! In fact, Microsoft has significant motions in place to get this exact kind of Feedback, from the MVP Communities to Partner Advisory Councils, and more, including the Dynamics 365 Strategy Simulator. Pilot for a Day You know those flight simulators that they train pilots in, so Microsoft has a secret one, 24 levels below a non-descript building on campus. What if James Phillips were to say to you, "Okay smart guy, you take a turn in our "D365 Strategy Simulator". Umm... it is one thing to voice an opinion about some particular aspect that impacts your particular footprint, we could all do that pretty easily. But that is only navigating for your practice, at the end of the day, even if a course could be plotted that satisfied every partners' viewport, it would crash and burn. While Microsoft may be Partner-Led, partners are not the customers. So, let's try that again, but this time, don't solve for partners, solve for customers. The Invite So I get this email from Phillips, "Steve, we have identified you as an opinionated know-it-all, and wanted to invite you and some other opinionated know-it-alls, to spend a day in our Dynamics 365 Strategy Simulator. Be on campus this Friday at 5AM at bus stop #12452". So I arrive at exactly 5AM and there are already several other partners, that we all know very well. We all get on the bus, and the blindfolding process seems to take longer than it should, but we are eventually underway. After about 30 minutes the bus stops, and I can hear a big garage door closing. We are all led, still blindfolded, down a corridor and guided into an elevator, as the door closes, we are told we can remove our blindfolds. The elevator has only one button, and Phillips pushes it and we start to go down. The ride takes a full 3 minutes, but stops smoothly and the door opens to a cavernous room. In the middle of the room is a large capsule, with a door on the back of it, sitting on a bunch of metal arms and levers. I snuck a photo of it when Phillip's back was turned. Pre-Flight We are ushered into a small auditorium, and sent down two rows to sit, I am in the back row. The first problem is that I am sitting right behind James Crowter, and he's pretty tall so I have to crane my neck to see. I look to my right to see who is talking, when we are supposed be be quiet, of course... Joel Lindstrom. Anyway, on the stage stands Phillips, and right behind him from left to right are Marko, Param and some AX guy I don't know. Above their heads are three large monitors, side by side. Each monitor is displaying various data about a particular platform like pricing, structure, licensing, functionality, etc. From left to right the monitors are NAV, CRM and AX. As Phillips opens his mouth to speak, George Doubinski jumps up from his seat and says "I am the only real developer here... just saying" and sits back down. Phillips looks at him for a few seconds, and then continues, "Behind me you will see an overview of the items that you will be able to control in the simulator. Each of you will have full control over every aspect of these items". I hear Mark Smith say, just loud enough for everyone to hear: "Brilliant!". Then I notice that Marko is kind of tipping his head, and darting his eyes up, motioning towards the NAV monitor. Phillips catches this out of the corner of his eye, and turns to Marko, who smiles sheepishly and stops. Param rolls his eyes, but the AX guy didn't notice. I also see Alysa Taylor, over by the door, whispering to some guy I have not met before, his name tag says, "Hi, I'm Hayden". We will be taken, one at a time from here to the simulator, and Crowter goes first. He stands and passes Sarah Critchley, who I can see is laser focused on her phone, I lean forward to see what is so important, at a time like this, and see she is editing a new cat emoji. The Simulator About an hour passes, and Crowter re-enters the auditorium. I can't tell from his face, whether he passed or failed, and he is not letting on. Before I get a chance to lean in and ask him how it went, my name is called. "Right Now Mordue!" Ugh. Phillips leads me into the main room, and the door is opened on the back of the capsule, and a staircase unfolds. He motions for me to enter, apparently I was climbing the stairs too slowly, because he kinda pushed me over the last one, and then slammed the door shut. It is quite dark, just a red glow, enough where I can make out shapes. There's a chair in front of me that looks like Captain Kirk's Star Trek chair, and I circle around and sit in it. As I sit, a metal seat-belt comes out of the left side and crosses my stomach and clicks into the right side. I look at the armrests, and it looks like almost all of the padding has been scratched off, and even the metal underneath has what looks like claw marks. Suddenly, I am awash in bright light as three monitors fire to life, in the same orientation as the auditorium. Below each monitor are switches, levers and dials to adjust what is on them. Below the middle monitor is a small LED that says "Mission One: Solve for Enterprise". It flashes a few times and then says "Begin", I feel a slight jolt as the simulator comes to life. Mission One Hmm, Solve for Enterprise... not my area of expertise, but I'll take a shot, because it doesn't look like I can skip it. First, I reach to the left, under the NAV monitor. I am remembering Marko saying that NAV can be used for SMB, all the way up to Enterprise, but most of the NAV partners I know, are not focused on Enterprise. I don't know AX that well either, but understand it to be a more complex product aimed at enterprise. So I turn off all of the NAV capabilities, and on the right, I crank up all of the AX levers. In the middle, where the CRM label has been crossed through with a sharpie, and Customer Engagement has been hand written below, I also start turning up levers. Field Service: On, Project Service: On, anything marked "Insights": On. A new monitor lights up below, that I had not noticed before, it is not very tall, but it spans across and under all three of the big monitors, and flashes CDS before showing a whole bunch of other dials, and I see a new set of levers below it. I flip them all on. I sit for minute... thinking... looking at the glowing green button on the right armrest labeled "Start Simulation"... I press it. I hear laughing erupt outside of the capsule, apparently the crew has seen this configuration before, I fear that I won't do well, but hey, this is not my area of expertise. I have no doubt that Joel will crush my score on this one. The capsule rocks around for a bit and then stops, all monitors go dark, the LED says "Simulation Completed". It did not say "Mission Accomplished", so I have no idea what happened, but before I can even think further about it, the LED flashes, "Mission Two : Solve for SMB". Mission Two Now we're talking, SMB is my wheelhouse. The three big monitors light up again, the same as they started in the first simulation. The first thing I do, is turn everything on the right (AX) side off. When Microsoft says SMB, I assume they are really meaning upper small to middle sized companies, as nobody makes any money on the 5 seat deals, so that is the lens I am thinking about. I look at CRM, ugh, I mean Customer Engagement next, as that is what I know. First thing, turn off Field Service and Project Service. My goal is to solve for the meat of the SMB market, not the fringes, so I go ahead and turn off Customer Service for now also. This is going to focus on Sales, the door that 90% of SMBs enter from. Insights? Too complex for most SMBs, at least to start, so I push those levers down, but not all the way. Appsource? Yes, yes, that one goes full to the top, SMB would rather buy than build any day. Plus, some of the enterprise features I turned off, will be filled by SMB focused products from Appsource. As I make adjustments, new windows appear, based on the selections I have made, a new one pops up in the corner now, it is labeled Business Edition in a crossed through font with a question mark next to it. I know that regardless of that they end up calling it, this is the simplified UI, so I push all of those levers to the top. A box flashes at the bottom of the window, "Do you want to change the default price of $40/user?", I check "No". I lean back, feeling pretty good about this configuration, I let me head loll to the left, and I am facing the NAV monitor. Hmm, NAV, I am not an NAV partner, but something is telling me that is is important for this simulation. I look down to the LED and it is flashing: "Create a branch of this simulation?" I think about this. Many customers that I have encountered in the SMB space have been looking for just a sales solution. Is that because they are not interested in an end-to-end solution, or because I do not know enough to offer one? If I did, and I offered it, wouldn't that give me an even stronger competitive advantage? I decide to create a branch of what I started and find out. I look at the NAV monitor... it does not say Tenerife yet, but that just came out and the guy with the Sharpie hasn't got to it yet. I see a lot of items on the screen that I do not understand, and the levers look foreign also, but I do recognize a few. One says SaaS on the top and on-premise on the bottom. I place it to about 80% SaaS, because I know there will still be some customers who are ignorant to the cloud. I tweak a few other levers that I really don't understand, but I need to move them somewhere, as I am sure the defaults are not what I want. I notice another lever that says "re-factor platform?" Looking down at the LED, I see that I can create yet another branch of the simulation from here. I press it. When I select "re-factor platform" for my new branch, I notice some new grab handles on the windows. I had just talked to Crowter the other day, and he floated an idea by me as a CRM guy, for my opinion. Hoping he did not notice the "Create a Branch" option, I am going to steal it and see if can beat him in this simulation with his own idea... I'm not proud. I take the grab handle at the top of the NAV screen, and drag the entire screen over to the middle one, and drop it on top of the XRM box. What if NAV were actually a CRM App built on XRM? That would take care of any integration challenges. I know we have CDS, but would this not be easier. One UI, a platform within a platform instead of next to it... I'm liking this idea, thanks Crowter, ya sucker. A box appears, "Do you want to change the default price of "TBD?" Hmm, this is a good question. Knowing that in the App model, different users could use different things, and I already accepted the $40 price for Sales only, I decide that for this NAV App a good price would be $75/user. It does not give me an option to create a price for Sales and NAV, but that may not come up that often anyway. I press the button on the armrest to start all simulations. The capsule rocks back and forth for what seems like a long time, and then everything goes dark again, just the red glow. Nothing is happening. The seat belt slides back open, so I assume I'm done. I stand and turn towards the door and it opens, I squint from the light and I see Phillips waving me out. He leads me back to the auditorium, and as I enter I hear, "Right Now Lindstom!" Post Flight As my eyes adjust, I notice Crowter sitting in front of me. I lean in and say "James, did you see the branching option?", and he says "what branching option?". I lean back and smile. Several hours pass, and finally everyone has returned to the auditorium. The last one to return is Chris Cognetta, he is backing into the room, still turned towards the simulator, I think he is explaining to the simulator crew how simulators work. It's quiet now, but I can hear George grumbling about a lever in the simulator that was sticking, and obviously not well designed. Marko, Param and the AX guy are nowhere to be seen. Alysa is still whispering to "Hi, I'm Hayden", and pointing at some of us, although I can't tell who. Phillips clears his throat, and says "Thank you for your participation, the crew will re-blindfold you and return you to the bus stop". Before I can stop myself, I blurt out "Wait!! Who won?", Phillips shoots me a glance, pauses, and says, "Hopefully, we all did". Next steps for you As you can clearly see, Microsoft is extremely willing to take feedback from partners. The next time you see Phillips, Marko, Param, Alysa, "Hi I'm Hayden", or the AX guy. Tell them you want to crack at the Dynamics 365 Strategy Simulator. They will probably deny its existence, and I will probably get some serious heat from them for exposing it. But don't take no for an answer.