Podcast appearances and mentions of charles lamanna

In this Founded & Funded episode, Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar sits down with Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, to unpack his journey from startup founder to corporate leader. They dive into what it takes to build a successful AI-transformed organization, how the nature of business applications is evolving, and why AI agents will fundamentally reshape teams, tools, and workflows. From "customer obsession" to "extreme ownership," Charles delivers insight after insight for startup founders and enterprise leaders navigating the age of AI. They dive into: Why business apps as we know them are dead How AI agents and open standards like MCP and A2A are reshaping software The shift toward generalist teams powered by AI What startups are doing today that enterprises will follow in 3–5 years How to focus deeply on a few high-impact AI projects instead of chasing 100 pilots Transcript: https://www.madrona.com/the-end-of-biz-apps-ai-agility-and-the-agent-native-enterprise-from-microsoft-cvp-charles-lamanna Chapters: (00:00) Introduction (01:20) Charles Lamanna's Entrepreneurial Journey (01:39) Customer Obsession and Ownership in Startups (03:54) The Future of Business Applications with AI (05:56) AI-Powered Business Agents (08:22) The Role of AI in Modern Business (11:11) Startups Are the Blueprint for the Future of Work (14:33) Industry-Wide AI Adoption (18:32) Driving AI Transformation in Enterprises (21:51) Maintaining Agility in Large Companies (25:03) Personal Impact of AI on Daily Life (27:55) Conclusion and Final Thoughts

NewsPower Platform Plan Designer (Preview) by Nick DoelmanHow NOT to use Copilot on LinkedIn by Femke Cornelissen25 experts predict how AI will change business and life in 2025 featuring Charles Lamanna by Fast CompanyPower Platform Weekly - Special Edition 4th anniversary by Carina M. Claesson, Daniel Laskewitz, Ed Gonzales, and Magnus Sørensen.By Nathan Rose:Here are 3 unique #PowerFx traits that make it a delight to work with PowerFx vs ExcelPowerFx has AI in it's DNA!Hydrate Development Environments via Pipelines by Matt Collins-JonesPreview PDF files from Base64 content in Power Pages using the PDFJs library by Michel MendesPower Automate Flow To Host A Web Page/Web Application by Matthew DevaneyWebsite Tracking In Realtime Marketing by Megan V. WalkerLooking to get Power Platform Certified in 2025? by Howdang RashidEvents Tallinn Technology Town HallJanuary 30-31stDevelopers guide to Power Pages - Nick Canadian Power Platform SummitMarch 21-22ndTickets on sale - January 1stColorCloudApril 24-25thUlrikke's Workshop: "Power Pages: From creation to go-live!"Session with Andrew Wingate: "Business Central + Power Pages = TRUE" DynamicsMindsMay 26-28thNick's session on Powerlifting and mental healtBe sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of Power Platform BOOST!Thank you for buying us a coffee: buymeacoffee.comPodcast home page: https://powerplatformboost.comEmail: hello@powerplatformboost.comFollow us!Twitter: https://twitter.com/powerplatboost Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/powerplatformboost/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/powerplatboost/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090444536122 Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@powerplatboost

“One of the most important elements of copilots going forward is going to be the context you make available to it. Everybody wants a copilot to understand them,” says Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business and Industry Copilot, Charles Lamanna. Speaking with Anurag Rana, Bloomberg Intelligence's senior technology analyst, in this Tech Disruptors podcast episode, Lamanna highlights the fundamental construction of copilots, the different models they use, how customers can fine-tune them further in Copilot Studio and how this progresses the company to the vision of a fully autonomous CRM software. The two also discuss automation in the context of the Power Platform and what these technological advancements mean for the future of the software industry.

Send me a Text Message hereFULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/565  Unlock the secrets of enterprise data management with insights from Microsoft's own Julie Koesmarno, a principal product manager in Dataverse. Julie's extraordinary journey from database enthusiast to MVP, and now a key player at Microsoft, will leave you inspired. From her passion for ice cream and travel to her innovative projects within Charles Lamanna's Business Applications Platform Group, Julie's story is a compelling blend of personal and professional triumphs.Explore the critical relationship between Copilot AI systems and enterprise data management. Julie sheds light on the concept of 'knowledge' as enterprise data, tackling the challenges and opportunities of integrating Microsoft Graph and Copilot. Learn why robust data housekeeping and security measures are non-negotiable as organizations adopt AI tools, and why grounding AI responses with accurate data is essential for maintaining integrity and governance.Experience a practical demonstration on data modeling and table creation using Copilot. Julie takes us through setting up an environment, designing data models with natural language, and creating a student accommodation review system. She also shares her journey as a female in tech, emphasizing the importance of a supportive team environment and active listening. Julie's reflections on overcoming challenges and fostering diversity offer invaluable lessons for anyone navigating the tech landscape. Tune in for an episode packed with expert advice and inspiring stories!90 Day Mentoring Challenge 10% off code use MBAP at checkout https://ako.nz365guy.comSupport the Show.If you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

Charles Lamanna is the Corporate Vice President of Business Apps and Platforms at Microsoft. In this episode, he explores how newly announced Microsoft Copilot capabilities help business leaders do more than boost their personal productivity using AI. They can reinvent their teams and even their entire business. Lamanna also shares how low- and no-code tools are democratizing AI by allowing anyone, not just software developers, to turn their great ideas into products. WorkLab Subscribe to the WorkLab newsletter  

The digital workplace is the future of work. Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications & Platforms at Microsoft, and Pete Cherecwich, President of Asset Servicing at Northern Trust, join Faster Forward to explore the nuances of digital workplace transformation, share insights about the future landscape of work, and offer an exclusive peak into the … Read More Read More

I caught Charles the other day for my fifth annual Chat. We talked about many things fresh off of Ignite—copilots, of course, but also Project Sophia and his thoughts about AGI.

Microsoft Power Platform Conference was a whirlwind of a week! We got to connect with familiar faces and meet new friends, all with a common interest: the Power Platform.  We came back incredibly energized and tired after balancing fun with learning in the bright city of Las Vegas. From the very first keynote of the week (Charles Lamanna), there was an intense, excited energy in the air that would carry through the entirety of the conference.  Ashley and Ali share their experiences at the conference in this special bonus episode. There have been many other recaps of the content and announcements posted by our colleagues and friends in the community, so we're focusing on what hit us the most. You'll hear about our stand-out moments, favorite sessions, and even some ideas to make it better in the future.  What was your favorite moment from MPPC? If you didn't make it this year, will you make it happen next year?! 

Welcome back to Future of Tech! In this special season, Avishai sits down with some of the leading thinkers in Generative AI. In this episode, he is joined by Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business Apps & Platforms at Microsoft. He and Avishai discuss what Microsoft is doing to educate their workforce about Gen AI, the impacts of Gen AI on large enterprises like Microsoft, and what he sees coming down the pipeline.    Key Takeaways: Charles is an AI optimist. Charles says he focuses on the fact that the majority of Gen AI use cases are human-directed. He believes humans will be able to leverage Gen AI to make their processes more efficient and productive, not replace them entirely.  Gen AI will be adopted across industries. Charles believes that AI will be harnessed by all industries, not just tech. He believes it will allow organizations to grow without compromising service.  Enterprises need to invest in employee learning. Charles stresses that in order to harness the power of Gen AI, enterprises should invest the time and money to properly train their workforce on how to use Gen AI, and how to do so securely. 

In this exclusive and captivating interview, we delve deep into the remarkable mind of Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President of Business Apps & Platform at Microsoft. Join us as we uncover the insights and experiences that have propelled Lamanna, to the forefront of innovation. Discover the driving forces behind Lamanna's relentless pursuit of technological advancement and his passion for empowering developers around the world. Gain valuable insights into Microsoft's transformative initiatives, with Lamanna's expertise as the driving force behind the company's Low Code Application Platform strategy. Explore the challenges and triumphs that have defined Lamanna's career, as he shares invaluable lessons learned along the way. Delve into the future of technology as Lamanna provides a glimpse into the next phase of the developer. This interview is an unmissable opportunity to gain unparalleled access to the visionary mind of Charles Lamanna, gaining inspiration and insights that will leave you captivated and eager to embrace the limitless possibilities of the digital era. Don't miss this engaging conversation.

The first day of the European Power Platform Conference is over and we are giving you a recap of the sessions that we attended. Nick talks about the session he had in the morning, with an introduction to Power Pages, and Ulrikke shares her experience stepping in and covering for a community friend that was prevented from having their session today.Session linksKeynote with Charles Lamanna, Kendra Springer, and April Dunnam Power Platform in the Age of AI - Copilot and More Dona Sakar The Best Way To Build An AI Copilot Product? Fusion Teams!Luise Freese and Robin RosengrünBuh-bye ugly Power Apps: Jumpstart your design process with a professional component libraryNick DoelmanCrash Course in Power Pages!Jens Schrøder and Michael OchsPower Pipelines, Power Platform Build Tools, ALM Accelerator. Oh My!Ulrikke Akerbæk as Oliver RodriguesPower Pages - Real World ScenariosStay tuned for another recap tomorrow. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of Power Platform BOOST!Thank you for buying us a coffee: buymeacoffee.comPodcast home page: https://powerplatformboost.comEmail: hello@powerplatformboost.comFollow us!Twitter: https://twitter.com/powerplatboost Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/powerplatformboost/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/powerplatboost/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090444536122 Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@powerplatboost

Build low code apps and processes easily with the latest updates to Microsoft's Power Platform. Move quickly from ideation on paper, to automatic Power App creation with AI-assisted app development through Express design. Then tie those apps to business processes using natural language to generate automated workflows in Power Automate. For IT admins, we show how the new Managed Environments provide the foundation for better management and governance over data used in your apps and flows. Business Applications and Platform CVP, Charles Lamanna, joins Jeremy Chapman to go through all the updates with the Power Platform. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Introduction 02:14 - How to convert drawings into Power Apps 03:56 - How to generate the backend of an app 05:10 - Natural language to flow 07:40 - More sophisticated app design 09:12 - Managed Environments 12:13 - Wrap up ► Link References: Try it for yourself at https://www.powerplatform.microsoft.com Check out Charles Lamanna's blog for recent updates at https://aka.ms/PowerPlatformIgnite22 ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft's official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. • Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries?sub_confirmation=1 • Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog • Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/website • To get the newest tech for IT in your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/msftmechanics ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: • Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics • Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ • Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ • Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics 

James and I went down to sunny (sweaty) Orlando for Microsoft Power Platform Conference (MPPC) 2022. Apart from getting to see a great set of announcements, learn a ton, and meet up with past pod-friends we also got the chance to sit down and have a conversation with Charles Lamanna — hot on the heels of his keynote address. Join us for this Very Special Episode of Switched On, our chance to share Charles' deeper thoughts on MPPC 2022 announcements. First, our own quick thoughts on MPPC 2022:James loved the enthusiasm. “Our industry is about to be turned upside-down.”I had big love for the announced collaborative editing feature in Power Apps, with coauthoring. Fusion teams are even more equipped now.Then — in an effort to avoid falling into a nerd black hole of our own excitement — we jump to the live-on-the-scene interview with Charles. IT. WAS. SO. AWESOME. Here is a sprinkling of his wisdom. HighlightsCharles loves the real-time coauthoring experience, same as me. Customers often have big development teams working on the same app — now think of it as the current Word or Excel. Your colleagues are there with you, making cool things happen quickly.Power Platform as a low-code platform is interesting in its comprehensiveness. Don't forget that you're doing a lot more than just Power Apps.James notes the Azure backdrop for Power Platform as a game-changer: “substrate”.There are “no cliffs” — there's always an escape hatch to go one layer deeper on customizing and powering up apps. You can always drop into a deeper layer of code or functionality.Charles LamannaApproximately 25% of Power Platform users are professional developers, and they often collaborate with non-pro devs.Fusion teams, CoEs, etc — those are functionally customer innovations on top of the delivered platform.7.4 million Power Platform developers. It's only just beginning.Low-code development platforms in 3 years: 3 trends. Data [there's a massive amount of data from every system, it's not easy to put it all together → data poor to data rich, connectors], AI [from big data to big AI, “there will be more UI built for AI than for humans”], collaboration [all this great stuff is happening in tech — it's still all about the people using it].AI is leaking into Power Platform in ways where you don't see or know it. It's just there, powering things.We talk about humans collaborating, in the future it'll be humans and AIs collaborating.Charles: serverless is the now-future.Fun fact: Logic Apps come from an internal hackathon project at Microsoft called Wolfkrow (“workflow” backwards)Money QuotesCharlesThat's the amazing thing about platforms: you build it, and your mind is always blown by what people are able to do with it.Power Platform has definitely entered the ‘flywheel is a blur' stage…every quarter there's a game-changing experience. [nod to Jim Collins]I remember in 2013 what it felt like for public cloud. It feels exactly the same way for low-code in 2022.Technology is what enables the feature, technology is not the feature.JamesBecause it's getting to a certain level of maturity it's like…how far can we take this? The answer is: pretty far.PaulMPPC 2023: Field of Dreams

In my recent conversations with Charles Lamanna here and Jason Gumpert here, we discussed the explosive growth of the Power Platform. Then while listening to Jukka Niiranen on yet another podcast here, I was reminded that we are all inside the Power Platform bubble. From the outside, however, this bubble is tiny. Expanding Bubble There is no denying that the Power Platform's growth is impressive, but who is growing it? Microsoft has a fist-full of enterprise-sized customers who went all-in and sang the praises. But of all the enterprise-sized customers worldwide, I doubt this has touched even 1%. Sure, we have a ton of new "citizens" making things, but a "ton" does not even register on the scale. In an imaginary global IT heatmap, the Power Platform is still invisible. Popping the Bubble The Microsoft bubble is our constraint. Microsoft people are talking to Microsoft Customers and Microsoft Partners about Microsoft stuff. Obviously, "Microsoft" is quite visible in that imaginary heatmap, but the Power Platform is still largely unknown. While organizations may be starting to hear about components, like Power Automate, for example, too many are oblivious to the other components that make up the Power Platform whole. Many think the ability to create a reminder Flow in Power Automate is the limit. Mistakes Were Made I spend much of my time with customers today trying to work around go-to-market mistakes Microsoft made and continues to make. Seeded Power Apps is one. This should have been called Power Apps Lite or Basic, so people would be aware that there is something more, like Power Apps Pro. This alone would not have solved the invisibility issue, but it could be a start. I think too many feel that the seeded capabilities are the extent of it. There are undoubtedly many widget-type apps that have been built with these seeded toys, but if a customer were to inquire about more, they would reach another GTM mistake. If they want more than a simple Laptop Checkout app, the next logical step must be "Dynamics 365". I recall clearly jumping straight into a Jet cockpit after mastering my tricycle at three years old. But that was me. Too Small Those who somehow accidently discovered that there is more available than just the seeded capabilities realize quickly that Microsoft just gave them a toy to play with. Looking back over their shoulder, they see mostly broken toys now. Many wondering why Microsoft let them waste so much time and energy before they tripped through the curtain of awareness. Too Big I am not knocking Dynamics 365; Microsoft has built a colossal Power App aimed squarely at enterprise organizations. It is indeed a "step up" from the seeded toy builder. But, among the zillion features coming soon to add to the existing gabillion features are the abilities to "Create sequences with looping of repeated steps" or "Assignment by segment priority" WTF is that? I just want to sell my stuff! You will need a team of internal and external resources just to sift through the capabilities and understand what they are and whether they can do anything for you. Just Right? There is a space between the seeded toys and Dynamics 365, which is actually the biggest hidden space. Obviously, Microsoft would prefer that you drop half of your annual revenue subscribing to their big solutions; it is not "bad"; it is their business, no different from any other enterprise software company. In my recent chat with Charles, he said, "we have some great data about every user who adopts Power Platform is significantly more likely to adopt Dynamics within the next year or two." Maybe these users were unaware of what the Power Platform could actually do? Low-Code/No-Code "LCNC" This "is" the movement of this decade. The movement of the last decade was getting all but the genuinely paranoid to the cloud. But once there, many realized it wasn't cheaper; it was quite a bit more expensive, and subscriptions are like waves in the ocean; they never stop. Where can you save? Development expenses. Chipping away at that 5, 6, or 7-figure albatross. This is what LCNC is about. It may be subscription protection at the developers' expense, but it is still a big win for customers. From Win to Win-Win LCNC will save customers a lot of money on their Dynamics 365 deployments. Some development may still be required for some things, but not nearly as much as in the last decade. And we are only in 2022! That is indeed a massive Win for customers. But a Win-Win is achievable for those who take the time to understand the Power Platform, the same thing that Dynamics 365 runs on, and what they can build with LCNC directly on there. Not only will they save massive development costs, even if they still engage an LCNC partner, but they could also save +/- 90% on Microsoft Licensing costs. This is not highly promoted for apparent reasons, but we are helping customers build sophisticated business applications with advanced logic and automation, solving complex business problems on $5 Microsoft licenses daily! Summary LCNC, while still in its infancy, is already very powerful and growing more so every month. To see an example of what I am talking about, you can check out our Free RapidStart CRM app and our addons. All of which were built using LCNC on the Power Platform. Microsoft tells a "No Cliffs" story, meaning that you can start with the seeded capabilities, and once you hit a limit, you can advance to the Platform Platform, and once you hit a limit there, you can advance to Dynamics 365. What they don't emphasize is that the Power Platform doesn't have any limits you will hit. Many, starting with RapidStart CRM as a head start, used LCNC to build massively complex mission-critical solutions, with and without our help. LCNC and the Power Platform is a movement you cannot afford not to explore!

The Microsoft Business Applications product line's new look is starting to come into focus under the leadership of CVP Charles Lamanna. In a recent conversation with Microsoft MVP Steve Mordue, Lamanna discussed some of his team's recent work, its successes, and future challenges. Lamanna's upward rise at Microsoft started in the Power Platform team, but he now represents the Dynamics 365 lineup, too.   Mordue discusses his impressions after talking with Lamanna this time (it was the fourth interview they've done over the years) and how both Microsoft's product and channel plans have impacted the community, including Mordue's own business decisions related to RapidStart CRM and Forceworks.   Show Notes: 6:30 - Could Power Platform really help upsell Dynamics 365 apps? 12:30 - Viva Sales and the Biz Apps R&D team's involvement 15:30 - Why enthusiasm from Charles Lamanna is likely to be followed by real progress 20:00 - Some Nuance R&D is now under the Biz Apps umbrella 22:45 - Microsoft's much improved acquisition strategy for business apps 25:30 - Reviewing the D365 product management leaders 29:00 - Are Steve's new clients starting with an interest in an app or in the platform? 31:30 - Adapting services offerings for low code development 38:15 - Changing customer perceptions on the idea of continuous development vs discrete start and end dates 40:00 - Making sense of the channel outlook from Partner Economics as it relates to Power Platform opportunities 44:00 - Differences in the new generation of buyers 45:30 - Why Steve's firm transitioned to offering a free app on Power Platform with a subscription services model 49:45 - How will partners prove their worth with a new generation of customers? 52:00 - Thinking about the future of the partner business model

I have had my head down working on some big things since RapidStart CRM growth exploded, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Charles Lamanna who recently took over for James Phillips as head of Business Applications for Microsoft. This was my fourth chat with Charles, and it was interesting to back listen to them in order. It really gives you a sense of where Microsoft has come. I managed to catch him in his office having just wrapped up their year-end. Enjoy! If you want to listen to my chats with Charles in order, The first one was October of 2018, the second one was September of 2019, the third one was March of 2020. Transcript Below: Steve: Welcome to the Steve Has a Chat Podcast. Where I call someone out of the blue with a record button on, and hope to have an unscripted conversation about Microsoft business applications. Let's see how it goes. Enjoy. Charles: Hey, this is Charles Lamanna. Steve: Charles. Steve Mordue. How are you doing? Charles: Good. Great to hear from you, Steve. It's been a long time. Steve: It has been a while. Have you got some time for a chat? Charles: For you, anytime. Steve: I appreciate it. Well, I guess the big news for you obviously is putting on the big boy hat, huh? Charles: Yes. I moved up an extra floor in the Advanta building in the Microsoft Campus. Steve: Oh did you? Charles: No, I'm just kidding. But metaphorically speaking at least. Because for folks that don't know, James Phillips leaving in March of this year, I kinda stepped in across all aspects of business applications of Microsoft. And, over the last four years, I've gotten to know the place, know the people, know the business and I'm super excited about the opportunity. And I think the future has never been brighter for business at Microsoft. Steve: Well, I never got the feeling that James held you back, or any of the folks on your team back, but he certainly, we have to give him a lot of credit for really taking this thing to a whole nother level. You weren't here before, I don't think, at least with the business apps, but it was really run by morons before he took over. And he completely turned that thing around and turned it in a whole nother business. And now with you taking over, I'm expecting that to continue. I don't know if there's been some things that have been in your bag that you've wanted to do that James was keeping you from, that you're going to pull out, or if you're just going to continue the path, or what's your thinking now that you've got that gavel? Charles: So definitely not held back. I would say I was super fortunate I worked for James for, I think seven, eight years in total. So I was able to learn a bunch and he was without a doubt, the most supportive manager I've ever had in my career, in terms of both enabling and clearing paths for what we wanted to do from a vision and dreaming perspective. And if it weren't for his support, things like Power Apps would have never gotten off the ground. So, definitely. And I think as we go to the future, we have this amazing foundation. I mean, BizApps is a major and key component and pillar of the Microsoft Cloud. Charles: 10 years ago, you probably would've thought that impossible. Right. To have Dynamics and Power Platform alongside Azure and Office. Now that we're here, let's go take it to the next level. And that's the push, and it's continuing a lot of the great innovation we've already done from a data-first, AI-first approach. Kind of sprinkling in some more collaboration with teams, and really revisiting the end-user experience, the platform, to go increasingly modernize and scale it and make sure that all our components from CRM, to ERP, to Power Platform work great together. Steve: I don't think it could have achieved that status with Dynamics 365 alone. It really took the Power Platform coming into being, I think, to give it the breadth that it needed to be able to get there. With Dynamics 365, we didn't have apps for users to do small things, there was no way it was going to permeate an organization the way the Power Apps do. Charles: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I say two things are interesting. The first is, Power Platform has allowed us to help more users and more customers with business process transformation, which is what BizApps are all about. Right? Steve: Yeah. Charles: How do you make your sales processes better, your financial processes better, and Power Platform really turbocharged that. And that earned us credibility in a lot of those departments and with a lot of those users, and we have some great data about every user who adopts Power Platform is significantly more likely to adopt Dynamics within the next year or two. So we see that symbiosis working in a way which is incredibly customer-friendly, and it helps our business. Second thing is Power Platform has even helped us reimagine parts of the Dynamics apps themselves. And I think probably two of the best examples are the connectors, which are key to the Power Platform. Charles: You see the connectors starting to show up inside all these Dynamics apps, like Customer Insights uses Power Query for data ingestion, or Viva Sales even connects to Salesforce. So there's this amazing interoperability that we have, and also enabling the end-user. Our team built Viva Sales, even though it's not in the Dynamics or Power Platform brand. But it's this idea of having an integrated experience in Office for sellers, built on connectors and built on the Office integration. So it's changed the way you think about some products, and it's also helped us go expand our user base. Steve: Yeah. I saw I was on a PGI call with that yesterday. Very, very cool stuff. At the last PAC meeting, I was supposed to be on the Viva Sales round table, but I'm like, "Yeah, that sounds boring. I think I'm going to go to this one." And I really, I went to the wrong one, I missed a good one. But you know where I am, right? I'm on the platform. Charles: Yep. Steve: And we're exploding. Our app is continuing to grow on the platform as a low-cost simpler alternative to Dynamics 365 for companies that aren't ready for that. And I'm always bugging you about, "Hey, that cool new feature you guys got in the first-party. When are we going to get that at the platform level? So ISVs, and people that are just building their own stuff from scratch, could take advantage of some of the syncs." We got the Outlook app a while ago, we've been getting some things. And when I saw Viva Sales, that was probably my only disappointment was that, at least as I understand it, it's hardwired to Dynamics or hardwired to Salesforce. And I get that trying to play those two against each other, but it's leaving guys like me out in the cold. Charles: Well, I'd say for Viva Sales, the intent is to support any CRM, and I really do mean that generally. And even customers, because there are customers out there that we talked to today who have homegrown CRMs, they coded 15 years ago. They have a whole dev team still working on it. The idea is to support interoperability with your account records, your lead records, your opportunity records, standard pipeline data. And to do that in a way which works through the connector. So today it'll earn V1, it'll only be Dynamics in Salesforce, but the intent is to make that be a general purpose adapter. And you could have a RapidStart CRM connector, which shows up and supports the contacts the way we want, and it would be connectable. That's not going to happen in the next three months, but that's the ambition. Steve: I can call you in four. Charles: I go down and said... What was that, in four Months? Steve: I can call you in four months. Charles: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I might not pick up the phone then in four months, no I'm just kidding. Because even talking about, if people are even on Seibal. We should be able to support them with their sales. Because the idea is, you shouldn't have to transform the seller experience at the same pace that you transform your core CRM, your core system of record, and that's just the way the world's moving. Steve: Well, I love the idea that one of the challenges that CRM has always had, of course, is user adoption. It's one more place they need to go to do something. Outlook app helped with that, getting data into CRM without them having to actually go to it. It seems like yet another way for people to engage with their CRM without actually realizing they're engaging with their CRM. Charles: Exactly. Yeah. It's almost like ambient... Yeah for sure. Sorry. Yeah. I say it's almost like ambient CRM basically. How do you make it so that, instead of the user goes to your CRM, the CRM goes to the user where they are. And the outlook app was the beginnings of that. Some of the Team's integrations we've done are the beginnings of that. And that Viva Sales and that whole Viva idea is how do you elevate it? So anywhere you go, your CRM data is accessible without you having to go to a different user interface. Steve: Very cool. Very cool. So I ask you every time we get on a call about exciting features that are coming up. And in particular, maybe even some features that have launched, that didn't take off the way you thought they would and people are just missing something. We have this problem with our app sometimes, people don't understand and so they don't move forward, and it would be perfect for them. And I'm sure there's lots of features and capabilities that you guys broke a sweat building, and know in your heart, this would be awesome, but people don't seem to be getting that. What's a good example of one of those? Charles: I'd say a product which we've had a capability, where we've had a lot of customer usage from a small number of customers, but very deeply and with huge impact, and we wish were with more customers, is probably Conversation Intelligence. I'm not sure if you've seen that around the Sales app, and where that actually will sit in inside of say a phone call or a meeting and help you generate action items, and summaries, and coaching, and help you understand sentiment, and listening and talk ratio. We've used that internally at Microsoft with great success. So our digital sales reps and the folks who work our phones, they are diehard fans. We have this amazing video we released a couple months ago where we actually went out and interviewed these digital sales reps and their managers, and they just were going on and on about how great it is. Charles: And that's rare where you hear that about a piece of technology for a seller. And we have a few other external customers that have gone through that same journey, where they have a thousand digital reps, 2000 digital reps using this and just in love with it. But it's not as pervasive as we thought it would be at this point. And it's one of those things where, it's a product discovery, and easing people into the capability, because then you got to go out of your way to enable it and configure it. So we're doing work now to simplify it, and make it more accessible to more users. And we're doing that partly through Viva Sales, like conversation intelligence, the major capability of Viva Sales. Charles: And the second thing is also, there's even some culture aspects to it. Because if you use it, it's generating transcripts and recordings of a call, and not everyone's necessarily super comfortable with that. So we're even working about how do you enable more features without having to record the call, and how do you enable capabilities without having to get a transcript? Or how do you make it more natural to say, "Hey, I have a sales co-pilot thing. Are you okay if I enable it?" So there's a lot of interesting things, it's never just a technology problem. It's also a discovery and a, I'd say, change culture management problem. Steve: Yeah. I think that's been the challenge with anything AI really. A lot of people, it seem to think it might be a little too futuristic. They look at the benefit and think that's really cool, but they have no idea how to get it. And AI just in general, doesn't feel that approachable to people, even though in certain cases, it's extremely approachable. You don't have to do anything, it's approaching you. So it's a learning curve, you got to wait until my generation dies off and then you guys will see. Charles: I don't have as myopic of you, as you Steve. But I would say that, the big thing that we have to do is, there's been this evolution of AI where the AI is going to be something that automates away what humans do. And what we've realized is, AI is not even remotely close to being able to do that. But what AI can do, is it can turbocharge the people that use it. And so what we're trying to do is, how do we go expose these AI capabilities in a way where you or anyone else who uses them feels so much more productive. And just like when you first got the ability to use PC or a spreadsheet, you're like, "How did I exist before?" We're hoping we'll get to the point where, once you start using some of these AI assistive capabilities, like we've done in Conversation Intelligence, you'll be like, "How did I ever do a customer call before? And I had to take notes on paper while listening as opposed to having the AI take notes for me?" Yeah, exactly. Steve: I'm terrible about that. I'll be chicken scratching over here while I'm talking to people, and then we get off the phone I look at and I can't understand a word I wrote. Charles: Yeah. I like post-it notes next to my desk where I'm always writing stuff down. Steve: Yeah. So what else cool's coming on the horizon that we should be... That sounds like the Conversational Intelligence has been around. Sounds like Viva Sales is going to really bring that to the masses, so that one's on a path. What are some other new things that we should pay attention to that you're able to talk about? Charles: Yeah. Another one of my favorite things, which we've started to reveal some capabilities going back to last Ignite, so November of 2021. And we have some big announcements planned for the second half of 2022, is the new Contact Center related capabilities inside of Dynamics Customer Service. We have Omnichannel, we announced integrated voice, the Nuance acquisition closed, and the Nuance contact center AI team joined my group to align with customer service and contact center. So there's a lot of really exciting innovation happening there. And I'm really excited about the potential to make it super easy to get a comprehensive customer engagement story, without having to wire up eight different pieces of technology and do a ton of different complex integrations. So that's a place where there's a lot of innovation, there's new capabilities, Omnichannel, Power Virtual Agent, even the same type of conversation intelligence applied to support cases, Nuance for their Gatekeeper, which is identity and authentication verification based on voice and biometrics. Charles: There's a lot of cool stuff in that space. And that's one of the places where so many of the customers we work with are trying to improve the customer experience, and to go reduce costs. So I say that's a place where we've had a lot of exciting announcements over the last six to nine months, and we have a whole bunch more planned for the next six to nine months. So I say, stay tuned. And I won't say more than that to avoid getting in trouble by leaking information. But I just say, that's a place to really pay close attention. Steve: Who knew call centers could be cool? Charles: Yeah, exactly. Who would have thought that I'd be talking about contact centers, and how it's the next generation or next frontier of AI applications in 2022. Steve: Oh, well. Well I do have to thank you guys for the low-code advances you've continued to make in that platform. It actually allowed us to launch a, I think we're the first ones to try this, a new Service as a Subscription. Which includes awesome includes deployment, customization, training, everything except development code, which as you know today in so many of these projects, there's so little, if any of that. Charles: Yeah. Steve: Just a few years ago, if you tried to offer something like this, it really would be little more than a support agreement. But now, we're deploying, we're building, we're customizing, we're building entire things for customers all on a monthly subscription. It's an interesting concept, and hopefully I don't go broke, but... Charles: But you know what, it's fascinating. I literally was talking about this with the Power Platform team this morning. About a future where we'll have more partners who are able to sell a comprehensive service agreement, which includes the cloud hosting licenses, but also some incremental custom development and also ongoing maintenance and support. And it'll be almost this whole new industry, which will push a lot of innovation to the edges of the ecosystem, right? Steve: Yep. Charles: Not built by Microsoft, built by partners who really understand particular regions, particular industries, or particular segments. Like y'all are targeting a space where we're not trying to go take Dynamics, CRM, and go bring it down there. You can go build a world-class experience on top of our platform and provide a very much all-in-one, which exactly serves the needs of that audience and that market. And we can stay focused on building the super horizontal platform, which has great performance, great usability, incredible power, those types of things. Steve: Yeah, it sounds great. I'm glad that we had the same idea you guys did. I'll let you know, in a few months, if it was a smart one. Time will tell. Charles: Yes. Yeah. Steve: So, how are the rest of the team doing? It seems like some folks have moved around a little bit in the org, who's moved where? Charles: Yeah. So one of the big things we've been really focused on the engineering side, for the engineering organization, is bringing together strength from a product perspective that target the same type of user. And for example, we have a new customer experience platform team underneath Lori Lamkin, who leads all of our Dynamic Sales apps. So the Core Sales and Viva Sales, as well as commerce, as well as marketing, as well as customer insights. And it's very much focused on revenue generation, customer journeys, customer experiences. And what's great is by bringing those assets together, we have a great answer for B2B customers, as well as B2C. Like if you want to have self service, no touch eCommerce experience with lightweight telesales, you can do that all with those sets of applications. If you want to do a high relationship, high touch B2B sales process, you can do all of that. You're not going to use commerce, but you're probably going to use customer insights and sales, and maybe a little bit of account-based marketing. So we brought together these things, which are solving similar problems under a single leader. And that way the engineering teams can go back and forth between these different places to finish out full end-to-end customer journeys. And so that's a big area that we've spent a lot of time on, and that's a place where it's really the biggest and fastest growing category for us in the Dynamics 365 application portfolio. So that's one interesting example. Jeff Comstock, folks may know him. He's been around Dynamics 365 for a while. He continues customer service, he leads omnichannel, he's done some of this great expansion around the contact center for us. Ray Smith leads our supply chain team. So that includes things like more supply chain. Steve: So Ray moved? Charles: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He by way of acquisition to SAP then moved. He worked in Dynamic Sales for a bit, where people may have known him. And now the supply chain, and really helping us be this new data driven, AI powered, supply chain story for core supply chain execution. Then we also had some exciting announcements around process advisor and the minor acquisition to help turbocharge that. Or Georg Glantschnig who leads our finance room of the house. And basically we call the room of the house, is the collection of products which focus on serving the CFO and the finance department. And that includes the Suplari acquisition, which we had done a couple years ago, as well as the Core Dynamics, 365 finance, HR, and project operations products. Charles: So you can see how we started to build these critical paths around particular departments and particular lines of businesses with our products. And in addition to that, we also of course have Power Platform to support all of it. So it's amazing to see these things come together and converge. And we've been on this incredible run of innovation around Dynamics. I was counting it earlier this year, 29 different products in Dynamics, and really coalesced around these specific areas where we have a lot of energy, and also very well understood. I'd say synergies between the products that we have. So I'd say exciting times. Very exciting times. Steve: Customers are starting to understand it better also. Business Applications was the same thing for a long time. Then it spent the last five years reinventing itself every month, and new things exploding out of Advanta. And I think a lot of customers were having trouble just keeping up with... It's like little whackamole for them. And it takes a little time for customers to absorb what's happening, and what it's for, or what it does, and then to adopt it. And we're seeing that now. We used to have to go out and promote Power Apps to people who didn't understand what this was, or why it was. And now it's the opposite. They always come to us, looking for Power Apps, looking at those sorts of things. So that understanding seems to have finally permeated down to the customer level. But boy, it took a while. Charles: Yeah. It warms my heart. And I would say one of my favorite books is by Jim Collins, 'Good to great.' I always recommend it to folks on my team to read it. And he talks about this idea of the flywheel. It takes time to get a flywheel spinning, for the first period of time it looks like it's barely moving, but then eventually it's going super fast and it's just a blur. And you need to be consistent, and convicted, and believe in the strategy and the approach. And what's amazing about BizApps is for the last four years, we've been on the same mission, the same vision, the same ambition. And we just spend all the folks in advance at turning that flywheel, turning that flywheel. And it's started to reach that blur phase where it's spinning so fast, you can't even see it. Charles: And this, this all started years and years ago with a ton of work, but we're really at that magical moment where customers know what Power Platform is. Customers know that Microsoft gets customer experience and customer engagement. They know that Microsoft can help them optimize their supply chain. And what the good news is once that thing is going, it really builds upon itself, and I think it'll only continue that momentum further. And my favorite story is, I used to always do these executive briefings at Microsoft where we have executives come in from our customers to Redmond and we have a briefing center. It's very nice. And I would always say, let me talk about Power Apps and low-code. Charles: And everybody gives me a blank stare like, "What the heck is Power Apps? What the heck is low-code?" I go in those meetings now, and people know what Power Apps is, and they know the low-code strategy. And the only question is, "how?". Not, "should I?" Or "if?" "How do I do it with you, Microsoft?" And so different from three years ago. So anyway, so you're exactly right. A long winded answer, but I'd say it's exciting to see all of these things come together, and the benefits of just consistently repeating a message that resonates with customers. Steve: I would say at least three quarters of my customer calls today, they're bringing up right out of the gate, "We don't want any development. We want to do everything low-code, no code." So this is coming from the customer side where we used to have to explain to them what low-code, no code meant. Now they're coming demanding, "I only want low-code, no code." I think that they've come to this realization that, while low-code, no code might not be easy enough for your mom to do, it doesn't require a developer, and code does require developer. And once you've got this little blob of code in your environment, it's a black box for you. And so they don't want any of these black boxes. They want everything to be accessible. Steve: Use your knowledge to build us something complex out of low-code, but then I can still go back in there later and manipulate it, adjust it myself, or our team. So they have absolutely bought into that. And I know we originally, a lot of us partners were concerned early on that this was going to reduce the workload for partners, while our workload is more than it has ever been. Although the developers on the bench don't stay as busy as they used to. We've completely pivoted the team from developer heavy to now, we haven't even got a good title for them. A citizen developer doesn't sound right. We tell customers that, but citizen developers is what we've got so... Charles: This guy we found on the street, or gal found on the street, we just asked them to start building out. But no, it makes sense. There is almost this new role which is, it's not just pure coding expertise, it's technical development concept expertise. But even more importantly is business process and solution expertise. And that fusion of those two skill sets, that's the magic. That's what makes it special, because you understand it. Steve: Yeah. The challenge that we have with this brand new model that we just launched, because, first of all, being the first one out there is not always good because people have no idea what you're talking about. They're trying to compare it to other things. But we've got this little caveat that it's all you can eat, everything, except development code. And trying to define what that is hasn't been easy, and you get these customers coming in, "Oh, we're going to need a lot of customization. So this isn't going to work for us." And so you may need a lot of customizations, but you don't need any "development code". Charles: Yeah. Steve: And getting them to grasp that development code and customization are not synonymous, not even close. Charles: Exactly. Steve: Development code is a very small component today of customization. And once I think that they understand that, then we'll probably see more partners coming into a model like this. Because it makes a lot of sense for customers, makes a lot of sense for partners. Charles: Yeah. And if you go look at building solutions that last a decade, this is to your point, code is this little black box opaque thing, which is hard to maintain over time. If it's no code, low-code, it's easy to open it up and reconfigure as business requirements change. And it's how you build solutions that last. And I think we're getting to the phase with business software where customers are expecting to make long term technology bets. You're not going to replace your CRM every five years from now on. It's like building manufacturing plants and warehouses. These are big investments that you need to be able to amortize over a long time, to justify. And so I think to your point, no code doesn't mean no flexibility, no customization, also doesn't mean no agility. It just means you're doing it in a different way. Couldn't say it better myself. Steve: All right. Cool. Hey, listen, I'm going to let you go. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day here when I caught you, to chat with me about this stuff, always fun talking to you Charles. I'm going to call you in four months and ask you about Viva Sales for the platform. Charles: Sounds good. Sounds good. Steve: I've got you on record there. Charles: So really appreciate you taking the time, giving me a ring, Steve. Hope you have a great rest of the summer. Steve: All right, man. Have a good one. Charles: Yep. You too.  

Keeping pace with an increasingly changing marketplace has never been so difficult. No place is this more evident than in creating the IT solutions required for digital banking transformation. One way to resolve this dilemma is with low-code and no-code platforms. These platforms provide opportunities for virtually anyone to create business and mobile applications, helping accelerate innovation and delivery of highly differentiated solutions. Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, is our guest on the show today. Charles shares how low-code/no-code app development has revolutionized the way financial institutions build future-ready applications. This episode of Banking Transformed is sponsored by Microsoft: See how Microsoft can help to unlock new opportunities at speed through innovative business models, deliver differentiated customer experiences across channels, products and services, and redefine new ways of working. More at Microsoft.com/financialservices

Low-code and no-code is becoming increasingly popular in software development, particularly in enterprises that are looking to expand the number of people who can create applications for digital transformation efforts. While in 2020, less than 25% of new apps were developed using no code/low code, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% will utilize this means. Microsoft is one vendor who has been paving the way in this shift by reducing the burden on those in the lines of business and developers in exchange for speed. But what are the potential and best practices for low code/no code software development? In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business Apps and Platform at Microsoft discusses what the company is doing in the low-code/no code space with its Power Platform offering, including bringing no code/low-code professionals together to deliver applications. Joab Jackson, Editor-in-Chief of The New Stack and Darryl Taft, News Editor of The New Stack hosted this podcast. 

Take advantage of the new pay-as-you-go billing model and seamlessly leverage the low-code Power Platform to spin up Power Apps directly from Azure. We'll also show you how to package Power Apps as self-contained mobile apps. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Business Applications & Power Platform CVP, joins Jeremy Chapman to walk through updates across the Power Platform. Pay-as-you-go billing model: Set it up and link your app to your Azure subscription Only pay when people use the app Track usage with new Azure Meters: Power Apps per app meter- accrue costs per unique user of the app each month Dataverse meter- get two gigabytes of storage + new overage billing when you go over limits Use Azure Cost Management to track your spending and create budgets and alerts Package Power Apps as standalone mobile apps: Tailor and customize each app experience. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Introduction 00:59 - Pay-as-you-go 01:45 - Track usage with Azure meters 04:07 - Standalone Mobile apps 05:41 - Updates used by Xiaomi's demo app 06:56 - Additional updates 08:59 - Wrap up ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? We are Microsoft's official video series for IT. You can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at #Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries?sub_confirmation=1 Join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen via podcast here: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/website ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ 

Low Code solution creation is all the rage. A Gartner report even forecasts, “By 2024, 75% of large enterprises will be using low-code development tools.” In this episode we're discussing Microsoft's Low Code platform. We'll hear why it can matter for you at a strategic level in your organization and we'll also be digging down into the capabilities of the platform.Our guests today, Charles Lamanna and Ryan Cunningham, talk about what types of solutions people are building using the platform, who uses the platform and who the most common type of “Low Code” users are, Microsoft's Dataverse as a key part of the Power Platform and what it is, and how someone new to these technologies gets up and running to try it out and get started.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptLow Code Application Development on AzureMicrosoft Power Apps on AzurePower AutomatePower Automate Robotic Process AutomationGuests:Charles Lamanna is the Corporate Vice President of the Business Applications & Platform (BAP) at Microsoft. He leads the engineering teams in the business applications & platform across both Product Management and Development. Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.Ryan Cunningham is the GM for Power Apps at Microsoft. Power Apps is the Low Code platform used by millions of people around the world to build apps that make their working lives better.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

May 2021 brought some great new offerings: Yammer conversation highlights, Immersive Reader for SharePoint documents, content migration from Dropbox and Google Workspace into Microsoft 365, Microsoft Lists: Export to CSV, Microsoft Lists: Updated sharing experience, Microsoft Lists: Turn comments on/off, and more. We also hear from Yogesh Ratnaparkhi, principal program manager on the SharePoint team focused on the migration of content into Microsoft 365 - specifically release updates to the SharePoint admin center’s Migration Manager to move content from third-party cloud providers like Box, Dropbox and Google Workspace into Microsoft 365. Click here for the episode corresponding blog post with details and links to all resources discussed in the episode.  Resources: Yogesh Ratnaparkhi | LinkedIn | Twitter [guest] Mark Kashman | Twitter | Kashbox Substack blog [host] SharePoint Twitter | SharePoint Community Blog | UserVoice "Migrate your content into Microsoft 365" [Tech Community blog + migration infographic] Microsoft 365 public roadmap Microsoft Tech Community Home Microsoft Docs - The home for Microsoft documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals.  Microsoft Tech Community Home Stay on top of Office 365 changes Events ESPC21 (June.1-2, 2021) - Virtual | Jeff Teper keynote, numerous Microsoft and MVP sessions + workshops Microsoft 365 Collaboration Summit (June.8-10, 2021) - Hybrid | Dan Holme, Karuana Gatimu, and Charles Lamanna keynotes, plus numerous Microsoft and MVP sessions + workshops Follow The Intrazone at aka.ms/TheIntrazone Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts

Review the latest governance capabilities in Microsoft’s Power Platform, including more granular data loss prevention controls and enhanced visibility through new tenant-wide built-in analytics. Power Platform makes it easy for anyone to build rich experiences around their data, apps, and processes, and integrate them with the apps they use every day. While this adds value to the business and developers, governance and productivity must be balanced. Microsoft CVP, Charles Lamanna, joins Jeremy Chapman to give you all the controls to support the shift to low-code development safely. Visibility: Out-of-the-box analytics allow you to easily discover and monitor flows and apps and how they're being used. Connector Action Control: A new feature to create more granular controls over the actions you can allow or deny. Endpoint Filtering, Tenant Isolation, Block Email Exfiltration: For more control over what's permitted or blocked. Out-of-box Analytics: Track adoption usage and health monitoring across Dataverse, Power Automate, and Power Apps. See which apps are being used across your environments, and quickly spot best performing apps. Troubleshooting & Diagnostics: Run your own diagnostics and troubleshooting using data about your app included out-of-the-box. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Introduction 03:21 - Visibility 04:35 - Granular controls: Connector Action Control 06:24 - Endpoint filtering 08:04 - Out-of-box analytics 08:56 - Troubleshooting and diagnostics 11:01 - Wrap Up ► Link References: For more about security and governance with the Power Platform, go to https://aka.ms/PowerPlatformGovern To see best practices our largest customers are using, check out our detailed white paper at https://aka.ms/powerappsadminwhitepaper Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? We are Microsoft’s official video series for IT. You can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at #Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries?sub_confirmation=1 Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Follow us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/microsoftmechanics/ 

So I noticed Ryan Cunningham, Product Lead for the Power Apps side of the Power Platform for Microsoft, suddenly come available in Teams. So of course, I ambushed him, and we had a great conversation about Power Apps and the whole Microsoft Business Applications group. Enjoy! Transcript below: Ryan Cunningham: Hello. This is Ryan. Steve Mordue: Hey, Ryan. Steve Mordue. How's it going? Ryan Cunningham: Oh, Steve Mordue. How you doing? Does this mean I'm in trouble? Steve Mordue: No, you are not in trouble, but you are about to be a guest on my Steve has a Chat podcast if you have time and are up for it. Ryan Cunningham: You mean like right now? Steve Mordue: Like right now. Already recording. Ryan Cunningham: Hey, okay. Let me check my calendar. There's nothing I'd rather do right now than being an impromptu guest on a Steve show. Steve Mordue: Well, we'll try and make sure you don't regret that decision. Ryan Cunningham: I regret a lot of decisions, Steve. But it wouldn't be the first. Steve Mordue: So let me ask you first, how long have you been with Microsoft? Ryan Cunningham: I just crossed five years. Steve Mordue: Five years. Ryan Cunningham: Just this past fall. Steve Mordue: I used to be a Salesforce consultant. We were Salesforce consultants for about 10 years and we moved over to Microsoft when they first moved CRM online back in 2011. So about 10 years ago. Ryan Cunningham: Sure, yeah. Steve Mordue: And I remember there being a few bumps making that transition going from on-premise to online, but then it kind of leveled out into what I kind of called the lazy river ride. It was predictable, it didn't move very quickly. There was no urgency and then James took over and he brought in all you young guys. It's been like a rocket roller coaster ride ever since. You ever got one of those really big roller coaster rides where you start praying for it to end, but you know it's not going to. It's just going to keep looping around and you can't get off. I almost feel like for a lot of us partners that have been around at least since it was lazy river, man, my head is rocking from all of the stuff you guys are doing. Ryan Cunningham: We don't do lazy rivers very well, Steve. Steve Mordue: Not anymore. Ryan Cunningham: Not anymore. Steve Mordue: Not anymore. Ryan Cunningham: At least class three rapids around here. Steve Mordue: How is it like on the inside for that kind of pace and ideation and everything that's going on internally? Ryan Cunningham: It's a great question. It certainly has not been constant here either. And again my experience in this community is not as long as yours. I joined at about five years ago and specifically joined the Power Apps team long before Power Apps was really a thing. I joined the team when Project Siena was for those that are familiar with that term, the sort of precursor to Power Apps was kind of in an early beta phase and there were grand ambitions of expanding out who could build software, but not a lot of... How do we say it coming out? Not a ton of product truth yet behind that. Steve Mordue: So I was in the audience, I think for one of your very first presentations before a big group of this product. You looked a little deer in the headlights at the time. Ryan Cunningham: I still feel that way sometimes. But if you take that over the course of the last five years where that idea has solidified, that product has gotten more mature. Certainly there's still more work to do, but we've gone from literally zero humans using at least standalone Power Apps to millions around the world and really also in the same breath gone from very long tail, very simple use cases to this grand merger with the Dynamics platform and customers building and trusting frankly much more sophisticated workloads to the platform. Ryan Cunningham: The world has changed a lot for us internally in how we approach this problem as you go through that product maturity life cycle. In the early stage, it's really about can we make anyone successful here? Now, it is much more about how do we scale and how do we focus on enterprise trust and developer productivity and really turn millions into hundreds of millions and that's... Steve Mordue: Oh, we got a little stall there. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Did I lose you for a second? Steve Mordue: Just for a second. I kind of sometimes think of Microsoft kind of like the Japanese manufacturing economy where they saw ideas that we would come up with and then they would put all their resources to make it better, faster, cheaper whereas a lot of the things we're doing in the power platform are not things that weren't being done before by others, it's just that someone on the team somewhere recognize hey, there's this movement going on out here with some of these smaller players and I think it's got some legs, so let's let's drop all of the arsenal that we have available as Microsoft onto this idea because clearly, we weren't the first low code platform right, but suddenly we're bringing everything Microsoft has to bear on this idea and to see it blow up like that. Steve Mordue: You can say that for almost everything that we've got going on, the bots, the flow, all of these sorts of things. We weren't the first, but then we came in and just put all this horsepower into an idea. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. And it so much is about execution and executing at the right time and doing it for the right people. I think part of the reason why we internally work quickly and don't want to be on the lazy river is also because I think we tried to approach it with this fundamental... This is going to sound weird, but distrust of our own instincts to say, "Look, we have a thesis that people are going to want to build software faster. We have a thesis that they're going to want to do that beyond just forms over data." That's going to take many different forms, but in the nitty-gritty details of who's actually going to find the most value in individual features and individual assembly of those features, there's a lot of margin for error. Ryan Cunningham: And the sooner you get real software into the hands of real humans and they can use it and react to it and give you feedback actively about it, but also just give you feedback through their usage or non-usage of it, then the sooner you have real data to adjust and change and do the next thing. Steve Mordue: So it's not really like build it and they will come, it's more like build something and let's see who comes. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. Steve Mordue: And then build some more. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. Develop a relationship with those people who have come and then make sure that you're building it in a way that they're going to get really excited about it and then extend to others. So we really prioritize when we have enough of a hypothesis to head in a direction get there as soon as possible in the world and then work really closely and quickly once you've landed there to make it great and learn, and be willing to be wrong and be willing to change. Steve Mordue: Don't worry. I pointed out when you [crosstalk 00:07:43]. It's a lot of moving parts. I know you came in through the Power Apps door but have since kind of got your fingers into the whole pieces of platform it feels like. There's a lot of moving parts going on. Whenever you have that many moving parts, there's going to be bumps and issues along the way. So I can imagine that's just a continuous thing that somebody's building something over here. Somebody over here. Maybe they didn't coordinate as well as they should have and it gets discovered later and then I imagine these little fire drills going on internally [inaudible 00:08:20]. Steve Mordue: Left hand wasn't talking to the right hand enough. Let's get that stuff going on. Is that part of your role is to referee those sorts of things or identify them? Ryan Cunningham: I guess you could say that. And that's also part of growing a product and a team across a really wide surface area. How do we put in place the right listening mechanisms to customers, to data and reviews internally so that we can catch those things sooner and react to them more quickly. Because in many ways the ambition here is to span a really wide area of software and do it with a platform that has value and relevance to a number of different people in that spectrum, which is fundamentally really hard. Ryan Cunningham: It's one thing to build a focused experience for one very focused narrow niche of people, it's another... That alone is hard. It's another to build a set of tools that a lot of different people can use. But I think that was actually part of our... If you rewind several years ago and look at what we did between the Power Apps software project which started independently and the Dynamics platform and bringing them together, we really realized at the limit these things converge. At the limit, making it easier for non-traditional software people, citizen developers, amateurs, makers, whatever you want to call them and making it faster for professionals to build apps, those two ends have to meet each other at some point for this to really scale. So let's rip that band-aid off. Steve Mordue: How close do you think we are? How close do you think we are to getting to that ideal point? I mean, I think there's still... Even when I look at the citizen developer stories, a citizen can go so far and obviously we'd like them to go as far as they're able to go, to comfortably go and pro dev takes over. I have to assume there's a continuous motion inside to keep trying to move that line. Let's simplify some of these formulas that may be required that are just whatever those stopping blocks where you see a citizen is able to get this far, it hits a wall. Can we get them to the next wall? How much is going on in that process? Ryan Cunningham: It's a great question and it is really one of the central things that keeps driving a lot of what we do. I mean, we also look at a professional's experience through that journey, right? You look at not enlightened professionals such as yourselves, but all of the other software people out in the world who are very skeptical of platforms and who have an instinct to start from scratch and write everything themselves and go through some- Steve Mordue: Some of that could be financially motivated also. Ryan Cunningham: Oh, sure. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Ryan Cunningham: Right? But I think realizing that two trends are really converging here. To your point earlier, low code is not new, but we've had low code in two very different camps. This is the company that shipped Excel 35 years ago, 36 years ago. We certainly know low code for true amateurs and there's always been this world of people without a software development background working around the boundaries of the software they're given with tools to solve problems and that goes straight to- Steve Mordue: To Access wizards. Ryan Cunningham: Absolutely. Excel macros, VBA, Access, InfoPath and a number of other products outside of Microsoft. That's an enduring tradition. Then on the other side, what we've been doing is professional software people for the last 40 years is just adding layers of abstraction and tooling and not repeating ourselves and borrowing from other people to more efficiently assemble solutions as well. You can look at a platform like what XRM was unofficially and Dataverse and Power Apps on top of it now is just a natural extension of making professionals more efficient by not doing everything from scratch. Ryan Cunningham: Now, that's where those two trends converge and you're absolutely right to answer your question. We focus on okay, we made a number of people successful at that. There's a plenty of existence proof in our community and in our growth numbers and in our customer stories of people coming at the product from both of those directions and getting really successful and having a lot to show for it. Now of course behind the scenes, we're still, I would say very hungry. We're still at a couple orders of magnitude less than the addressable market of software consuming humans of what we could be serving even for all the astronomical growth we've seen in the platform over the last couple years. Ryan Cunningham: I mean, so it is absolutely about how do we take people coming in the front door. I'm a Teams user. I have some Excel skills. I happen to stumble on this Power Apps thing. How far do I get on my first try? What brings me back? How do I go from a user who expresses intent to a user who has a moment of success, to a user who then has an app that's used in production. And even from that point to somebody who keeps coming back to keep putting apps in production. Ryan Cunningham: Then similarly as a professional, how do I expand my tool set from Azure and Visual Studio and how do I have good experiences in my first try with a platform. How do I get to a point where I put something out there that humans are using in the world and I feel good about it. We really closely look at retention. We look at funnels through those early experiences. We look at satisfaction. All those annoying prompts of how likely are you to recommend Power Apps to a friend or colleague. Those are really valuable data points for us in addition to just the general growth rates overall because of indicators of the likelihood to be successful and grow in the future. Steve Mordue: I know we definitely have had success with enterprise organizations in particular where IT has embraced this and shepherded the process and built in their own systems like at the whole chevron way that they go about making power apps developers out of their employees and they've got a very specific process. I guess the other side of the equation is a smaller company that doesn't have those kind of resources. It's just Bob who's always been handy with spreadsheets. Suddenly he's trying to figure his way around. It seems like that's the one where we can't give that guy too much help. Steve Mordue: In enterprise they're going to have their system. Maybe have classes internally. They send their people to and stuff like that. It's a smaller organizations where he's left to the documents he can find and what he can understand. I think one of the things that Microsoft has always been a little bit of a challenge with Microsoft and documentation in particular is that they assume a certain level of understanding, in particular Microsoft and there's lots of folks that are coming to the platform that have zero understanding of Microsoft or history or know anything. Even acronyms or none of it. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Steve Mordue: It's almost like you can't make the documentation too dumbed down to get to that success. Well, how big is the team up to? Now, the last number I heard, and this has been a while ago, it was like 7,000. It was a pretty, pretty good sized team for the bag. How big is it now? Ryan Cunningham: That's a good question. I'm not trying to dodge you. I suppose I could look it up. I don't know for sure what James is... That whole business applications group org size is, but that's actually probably a decent estimate now that's not too inaccurate. Now, that's spread across a really wide surface area. All of the first party Dynamics apps have dedicated teams working on them. There are a number of other orgs within that organization focused on things like advancing AI and whatnot and then there's the core platform team, the Charles Lamanna team which I'm a part of which we structure into a core team focused on the backend, on Dataverse. A core team focused on each of the front-end products, so Power Apps, that's my team, Power Automate, Power Virtual agents. Then we also have a dedicated group in the platform org around admin and pro developers, and those experiences. Steve Mordue: I think when he came in, there was closer to a thousand on the team. So I mean the team has exponentially grown because you can't keep a lazy river going. Ryan Cunningham: Nope. Steve Mordue: You got to have speed when you got that many people on the payroll all working on something. So I also recall a time and I know it's still there, where there was a maniacal focus by the business applications group on the competitors particularly Salesforce at the time. I know that Salesforce is still in the radar. It does feel like we've kind of moved from really being focused on one primary competitor as we've launched all of these different applications into other competitive spaces where now you guys have hundreds of competitors that are all out there. How much do you guys focus on what the competition is doing internally and how you guys gauge what directions to go? Ryan Cunningham: It's really important to be aware of what people are doing in the marketplace. And we do spend a lot of time making sure that we have an intimate and hands-on not just academic understanding of what a lot of different software companies are producing out there. Steve Mordue: So you guys have licenses for everything. Ryan Cunningham: Well, where we can and it gets complicated because Microsoft also partners with many companies. Some companies we have agreements with about who will or won't use what software and we've got a lot of great lawyers to help us navigate that whole [inaudible 00:18:23]. I think the point is look, we're adding software to a world that already has a lot of software in it. It's important to look left and right and be aware of what else is out there because none of this stuff gets consumed in a vacuum by customers. You go to any moderately large customer organization, there's already a CRM system or seven in place. There's already an ERP system or eight in place and there's already a bunch of individual systems around that for point things and that's just the world we live in. Steve Mordue: And if they're exploring something, they're seldom exploring one thing. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly, right? And often if they're exploring especially a platform. There's a lot of existing things and a lot of the conversations become about how does this work in an existing ecosystem and how does it work? How can it potentially consolidate some of those things? We had Ecolab at a recent digital event talking about some of their Power Apps and Dynamics implementations. The average field employee at Ecolab had something like 27 different individual tools that they had to use to get their job done and it was a mix of... I mean, they had dynamics and they had Salesforce, and they had an ERP system, and they had a whole bunch of individual custom homegrown things and this experience was just really terrible for somebody out there on a tablet or a phone trying to inspect your water filter at your company. Ryan Cunningham: Starting to bring in Power Apps as a front door to some of those other systems without replacing them and just even making the wayfinding better is key. So look, it's important for us to be aware of what the world is doing. I would say it's never as simple as pure competitor or not in that picture because look, if you're a company like Microsoft, a lot of the names you rattled off or alluded to are also Azure customers and they're partners with them in other places. We're fundamentally a platform company I think is what it comes down to. Ryan Cunningham: The world is better when people can choose what they want to choose and are able to interoperate with those things at scale. Now obviously, there's incentive for us to have them using our stuff in that mix which is why we care a lot about it, but there's really not... Especially if you look at the body of what we offer even just in the platform, there isn't a clean head-to-head competitor right now for all of it. There are certainly competitors for each piece and I think being aware that those customers have choices and that we want them to genuinely choose the best and we want to be the best, that means we have to be aware of what best is and what customers define as best is just as important as what the guy down the street is offering. I think that the business applications group has the advantage of the enormous coattails of Office 365, now Microsoft 365. Steve Mordue: Sure. I don't know how many calls I get from a brand new customer who the primary reason they're looking at this platform is because they're already using Microsoft 365. And this idea that we want everything to work together and talk together. I think those coattails are an example of coattails that some of the other companies just don't have. You look at Salesforce for example. They don't have this productivity suite with millions and millions of users. So their story is going to be... We can integrate story and I just see more and more... I think we have to give such a credit for this because for many years Microsoft had a mixed reputation with IT. Steve Mordue: There are lots of people that hated them and all sorts of different things and such. It kind of seemed to have changed the attitude of the company to where IT who used to be like we're using on-premise exchange that's the only Microsoft thing we're going to touch. Now, they've brought in Microsoft 365. Now from an IT standpoint, it's you know what, I don't want to make my life any more difficult than it needs to be. What's the most logical choice for business applications when we're already stood up on all of this stuff and it's an enormous advantage and a huge coattail for the whole business applications group to ride in on. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. I mean, this is why we focus so much on the platform working well in Teams for example. We've put a lot of effort into that this past year. I mean, part of that is the world turned upside down and changed and everybody started working in Teams. The other part of that is it's a huge advantage for a customer to be able to program and customize the collaboration environment whatever that is. Again, there's a long history of that within Office with SharePoint and InfoPath and stuff like that, but being able to look at that in a modern world and say, "I already have every employee working every day inside the team's environment. If I can start to put line of business applications in that environment, it's much easier for those employees to discover and it's much easier for them to then work around and collaborate around when those experiences require some form of collaboration." Ryan Cunningham: There are major Microsoft customers, Fortune 500 customers with tens and hundreds of thousands of users in their tenant that have more than half of those users using a Power App and Teams every month. You see IT departments using it. Those are not necessarily bottom-up Citizen Developer apps. You see IT departments really seeing that as a way to sort of re-imagine maybe what we might have called an intranet site 10 years ago sort of imagine an employee-facing app in the place where employees are already working. Steve Mordue: Sometimes, I actually feel a little guilty that one of our biggest growth years was a result of a virus and certainly the same could be said of Teams. I mean Teams was doing fine, but a virus really catapulted Teams to the position that it is. You feel a little guilty, but then again it is what it is and somebody has to feel that that need and it does create some massive opportunity. Ryan Cunningham: For me, especially rewinding to March and April, and May, I mean this was really a pressure test of our whole promise. The whole shtick and spiel of saying you can develop apps faster, you can do it quickly, you don't have to go through all the time and expense of software development, you can put it where people want to use it. Got a lot less nice to have in March of 2020 went from a lot of people from, "Oh, that sounds cool. I'll check that out someday." Steve Mordue: Someday. Ryan Cunningham: This is interesting to this is the only game in town. There were moments where I don't... I hear what you're saying. It is difficult to go feel like you're thumping your chest about business success in a year where a lot of people have had a really hard time and I really want to be sensitive to that. At the same time, the platform has really directly and indirectly helped a lot of people with those struggles. A whole number of both through the healthcare response to COVID, solutions that were implemented almost literally overnight in some cases for major state governments around the US and national governments abroad to first roll out large-scale testing programs on portals with CDS or Dataverse behind it and then roll out economic assistance programs on the same platform. Ryan Cunningham: Now rolling out return to work solutions on the same platform. Those are things where the traditional model of start up a waterfall development process, go write a giant requirements document, triple bit it, go through... You don't have the luxury of the Gantt chart in this world and you have to be able to move fast. And those are places where that is the platform we've been building for is that environment where we got to move fast. We have to do it non-traditionally and we have to do it with a lot less effort. Ryan Cunningham: This last year has really forced us to hone in on that value prop and prove that it's real, and frankly adjust a lot to make it more real for people who are trying to get that value. So I would say we have learned a lot in the course of this pandemic. A lot of people have. But we've also been able to do some good for the world in the same breath. Steve Mordue: It definitely was interesting timing because if you guys probably had to pick a time for a super crunch test of our platform maybe you don't like to see it in another year out or something. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah, sure. Steve Mordue: You can't cage these things, but it kind of hit when you guys still had some wiring to finish and I would imagine that the pressure on the team... It's one thing to we got to be out to market quickly because of competition. It's another thing because something like this has come. It has to bring a huge amount of pressure the team. We need to take Teams to the next level. We need to take build your own apps the next level and suddenly we've got an entire workforce that is now working from home that never planned to be working from home that is completely ill-equipped for that entire motion and these people need this stuff fast. Ryan Cunningham: Not to mention an entire generation of students who are now learning remotely, many of them in every age group from my first grader up to colleges and in universities. It's affected everybody. But you're right. I mean, the platform has been stretched at every level and it's not just the power platform. You're right. It's also very much Teams. I saw a really interesting internal presentation from an engineering leader in the Teams org comparing, "Look, here's what our load and traffic pattern looked like in January of 2021 and then to scale superimposing that on what it looked like in March." Not to say that, "Hey, look at all this great growth," it was really to say, "Look at what it took to go scale a planet scale service that dramatically that quickly." That was not a pleasant experience for the engineers having to work on that. That was [crosstalk 00:28:54]- Steve Mordue: A lot of late nights. Ryan Cunningham: ... 24/7 as any other response. No software is perfect. We like to gripe about everything and I share my set of barbs with stuff, but man, I have a ton of respect for the Teams engineering group and how well they have handled that just massive overnight change. Steve Mordue: So as we're recording this, vaccines for the virus are rolling out and I assume at some point in the coming months, it'll be behind us. In the meantime, it was around long enough to push lots of people to work from home longer than maybe their company owners thought would have to happen, but now they've gotten used to that. They've made accommodation. They've made it work. What do you think is going to happen when this particular crisis has passed and there's the ability to go back to normal? What do you think is going to happen with all these folks? Are we going to see a mass return to offices? Are we going to see people say, "This is working"? What are you guys thinking? Ryan Cunningham: I mean, it's a good question. I don't know that I can speak for all of Microsoft on this one, but I think at least in our own team- Steve Mordue: What do you think? Ryan Cunningham: I mean look, our team is already very globally distributed. We have the majority of our engineers and core products, PMs working in the Pacific time zone, but we have a significant group in Paris. We have a significant group in Bangalore. We have individual pockets. We have people in Fargo, North Dakota. We have a team in- Steve Mordue: Israel? Ryan Cunningham: We certainly have team in Israel. We have teams in parts of Europe. We have a team in Toronto. If nothing else, I think the core of [inaudible 00:30:49] sound based team has developed a lot more empathy for the experience of the very significant portion of our group that works around the world. I'm very experienced joining Teams. And I really hope that that continues if nothing else even if we all end up back in offices at a more regular level. Ryan Cunningham: We've learned at digital events and conferences and stuff. Certainly, it is not the same as being in the room with people catching up and networking, finding those discovery and unplanned moments with humans. And I do believe that we will go back to getting in rooms together both as employees, but also as colleagues. I really hope that we get to do that again soon. However, some of the digital events that we've pulled off as unelegant as some of them have come together also very rapidly having to figure out how to completely reimagine conferences like Ignite virtually in just a few months, those themselves were gargantuan tactics. In some cases there were orders of magnitude more participation in those events than when you had to get on a plane and fly to Orlando to get the benefit really. So there's- Steve Mordue: If I'm Microsoft, I don't know how eager I am to go back to in-person events given the success of like you say, I mean, so many more people able to attend. Microsoft's goal in having an event isn't for us all to hang out and have beers, it's to disseminate product information to his broader audience as possible and as deep a format as possible. Sitting in a session room, watching some guy present a slide deck, maybe it's a little more interactive, but not enough more interactive to justify the 30 people behind me versus 3,000 people that could be behind me in a video meeting. Steve Mordue: So from Microsoft's standpoint, you would think that, "Hey, great news. We don't have to go back to doing live events," which are, I think, they got to be a huge expense, a huge logistical challenge, all that sort of stuff. So the only reason to go back- Ryan Cunningham: I mean, I imagine- Steve Mordue: ... would be camaraderie or something. Ryan Cunningham: Like all things moderation. I'm sure we will... I hope we will reconvene at least some live events and I'm sure we will. I think we've learned that there's probably a bias before this year, this past year that the digital portion of a live event would be much less valuable. I mean, even already, I don't want to overplay that hand. Even already, we would frequently get more total usage over a lifespan of content consumed digitally when it was produced at the live event than at the live event itself. Ryan Cunningham: You could take a keynote at Ignite. There's 3,000, 10,000 people in the room, whatever, but then you go take the three months following the streaming of that online would accumulate far more visitors and end users than originally. That was already known. But being able to extend that from the keynote stage out to every session and being able to figure out how to produce that type of an event in a very decentralized way is, I think we've learned a lot through that process. Ryan Cunningham: Back to your question about people going to offices and the team working in places, I think there's a lot of reasons why a lot of people really value that type of working whether... There's people on my team who live alone and are really, really craving social interaction with other humans that are ready to come back. But there's also people on my team and self included with young kids in the house and a lot to manage and really craving return to normalcy and in that type of life environment. Ryan Cunningham: So I think work from home, I think we've all learned that we can do it and some people have learned that it's even better for them, but I think there's a lot of people who will still value working in a physical location and I hope we'll return to a good chunk of that as well. Steve Mordue: Yeah. It does get kind of lonely for a lot of folks especially those social people that need to be around people, need the water cooler or need to go to lunch. Ryan Cunningham: Yep. Steve Mordue: That's the best part of what they're doing. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Let me ask you about... Maybe I'll get a little self-serving here now. Ryan Cunningham: Sure. Steve Mordue: You're familiar with our RapidStart CRM? Ryan Cunningham: Yep. Steve Mordue: And I'm just curious about what the team internally thinks about motions like the one we're doing and others are looking at where we've... And I know you'll be a little biased because you're more on the platform side as is Charles. Charles is less concerned about the first party group. They got their own problems to deal with, but we're basically making a business out of building simpler versions of what the first party Teams have built for an audience that isn't prepared for that level of complexity. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. Steve Mordue: And we've built it to run on the $10 pass, and we recently made it free. I'm just curious what the talk in the halls is about ISVs like us that are basically building products that are attacking directly. I mean, I'm attacking directly the sales professional for sure and even enterprise for a lot of customers because you've given us enough in the platform that I can build quite a bit for a lot of customers before I'd have to really go to those first party. What's the talk in the halls about that kind of motions? Ryan Cunningham: Well, luckily we don't have any halls anymore, Steve. We're all working from home. Steve Mordue: That's true. Ryan Cunningham: Otherwise we're- Steve Mordue: In the video halls. Ryan Cunningham: [crosstalk 00:36:36] Steve Mordue in every elevator lobby. Look, I will say a couple things on that. I don't want to speak for Charles, but from a platform perspective and certainly from my perspective too. Yes, our day job is focused on building a platform. Our biggest customer of the first party apps running on that platform still by revenue at least. We have a lot of incentive as a Microsoft shareholder and as a member of the business applications group and seeing the first party apps be successful. In fact, a lot of our effort and our engineering effort goes into helping those first-party apps be successful and stay successful and get modern and get fast and get mobile in addition to or in some cases around building the core platform itself. Steve Mordue: James has said not that long ago that make no mistake, those are what pay the rent. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah, absolutely. Look, Power Apps is driving an incredible amount of growth from a both a usage and a revenue perspective. But yeah, I mean there's an established greater than a decade business in CRM at scale that customers are driving themselves trusting billions of dollars of business too and paying Microsoft a lot of money for that privilege, right? So we take that very seriously and we are directly incented to protect that business whatever that means. Ryan Cunningham: Now, that said to rewind earlier in the conversation, we're a platform company at heart right and it's not just that Steve Mordue can go out there and build a CRM system on the Dataverse and Power Apps platform. I mean, we have multiple Power Apps competitors building on the Azure platform. They're Azure, and that's great as a shareholder and as a software person. The best solution should win and that's never going to be a one-size-fits-all answer for every customer. To your point, there are some customers that are going to be best served by a certain piece of software and Microsoft as a builder of generic things is not going to get into every niche, it's not going to get into every vertical. Ryan Cunningham: We want an ecosystem of people to build on the platform and extend things and even build fully standalone things for those niches, because we won't get there ourselves and we know that there are more of them out there where expertise needs to go. For Microsoft to really have a Microsoft product offering at scale, it needs to have a really big business behind. It's a really big business behind it. There's plenty of opportunity in the market at other multiples that is very profitable for software vendors and very advantageous for customers that are businesses that Microsoft will not directly enter. Ryan Cunningham: So I think in those worlds if the platform doesn't work for that, then what's the point of having a platform. It needs to work for that and we need to make RapidStart successful just like we need to make the first party Dynamics app successful. I believe those two things are not at odds with each other and they should live in a co-existing world. Ryan Cunningham: From a customer perspective even as a platform person, a lot of people will come in and say, "Should I use this off-the-shelf piece of software or should I build it myself in Power Apps?" My first answer to them is always if the off-the-shelf thing does what you needed to do or even does 80% of what you needed to do, it's usually worth buying. And even if the price tag feels more expensive, because what you're buying there is a team of people behind that app who not only put all the effort into making it, but are going to keep putting effort into making it better. Ryan Cunningham: And whether that's Steve's team or whether that's Muhammad Alam's team that is almost less relevant. The concept is I'm going to buy a piece of software that people have already figured out a lot of the hard parts for this use case and they're going to keep making it better. Now the ability to extend it is really important in business applications because selling shoes is very different than selling wind turbines even if it all involves selling stuff. [crosstalk 00:40:55] Steve Mordue: It's one of the reasons we ended up going free. When I first came up with that idea for RapidStart, we launched it in 2015 and it sat on top of CRM online the single SKU at the time to just really make the whole thing simpler because there was that need for something to be simpler. I had this dream that I was just going to sell that. People would buy it, pay me every month and leave me the hell alone. That was what I had imagined. But everybody, everybody wants to tweak and fiddle and make it unique. We actually look back last year at our revenue with 10 times more revenue on the services of helping customers customize our app that we did on the recurring revenue. Steve Mordue: That's the reason we decided, "Well, let's just make the app free and lean into the services as much," because I really didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that business at all. Now, I'm being you know pulled in or the godfather won't let me out of the services business. But you're right, everybody needs something unique. So we really recast them as accelerators as opposed to here's something you just buy and use. But it's the same even with the first party apps. Nobody installs a first party app and just uses it. Steve Mordue: They've all got to be molded to fit the business, and I think that that's the nice thing about the platform whether it's on first party or just on Power Apps is you've got all the tools to... And that's actually one of the challenges we run into, I'm sure you guys do too where they look at some app and they say, "Oh, that's not exactly what I need," and then they move on, without realizing that, you know what, that can be exactly what you need and frankly, with the tools available that we have today, not that expensive, not anything like it used to be. Ryan Cunningham: Supposed than what I need and I can make it to work. Steve Mordue: Yeah, and a fraction of what it used to cost to do those kind of services. Ryan Cunningham: Part of making this stuff easier to adopt is about having apps that are much... At least much closer to what a customer needs out of the box. They don't have to do a bunch of customization upfront. I think something that we have been on the journey from, if you go rewind 10 years in CRM to now is make it less of a giant monolith make individual modules much more ready to consume. We've done a lot of work around that. But even within Power Apps, a lot of people get started by grabbing a template and implementing it and starting to use it fairly stock and then realizing, "Hey, I want to put my logo on it and then I want to change this form and then I want to change the field. And then I want a thing to kick off." Ryan Cunningham: Making the customization incremental as opposed to putting a really large tax and price tag before it's useful is one of the tactics we pursue to make it easier to get more people started. But that said, there will always be the need to tailor and customize software in a business application space. I think one of the trends we are seeing is this blurring of lines between... We like to pretend classically that there are ISVs who produce software and put it in the world and then never touch it. Ryan Cunningham: Then there are system integrators who do the dirty work of services to make it work. Those lines get really blurry in the modern world where from a classic services provider standpoint when I'm building and customizing on a platform, it's actually much easier to then start to templatize and repeat my solutions so I'm not just doing labor every single time. Ryan Cunningham: And to your point from a software maker perspective for customers who want to constantly customize it, it gets more viable to go the other direction depending on what your business model is. We see a lot of people living in that world. We even see customers themselves, energy companies, healthcare companies building stuff, financial services companies building stuff for themselves on the platform and starting to commercialize it to other people in their industry because it's on a platform that's transferable and that's something that classically you didn't see with line of business software. Ryan Cunningham: It was built in a vacuum custom and very tailored for one customer and then it sort of lived in that silo for a long time. But the ability to make those assets transferable is a huge advantage in this world. Steve Mordue: Back when they really first started pushing the Citizen Developer motion, I think I wrote a post about the end of SI business. This is it. We're all dead now. They won't need us anymore. The sky is falling, Chicken Little. But now as we've seen this thing roll out, because it is less expensive to get deployed, there are people building apps and using apps that would never have considered it before. Steve Mordue: So while I would say it's probably true that our average customer SI project has lost a zero in value, there's 10 times as many of them. So it's evened itself out. We've got many more customers available now than when the only way you could become a customer was if you had really deep pockets and a lot of patience. So we just opened up the number of potential customers by 10 times even though the deployment of each has gone down some. I'm not disappointed. Ryan Cunningham: And I think that trend is holding. I mean, I think you see even some of the big services companies like the big four and stuff like that actually seeing some very similar trends where they're building real practices on power platform whereas a couple years ago, they didn't see it as something for their business model, maybe even a threat to their business model. Now, they're realizing, "Look, I can drive real revenue out of this just the size and dollar amount and number of projects is a different mix that it was before." Ryan Cunningham: In some cases, those tend towards strategic consulting engagements. It becomes, let me think about helping a... For a large global organization to wrap their head around how do I use Citizen Development in my company? How do I keep it secure? How do I monitor it? Where do I let a business unit roll their own thing versus where do I bring in a team of professionals to build and maintain a solution? Ryan Cunningham: Even just that decision-making process and the center of excellence and governance practices that go around it, that's a major engagement that a lot of customers need help with right now because they're not organized for that today or resourced for it today. And then you look at getting into each of those individual projects. Certainly today, even in a future where apps are 10 times as easy to build as they are today, if I'm going to go roll out a mission mission-critical solution for managing customer data and critical decisions, I need software-minded people to help me think about how to keep that compliant, about how to build it in a way that humans are going to want to use it. Ryan Cunningham: Just because we put a tool like Photoshop out there in the world, does not instantly make everybody a photographer and a digital artist. There's still that mindset and expertise that's going to be really necessary. So for a lot of a lot of services organizations right now, I think they're realizing that there is a lot of value both in the execution of individual apps and projects, but then also in helping customers adapt to this new world where a lot of people can build software and you have to make decisions about who builds what and how you maintain it. [crosstalk 00:48:15] Steve Mordue: I think definitely one of the areas that's been blown up completely is the old ROI story because you used to be looking at a significant investment to deploy something of time and money, and the return on that investment was quite some time. That was what was going to limit the growth of any business application platform out there was... And now, that's produced almost nothing. Steve Mordue: So literally, Bob can go build something that starts generating revenue or saving money in an afternoon. The ROI, it's not even a question anymore about a half a day of Bob's time to go and streamline this process and save us five hours a day with his four-hour effort. Ryan Cunningham: True. Steve Mordue: And that didn't exist before. That just did not exist within the dynamics application before platform, before Power Apps, before Canvas apps. It's completely changed the entire game. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Before I let you go, what of the things as you look across the landscape right now and maybe the things that are coming up that have been discussed that people are aware of, what excites you the most? What do you think is... Two things. What are you the most excited about? And the other one is what do you think more customers would be excited about if they understood it better or realized that that's the most underutilized high value thing that people are just missing? Ryan Cunningham: Sure. Those are big questions. I think there's a lot that I get excited about. For people that know me, it's not hard to get excited. Steve Mordue: Yeah. You're excited about that lamp in the background, I know. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. It's a great lamp. It's not. It's a crappy lamp from Ikea. Look, I think for me certainly there's a ton of work in our feature backlog that's really cool and really exciting and there's a lot of work particularly around bringing intelligence to the authoring experience that I'm pretty excited about. To the earlier conversation we're having about make it easier for people to be successful and maybe not have to deal with that formula bar, there's a lot of cool stuff that we're starting to apply. Ryan Cunningham: We've brought AI builder to end user apps, but actually bringing that to the maker experience of being just... And not in magical unicorn pixie dust ways, but just in really practical ways suggesting ways for people to do things, suggesting things to do next, making it possible to write logic in natural language as opposed to having to know all the ins and outs of the formula for example. There's some really cool stuff cooking there that I think will start to continue to open up orders of magnitude of humans who can be successful. Steve Mordue: Move that bar farther down the path. Ryan Cunningham: Absolutely, right? Classically, sometimes we think about those as tools just for true amateurs. But if you go look at even all the productivity that a product like visual studio has brought to professional developers, it's in stuff like Typeahead and linting and all that. It's really about bringing micro intelligence to those micro interactions that a person who's living in this tool for eight hours a day, all day long is going to need to be really productive. Ryan Cunningham: So we're really thinking about that both ways. So those things are exciting. I think if you zoom out a little bit though beyond the individual level of feature work, I would say, what's most exciting to me and what I hope is getting more exciting to more customers is less about any one individual feature or product and more about what's possible when you start to combine them at scale. Ryan Cunningham: I think that's where, if you look at organizations that have really gone all in on Citizen Development and low code for professionals as well and start to work together, you see this new way of working where you have professionals and amateurs and IT people and business people knowing each other and working side by side in a place where they traditionally were opposed to each other. Or at least just not aware of each other. And that's where you get not just one cool app with one cool feature, but literally thousands of applications inside of organizations that are just creating a crazy amount of value and you start to change you start to change the lives of people in those organizations. Ryan Cunningham: Both the people that are able to implement that stuff, but also you just make the jobs better for the people who get to use stuff that was built by their company and was built much faster. That's ultimately super exciting to me is to start to see this making a real change in the way that humans are working and doing it through a mix of apps and bots and automations, and Teams experiences. Ryan Cunningham: It's when those things sort of work together in concert that I think they get most exciting. So I'm thrilled to see that happening. I'm really excited about this end-to-end stack of what customers have done with Azure resources through power platform, in Teams and how that has created a meaningful dent and how a company works. I'm super excited about all the work we're doing to make that smoother to actually implement and manage and deploy, but I really hope customers see beyond the one use case, see beyond the one app or see beyond the one product and see what's possible when I start to change the economics of how software is rolled out in my company. And by economics, I mean not just- Steve Mordue: It is a discovery process. Ryan Cunningham: ... who participates. Right, yeah. Steve Mordue: It is a discovery process. They stumble upon something. They start using something and if they're successful with it, then they start discovering these other pieces around it that are available around it to extend on it. I don't think the technology itself right now that we have is a blocker to growth. I think the biggest challenge with growth right now probably relies more on the complexity of the licensing side. I mean, there's a lot of customers- Ryan Cunningham: I mean, I think there's good parts of it. Steve Mordue: ... that can't even get started because they don't understand what they even need or how to buy especially in the Power Apps store where they've got some seated Power Apps capabilities, they don't know what word seated even means or that they have it, and then they're seeing all these cool Power Apps things and they can't figure out how do I get from here to there? Why can't I do this and that? I think that probably is a bigger blocker to potential growth than the technology itself. Ryan Cunningham: Maybe. I would say certainly- Steve Mordue: Have you read the licensing guide? Ryan Cunningham: It's my favorite James Joyce story. Steve Mordue: I'll bet. Well, most customers haven't and wouldn't. Ryan Cunningham: Well, I guess what I would maybe zoom out from that, I would say... You're right. The technology itself can solve a lot of problems for a lot of different people and we have existence proof of that. Getting an organization at scale to discover it to see it in that light and then to have an organizational culture embrace it. Certainly licensing is a part of that, but it's also about who in IT is responsible for it? How do we govern it? Where do we roll it out? Who is footing the bill when I do understand how to pay for it? Ryan Cunningham: At the end of the day, licensing is actually very simple which I know is a controversial opinion. You get a measure of it in Office. For extending Office, you pay for Enterprise data sources. There's two ways to pay. You pay per app or you pay unlimited, full stop. That's the license. Now, we do not do ourselves many favors when we have classically rolled that out. And I absolutely take your point that we have made the communication of that complex. Ryan Cunningham: And for a lot of customers, this is not a commodity expectation. We're at a point right now where everybody needs an email account and a productivity suite and Word processing and every seller needs a CRM license and those things are not necessarily controversial, it just becomes about what's the best price from the best vendor. Because they're mature products in mature markets. Ryan Cunningham: Low code is at a very different state of market maturity. So for a lot of people it's about not just understanding how our pricing is structured, but understanding organizationally for them how do they conceptualize ROI? How does the market offer these products and how do I evaluate that potential expense against the value I'm going to get out of it? I think in addition to making things like the licensing guide easier to read for people who do not have PhDs, I think it's also really about helping the market get more mature and seeing... We really genuinely believe this will become an expectation of organizations. Ryan Cunningham: If you go fast forward another couple years, if I can't rapidly innovate internally and I am dependent on a team of professionals to start from scratch every single time that I that I need a problem solved, that's going to be a major competitive disadvantage for organizations. And on the flip side, being able to have every information worker be able to do at least basic tasks extending their software and solving their own problems is increasingly going to be an expectation. Ryan Cunningham: We're not there yet from a market maturity standpoint. Not everybody sees it that way, but we've certainly seen enough proof of organizations already evolving to that point that we know that that's coming. So I think being able to get to that place is a journey for a lot of companies. It's then really the next phase for us of bringing the world to where we know it can be. Steve Mordue: I mean, you just look at some of the things in the past like the first Obamacare website debacle with all the millions of dollars they spent to basically build a website and then look at what it would have taken for somebody to pop that up on portals today. I mean, there's no compare. I mean, we've actually lost projects in the past because the people thought we didn't understand the scope because we were like 10% of what the other companies... So we clearly misunderstood the scope and they just misunderstood the value of a platform and what that does to a development cost and time cycle and everything. Ryan Cunningham: There are government entities that rolled out COVID testing solutions on Power Platform in literally weeks to tens of millions of citizens and had that go off without any major hiccup. You're right. We get back to that pressure test. It's like getting that to go to scale and to help more people see it that way and be able to expect that from their software. That's really the next mountain to climb. Steve Mordue: I think the two challenges we've had around licensing are that Power Apps versus Power Apps. We've got these two products that really are our different products that share the same name and that puts some confusion in customers where they think they already have Power Apps. Ryan Cunningham: Have it right. Steve Mordue: They don't understand why they have to go buy Power Apps or they have Power Apps. And the other one is the passes, the per user or the per app passes. Those are assigned in a different way than all the other licenses they have been using internally for years. It's the only thing that's assigned that way. So it's a different process and they're looking at how do I do this? I've assigned licenses all the time. I don't understand how to do this. Steve Mordue: Those are two spots if you could personally take as a favor to me, go clean up the pathways [crosstalk 00:59:39] on those to make that as smooth as possible for people to understand, that would be that would be awesome. Ryan Cunningham: And that feedback is well heard across the market. I mean, we are at the pace that we were trying to do some work on the first problem to clarify really Power Apps for Office from our apps for stand-alone. And then separately the per app concept is a really powerful concept and actually a lot of organizations have embraced it. I don't know if I'm allowed to say this. there's more monthly active usage of apps on a per app license today and this has been true for many months than there were on either the older two licensed models, right? Steve Mordue: Sure. Ryan Cunningham: I mean it hunts for a lot of people when they can realize, "Oh, hey. This is a way for me to apply the value of the platform to a use case without having to go have this broader discussion about committing the entire organization to an unlimited number of apps." Steve Mordue: And just a difference of cost Ryan Cunningham: It's a different concept for people. Steve Mordue: And just a difference of cost. At $40, I can afford to have 10 people use this. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Steve Mordue: At $10, well I can afford to have 40 people use this. So suddenly, strictly related to cost, you're going to see that usage explode on those lower cost licenses because those are people now using an app that weren't going to be able to use it before. They weren't going to justify the expense for that level, that tier if you will. You start getting into 10 bucks, I mean that's pretty much anybody in the organization you could justify 10 bucks for. Now suddenly, everybody has an app. Ryan Cunningham: Yup. We've seen a number of customers already even though this has been in market only about a year. Start there and then very quickly realize, actually we want unlimited [inaudible 01:01:25] people through the transition is a phase as well. Steve Mordue: This is something that you take in account as a builder of apps also if you're wanting to try and build for that, you build your apps understanding the licensing structure and you design for it. So listen, Ryan, I appreciate you taking this time out of your, obviously not busy afternoon. Ryan Cunningham: [inaudible 01:01:50] Steve Mordue: A rare not busy afternoon for you, I'm sure. I'm feeling very lucky to have caught you when I did. Ryan Cunningham: Sure. Steve Mordue: Any closing thoughts? Ryan Cunningham: Hey, keep doing what you're doing, Steve both being a rock in the community and also pushing us on the platform to make it better. I think ultimately we see this as a thing we're doing together and I mean that really genuinely. We don't sit in an ivory tower. [inaudible 01:02:18] When we do, we make plenty of blunders, but I think this thing we are building is bigger than lines of code. It's a mindset and I think the more that the community embraces it, the faster we go. So I really appreciate you and everybody that is hopefully going to listen to this someday and participate. Steve Mordue: There'll be thousands listening. There usually are. So don't worry. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah, 100%. Thanks for the call, Steve. Steve Mordue: All right. Cool, man. Talk to you later. Ryan Cunningham: Be well, peace.    

In this episode, Praveen Bhadada, Managing Partner, Zinnov, talks to Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft to understand the Microsoft automation narrative, and what fuelled the tech giant's belief in the potential and possibilities of the automation space.  Charles also sheds light on Microsoft's transformational journey from being a developer-centric company to a citizen developer-centric portfolio, on its journey to becoming a Power Platform in 2021 and beyond.

See how anyone can now build an App directly from within Teams (without ever leaving Teams) using Power Apps, as well as the latest templates to kickstart your efforts. And for pro developers, we’ll show you how T-Mobile built their mission-critical Orbit Power App using custom code, Azure APIs, and connectors. Host Jeremy Chapman is joined by Charles Lamanna, CVP of Microsoft’s Low Code Platform, who shows you: • New Power Platform solution templates for common apps you might use in the context of Teams • How to increase storage as your app gets more and more use • How to build connectors and APIs • For Power Apps used in Teams, Azure API management is free ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Introduction  01:04 - Build Power Apps in Teams 08:47 - Solution templates 10:08 - Increase storage 14:08 - Build connectors and APIs 16:16 - From simple to complex 17:01 - How to get started ► Link References: Find everything you need to get started at https://powerplatform.microsoft.com. Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? We are Microsoft’s official video series for IT. You can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries?sub_confirmation=1 Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Follow us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/microsoftmechanics/

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.

"To me, Microsoft is about empowerment... we are the original democratizing force, putting a PC in every home and every desk." That quote by CEO Satya Nadella, of course, reflects the ubiquity achieved by the Windows operating system. His company's feat of democratization however, is just prologue to the coming revolution Microsoft foresees in automation. An upheaval expected to be so disruptive to the status quo, it will empower the information worker masses to finally overthrow the oppressive yoke of robotic tasks smothering their productivity.  With newfound freedom to unleash their ingenuity, they'll not only enrich their own lives, but add greater value to the organizations employing them.   The Microsoft executive charged with redressing the imbalance between toil & talent plaguing white collar wage earners is Charles Lamanna.  As Corporate Vice President, Low Code Application Platform, his portfolio of responsibility encompasses all the critical assets needed to bring Microsoft's lofty vision to life.  In this wide-ranging discussion, we get first-hand insight from a senior executive on the vital role automation plays in the software giant's Cloud-First, Mobile-First strategy.  Along the way we'll also learn why the shifting ratio of repetition to creativity within a given task will determine which automation type it's best suited for; the automation skills one should master to position themselves for success in the future; and what the single biggest disruptor for automation will be over the next few years.

At the #POWERfulDEVs Conference in July, we connected with Power Platform influencers, Cloud Advocates, and community members. Charles Lamanna closed the event to highlight his take on fusion dev teams, aka the next big thing for tech and businesses, and how you can use this concept to be an industry leader in your space. Now we have the opportunity to connect with Charles Lamanna, CVP at Microsoft, to discuss all things #PowerPlatform #lowcode #nocode. What questions do you have for him today?Submit questions before the Ask Me Anything event on Dev.To (http://aka.ms/amacharleslamanna/questions) and Twitter using the hashtag #powerfuldevs. Then hear Charles' answers LIVE on August 25th at 8:55 AM PDT on #learntv. See you there!

I guess it is fairly obvious from my post yesterday, that I am pretty pissed off at Microsoft. I have always been one of those "Don't point out a problem, without suggesting a solution" kind of guys, and I have done my share of pointing out problems with Microsoft's Business Applications ISV efforts. So here are some ideas. Why ISVs? First, why should Microsoft even give a shit about ISVs? Certainly prior to sharing in ISV's revenue there did not appear to be much reason, based on how Microsoft had historically engaged with ISVs. I guess we have to thank Salesforce and their successful AppExchange for Microsoft paying any attention at all. For years I have watched various Microsoft people get up and say "ISVs are critically important to us", followed by very little in the way of tangible actions. Obviously, "We have a marketplace too!" should not be the end goal here. What Salesforce keenly grasped, was that ISVs either generate business they would never have had, or make their platform for the customers they do have, extremely sticky. We know this from our collective efforts to get customers to move away from Salesforce; very often it is some ISV solution they depend on, that is making them stay put. It has gotten easier to be sure, but mostly because of Microsoft's integrations to other Microsoft products being superior. SFDC customers are giving more weight to that now as so many of them have switched to Microsoft 365. On one side of the scale is this fully integrated Microsoft story, and on the other they have the disruption of losing a critical ISV solution for which Microsoft has no ISV comparable. What Microsoft really needs is 10X the number of ISVs they have today! It all costs money I don't recall when Salesforce started AppExchange, but I don't think it was long after they launched the company. I also don't recall whether they took a cut of ISV's revenue when they started, but they clearly do now. It would not have mattered, because at the time, they were essentially the only game in town. 800 lb Gorillas, with triple anyone else's market share, can afford to be demanding of ISVs. I have no doubt that SFDC makes a huge amount of revenue from this motion, not only for licenses that they would not have sold otherwise, but also their ISV vig. I have no idea what they invest in their ISV ecosystem, but I am sure it is not small, because building and maintaining it is not cheap. But SFDC recognizes the value. Up until recently, Microsoft apparently invested the change found in the sofas around campus. I applaud James Phillips and Charles Lamanna for seeing they were not going to win the race with SFDC on Microsoft's trajectory at the time, and pivoting into new ground. The "Citizen Application Platform" is an entirely different approach, but "Citizens" are not going to build robust mission critical applications on Dataflex. Microsoft needs customers on the big money, sticky stuff that ISVs have historically created for SFDC. Cart before the Horse? Guggs apparently realized there was no budget to create this thriving ISV ecosystem that Microsoft would be the primary beneficiary of, and decided ISVs should fund this. Let's think about this for a minute. You have a historically dismal track record for ISVs, you publicly acknowledge that, and step one towards a fix is to ask ISVs for the money to fix it. I had suggested at the PAC meeting where the Revenue Sharing idea was first floated, that maybe they should "prove" success for ISVs first, but I guess they didn't hear me. I am sure that Microsoft has had to spend some of their own money on this effort, as I doubt that the Revenue Sharing income is significant yet, but they need to spend a lot more. And they need to spend it fast and right, otherwise they should suspend the Revenue Sharing for a while until the value for ISVs is there. I can see it! When I throw my head back, and let the possibilities swirl around, I can see success for ISVs, and Microsoft. I know I have been a strong Microsoft advocate in the past, and call me a flip-flopper, but I could easily become one again. Even though SFDC does not have it perfect, I still envy their ISVs today. And, even though he is a egomaniacal as they come, Benioff still let ISVs shine, less concerned about brand positioning, than money rolling in the bank. So, what might I suggest to Toby? Stop Antagonizing Maybe they can't see it. Maybe they don't actually believe that ISVs are critical, or even necessary. Maybe they see us a necessary evil for certain edge case deals. Maybe they see an ISV ecosystem 10X the size it is today as a huge hassle. That would certainly explain things. Or maybe they don't think any of that, and simply don't know what to do to solve the problem. Launching a Revenue Sharing program at this stage, in spite of knowing full well that it was going to piss of the entire ISV ecosystem, does not appear to have been the best first step. If this is going to work, we have to all be smiling the whole way through. No pain, no gain, only works for the gym, Equalize the effort Right now, particularly in Co-Sell, my guess is that 5% of the ISVs are getting 95% of the attention from Microsoft. I understand that's where the quick money is, but that is also short-sighted, scorecard-based thinking. The goal should not make the few large ISVs even larger, it should be to make all ISVs larger. If you want to recruit a lot of ISVs, they need to see that they won't just be given the crumbs left over after the existing large ISVs have had their fill. Kind of like how many organizations and governments have a minority program, where a certain amount of projects must go to a certain population, Microsoft should come up with a similar program for small and start-up ISVs. Engineering I am aware that Toby will not have much influence over what the product teams do, but it impacts ISVs in a big way. The last thing the product teams think about when they create new features is the ISV story... it's more of an afterthought. As a result, many of these features or products are not what I call "ISV Ready" for various reasons. Every product team should have an ISV advocate, from the very first conversation about a new product or feature. I mean there's like 6,000 people in the BAG organization now, surely we can task a few of them with watching out for ISVs. AppSource One of the touchier subjects for ISVs is AppSource. If done right, AppSource could be a primary benefit to ISVs, and draw for new ISVs. I know AppExchange certainly is for SFDC. Unfortunately, AppSource for Bizapps ISVs has become little more than brochure-ware. Poorly built, hard to use, and not promoted nearly enough. I am also aware that AppSource is not "owned" by the Business Applications Group, they only own their own door to it, so again, Toby may have his hands somewhat tied. Supposedly, AppSource has been very effective for Azure, and some of the efforts have been toward trying to copy that success. But the Azure buyer is a completely different person than the BizApps ISV buyer, and AppSource is not giving that buyer what they need. What specifically might I do? First, I would reverse the process. Right now when you enter AppSource, a significant amount of the page is dedicated to showing you a bunch of "Featured" solutions. The problem is, AppSource has no idea what I might be looking for. The odds that I am looking for a solution, that you happen to be "Featuring" are pretty slim. I'm not even sure how these apps got "Featured". I would delete that whole section. The entire focus on the landing page should be helping me find what "I" am looking for. This is an area where Microsoft could actually do something better than AppExchange. Make this landing page into a "Process" that guides me easily to understand what I want and need first. Only then, show me a list of options, limited to that. Once I land on a solution that looks promising, give me the opportunity to book a time on the ISVs calendar for an in-person demo or conversation, not just a generic contact form. Circling back to the "ISV Ready" conversation, AppSource is not ISV Ready. Test Drive is clumsy and largely ineffective. Trials only really make sense for widgets, and there is no way to expire the trial unless the ISV builds that into it. The promised commerce component is nowhere in sight, and even if it was, the churn challenge will be similar for ISVs as it is for Microsoft when customers just try and deploy something on their own, again other than a widget. More important to ISVs than commerce, would be a universal licensing system that we can just plug into. Licensing schemes end up costing ISVs a lot to build and maintain, and customers end up with a different one for each solution they install. Lastly, drop the dime on promoting it. Stop being the marketplace that is down the street around two corners, and be right up on main street. I have more, but that's a good start. Benefits To offset the shock of the Revenue Sharing program there was a promise of benefits. Most of the benefits seem to be targeting new ISVs, and that's fine, but when you look at the costs of an ISV, and particularly those that Microsoft is in the unique position to help offset, there are some obvious opportunities to create value. One of them is IUR. Historically Internal Use Rights have been a benefit of Competencies. But for an ISV, competencies are not nearly as important as they are for SIs. For a short time there was an ISV Competency, that again seemed to have been put together without talking to any ISVs. It was summarily cancelled without any replacement plan. Either this should be reworked and brought back, or IUR should be a benefit of ISV Connect. It is not reasonable to expect ISVs to have to not only pay Microsoft for development platform, but then also ask for a share of the revenue earned as a result of the platform we had to pay Microsoft to use... Pick one! I am aware that IUR is not free to Microsoft, but I did say Microsoft needs to spend some money on this. I think I will leave this here, for now. I am aware that I ruffled a few feathers with my last post, and may with this one also, but to be honest, the survival of my business depends on Microsoft getting this right. I see no upside in keeping quiet.

Take a look at the latest updates to the Power Platform that allow you to build intelligent, low-code, cross-platform apps. Join host Jeremy Chapman as Charles Lamanna, Power Platform CVP, shares a hands-on demonstration to walk you through some of these updates in action. QUICK LINKS: 02:29 - Hands-on-demo 07:12 - Setup Mixed Reality 08:12 - How robotic process automation capabilities work 10:50 - How to build a bot inside of Teams 13:01 - Where do you go to start using the Power Platform • Discover the new robotic process automation capabilities in Power Automate: record mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, and Win32 application experiences, and then play them back in the background. This allows you to automate tasks (even if there's no API, and all you can use is a Legacy application or Legacy experience). • Check out improved experiences of Power Virtual Agent, the newest addition to the Power Platform. This includes additional channel support, so you can work inside of Teams and WhatsApp, as well as integrate with Azure Bot Framework or Azure Bot Framework Composer to bring additional code-first skills inside the Power Virtual Agent design surface area. • And finally, find out how to make the Power Platform respond to your new remote-work reality. With improved Teams integration, Power Apps now has responsive app templates that work on mobile, as well as desktops, and better understanding of the context that's hosting the application. Additionally, Power Apps Mobile has new mixed-reality capabilities and can visualize 3D assets in space. New to the Power Platform? Sign up and get started at https://aka.ms/lowcode Check out the Power Platform community at https://aka.ms/power-users If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics, we are Microsoft’s official video series for IT. You can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at #Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries?sub_confirmation=1 Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Follow us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/microsoftmechanics/ #Microsoft #PowerApps #PowerPlatform

When Model-Driven Power Apps first appeared on the scene, it brought with it a $40 per user license called Power Apps P2. Earlier this year Microsoft launched a $10 per App "Pass". Clearly $10 is going to get some eyeballs, along with a lot of skepticism about it having a place in an organization that may be paying $100 per user plus. So let's talk about it. "Your going to like it" I believe it was at last year's MVP Summit; there was an off-site dinner for the bizapps crew. I saw Charles Lamanna, Corporate VP of the Low Code Application Platform, sitting at a table with an open seat next to him, so I snagged it. Charles is well aware of our RapidStart efforts, and has been a supporter since I first met him when he came on board the bizaaps team. At some point in our conversation, he leaned in a quietly and said they were working on something: "You are going to like it". He was vague on details at the time, but he clearly understands our RapidStart business model, so I got pretty excited. Announcing the $10 Per App Pass! I had a few "pick my brain" calls with the Microsoft team about the upcoming "per app pass" before it became public. I specifically recall asking, more than once, if they were prepared for "unintended consequences". The problem with "unintended consequences" is that they are not always easy to spot in advance, particularly if you have a filtered view. Microsoft is a technology company, and the Business Applications Group is made up of a lot of technology-minded people. A recurring theme seems to be their inability to view things through a business eye. This is how the Team Member licenses ended up being abused. To a technical thinker the Team Member seemed like a perfect solution to a particular challenge. To the business person on the ether end, it seemed like an excellent opportunity for exploitation. The Scorpion and the Frog There is a classic fable that this reminds me of: "A scorpion, which cannot swim, asks a frog to carry it across a river on the frog's back. The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung by the scorpion, but the scorpion argues that if it did that, they would both drown. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung the frog despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replied: "I couldn't help it. It's in my nature." Microsoft often finds itself a Frog, dealing with customer Scorpions. What will a Scorpion do with a $10 Pass? They will seek ways to exploit it. In our case we have taken full advantage, rebuilding all of our apps the be able to run on any license, but in particular, the $10 App Pass. I don't feel like we are exploiting, after all Charles did say I was going to like it. This kind of felt like tacit permission, even encouragement to head down this path. It's a two-way street, Charles also needed some ISVs to showcase this approach for other ISVs to consider this path as a great way to join the ecosystem. Wait a Minute! The risk of cannibalization of the first-party applications was obvious, and not lost on the team. In one of my chats with Charles, I asked about this probability, he said: "I would say we are quite confident on the Microsoft side that the value and the intellectual property and the ongoing services and support and SLAs and integrations that come with the proper Dynamics applications can and will continue to command those prices." But just to be safe, they decided to toss a blanket over a few key entities and restrict them to the first-party apps. At the time there was, and still is, a lot of discussion about API limits across the stack, and the Per App Pass was given a pretty low limit of 1,000 per day. I had not liked the "Restricted Entities" idea from the jump. In that same chat Charles alluded to more Restricted Entities coming, but in a later chat with Charles, he conceded: "restricted entities as a concept are largely antithetical to our common data service, common data model and vision. And they were just like the least bad option to go make sure that we appropriately can license Dynamics apps." I had suggested a different approach in another post: "The real value of the first party apps is in the logic layer, not the data model.". While I'm sure my comment was not the trigger, it is the direction they are now heading. Devilish Details So the "replacement" scheme for restricted entities is still being formed, but basically the vertical fences between certain entities, will pivot to a horizontal line between the first-party tables, and their proprietary logic. Where restricted entities was a quick and easy solution, this one will take a lot more work for Microsoft to execute. It seems proprietary logic is all over and pretty deeply wired. Will this be better? It's hard to say at this point. Where before we had some entities that could not be used, the other ones, that were not restricted, were being used... along with their OOB logic in many cases. So it seems like instead of pointlessly replicating entities, we will now instead have to create all of our own logic, and possibly our own forms, dashboards etc.. But, it seems completely fair to me. No one is entitled to get a Prime Steak for the price of a burger. Burgers So what will this mean for your $10 app plans? Well, Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away. Eventually, you can have a "no cliffs" scenario. The cliff I am referring to is starting with vanilla CDS and building some apps, and then realizing that the first-party apps have a lot of features that would like. Today, you cannot get from here to there without a migration. Not a "cliff" exactly, but definitely a hassle. This path will be cleared "in the fullness of time", where a simple license swap will be all that is required. Today, you can install the first-party schema on your vanilla CDS, it is available here on Github. As of now, even with this schema installed, you do not have a direct upgrade path, but the migration should be easier going from an OOB entity to an OOB entity, than mapping your custom one over. When the path is "cleared" will using this approach today just start working for upgrade later? Good question. So, does the $10 Plan make any sense? Depending on your use case, it is completely viable. We have developed many very sophisticated solutions on CDS with the $10 Per App Passes, even without utilizing all that is available to that pass. Mostly starting with one of our RapidStart accelerators, we have built Project Management applications, Field Service applications, Referral Management solutions, each of which has become an accelerator on their own. What will you miss out on? For many customers, they won't miss out on anything, again depending on your needs. Like Charles said, there is a lot of value in the first-party applications for those that need it. Top Down We started with the premise that many customers just want something simple to use at the lowest possible cost. So we built our accelerators with the $10 pass in mind. You can start with a vanilla CDS, and many do. But many customers already have Dynamics 365, and a significant number of their users are making use of those high-value proprietary features. But not necessarily all of their users, particularly in larger organizations. A significant part of the work we are seeing today is taking certain use cases, building a specific app for those users, and dropping them down to $10 passes, sharing the same data as the first-party users. This tends to be an addictive motion. Is this cannibalization of high cost licenses? Yes, but I would argue that if a user can do their job with a $10 license instead of a $95 license, that makes the customer happier and less likely to consider a change in platforms. Unintended consequences are not always a bad thing.    

I try and sneak up on Charles Lamanna a third time, but he was ready for it, "fool me once". Recently promoted to CVP, Citizen Application Platform I wanted to check in with Charles, who was working from home, about some of the things that are going on.  We covered a lot of topics, including the post-virus workplace, RPA, API Limits, Multiplexing and Restricted Entities. Enjoy! BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Tuesday at 5PM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays! Full transcript follows: Charles Lamanna: Hello, it's Charles Lamanna. Steve Mordue: Charles, Steve Mordue. How's it going? Charles Lamanna: Hey Steve. I guess this is being recorded, huh? Steve Mordue: You bet. This is our third time. Have you got some time? Charles Lamanna: I do, always. I have a lot of time locked in my house right now. Steve Mordue: Yeah. It's going to be interesting for people who are listening to this in the future, we are recording this on March 27th 2020. The country is on lockdown and we're still heading upwards, so we don't know where this thing will go or end or what things will look like, but that's where we are now and the whole campus has been basically shut down except for essential people. You're all working from home. Charles Lamanna: Yeah, for a little over three weeks now actually. We did the MVP Summit from home, we did the partner advisory council from home. We even did a virtual offsite where for four days, we all joined a Teams meeting for eight hours each day. Steve Mordue: Oh my God. How are you finding it, compared to going in the office and being with the team. It was massive loss of productivity of your stuff or is it still okay? Charles Lamanna: I'd say there definitely is a slight loss of productivity. It's not as bad as I thought it would be, but I mean, never thought I'd miss my office so much. I really miss just ... you get used to it for a few years, you get everything in place. Steve Mordue: There's a bunch of businesses, I look up my apartment window to downtown Tampa at all these office buildings that are full of law firms and all sorts of people, with bunch of cubicle farms within them with people that could actually be doing their job from anywhere and could have for years and now of course are, and I'm wondering how many of these companies that were reluctant to do remote, that felt like I need to keep eyes on you, by the time we get through this, we'll have figured out how to do it remote. I wonder how many of those remote workers will end up coming back to an office. It could be a huge shift. Charles Lamanna: It definitely will. It's interesting. I was in a talk yesterday and we were talking about how when the original SARS outbreak happened, that actually is what launched eCommerce in APJ, and it's around then this jd.com and Ali basically like mobile ordering took off during that time because people were locked at home and then the rest is history, right? Those are the second largest eCommerce properties out there in the world second only to Amazon. So definitely, I would imagine the way people work and the technology people use will be fundamentally different on the other side of this. Steve Mordue: Well, I'll tell you what, it's almost prescient the way you guys decided to invest deeply in Teams over the past year before any of this was out there. And now looking back, that's looking like really brilliant move. Charles Lamanna: Yeah, there's a lot of impact. A lot of people are in trouble, but it's just, it's so exciting to be able to use something like Teams to do remote learning and tele-health and just video plus chat plus meetings integrated, Teams is really the only one doing that right now and it's just phenomenal for someone working remote or working virtually like us right now. Steve Mordue: You said we did recently go through MVP Summit, which converted into a virtual event at the last minute and it was not horrible for a virtual event first-time scrambled together. But I'm also wondering about events in the future if this may change a lot of events into virtual events even when they don't need to be anymore. But it feels like the technology needs to get one step better on the idea. It wasn't really built for virtual events at scale like that. But it seems like you guys are in a spot to really, you know what, we could figure that out and make a virtual event application actually built specifically for that purpose and potentially get rid of a lot of future ... because I tell you, there's no executive out there that's happy about approving travel expenses for his team to go to some in person event if he could sit at home or sit online, what for? Charles Lamanna: And what's really interesting is, I read Ben Thompson, he has a article called Stratechery and it's one of my favorite things to read and he talks about like is this the end of large conferences? Because when you move to all digital and you realize you get such bigger reach. I mean, you get 100,000 people, no problem. That's almost impossible to do in person and for a fraction of the cost and it can be way more tailored and you don't have to worry about double booking. That's another example where maybe things start to change fundamentally in the future. Steve Mordue: And I think conferences for years have been more about, or at least equally about, the social aspect, seeing people in person going out to the bar after the event, having fun going out to dinner, seeing some town, that sort of thing. And that part of course is probably what causes a lot of people want to go to a conerence and I have guys you and I both know that go to a conference and don't go to any sessions. Guys like myself and Mark Smith, we don't go to any sessions. We just go out there. We do that little things like we had you on and stuff like that just for fun and mainly are out there for the drinking. So we're going to miss it. Charles Lamanna: Yeah. Well I guess, the one thing too is just having a group of 20 ... that's the only thing I've learned for ... like Teams is amazing, like four people, you can have a really good conversation or a big broadcast, but if you want to have a group discussion it's hard. And that's something that works so well because you get all these people together that would never be in the room at the same time in person at these conferences and you can have some really interesting conversations. Steve Mordue: That would be the thing to figure out because in person in like MVP Summit, you guys get up in front of, I don't know, a hundred of us and we're all raising our hand, taking our turns, asking questions until we run you guys off the stage in fear. But now in this virtual, there's no real raise your hand. It's just the loudest person, the one that doesn't stop talking gets to continue until his questions gets out of his mouth and that would be an area that it seems like they could do some improvement. Charles Lamanna: Yeah, and I think [crosstalk 00:06:35] is raise your hand in Teams so you can press the button to raise your hand. I can't wait for that. Steve Mordue: That would be awesome. So you could mute everybody and they'd have to raise their hand and ... well, there you go. That's already heading the direction it would need to because that's what you'd need really for some kind of a virtual conference. Charles Lamanna: Yes. That way also I can just never answer you when you raise your hand. No, I'm just kidding. Steve Mordue: Yeah, exactly. "Oh, it's Steve raising his hand again. We'll just ignore him." Charles Lamanna: Yep. Steve Mordue: A lot of stuff that you guys announced at MVP Summit and of course as everybody knows that's mostly NDA for now so we can't talk about a lot of that stuff, but there's a couple of things that we could talk about. One theme I think I heard, which I wouldn't think is NDA, was this idea of make everything we have work better. And when you guys are building like you've been building at the pace you've been building. It's like somebody threw matches in a box of fireworks at stuff that's coming out. It takes a while for all of those wires to get connected and everything to be singing like you'd want it. And sometimes it's like, you know what, this is working darn good. Let's get this other thing launched and then we get a bunch of stuff that's working darn good but not perfect. So it definitely feels like there's a motion now to let's go back over top of all this awesome stuff we've launched and let's connect those last few wires. Let's get this stuff really working as good as it could work. Is that a fair statement? Charles Lamanna: That's exactly right. And the mantra we keep repeating internally is "end-to-end" because what you'll see is there'll be components that work well individually but they'll just be huge seams or gaps when you try to wire them up together and our whole vision has been that you want to wire these things together. That's why we talk about one Dynamics 365, one power platform. So we have this big focus on making sure scenarios that span applications or expand parts of the platform actually work well end to end and it's going in and wiring those things up and spackling over the creases and putting a new coat of paint on it. It's not fundamental and it's not necessarily something that will pop in a demo or in a keynote, but it'll just make a huge difference for our customers. And we see it already, we track our net promoter score very closely, like what are the makers, end users rate the product as they leverage it, and we just see it as we systematically improve these end-to-end experiences. That net promoter score just keeps going up and up and up and up. Steve Mordue: I know we're a one Microsoft now, which is a nice term, but in reality, these are lots of groups that are focused on their things. You've got the Office group focusing on their things, Biz Apps focusing on theirs, Azure focusing on theirs and you've got within your own group of bag things like VRP and power platform that they're wiring there you're working on and at least that's in your realm. You can make that happen, but then you get Azure AD group go do something out there that messes up something for us, or you talk about a gap, like a gap maybe between something we're doing over here and something's has happened over in the Office side and those are kinds of things that you don't have direct control. You got to try and influence and almost make a case internally to those teams that, hey, this is good or get Sacha to make a case, get somebody to make the case. Charles Lamanna: Yeah, and I think like that is a challenge. As any organization gets bigger you have, like I'd say it's not perfectly well mixed. Kind of like the ocean, right? The ocean is big enough. It's not perfectly well mixed, but I think the fact that it's actually a cultural tenant of Microsoft now to operate in the one Microsoft interest, useful listening and being willing to have the dialogue on is this truly better at the macro level? Is this a global maxima for Microsoft to go do this capability? Even if the things you directly own, it's maybe not a maxima for you and this opens the door to have that dialogue of hey, we need this feature for say the Outlook at [inaudible 00:10:38] so that our Outlook mail app can be better and we can get people off the comm at it. That's an example of a really tight partnership between Outlook and us. Charles Lamanna: And systematically, the Outlook team is completely willing and has shipped feature after feature to go make that Dynamics and Power Apps mail app richer and richer. And just the most recent example is to finally bring delegation to the mail app and that's come over the last three and a half months. So that definitely is a challenge, but it's eminently surmountable and solvable. Steve Mordue: I would imagine there's to some degree of quid pro quo, right? I mean, hey, you guys helped me out with this. I know there's nothing in it for you, but it'll help me. And then when I have an opportunity later to help you guys out. So we're all kind of open arm instead of crossed arms when [inaudible 00:11:27] approaching these other things. So how big is your list of things you owe other people? Charles Lamanna: For Power Apps, I owe a lot. But what's great is a lot of these things aren't like a zero sum in that in order for it to be good for one product or one team at Microsoft has to be bad for the other. The reality is Power Apps inside of Teams, I'll use that as an example. As Power Apps, we're very excited about that because are asking for an integrated experience inside Teams. I want it by my left rail for the app bar or I want it as a tab inside my channel. Those are real customer demands and on the other side, Teams wants to go support as many line of business applications as possible inside Teams. And we all know what's the fastest way to go create a bunch of line of business apps? It's not to go write code is to go use a low-code solution like Power Apps. So you actually can go help accelerate the platform and the line of business awareness and teams and you can go up Power Apps, reach new customers at a broader base just by doing that one feature. Charles Lamanna: So it is a very much win-win situation and adopting that mentality through one Microsoft that really the Microsoft cloud is what customers want and customers want to go trust and transact with Microsoft and not individual product teams. It is just a cultural shift that has really grown under Satya with great success. So I would say, I don't know if a product like Power Apps could have been successful 15 years ago, but it definitely, we have the environment where you can't have something like Power Apps embedded in SharePoint, embedded in Teams, the platform for Dynamics and a standalone business and having that not be dissonance or in conflict. Steve Mordue: It's interesting, I think that the companies that have embraced Teams, and it was frankly a slow go to get people to bite on because it looked a lot different than what they were used to and how they did business. But now the ones that have really gone into it are like, they're maniacal about Teams and Teams is like their new desktop. They're operating in Teams all day long now and like I can't imagine how we ever did anything before Teams. So we're still at that inflection point with Teams where I think there's a huge number of customers yet to discover what a lot of customers have about how transformative that can be. So you had to have Power Apps along for that ride. I think that ride is just getting started. Steve Mordue: It's interesting these times right now, there's an awkwardness about marketing or promoting things that make sense because of a virus. For example, I tactfully tried to write a couple of posts here recently and stood back. I was thinking, does that look opportunistic? But the one was this idea that I'd mentioned earlier, lots of people sending people home to work from home. Well, these companies that have had on-premise systems and still have them been reluctant to move to the cloud, that moved to remote workforce is going to be much more complicated than it would have been for those that had already gone full cloud, people just logging in. They got all the security they need to get. Some of these VPN solutions just were never designed or reinvested enough into to support the entire workforce. What are your thoughts about that? Do you have an opinion on that? Charles Lamanna: Yeah. I think the way we view it is number one, things have changed right now. That's just the reality. People are in different working environments, people are under a different economic pressure. There's very real frontline response necessary to go and combat COVID-19 out in the field. So things have changed. That's number one. And the second thing that we've adopted is because things have changed, we need to be flexible. And if you look across what we've done at Microsoft, even just specifically in the area that I work on, we took the April release or the 2020 wave 1 release. Originally it was going to be mandatory upgrade in April. Talking to a lot of customers, they said, "We can't get the workforce to test it. Please don't do this change, we can't take it." Charles Lamanna: So we extended the opt in window for the wave 1 release to May for an extra month and we'll keep evaluating stuff like that constantly. But we did that and that's a big change for us because we really have trumpeted that clockwork. It's always in April, it's going to come up. But we just felt like that was the right thing to do. Or we've also done a bunch of programs where for six months you can get Power Apps or Dynamics CE free if you're in healthcare, hospitals, life science or government organization because we want to go help. So there's literally dozens and dozens and dozens of state local government, hospitals that we're working with right now inside my team. And we wanted to make sure we could help them in a way where it was clear we were not trying to profiteer off of the crisis. Steve Mordue: It is that fine line though, because obviously there'll be a lot to these folks that'll take you up on those opportunities. And then when all this stuff passes, at some point you guys are going to reach out and say, "Hey, that thing we were giving you for free for so long, we like it back or have you start paying," and it is a fine line about, the super cynics could look at it very cynically I guess. The other thing that is interesting to me, I was talking about how in this time of business, revenue is going to be a challenge for businesses right now. Revenue is going to drop for most businesses that are out there. There'll be certain businesses certainly that will ... in every crisis there's always some businesses that do better than others but most are going to have a little downturn. And their revenue growth is going to be largely out of their control at the moment. And the government could shut down the people that are buying your product or who knows and it's not something you could control like you could before. Steve Mordue: So what you can control though is your costs. That's really all you can control right now. It's the cost side and both those drop to the bottom line the same way, right? Charles Lamanna: Yeah. Steve Mordue: And obviously you laying off people as people are doing that, but it seems like the time for people to really look into their organization for where money is leaking out. Because I look at historically to solve a problem like that, maybe with a business application, we're looking at Dynamics 365 or Salesforce or some big applications, costs a lot of money, a lot of time to get implemented to plug up a leaky ship that's losing some money. Where now with Power Apps, we really had the ability to go, let's identify those leaks. Let's spin up a Power App in a week or two weeks and solve this problem. Steve Mordue: We're doing one right now for a Fortune 500 company that discovered [inaudible 00:18:20] $50,000 a month. And in a big company, you can not notice that. I would notice it, but they didn't notice it until someone suddenly noticed it. We're literally going to plug that hole with a Power App at a total development cost of about 15 grand. And it's just amazing, amazing when you think about how many of those sorts of things and now's a good time for people to really focus on where's money leaking out of your business and there's some lower costs, low-code, quick tools now that could potentially plug those leaks that we didn't even have before. Charles Lamanna: Yeah. And if we look at as a company, we actually view Power Apps and Power Automate together as two products that will be envisioned doing quite well even during an economic downturn for that reason. Because you don't have to hire a very expensive developer to maybe go solve the solution or even if you go work with a services company to implement it, they can implement it much more quickly than they would if they had to go write code. And we're working with I said like a Fortune 100, like very large company just I was talking to this week and they said, well before we were talking about Power Apps all about like transformation. How do we go drive revenue forward and now for the next six months we're going to pivot and we're going to be focused on driving efficiencies in our business process and retiring other IT solutions which overlap and can be replaced with Power Apps. Charles Lamanna: So they're now going to go hunt for like this licensing thing, they pay one million bucks a year. This one, they paid two million bucks a year. Can they just spend a little bit of effort, move that to Power Apps and be able to shut down those licenses once and for all. So that's the benefit of the flexibility of the platform and just the ROI is so clean that we think that there's going to be a lot of opportunity between Power Apps and Power Automate with the new RPA capabilities. Steve Mordue: And talking about RPA in a second, but you did make a point there that it's funny how their original thought was to use it to grow revenue. And because of the situation we're in now, they're looking at another use case, which frankly was just as valid before any virus or anything else was out there. It's interesting that it took something like that to have them say, well what's the other hugely obviously we could solve. Charles Lamanna: Exactly. Steve Mordue: So RPA is an interesting one. There was a lot of talk, a lot of excitement about RPA. And I know that you're probably still somewhat limited on what you can talk about, but whatever you can say, what are you thinking about that? Charles Lamanna: The RPA, we're going to be GA in that with the April wave. So wave 1, just in a week or so. We announced the licensing details for RPA four weeks ago or so I think on March 2nd and what's exciting between the capabilities of it being a true low-code offering like typical power platform offering plus the reasonable licensing options that we have, which are generally like I'd say, the most affordable you're going to find out there for an RPA solution, we think we can actually start to democratize enterprise grade automation. Make it possible to really have business users, IT, pro developers, partners, service companies all use the same platform to go automate and drive efficiencies. So that's the exciting bit, because Power Automate and Flow have been around, Microsoft Flow before that had been around for a while but have really been, I'd say capped to a degree around personal and team and light departmental automation. Charles Lamanna: But now with the RPA functionality, we're starting to see enterprise wide invoice processing, quarterly earnings preparation, accounts, basically resolving receivable accounts, things like that. Very heavy workloads built on top of Power Automate, the same low-code tool has been there for a few years. So we're very excited about it for that reason. And in a world where you want to go trim costs, there's real opportunity to go drive efficiency using Power Automate over time. Steve Mordue: Yep. Definitely. It wouldn't be a talk with me if I didn't bust your balls about some stuff. Charles Lamanna: Let me hear it. What is it about? Steve Mordue: In one of our last calls we talked about the hot topic at the time was about these API limits and you said, this isn't something we want customers to think about. We actually thought of it more as like an asterisk on your cable bill. It shouldn't be a factor. Yet it continues to persist in people's minds. The conversation has not gone away. We've got people claiming that they're running into limits and doing stuff like that. And what are your thoughts around that now that it's actually out there and we're seeing how it's landed in people's organizations. Charles Lamanna: I do still hear a little bit of noise from customers or partners that are running into it. But it is dramatically less because it doesn't impact 99% of customers, it wouldn't impact that 99% of customers. So since it's kind of rolled out, we've heard a lot less noise but there's still does exist some noise. And the thing that we could- Steve Mordue: Would you call it air? Would you just call it a false noise? Because you guys have the analytics in the background, you know what's exactly happening. You know if once you launch this that suddenly half of our customer base is hitting this wall and you know that that's not happening. So is it still the feeling that the ones that are squawking either of that small percentage or just fear mongers? Charles Lamanna: I think there are ... I'd say I'd break down three very valid concerns that we hear. The first is, we don't have enough reporting to make it clear and easy to understand where you stand for the API limits. We have early stage reporting and power platform admin center, but we don't have enough. So there's a lot of improvements coming for that by wave two of this year. So by the end of the next wave, release wave for Dynamics, you'll be able to go in and understand exactly how your API limits are being used and if there's any risk. And that's just going to be exposing telemetry that we ourselves look at today and we think that will help with a lot of the concern that people are facing. So that's one. Charles Lamanna: The second is we have people that are using a lot of the Dynamics products. They're using customer insights, they're using Power Apps, they're using customer engagement, you're using marketing. And their concern is all these application workflows. Like imagine customer insights taking data from CE or marketing doing segmentation on CE are actually generating a lot of API calls. So as they actually keep adding more and more apps, which we like of course, and we think that's the whole special value prop of Dynamics, they are generating a huge amount of API calls. And so this is something we're going back and looking at to see how do we count the application API calls from Microsoft delivered apps and also what API inclusions should come with those other licenses. So that is something we're looking at and we don't have enforcement today so people aren't really feeling the pinch, but people are looking at it and saying, "Hey, I can see that I'm making a lot of API calls because of these other apps." That's the second one. Charles Lamanna: And third thing is we have customers who have a web app or some other service which calls into CPS in the background and that generates a lot of load and that is causing friction. Those are probably the people that we intended to have impact from these changes. And because those are people where maybe they have 10 user licenses but they generate like a billion API calls a day. So that's probably not correct. But we are seeing noise in a few places there. And that last one I think is probably, we're not going to do anything to simplify, whereas the first two are things we're going to go try to simplify and improve over time. Steve Mordue: Couple of other things before I let you go. One is, multiplexing is a concept that's been around for a very, very long time. Back when we had CALS, back when it was a physical app installed on machines and stuff like that. Now we're in this different world with all these cloud apps and services bumping into each other. But multiplexing is still this big gray box for lots of folks. And even in the Microsoft documentation, it's kind of contradictory in some places. What's the story with, we've got Salesforce Connectors, we got SAP Connectors, we've got all these other kinds of connectors that almost seem to be in direct conflict with some of this multiplexing. How do you guys get to figure that out? What does multiplexing going to look like in the future? Charles Lamanna: I would say the spirit of the law when it comes to multiplexing is, if you're doing something to reduce the number of user licenses you'd have to get for users, then you're probably doing multiplexing. And the problem is to convert that to a letter of the law is we create confusion historically to a degree as well as accidentally prevent things that we don't want to prevent based on how the language is written. And I'll give an example. So if I use a connector to say Salesforce or SAP, I still have to be licensed through Power Apps to Salesforce or SAP because you're running with your identity to Salesforce and SAP. So we feel like that's totally aligned with the spirit and those partners feel good with it. Charles Lamanna: One of the places where there was some weirdness was like say I have a Power App connecting to my Dynamics CE data, but I'm not using any of the Dynamics CE logic. Is that multiplexing? Technically four months ago that was multiplexing as the way the licensee guide was written. But that was not the intent and that was not the spirit of the law. So we've gone and changed that actually to say if you're licensed for Power Apps, you're writing a Power App to connect to Dynamics data, but not using the Dynamics app logic or app experience, then that's totally fine and not multiplexing. And that was changed I think in late January, early February because some people pointed out, like this doesn't make sense. And then we said, "You know you're right. That's not where we want to have the impact of that being." So we went and changed it. Charles Lamanna: But at its core, if you're using or doing something to circumvent a user license and you'll know you're doing it because it will feel unnatural because the system's not built to behave that way, that's multiplexing and not allowed. Everything else, the intent is to have it be allowed. Steve Mordue: So if your goal is to game the system, you're multiplexing. Charles Lamanna: Yeah, and you'll know it. If you're like, okay, I'm going to create one system account and people will use a web portal I build in Azure and the system account will then have to fake authorization talking to CDN, you're like in bad territory when you're doing that. Steve Mordue: Yeah. A lot of that comes from customers. Customers are like, "Can't we take a Power App and then have a custom entity that by workflow goes and recreates a record in a restricted entity." I'm like, "No, what are you talking about?" Anything you're doing to try and go around the fence, it's probably going to fall into that funny territory. But- Charles Lamanna: Yeah. And a challenge we always have is, how do we convert these ideas into a digestible licensing guide? And I think it's almost like running a law, like legislating, but there are no judges to actually go interpret the law. Steve Mordue: And we also know that when it's written down in a licensing guide, it almost might as well not be said. If we can't get it technically enforced at various levels, we can point back to the licensing guide. We as partners should be telling customers, "Yep, not allowed to do that." But without technical enforcement, these licensing guides are just something you could beat them over the head with when they misbehave. And speaking of restricted entities, when we last talked, you had mentioned, yep, there may be some more coming. That was a very long time ago and we haven't seen them. Is the thinking still along the lines of that is how we're going to protect some of the first party IP or we maybe have some different thoughts of different ways to protect it in this new world of a common data service, open source, data model, et cetera. Charles Lamanna: We actually do ... we are working on something, I can't quite tip my hand yet, that will better allow you to share data and share schema from the common data model, the common data service in the apps without running into the concept of the restricted entities. So there is something in the works that we're working towards and I would say at a high level, restricted entities as a concept are largely antithetical to our common data service, common data model and vision. And they were just like the least bad option to go make sure that we appropriately can license Dynamics apps. So we are working feverously on many proposals to get out of that restricted entity business, but still have a model which more appropriately captures and protects the value of the Dynamics apps without introducing restricted entities. So there, I'd say stay tuned. There definitely the best minds are working on it and I've seen a very digestible and good proposal that is running up the chain right now and that'll get us in a much better place later this year. Steve Mordue: I had that assumption since you talked about adding some and so much time had gone by and my thinking was, because I never liked the idea of the restricted entities for reasons you just said. It felt like a quick down and dirty temporary solution and I had the assumption that since we hadn't heard any more that you guys were actually coming up with a better idea. So very glad to hear that. I'm sure everybody would be glad to hear that. So I know you got to get back to work. You're a busy guy. Anything else you want to convey to folks out there right now? Charles Lamanna: The biggest go do I'd have for folks right now at this point in time, it would be go play with Power Automate, learn the new RPA functionality. It's a huge addition to dynamic CE. It's a great thing for support and customer service workloads. It's a great thing for finance workloads. Like we have one customer that went from 22 finance ops people down to three just using Power Automate and RPA. Plus if you use Power Apps, it's a great way to go extend it. So I say go give Power Automate and RPA a try. That is the number one thing I think to pay attention to and that's the number one thing we're going to be talking about at the virtual launch event. That would be my call to action. That'd be the one thing I'd say. And the second thing would be, I even wore short thinking Steve would maybe video call me today, but it's too bad you can't see it. Steve Mordue: That's very nice. Charles Lamanna: But maybe I take a picture and send it to you about a merry pigmas. So that's the current state here is I work from home, but I say- Steve Mordue: We're all letting the hair grow and- Charles Lamanna: Yeah, I had a call with our PR and AR folks, our analyst relations folks because I had an interview on Wednesday and they said, "You're going to shave, right? You're going to shave before you get on the camera with him." So yeah. But anyway, exciting times. As always, pleasure. Steve Mordue: Listen, you never have to shave to talk to me. Charles Lamanna: Awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that. Steve Mordue: All right Charles, thanks for the time. Charles Lamanna: Yeah, always good to chat with you, Steve. Have a good weekend. Stay safe.

There are a couple of different ways to approach building a Power App... and I am not referring to Canvas vs. Model-Driven here, but rather, the environment type. Today, you can build a Power App on either a "vanilla" CDS environment, or on a Dynamics 365 CDS environment. Why does it matter? Vanilla Let's quickly discuss the Vanilla approach as it is the safest, which I will explain why later. If you log into the Power Platform Admin Center you will be presented with a list of Environments that you have in place. If you have Dynamics 365, any of those environments will also be listed, otherwise these will all be what I call "Vanilla" environments. Clicking on the + New button, will start you on a path of creating yet another Vanilla Environment. If all you have is Power Apps licensing, then all of your environments will be Vanilla. What is Vanilla? A Vanilla CDS Environment will contain a basic data model, including Contacts, Accounts and few other items. It is meant to be extended by you to meet your needs for a Power App you want to create. It is a perfect solution for moving a Speadsheet based process into a "real" app. Or for possibly replacing some basic point solutions. But what if you also have Dynamics 365, and want to build a specific limited purpose app using the data that resides in that Environment? Apps on D365 Dynamics 365 CRM apps are basically just great big Power Apps. You could build your own app, to do something particular for a certain set of users, and it would appear in the App list, right next to Enterprise Sales for example. Why might you consider this? Let's take an example of a part of your business that uses Dynamics 365. Let's say this department uses the Contacts and Accounts entities, but it also uses a few custom entities that you created for some specific purpose. One reason to consider building a Power App is that you can create a highly targeted application just for those users, that includes only what they need, and nothing more. Another reason is that you could potentially reduce your licensing costs... significantly. License Tightrope When you build a Power App on top of a Dynamics 365 environment, you have access to all of the entities in that environment, including of course any custom ones you created. If you were to pull into your app Contacts and Accounts and your custom entities, you are potentially creating an app that could run on a $10 App Pass instead of a full user license. But if you also decided to pull in the Case entity, for example, you would see a message that this entity is restricted. You can still use it, and it may still make sense to create a targeted app for some purpose, but you will not be able to use the lower cost licenses for these users. Restricted Entities Some of the entities that are in a Dynamics 365 environment are "Restricted", there is a list of them here. Why are they restricted? Microsoft has given you the ability to build a Model-Driven Power App, ostensibly, to build simple apps. However, there is no limit on how complex your app can become, it is only limited by your knowledge and ability. With a much lower cost, many are taking a hard look at how they are using the Dynamics 365 apps, and some are opting to just build their own "Sales" app for example. Not only can they eliminate all of the features they are not using with a skinnier app, but they could potentially reduce their license costs, as long as you avoid the Restricted entity trapdoors. More Restricted Entities Coming... eventually Microsoft announced in October, and Charles Lamanna confirmed publicly on my podcast in September, that more entities will be tagged as restricted. But as of today, we still don't know which ones. Meaning we have been building within the boundaries, but at some point the boundary will be moved. That will not be a good day, if something that we used, suddenly gets tagged as "restricted". Why Restricted? Microsoft needs to protect their first-party app revenue, this is understood and reasonable. If I had P&L responsibility for one of the first-party apps, I would be concerned about Power Apps cannibalizing some of my users. But restricting access to a few random entities is a bad way to approach that. Previously there was a rule that you could not "replicate the functionality" of the first-party apps, but they removed that rule so Power Apps would not die a quick death. So, while I can't use a restricted entity in my app without triggering a higher license cost, I am free to build my own custom entity, right next to the restricted one and use that. So is this the perfect solution? Well, that depends on the trajectory of the customer. If at some point in the future they want to move to the full first-party apps, and have been using a custom entity for some OOB feature, they will have to migrate data. Or, if they have a mix of users, some on first-party and some on a Power App, this would also be problematic. So the restricting of entities does not protect the first-party apps, it just creates future frustration for customers. A Better Idea? As I was writing this post, a fellow long-time MVP floated the same idea I was planning to write here. Basically the value of the first-party apps is not in the data model, as I said I am free to replicate that, and it is not even hard to do. Protecting an app by creating a potential "pain in the ass" scenario in the future is not a good idea, as most customers will not realize that until later. The real value of the first party apps is in the logic layer, not the data model. In particular where Microsoft has made some proprietary logic part of their app. Also, app specific features like plugins, or behind the scenes processes like Lead qualification, or SLA management. These are things that are not only valuable, but more difficult to replicate. If I were able to use a restricted entity, like Case for example, I would have no reason to create my own. If at some point that customer wanted to move up to the full Customer Service app, it would be a simple license swapping process, instead they may consider staying put, if the hassle is too high. This would be the opposite of what Microsoft's first-party teams would like to see happen. I have customers in that very predicament right now. Restricting entities was a down-and-dirty, lazy way to solve this problem. Hopefully Microsoft will come up with a better approach soon.  

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This is the Power Platform Daily Brief for September 16, 2019. This episode is brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic. Topics and links for today's daily brief: Charles Lamanna announces the winners of the TDGi Hack for Good. https://youtu.be/FTbvjwLgTCQ Watch the 2019 Virtual Flow Conference on demand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvCcnlw6tjs Register for the October 10 wave 2 virtual launch event https://info.microsoft.com/Microsoft-Business-Applications-virtual-launch-event-October-2019_Registration.html?ocid=AID2450874_QSG_BLOG_356824 App Checker now includes performance optimization tips: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/app-checker-now-includes-performance-optimization-tips/ PCF Controls now work in canvas apps https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-experimental-release-of-the-powerapps-component-framework-for-canvas-apps/ Custom connectors now are supported in solutions. https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/custom-connectors-now-available-in-solutions-preview/ Plus, Joel is preparing for the PowerPlatform 24, D365UG summit, and other conferences. He shares his process for how to prepare to deliver a conference presentation. Music: www.purple-planet.com  

In this episode of "Steve has a Chat", I try and sneak up on Charles Lamanna again, but no dice. Recently promoted to CVP, Citizen Application Platform I wanted to see if I could get Charles to help clear up some of the confusion around licensing and API limits that seem to be the topic of the day. He was more than happy to help me set the record straight. Enjoy! BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Wednesay at 11AM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays! Full transcript follows: Charles Lammana: Hey Steve. I bet you're recording this, aren't you? Steve Mordue: Charles, you know I am. Did I catch you at a time where you could talk for a little bit? Charles Lammana: Yeah, for sure. I'm about to go to dinner, but I'd talk to you anytime Steve. Steve Mordue: I appreciate that. So we're recording this on Friday the 13th, that's ominous. And right now there's a lot of questions out there in this space, and I thought, "You know what?" I'm going to grab you and see if we can't answer some of these, for some of these folks. I've been fearlessly FUD fighting for the last week or two. I thought I'd just go grab the horse and get his mouth, so. Charles Lammana: Sounds good. I can guess what you're fighting, but I'll let you share that first. Steve Mordue: I will. Before I do that, congratulations on the promotion. Charles Lammana: Thank you very much. Steve Mordue: Corporate Vice President of Citizen Application Platform, right? Charles Lammana: Yeah, that's right. I think I dilute the Microsoft CVP brand a little bit, but- Steve Mordue: I don't think so. I don't think so. Are you still seeing that girl that you introduced me to a little while back? Charles Lammana: Yes, yeah. And you know what's funny is, the place I'm going to dinner is actually the same place that we ran into each other- Steve Mordue: Oh yeah? Well I guess she chose wisely then, in selecting a boyfriend. Should we read anything into the Citizen being part of the title? Charles Lammana: So Citizen Application Platform's been the name for our team for a while and the main focus there is not like citizens of the United States or any country, but instead that anybody, even if they're not a professional developer, can use the Power Platform to go create applications, create dashboards, create flows and so on. That low code element. So that's the real focus, why we have the Citizen Application Platform. Steve Mordue: So we're already shortening that to CAP? Charles Lammana: Yeah. Steve Mordue: You guys calling it CAP inside too? Charles Lammana: Yeah, it is a mouthful. Steve Mordue: It is. Charles Lammana: And people ask me, do I work with the government or something. But nothing related to the government, just making it so anybody can build apps. Steve Mordue: So I think that a lot of the questions, of course, are coming around from the Dynamics 365 guys. It's interesting because we used to all be Dynamics 365 guys and now there are Dynamics 365 guys and Power Platform guys. And they overlap some, but there's clearly a path for those like myself and others that have decided, "We're going to go Platform all the way." And a lot of the partners that are still heading down the first party all the way, and some of the confusion that's out there around some of the new licensing things. The two things that keep popping up on me and Mark's live weekly show, have you heard that yet by the way? Charles Lammana: I haven't, but I'll check it out. If you guys are talking about licensing, I got to hear what you're saying. Steve Mordue: Oh, we're just saying wrong stuff I'm sure. But licensing and of course the API stuff popped up and I've been responding to both those and I realized that one of the things I was saying might not have been correct on the new per app licensing. Now you know that that $10 per app licensing is blowing up everybody's head, right? Everybody's thinking, "This is crazy. This is going to blow up the market. How can anybody make any money?" But clearly this is a scale play and I was just under the assumption, I guess because of the way I was reading this stuff, that that $10 license was for a single app that you just built on the platform. And Ryan Cunningham confirmed with me the other day that no, you could use this on the Dynamics 365 instance as well if a user's only using a single app that doesn't use any restricted entities. Steve Mordue: Well there's hardly any restricted entities in the sales app and I thought, "Well, I mean you're just going to have a bunch of people that are going to pull out a couple of things in the sales app they may not be using anyway and start paying 10 bucks instead of 95." Clearly that's not the intent. Was he wrong, am I wrong or is there just this idea that, "You know what? We're going for scale at 10 bucks and everything else, get out of the way"? Charles Lammana: You're both right, but let me inject an additional piece of information. So even in a Dynamics instance you can use the new per app per user license, that's $10 for power apps, as long as you don't use any of the restricted entities or any of the application IP, like a schedule board or something from field service. The piece of information that's missing is that list of sales restricted entities as part of the new per app per user license, there's a few more entities from sales that will be added to that list. Steve Mordue: Now it starts making a little more sense. Yeah, because I was thinking whoever owns the sales app must be crapping their pants over there at this stuff. You've got to throw him something to keep his PNL going. Are you at liberty to say what those are yet? Charles Lammana: Yeah, so I don't have the exact list off the top of my head, but I mean the intent is exactly as you described with the list that we have. And that is to make sure that if you are using the dynamics for sales application IP, which has a whole giant engineering org working on it, then it's only fair to pay Dynamics 365 for sales licenses or we'll go purchase them. So it's not going to be contact, but the ability to create an opportunity or manage opportunities, that probably should be restricted, if that makes sense. Steve Mordue: Yeah. That's where it starts kicking into the logic and certainly those aren't components of the platform by itself, whereas contact is, and that's where you start bringing in the Microsoft vetted logic around all that stuff. So that makes sense. That makes sense. Plus it's good for me, as you know, from what we're doing, I'm sitting here thinking, "Oh great, everybody's just going to go start paying 10 bucks for the sales app and I don't have a business anymore," so I'm still good. Steve Mordue: On the API stuff, and I've been kind of comparing this, there's a lot of FUD out there and frankly I've probably created some in the past, I know, I've not always said positive things, but at least I said things that were true. And lately, every time you guys go and announce something, and I'm just picturing you guys sitting back there reading that thing a hundred times thinking, "Okay, this is going to be fine, right? Nobody's going to have a problem with this." And it pushes a publish button and all hell breaks loose. And I feel for you guys, I really do, especially when these folks just attack anything you say and try and turn it into the worst case possible scenario. And the API limits I think is the one that all I'm hearing people say is, "Open a contact record. It does 50 API calls," you know, they're clearly taking that conversation in a direction. And my understanding from you guys is that when you do things like this with these limits, you're looking at a fraction of the market that's outside of it. I mean 95% of the people out there today shouldn't even have to think about this. Is that a fair statement? Charles Lammana: That's exactly right. And I mean all the limits are a bit ... at this point Dynamics is such a big service with such a big surface area and so many customers, we can do pretty good quantitative analysis of what a typical user or a typical customer does. And we did that and that's where the API limits came from because our main focus, put very simply, we want basically all except the most sophisticated complex implementations to just require user licenses, because it's just such an easier conversation for the customer and Microsoft. I have a thousand sellers, I want a thousand sales apps, that's it, boom, done. You don't want to have to go architect, "How many API calls did they make? How many integrations do I have?" And basically our position is you shouldn't have that conversation if you're just going to do this, the vanilla sales workload or vanilla general power apps, workloads over CDS; you don't need to go even think about API calls. Charles Lammana: And we do that. We do it because there are customers who do use a lot of API calls and it is important to their implementation and they'd like additional API capacity where there's no way for them to purchase it from Microsoft today. So we have to have a limit and then we have to have a way to purchase incremental API calls in order for that model to work. But again, the idea is we're not selling infrastructure or PaaS, there's no cores, none of that stuff. We just want customers to be able to buy USLs for power apps, for Flow, as well as for Dynamics. Steve Mordue: Yeah. I think it kind of creates some fairness too because obviously we've had issues in the past with a certain segment of customers that are getting a lot more from the platform than intended and everybody else is using it as intended. So I can imagine if you've got some customer that, because of how they're using the platform or running their business or generating a zillion API calls, well they should be paying more. They're getting more out of it. They're doing more with it than the average customer who isn't. So I think it makes it a little more fair. I've always been annoyed at thinking that my customers or myself am subsidizing other customers overuse, you know? Charles Lammana: Exactly, yeah. Tragedy of the commons, right? That's what the problem is with the multi-tenant SAS. If people can use way more infrastructure at no incremental costs or has issues, we're just trying to shape that behavior. But I mean I'll own, from a Microsoft point of view, we could have done a lot more to more clearly communicate those changes and make it more obvious and provable that the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of our customers will not be impacted. And we kind of view it, and it's kind of funny, we didn't really expect such a pushback on it, but we viewed it as just like that little asterix that you have with your cell phone or cable provider where when I get my internet from Comcast I don't think about how many gigabytes I used to download, but there is a limit. I mean it's really big and I bet like almost nobody hits it, but there is a limit at some point of internet download I can go do with my internet provider. But they have those same types of protections. But I just don't worry about it because it's not front and center. We should have done more to make it clear that that's the intent of these changes, to be that little asterix that you really don't have to think about unless you're doing something well outside the normal bounds. Steve Mordue: You know, and we had the same challenge with the storage when we tried to change the storage for the better. And when that first got announced all you heard was, "Storage is going up eight times," and everybody's thinking, "Oh my God." And you guys retrenched a little bit, came back with a little clearer story about how that would work and I'm sure some people are paying a little more, but none of my customers are. So that doesn't seem to have impacted but a fraction of customers also. Charles Lammana: Yep. Yeah. And a lot of those changes, our whole goal is we want our billing model to also not drive weird behavior or bad behavior that make it hard to implement. And the old storage instance cost model did that. So I mean that's why it was really important to change and some of the new API call models also do that. We just wanted to make it so if you build things the right way, the licensing and billing model will reward you for a more reasonable price. Steve Mordue: So you say you don't want to reward or create weird behavior, but we just launched a $10 skew that sits on a platform that has access to all of the XRM capabilities. If somebody was motivated enough and had enough budget they could essentially build the entire Dynamic 365. They wouldn't, and as I stand back and kind of look, from my perspective, haven't been probably one of the first people in there when there still was missing parts and seen them come, I've seen the portals come, we've seen the Outlook come, we've seen the accelerators now have CDS only versions, we're just seeing more and more stuff coming to the platform, that that's got an awful lot of appeal to people to ... I won't say do weird behavior, but who think, "I want to get off this $95 skew if I can." I mean what's the thinking inside on that? I mean that's got to be expected? Charles Lammana: Yeah, I think just our viewpoint would be if we ... I would say we are quite confident on the Microsoft side that the value and the intellectual property and the ongoing services and support and SLAs and integrations that come with the proper Dynamics applications can and will continue to command those prices. And it's not always $95, we also have Sales Pro and Customer Service Pro which are a cheaper price. And even if you use the pro license or the enterprise license, it also entitles you to a multitude of custom applications in that same environment, which the $10 per user license doesn't. Charles Lammana: So I think we feel pretty good about that value prop, and going back to the ... we don't want to do artificial things with our billing model. We think a platform for one app, $10 per user per month, that can unlock the entire world to build all their apps on that platform and we feel like that's the right price for it, the right level of cost between the customer and Microsoft. And we wouldn't want that statement, which we believe to be true, to go be limited because we also think that we can sell a finished SAS application in the case of sales or service for pro and enterprise at a higher premium. Charles Lammana: We think both of those things can exist and we will have blends. Like we will have customers who will repurpose their sales license for platform capabilities and we'll have customers who will use our platform license to go and try to create a mini CRM, and we think that's okay. I mean that's just their own calculation based on their value. But we're aiming for the 95 to 99% of the entire world where we think the value prop works pretty well. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I mean I know that when I look across our customer base there certainly is a significant percentage of those people that are heavily using a lot of those high value features that you talk about. And then there's a segment that just never did, they're just kind of using basic stuff, and those are going to be pretty simple candidates to say, "Hey, you know what? You're not using all this stuff, just drop down." Or try and do a sales job to get them to start using it, because the worst case scenario is they aren't using it and they feel like they're paying too much and then they just churn out. And I'd rather move them down and keep them on something that they want, maybe they grow back up. Steve Mordue: That's another story that's had a little confusion out there is that migration back and forth story. Now, my understanding today is of course if we start on CDS and the customer says, "Hey, this is pretty good, but I want to get some of those snazzy features in the first party," right now we're looking at a migration project, I think. Is that something that you guys think will be fixed or is it something that is a concern or something to think about, or are we just kind of looking at those as different customer types? Charles Lammana: No, I'd say we definitely don't want to require a data migration like it does today. We want to get to a proper model where ... because I think of CDS and the platform as almost like Windows OS, right? You buy the Windows OS and then you'd go buy all the apps that you want and install it on the OS. And it's not like if I buy Windows and I install Office, but then I want to install, I don't know, Adobe Acrobat or something, I have to go re-image my Window server, right? So we want to make that be the right layering, and that's really just an architectural legacy reason for being that way today. But longterm, absolutely, you want to allow it. So you start with CDS, you can add sales, you can add service, you can add field service, you could add Talent, you could add Project Online; you can add and mix and match all these different applications on top of that CDS environment. Charles Lammana: And we have early positive signs where that happens. We can't do it for the core CRM app yet, but low approvals, which is modeled as an XRM app and Project Online from Office 365, that's also an app installed on CDS. Those, we actually have many customers who start with a blank CDS and then end up with both of those applications installed in addition to Talent, which is also an app on top of CDS. All those three apps added incrementally, organically over time on top of CDS. So that works great, we just need to go make it so the core CRM also can do the same thing. And that's just some legacy reasons, which as you know, we've been on a journey the last year and a half to go clean up and we're kind of going piece by piece, like Outlook, then Activities and server-side sync are all just some examples where we're hammering against that, but we think we'll get there, no problem, in the foreseeable future. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I mean for what we've been trying to do with the RapidStart, the Outlook app was definitely something that we needed. I mean everybody was wanting something like that, so thank you for that. And you knew I was hammering you guys for it too. Charles Lammana: Yep. You would never let me forget it. I mean I wanted to make sure it was done before we had this phone call happen again, but ... Steve Mordue: No problem. You guys got it done. Appreciate that. Charles Lammana: Yeah. Yeah, and I've heard quite a bit about RapidStart, so it's great to see the traction of a third party app bill on top of the platform, it's really exciting for- Steve Mordue: Oh yeah, yeah, we're excited too. We're developing some now on top of the accelerators, so, and the ... you having much to do with the accelerator groups? Smith and- Charles Lammana: Yeah, so it's not directly out of my team but we collaborate very, very closely with them. But yeah, I mean accelerators are so key because the world increasingly is going to industry-based motions, like if I'm a financial institution, do I really have to rebuild all the financial services goo that goes on top of a CRM or CDS all the time? They don't want to, so the accelerator just provides a ton of value out of the box. Steve Mordue: Yeah. So they just, with the banking accelerator, I think it's the first one where they released a CDS only version and then some additional add on versions that might take advantage of some of the first party. And I was talking to James about that and he said there's a plan to kind of go back to the other ones. So as soon as they did that we took a look at that banking core, which is an accelerator, and put our accelerator on top of that accelerator, "That'll be real fast," and looking at trying to leverage those accelerators. I think that's going to be an interesting ... I'll be curious to see what the market does with something like that that's built on an accelerator. It'll be a good test for the market. Charles Lammana: Jjust on the accelerator bit, for Dynamics 365, our core customer engagement or CRM app, the accelerators have been absolutely key the last six months to drive business. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I've been hearing that. Charles Lammana: Financial services places, man, it's been a lifesaver for us because customers just love to see that fast time to value. And then so just we think that accelerators are going to be really important for the platform, for the Dynamics apps and for third party apps and building our ecosystem. Steve Mordue: You know, talking about data models and industry data models, what's the latest on ODI? Is that progressing as you had hoped? Is it going faster, slower or is it going to happen? What do you think, or is there too many people punching- Charles Lammana: It's advancing exactly at the paces we would want/expect, and I'll expand on what I mean by that. ODI is one of those super industry changing efforts and motions, and the reason it's industry changing is because we're bringing together so many companies like SAP, Adobe and Microsoft, that historically don't partner together and are built completely different stacks. We're bringing together all three companies to go do something, to create basically open data for our mutual and joint customers and a well-defined schema with a well defined set of entities to deliver a bunch of value to customers. So that's going to be a big deal when it lands. But just- Steve Mordue: It's a big rock. Yeah, it's a big rock to move. Charles Lammana: Exactly, three companies and 25 different applications, you mix in Dynamics, you mix in Office, you mix it Azure on the Microsoft side, it takes time. But when it arrives it's going to be a big deal. So ODI is absolutely something to pay attention to and it's something that continues to get significant investment from all three companies. It's taken its time, but I think it's going to be, whenever it arrives, it's going to be a really transformational item for our customers. Steve Mordue: Are you still driving that? Charles Lammana: I'm not. Robert Bruckner on our team is driving that. We support it from a platform, of course, just it's a lot of energy to go drive that process, so I'm glad we have Robert shouldering the burden. Steve Mordue: Yeah. So we've got October release coming right around the corner, and of course the advance news that has come out, all anybody has been focusing on, the FUD rakers, is on licensing and APIs. But if you take that part of the conversation aside, which I feel like we should have done in our conversation so far, I feel like we've accomplished that, to all but the truly ignorant, if we take that part aside, what do you think are some of the most exciting things people should be looking for in this release for Power Platform? Charles Lammana: I would say there's a few little things which I think are a big deal, and then there's a few big things. The little things are just usability improvements. If anyone's gone on and turned on the October release switch in the admin center, you will notice a significant modernization of the unified interface for model driven applications. There's much better grid density, much better density on forms, way less wasted white space. Better- Steve Mordue: And how long have we been hearing that, right? People complain about white space. So just glad to see that one finally get behind us. Charles Lammana: Oh man. And they're all little things, but you know what? We fixed the top 10 most painful user experience items of unified interface for October. And it's hard to do that in a way which doesn't trigger a whole bunch of retraining for our customers, so we had to be really thoughtful and diligent and you may not even realize it if you first turn it on, but just open it up side by side and we're really proud of those. Lots of little changes, lots of little pebbles that together really changed the experience for Dynamics and for model driven applications for power apps. So those are kind of the little ones. I'm very excited about that. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I was poking around in an October version and yeah, you could definitely feel it. It's not dramatic, it's not like, "Oh my God, where am I at?" You haven't lost anything. But you definitely sense right off the bat the density and then the features that have been added or ... yeah, I think you guys probably did a smooth job of that. So now tell us about the bumpy stuff. Charles Lammana: Yeah, the big stuff, the bulky stuff would be AI Builder is reaching general availability, as is PowerApps Portals. And we think that basically a modern platform needs to be able to support B2C, so external users to your company as well as anonymous access, and PowerApps Portals delivers that for the standalone PowerApps customers. And then we also believe the future of all applications and all automations and workflows is an intelligent, enriched experience and AI Builder delivers that for us. So you can use binary classification and prediction capabilities inside of AI Builder to make your power apps that are canvas model driven, but are built on top of CDS, make them much smarter. And that is one of my favorite features, it's just so amazing how easily you can enable a machine learning model without any data science or even developer background. Charles Lammana: And then also we have like things like the Forms Recognizer which actually parses digital paper, PDFs, JPEGs, what have you, extracts that information into a structured form and you can use that in your power app or your flow. And we're seeing unbelievable adoption, almost 50% of all AI Builder customers are using the forms understanding capability. It's so transformative for the back office, and if you haven't checked it out, just use it and then your mind will start racing; "My legal department, my finance department, my HR department, my procurement department, all of them can just work so much more efficiently if you can get forms recognized or working with the flow." So we think Portals and AI Builder are two big, bulky, meaningful changes for Power Platform. Steve Mordue: And AI Builder goes across, right? I mean you could stand up AI Builder on just bare CDS, you could stand it up on first party, it goes across, right? Charles Lammana: Yep, absolutely. And I apologize to anyone else from my team that may be listening that I didn't mention your feature that you worked on, but they're all important in the October release. But those are my three most favorite children. Steve Mordue: I definitely am hearing excitement about AI Builder and Portals is another one that's getting its share of FUD, something I read recently and some guy jumped on social talking about how Salesforce is so much cheaper because of this, that and the other. And unfortunately Dileep Singh happened to see what was going on, he jumped in and said, "Wait just a minute here," and kind of clarified some stuff right out there that reversed that whole story. So I'm looking forward to the day when we don't have a whole bunch of people out there watching your every move looking for the gotchas. Charles Lammana: Well I would say our goal at Microsoft is broad adoption, which I mean generally reflects in lower prices. I mean that's our goal. Like if you go to Microsoft's mission statement, empower everyone and every organization to do more, you can't do that with outrageous bespoke boutique pricing. So that definitely is not our objective and we certainly will learn and we make mistakes, but our push is we want everybody to be able to use this thing. I want everybody in the world to build apps and create flows and create power BI dashboards. Steve Mordue: Yeah, we'll leave the hidden costs to Salesforce, they're pretty good at that. So Charles, anything else you want to touch on? I've got, I don't know, millions of people that will be listening to this probably. Charles Lammana: I mean the biggest thing I would say is, and this is my kind of call to action every time I talk to you, and maybe it's an overwrought point at this point in time, but Power Platform, I mean our push is to go unify the Office and Dynamics communities with a single low code platform for all of Microsoft, and in the process make it so everybody in the world can have access to analyze data, create apps and build automations. So if you haven't checked out Power Platform as just Power Platform and outside of Dynamics or Office, go do it now. I think it's super amazing, in five minutes you can get value and just from the point of view of Microsoft as a company, it's just really critical to where we think the future's going. Steve Mordue: Yeah, I've had people ask me, "Where's the best place to start with Power Platform?" And I typically suggest Flow because it's about the easiest one to understand, the quickest of value and suddenly just light bulbs start going off. And when people are talking about building, because we are doing a lot of work with customers that are moving up from spreadsheets, that's a huge mountain out there for customers that are doing relatively complex business processes on a bunch of shared spreadsheets and torturing them. And we're generally recommending those customers go straight to a model driven app that has kind of that foundation, because then from there, you know, they can spring off with canvas flow, AI Builder, Power BI, have all those other things. And we're starting to get to a point where I'm getting crisped for that conversation because whenever you announce new things and stuff like that, nobody knows what we're talking about. The partners are behind and customers are behind-er. So, lots of education, a sales process now is an education process and probably will be for a while, because I don't see you guys slowing down. Charles Lammana: Never. We- Steve Mordue: Yeah, you're not even going to let us catch our breath before you're going to go do some stuff and keeping the partners hopping. Charles Lammana: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Well, Charles, I appreciate you taking some time. I knew I might be able to catch you here in the last hour of your work week and I was glad to do it. We'll be publishing this here, I don't know, probably Monday or something like that, get it out there pretty quick while everybody's got all the questions. Charles Lammana: Sounds good. Steve Mordue: So you have a good night, you mentioned something about dinner, so enjoy your dinner. Charles Lammana: Yeah, as always, great chatting, thanks Steve. Steve Mordue: Tell your girlfriend I said hi. Charles Lammana: Will do. Steve Mordue: All right, bye, guy. Charles Lammana: Bye for now-

It seems clear to me from listening to people on social media, comments on my posts, and generally having an ear to the ground, that too many people, including many who should not be, are still confused about PowerApps... and wouldn't they be? A Quick Quiz. What is a PowerApp?  A Mobile Application you built on top of SharePoint  A Mobile Application you built on top of the common data service  A Mobile Application you built on top of Dynamics 365  A Custom Application you built in Dynamics 365  A Custom Application you built on the Common Data Service  A Custom Application you embedded into a Dynamics 365 Form  Something Else If you answered "all of the above", you get a gold star, but you're no closer to clarity. PowerApps Camps There are three primary camps for PowerApps as I see it. There are campers that come from the productivity side of the lake, where Office 365 and SharePoint live. We also have campers from the Dynamics 365 side of the lake, busily extending the Dynamics 365 applications with their own canvas and model-driven apps. Lastly, we have the Platform side of this apparently three-sided lake, using both canvas and model-driven paths to build apps from scratch on CDS. While these campers can hear the sounds of other campers across the lake, they seem to have little understanding of what the other campers are doing over there, even though they are each called "Camp PowerApp". I want to go a little deeper into the two of these camps that are part of Business Applications that I am familiar with. Someone else can speak to those productivity campers. A Custom Application I think the biggest confusion, for those of us in one or both of the Business Applications camps, are the distinction between items 4 and 5 from the quiz. "Building custom applications in Dynamics 365" vs. "Building custom applications directly on the Common Data Service". But Steve, aren't those both on CDS? Yes they are, but they got there via two distinct pathways, from opposite sides of the lake. They are not the same thing and different rules and licenses apply to each. Dynamics 365 Campers Let's face it, Model-Driven PowerApps are just XrM renamed. Everything you ever did with XrM in the past is now called PowerApps. Along the way a few more things happened, like the separation of the first-party apps from each other, and the introduction of the ability to make new role specific "PowerApps" by mashing up parts of the other first-party apps into your own concoction. Dynamics 365 brings all of the power and advanced capabilities you could want, including A.I., MR, and all the other acronyms. This is the deep end of the pool! The separation of the Apps from the underlying platform was of less importance to this camp, but actually spawned a whole new camp. Platform Campers These campers could care less about Dynamics 365. They are building their own custom apps directly on the same platform that sits under Dynamics 365. Are they masochists or anarchists? I guess a little of both. The "Platform" is actually the old XrM framework sitting on top of a database that is now called the Common Data Service (CDS). It is but a hollow shell of Dynamics 365, containing very little in the way of usable items, yet everything that is required to build as powerful an application as Dynamics 365. This is the deep end of the pool. Deep Ends If you were reading/listening closely, you heard me refer to both of these camps as the "Deep ends of the Pool". Extending the complex out-of-the-box functionality in the first-party apps requires significant skill and knowledge. But building functional, powerful and comprehensive applications on the platform also requires significant skill and knowledge. The shallow water in the middle is where "Citizen Developers" swim, creating their cute little widgets. Fuzzy Rules When it comes to the rules, there is clear separation, but for many it still seems fuzzy. Some common examples: "You can't use a Restricted Entity in a PowerApp!" This is incorrect, a clearer way to phrase this would be "If you are building a PowerApp on top of Dynamics 365, and you include in your PowerApp a restricted entity (for example the Incident entity), the user of your PowerApp will require a license that includes that entity (i.e Dynamics 365 for Customer Service)." This does not mean that you cannot build the app! Also, Restricted Entities have nothing to do with Platform Campers. There are no restricted entities in CDS without Dynamics 365. Similarly, with Team Member and it's restrictions. Team Member licenses are a type of Dynamics 365 license. Again, Team Member has nothing to do with the Platform Campers, only the Dynamics 365 campers need to be concerned with Team Member. "You cannot replicate the functionality of the first-party apps in PowerApps." This was previously true, and relevant only to the Platform Campers, but is no longer the case. For Microsoft to succeed with their Platform aspirations, it was clear they needed to eliminate any artificial restrictions, and they did. Fuzzy Licensing The recent announcement about the Platform License changes that I discussed in my last post, referenced this blog post by Charles Lamanna. Note that this post, and these licenses refer to "standalone" (aka Platform), and have nothing to do with Dynamics 365. This post and these licenses are for the Platform Campers only. You cannot use a Per App License with Dynamics 365, Dynamics 365 has it's own licenses. Similarly, the retirement of the bundled Plan licenses for Dynamics 365 has nothing to do with Platform Campers. A Fuzzy Line The line between these two camps is very clear, yet at the same time, not very obvious. There is way too much "assuming" and lazy interpreting going on, leading to way too much misinformation, leading to way too much confusion. One way to help would be, if you don't know that what you are saying is correct... don't spit it out to the world as a fact. There is an old saying, "Better to be silent and thought a fool, than to speak up and remove all doubt".

My fellow MVP, good friend and co-collaborator on PowerISV, Mark Smith (aka @nz365guy) is on a "Shock and Awe" campaign that opens with the phrase: "Dynamics 365 is Dead!". But is it? The House that D365 Built At the recently concluded MVP Summit, Mark had the opportunity to lob his "D365 is Dead" grenade at Charles Lamanna for reaction. Charles seemed legitimately puzzled by the thought, and simply replied that "D365 pays for the entire Business Applications Team and Advanta campus".  So... not dead. Uprising I think we are a long way from knowing if Mark's assertion will prove correct. What sometimes gets missed, is the second part of his proclamation "... long live the Power Platform". Clearly Mark is placing his bet that the fairly new ability for users and developers to build apps directly on the platform, will eclipse the long-standing App offerings from Microsoft, that are built on the same platform. Zero-Sum Game? If anyone should be agreeing with Mark on this one, you would think it would be me. After all, we were one of the first ISVs to shift our applications from above the first-party apps, to under them. Our focus is 100% around building on the platform, avoiding the first-party apps entirely. We went "all-in" on the platform. Do I think this motion will overcome the First-Party apps? I do not. It is also not a goal or desire of mine. I don't see it as a zero sum game at all. A Fair Comparison? There is no possible way that my relatively small team is ever going to build a more sophisticated sales application, or any of the other first-party apps, on the platform. You are talking about a vast repository of development and refinement, created over a very long time, and the hits keep coming with AI and Mixed Reality, etc. I hear some people try and compare on price in a sales conversation, that the platform license is a third of the cost of the plan! As though they discovered a coupon to get the same thing for 66% off. But, they are far from the same thing. Customers? Clearly, sales of Dynamics 365 Apps are growing significantly YoY, and customers are not buffoons. Many have complex needs that can only be practically met by the power of the first-party applications. Is a partner really going to build their own Connected Field Service app on the platform? Force.com did not eliminate Salesforce's Sales, Service or Marketing clouds, in fact, it was the opposite. The Opposite? The real genius of Microsoft releasing a platform license, was to grow the entire pie exponentially. As opposed to taking away from the first-party apps, I think apps built on the platform, by partners, ISVs or Citizens, will actually drive more first-party app sales. This is happening through two movements. Movement One I don't have actual figures, but anecdotally, from my own experience, I think it's fair to say, that well over 50% of all organizations, from SMB through Enterprise, are still using Outlook and Speadsheets. Most organizations have not even made the move to a legitimate Business Process Application of any kind, and instead torture Excel. I worked with one Fortune 40 company that was using Outlook as a CRM for a 15,000 person sales force. Does this company have the need and budget for a sophisticated application like Dynamics 365? Obviously. Would it transform their business? Clearly. Are they eager and ready to jump into an enterprise-grade solution? Often not. Could a simple business application be built on the platform, that would be significantly better than Outlook and Excel? Absolutely. Is that a net new customer for Microsoft that they would not have gained otherwise? No Doubt. Should I continue asking and answering my own questions? I think not. Movement Two The Microsoft Bizapps ISV community is growing, maybe not as fast as they would like, but the momentum is there. Many ISV solutions were built on top of, or depended on items in, the First-Party applications. These would be the ones that fall into Guggs' patterns of "Extend" or "Connect". Many of these offered significant enhancements to the D365 Apps, others built their own end-to-end features on top of the first-party apps because that is what they had. So the second movement I see, is for certain ISVs to decouple their dependencies, and relaunch underneath the First-Party apps. This reduces the license cost to their customers, greatly expanding their addressable market, which again grows the whole pie. If a solution does not need anything from the First-Party apps, there is no need to price limit your market by sitting on top of it, if it is not necessary. Addressable Market Both of the above movements, will significantly expand the total addressable market by a factor of [insert big number here] . Will they siphon off some potential first-party sales? Sure, but they will also introduce a ton of customers to the Microsoft Business Applications Platform. A customer who starts with some departmental need filled by a custom PowerApp, and has a good experience, leads to more investigation by the customer. I have directly witnessed, with our own entry-level solutions, customers who then moved onto to add the full first-party Sales, Marketing and AI applications. This was not going to happen without an easy entry point. In fact, I feel comfortable saying that close to 100% of our customers, would not be using Microsoft Business Applications at all, were it not for the options we made available to them. How can Microsoft Accelerate these Movements? I know that the Bizapps leadership gets it. I know that the PMs who have P&L responsibility for the First-Party apps, do not get it. Right now, there are only two barriers to explosive growth. The first is artificial, first-party protection schemes. The second is prioritization of the tools and programs required for these motions to flourish. I also know that both of these barriers will be coming down very soon.

Power Platform Changes and Answering Community Questions with Charles Lamanna Full show notes available here: https://www.nz365guy.com/75

Happy New Year! This episode is brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic. This is our final "best of 2018" episode, and today we present our top episode of 2018. In CRM Audio 78, Charles Lamanna, General Manager for the Microsoft Business Applications Platform, answered our questions about what D365 and PowerApps coming together with the Common Data Service really means. Topics discussed in this episode: What does the new release of CDS mean for Dynamics 365 customers? What does the new release of CDS mean for PowerApps users? How does the new release simplify integration with Finance and Operations? Will ISV’s be able to extend the integration templates? How does PowerQuery fit in? Does CDS fulfill the vision of “naked XRM?” How does the CDS/Power Apps/Dynamics convergence account for security? How should customers decide if an app scenario is model-driven or canvas? Get in touch with Charles Email: chlama@microsoft.com Twitter: @clamanna This episode is a production of Dynamic Podcasts LLC. Subscribe to the  CRM Audio network of podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Player.FM, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher, or YouTube. You can also listen via our app on iOSor Android.

I was recently at Extreme365 in Austin, I even had a role in Keynote! One of the sessions was a "Fireside Chat" with the Bizapps product team. Aside from there not actually being a fire that I could see, there was some great conversation. Ryan Jones, who works with Charles Lamanna on the platform team, said something that stuck in my head. Five Things When asked about what ISVs can do better in working with Microsoft and AppSource, Ryan said Microsoft focuses on five things. Availability/Reliability (This actually seems like two things) Performance Security Supportability Efficiency Depending on whether you are "Build", "Extend" or "Connect", these may have slightly different meanings to you. If you don't know what Build, Extend or Connect are, read this post. Let's dive in a little deeper on these five things. Availability/Reliability Like I said, this seem like a twofer, and really feels more like a Connect track issue more than the others. If you have an external service that your solution connects to D365, then obviously you will want to make sure you have provided for redundancy in the event something happens, so your users are not suddenly without your wonderful value-add. In addition, you will need to stay on top of changes to Microsoft's end of the platform, to make sure your solution continues to connect, day in and day out, to delight your customers. Performance For a Connect ISV, you need to make sure you have enough capacity to scale and handle whatever may come your way, without bringing your solution, or D365 to a crawl. For all ISVs this is an important consideration. Poor performance can come from many different things, but the result is that your customers suffer with a bad experience. In addition, poor performing code could put unnecessary strain and cost on Microsoft's end, which may cause you to be removed from their Christmas Card list. Microsoft recently launched the Solution Checker to help you identify performance issues. You can read about it here. Security We know that Microsoft is maniacal about security. It is a competitive advantage that they do not plan to put at risk. ISVs are a weak spot in their defense. I have seen apps in AppSource, that request you provide tenant admin credentials into a form displayed in an iframe. Seriously! Microsoft has started to focus on this "hole" more, and I expect that to tighten up significantly. It is not enough for them to waive responsibility for your app, they need to ensure that your app is not creating a security doorway. Supportability There are certain ISV apps that continuously generate support issues for Microsoft. You do not want yours to be on that list. If it is, you already know it. Deprecated code is probably the main driver of lack of supportability. Fortunately the Solution Checker and AppSource Pre-Certification tools are here to help you identify these issues. Many of these issues will also cause performance issues, so you should fix them. Microsoft has not yet launched a tool to automatically fix your crappy code, so for the foreseeable future, you will need to crack it open and do it yourself. Efficiency This one is getting tougher to keep up with. Things you built a particular way, only a year ago, are not necessarily the most efficient way to do that task today. Some thing that you wrote 500 lines of code to do, might be accomplished with a checkbox today. This is particularly true for legacy ISVs. If you have not touched your solution in the last 6 months, you are already out of sync. And we both know, many of you have not touched your solutions in years. If you did, it was just patching it up to keep working, so today you have a real house of cards. Efficiency is not even a consideration. The Stick is Coming Up until now, Microsoft has been more than forgiving of ISVs and Customer solutions that fail on one or more of the above five items. But that is neither scalable, or supportable as we rapidly move towards a single version of the product. Microsoft has tried the Carrot approach, and that has worked for a portion of you, but now it is time to switch to the Stick. I expect Microsoft to get much more aggressive around solutions complying with these five things soon. Consider yourself warned.

In this episode of "Steve has a Chat", I sneak up on Charles Lamanna, General Manager of the Application Platform at Microsoft. I called him "out of the blue" at the end of his day, and we chatted about a bunch of things, including the new Open Data Initiative, Licensing, PowerApps, Team Member, ISVs and more. Enjoy!

Recently, I found myself looking in the Google Play Store for a mobile app to solve some issue. I found several options that were close, but none met my need perfectly. My choices were: a) continue to live with an unmet need, b) Use one of the apps that was close... but not really, or c) Hire a mobile app developer and build one, which would be insane. The challenges for Business Applications have been similar up to now, but that is changing. The Current Landscape If you are a business in need of a Business Application, which, as a business, sounds like an application you might want, you have a few paths. Before I go further, let's level-set on what I am referring to by "Business Applications". In today's terms, Business Applications include things like your CRM system, ERP system (for finance), Project Management System, Business Operations Systems, etc. These are distinct from other utility applications your business also needs, like Email, word-processing, etc. Business Applications are really the foundation of a business. For any business, imagine what a mess you would have without your accounting software, for example. While many people still use things like Email as a Business Solution, at some point of growth, that flywheel simply gets to big to effectively turn with that AAA Battery.  This is when you would consider the power-plant known as Business Applications. Let's set aside for the moment what your actual requirements are, and I know we can't set them aside, but it will only be for a minute, so I think we'll be okay. Your options, regardless of your specific requirements, will fall into four buckets. Purpose-Built Industry Solutions (Acme Law Software), Broad Solutions (Like Quickbooks or Nimble), Solution Platforms (Like Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.com), or Custom Development. Let's continue to leave your requirements aside for now, and dump these four buckets over for a closer look. BizApps Buckets So like one of those dating reality shows, we'll go ahead and eliminate one option right off the bat: Custom Development. Custom development is for the people who build these buckets, as a customer you have no business, or budget for building anything from scratch. Even the US Government has moved from pure Custom Development, to Extending Off-the-Shelf software and platforms. So that was easy, let's take a look at the Broad Solutions. Broad Solutions are a typical next step from Email and Spreadsheets alone... they are a toe in the Business Solutions water. They are typically designed for the widest possible customer segment, to fill a fairly narrow requirement. We see many customers who, over time, have cobbled together complete business solutions using multiple broad solutions. They will turn a bigger flywheel than Email alone, so we'll think of them as having 12 AA Batteries. Depending on how fast you are growing, and how much patience you have for maintaining a House of Cards, Broad Solutions could last you for quite some time. So we won't eliminate this Bachelor yet, we'll just say his prospects for long-term relationship material look dim. The next bucket is "Purpose-Built Industry Solutions", and without even knowing what your industry is, I can safely say, there is a least one for your industry. These "Industry-In-A-Box" type solutions, really blew up in the prior two decades. Before to the cloud revolution, many of these pricey solutions were cash cows for the bucket owners. But with the current speed of change, most of these have suffered from their inability to keep up with what everybody expects today, like web and mobile access, or analytics, for example. They also suffered from "Here's How it Works Syndrome", essentially dictating a fixed process for everyone in their Industry, with little wiggle room. Salesforce.com changed everything, by launching a cloud based "solution" platform that could be customized to meet your needs. It remains the highest selling Business Application, dwarfing all other "Industry-In-A-Box" solutions combined. Microsoft also joined the "Customizable Cloud Solutions" fray with Dynamics 365, and between them, suddenly the idea that you have to conform your business to your software became a silly notion. Both Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics 365 offer what might be considered on the surface as "Industry in a Box" solutions, but without a specific industry focus. They both have pre-built finished applications... but the similarity ends there. These finished applications are completely customizable to meet any requirements you may have. Granted, you have to know what you are doing, or engage a partner, but the cost of customizing on top of these platforms, is a fraction of the cost of Pure Custom Development, to get exactly what you want. This... has been the huge shift over the last decade. What's Next? Well, what's next for Dynamics 365, is recently catching up with another option Salesforce.com has offered for years, plus adding a bunch of new things Salesforce.com can't touch. First, catching up with the availability of a "Platform Only" license. I have written quite a bit about this exciting door that Microsoft has opened, primarily from an ISV standpoint, but this will be huge for customers as well. While the first-party apps are awesome, and extending them to be whatever you want, should not break the bank, there are some scenarios where they may not be the best starting point. While being customizable, the first-party apps make a lot of assumptions in their default deployment about how your business should run. Sales, for example, assumes a fairly specific path of Lead-to-Opportunity, Quote-to-Order, Order-to-Invoice, etc. This includes Views, Forms and Business Processes to match. Many businesses operate that way, and many others can customize this functionality to fit their needs. But what about a business that does not operate that way... at all... not even close? In those cases, it may make more sense to start with a Platform License and build exactly what you want. Obviously there is a step of weighing that needs to be considered. Weighing the cost of customizing the first-party app(s) vs. the cost of building your own app(s) on a naked platform. You would also have to take into consideration the difference in the recurring cost of the subscription licenses over time. But for some, it is an interesting new door. Only Microsoft While much of what I described above could be said for other platforms, there are a couple of significant things that are uniquely Microsoft, that I want to point out. The combination of Office 365 + Dynamics 365 + Power Platform + Azure is something that only Microsoft can deliver on. Charles Lamanna, GM of the Platform, helped me crystallize two truly unique scenarios: Deep Office 365 integration across transactional experiences (e.g. Outlook add-in) as well as intelligent experiences (e.g. Relationship Insights / AI). Deep Azure integration, to enable a “power-to-pro” experience for customers. That is, they can start by configuring Business Apps, then customizing them with PowerApps, and then jumping into Azure using Visual Studio, Xamarin or VS Code, to develop against them as needed. So about those requirements of yours that I set aside a while back; as you can see, it really doesn't matter. Obviously Microsoft can meet your Business requirements, whatever they may be. But comparing your your list of requirements today, to your list of requirements from 3 years ago will reveal a lot of differences. I think it is fair to say that your requirements will continue to evolve over time. So the bigger question is, who will also meet your unknown future requirements? I'm betting on Microsoft.  

Dynamics 365 Customers and Partners have had a few changes pushed to them in recent years. Dynamics 365 was evolving at a pretty rapid pace since it hit the cloud, and when James Phillips took over the team, he took both of his feet and smashed the gas pedal. It's like the USS Enterprise when it hits Warp Drive (I get a chill every time I see that). Trees in the Forest I have been seeing a lot of posts about the October Release Notes and the #freighttrain of new features coming. Everybody seems to be writing about their favorite new feature(s). Don't get me wrong, new features are always fun, but if you move out of the trees, and look at the whole forest, there is a lot more going on here than meets the eye. Seismic Shift I get that "Seismic Shift" is probably an overused term... but I think it is a very real thing that is happening in Microsoft Business Applications... right now! If you have followed this blog in the past, you know that when I get highly animated about something, you probably want to pay attention to it. I said in the title that CDS changes everything you know. But at the same time you have been hearing that, if you know XrM, you already know CDS, and that is completely true. But that is looking at CDS through a specific narrow lens, a legacy Dynamics lens. But if you circle around to the other side of CDS, you can clearly see that Dynamics 365 is really just one door to CDS, of many doors. A PowerApps Stamp I was talking to Charles Lamanna recently, the GM for the CDS Platform; I suggested that he had a PowerApps rubber stamp, and that he was stamping "PowerApps" onto everything in sight. He smiled... like a guy with a rubber stamp in his pocket. PowerApps is one leg, of a three-legged stool, known as the "Power Platform", the other legs being Power BI and Flow. Dynamics 365 is not mentioned as a component of the Power Platform. I think in the very near future, the term "Dynamics 365" will actually refer to the First-Party Apps, and those apps will be sharing the spotlight with applications built by others on the Power Platform. The Power Platform I know I have mentioned it before, but it was not that long ago that I was told unequivocally, that Microsoft will never release a platform-only license. In order to get CDS, you will need to license one of their first-party apps. In hindsight, I think I recall hearing this from a GM for one of the first-party app teams. Whether he was unaware, or the decision to release a platform-only license, was made afterwards, I don't know. But somebody decided to take a risk and release a platform-only license. What risk? The risk that smart folks might actually build better "apps" than Microsoft, on Microsoft's own platform. Risky Business A quote from this 1983 movie was "Sometimes you just gotta say, "WTF". "WTF" gives you freedom". Somebody at Microsoft said "WTF", let them have the platform. At the end of the day, cloud is about scale, whoever has the most recurring revenue wins. If all of Wall Street could only place their bets on one number, it would be growth of recurring revenue. Wall Street does not give a shit about how you get there. Up until now, in the Microsoft Business Applications space, their recurring revenue growth doorway, was tied exclusively to their sale of their first-party applications. Well, they just broke down the doorway... hell the whole wall has come down. Let's do some Math Let's say you are a mid-sized Real Estate firm looking for a business solution to improve your sales process for your 500 agents. In your web search you discover this link to Dynamics 365, and click to explore it. Obviously, not wanting to waste your time, you will go to the pricing page first, and see the Customer Engagement Plan at $115/Per user/month. Hmm, that's about $57,500/month (we, as partners, know that is a worst case cost scenario, but the visitor does not). For almost $60K a month, this application must be awesome! So the customer initiates a trial. In their poking around, they are duly impressed with all of the cool features and capabilities, but... where is the Real Estate angle? "RING" There goes the phone, who could that be? "Hello Mr Real Estate CEO, I'm your friendly Dynamics 365 Partner and I see you are interested in Dynamics 365". "Well yes, but where are the features for Real Estate?". "What do you need? We can build anything for you, Dynamics 365 is fully extensible". "Well, I would need blah, blah and some blah to make this work". "No problem, we can build that for you for $100K". "Thanks, I'll get back to you". Back to the web search results, there's another link for the "Acme Real Estate Application". Taking a closer look, Acme is only $75/Per user/month. Hmmm, that's about $37,500/month... let's take a look at this. Wow! This application has been built for exactly what I need... it already has blah, blah and even blah! It says it is built on the Microsoft "Power Platform", whatever that is... I'm Sold! Looking at the difference in cost, you might think that Microsoft just lost $37,500/month ($115 Plan License, vs, $40 P2 license) to an ISV, but in reality, without that ISV solution, that customer was going to another platform. Net gain to Microsoft... $20K monthly recurring revenue. Microsoft has a half-dozen first-party apps that run on the CDS platform. Imagine 500 vertical ISV solutions running on the same platform. Microsoft will take that to the bank all day long. Transition of Power Up until now, Microsoft Business Applications success was largely tied to their Partner ecosystem of System Integrators. These are the partners that sell the first-party applications, and then configure and customize them for their customers. ISVs have been around for a long time, but mostly in the role of "Addons" offered by SIs. That wall that Microsoft knocked down, is about to change that. Already there are some ISVs, like us with our RapidStart CRM solution, that are trickling over the transom. That trickle will become a flood, and ISVs will become Microsoft's most valuable partners, in the very near future. According to Mr. Spock, “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”.