Podcast appearances and mentions of steve mordue

Power Platform Boost Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 9, 2023 40:40

With the second annual Microsoft Power Platform Conference (MPPC 2023) now over, Microsoft MVPs Steve Mordue and Asif Rehmani joined us to review their experiences and observations at the event. Microsoft had positive numbers to share on growth in both customers and community, but it was the company's messaging on Copilot overpowered other announcements at the event. Nevertheless, attendees and community presenters were at the show to talk about a whole lot more than the latest AI hype. Steve and Asif tell us about some of the sessions and themes they took note of in areas including governance, security, DevOps, data management, updates to Fabric, and more. And they share their views on the balance Microsoft is trying to strike between splashy AI headlines and less exciting foundational improvements across the platform. More from Asif Rehmani: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asifrehmani/ VisualSP.com More from Steve Mordue: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemordue/ SteveMordue.com Forceworks.com

ai microsoft fabric devops copilot asif force works steve mordue

❤️Community❤️

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2023 47:21

In this episode, we talk about news and updates from the last two weeks, highlighting great community content from among others, Amey Holden, Carsten Groth, and Steve Mordue. We also talk about Mike Hartley and Alison Mulligan's podcast "The things we don't talk about", and the inclusion and safe spaces we experience in the Power Platform community. NewsDynamics 365 Real-time Marketing Segments with Power Automate by Amey HoldenPower Platform | Pro-dev

community real mastodon power platform cobe power automate steve mordue

Measuring Microsoft's AI push with Steve Mordue

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2023 20:01

This episode is sponsored by Forceworks. Microsoft has revealed a broad range of plans to bring generative AI to businesses. The Copilot brand now spans productivity tools, collaboration, and business applications, and their Azure OpenAI Service will offer any developer new ways to incorporate the technology into their own offerings. Our guest, Microsoft MVP and Forceworks CEO Steve Mordue, has been thinking about the impact AI will have on some of today's conventional wisdom around developers and applications. He wrote about Microsoft's vision for building a massive population of no-code/low-code citizen developers and why that could be as unrealistic as the myth of the so-called full-stack developer. Microsoft's Copilot investments could expose the weak points in how customers use Power Platform or how they customize their business applications more broadly, Steve says. He even offers a few guesses at what could come next as Microsoft and others in the generative AI market accelerate their efforts. Show Notes: 1:00 - Did the velocity of ChatGPT's uptake surprise Microsoft 3:00 - The challenge of making generative AI useful and not generic 4:30 - Roles that AI will impact heavily, according to Microsoft executives 6:30 - The value of AI tools for end users compared to developers 9:00 - Has no-code-low-code and the push for more citizen developers helped Microsoft customers? 13:30 - Foreceworks's progress on their services as a subscription model 16:30 - What could come next in the generative AI space at Microsoft and with competitors References: The Forceworks subscription model Steve's blog post: The Myth of the Full Stack Developer

ai microsoft myth chatgpt roles measuring copilot microsoft mvp power platform full stack developer force works azure openai service microsoft's copilot steve mordue

Steve has a Chat with Vahe Torossian

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2022 56:59

I had a chance to sneak up on Vahe Torossian, a Microsoft Corporate Vice President and the man in charge of Sales for Microsoft Business Applications. While Vahe has been with Microsoft for 30 years, many of you may not know him, so I wanted to fix that. Vahe is no ordinary Seller; he's the “Top” guy who sets the sales strategy and motions for the entire global team. Vahe is also the guy who runs the really big enterprise customer meetings, and he's super-friendly, as you would expect for the Chief Rainmaker. We covered a lot of ground in this one, so enjoy! Transcript Below: Vahe: Hey, Vahe Torossian speaking. Steve: Vahe, Steve Mordue, how are you? Vahe: Hey Steve. In fairness let's say Charles mentioned that somehow you were going to call me. I didn't know when, but it's great to talk to you. Steve: After I interviewed him, I asked him who would be a good person to talk to? And he dropped your name. So it doesn't surprise me that he gave you a little heads up. Have you got a few minutes to chat? Vahe: Yeah, of course. Thanks Steve. Steve: Oh, perfect, perfect. So before we get into it, maybe we can tell the listeners a little bit about what your role is. I know you've been at Microsoft forever, I think like 30 years or something like that, and you've held a lot of different positions. But now you're in the business application space and that's been fairly recent. So there's probably a lot of folks that might not be familiar with you, who should be. Vahe: Oh yeah, thanks Steve. You're right. I've been celebrating my 30 years anniversary at Microsoft in April in 2022. I actually took the helm of the Biz Apps sales organization globally in late 2020. So basically I took my one way ticket to Redmond in December 2020. And the plane was almost empty, it was during the pandemic. And it was kind of a strange feeling for someone who has been traveling so much in the past. And of course, let's say I came with the lens of the business application, of course. Having led let's say Western Europe in my past role, having all the businesses of Microsoft. And I think Western Europe was quite successful on Biz Apps, our trajectory growth. And I guess that was also in fact the good match to some degree to try to take it at the global level. Steve: So is it a little easier to think about a smaller segment of the product mix, now really being able to focus like a business application? So I think before you were looking over all sorts of different things, weren't you? Vahe: Yeah, actually it's a great question. Because I think it's very different way of looking at the business. When you are, let's say almost you are the CEO of Microsoft in the countries that you are, let's say leading. You have all the levers to engage customers, partners, government, in different circumstances. And you try to leverage as much as you can the portfolio that you have to maximize the value. In the context of let's say the business application. I think it was, the interesting bet to some degree Steve, was to say, Hey, this has been a portfolio at Microsoft, whether you call it Dynamics 365 or Dynamics only as a brand in the past. And if you go back 20 years, let's say almost, with the Navision and Axapta, and Solomon Software and Great Plains. All these stories, all these product came together. And 20 years later, I think it has been part of a portfolio somewhere. Vahe: And you had almost what I will call the strong, let's say, portfolio of Microsoft, the platform, the modern workplace and environment. And I felt the work that James Phillips in the past, and with Alyssa, and Charles, and Amy here now on the marketing side. Have been a strong inflection point to bring together both the technology in the cloud environment. But at the same time, a market environment that requires very different, let's say tools to make the most of this transformation. And I felt that there's one piece at Microsoft that requires a huge catalyst leveraging the innovation. But responding as much as we can to what the customer need or even don't know yet what they need. And I think that's what I think to me was almost a bet. It's almost like all of a sudden you move to the little dog, if I may say. But with a huge potential of transforming something with great asset for Microsoft, and the customers and partners. Steve: Well I have to say, having been involved with Microsoft for a while, we have a phrase over here called redheaded stepchild, which is kind of what Dynamics was for many, many years. It was off campus, it was just this thing out there and under Satya, when Satya came in, he's the first one that I think came into the position that recognized this should be another leg on the stool, not some remote thing out there. And I think that's made a huge. Difference because I was involved in the years before Satya with business applications and they were not just something over here on the back shelf, and now they're right front and center. I think that between Dynamics and what's happened with the power platform, cloud in general. Microsoft's ability to get into and help customers is massively different than it used to be. And in your role now, you're dealing with a lot different type of customer. You're talking about Office 365 or Azure, you're dealing with IT. And now you're mostly dealing with business users. It's a completely different audience you're having to work with today, isn't it? Vahe: Absolutely. I think also you're right since Satya took the helm of the company, to some degree you of course we have seen how we tackle the cloud computing hyper-scale environment. But at the same time, in fact what happened with the Covid in the last two years, have seen an acceleration of what we call in the past, the productivity tools to become more and more collaboration environment. And from almost an application or a set of application, it became more and more a platform on its own. And so it's almost like when you think about where we are today and we were talking about the Covid, I don't think the Covid is yet over fully everywhere. But now everybody's talking about recession, right? And there's no one headline that you look, you say, oh my goodness, what's going to happen? Which just means in terms of planning for 22, 23. Vahe: So I think the assets that is now quite unique to some degree, or differentiated as you said, between the Dynamics 365 platform components and the Power Platform, it's almost bringing together. But I think, I don't remember Steve, in a few years back, I think Satya was talking about the mobility of the experience. And that was more from a device perspective initially. But actually what you see now is that with Teams as a platform, the system of productivity almost connect with the system of record more and more. And it's re-transforming the way you are thinking. It's almost like, you think about, you don't have to go to a CRM environment or ERP environment to get access to the data. It's almost like wherever you work, if you use an Excel or if you use Teams or whatever, you get access naturally, almost intuitively to your data set. And the data set are that's almost fulfilled naturally. And so we have no additional task. Vahe: And so I think that's the transformation world in which we are. Which connects cheaper well. We almost do more with less, right? And that's going to be almost the conversation we're going to have in the coming month. And it started already with many customers and partners. How we can optimize the assets that they have, how they can let's say increase the deep provisioning of some assets that they have. They are paying too much to concentrate a bit more, to get more agility. And I think this is where also, from a partner perspective, Steve, I see a lot of potential. You are referring to Power Platform, it's fascinating to see what it was in the very beginning, this notion of citizens developer, what does it mean? Vahe: People didn't know exactly what it is, we're quite afraid to touch it. But now when you see the shortage of developers in the market in general. And how you can make the most of some absolutely topnotch people who are not developer, touching the last mile execution challenges. Have been facing crazy environment and situation that they say, I can't believe how my IT guide doesn't solve these things. I've been telling them the customer pain point for so many years. And now with some, let's say [inaudible 00:08:45] place, let's say available for them, along with some let's say technical assets, you can really make the magic in the very, very, very time. Steve: Charles came up with a term on the fly, ambient CRM. Kind of where we're heading here when you talk about things like Viva Sales and some of these pieces that are really wiring all these components together. Covid was a terrible thing, but it certainly was a perfect storm for pushing the technology forward into a place that it's been fighting to get to, it's really been fighting to get to that point. And Teams was a great product. But certainly Covid created the perfect environment where Teams made insane sense for companies that were maybe just thinking about it or dabbling with it, and suddenly they're all diving into it. And you guys of course poured the investment on top of that. And I think that the silver lining of Covid, for technology, is how far it really allowed it to advance in that period of time. Maybe we just need a pandemic every five years to push a technology forward. I don't know. Vahe: No, but I have to say that even in my previous role when I was running Western Europe. Even the most skeptical people in regard to the cloud or the transition to a cloud environment. Having the one that rushed in the first, almost to a cloud environment, once the pandemic has been a bit of a real situation to face, and to drive the economy or the public services let's say on. So I think you're right, so you don't want to wish for another pandemic or whatever, but it has been absolutely a forcing function in many domains. And that's true. Steve: I think the challenge we have is particularly in the business application space. You guys have launched so many things in such a short period of time. And as you mentioned before, Power Apps, people picking it with a stick, they don't even know what it is. And there's also this first mover fear, I think. Microsoft has been, in my mind, kind of famous for coming to the game late and then just taking over the game. We were very late to the cloud, but once we got there we just took over the cloud, and it seems to be a pattern. But when you look back at the early days of cloud before you guys stepped into it, it was wild west. And all sorts of challenges with cloud. And I think that that gave a lot of people fear about, I remember I moved into cloud early and we got destroyed. Steve: And so I think there's a lot of folks out there, just from a technology standpoint, that have gotten their hands burnt by moving too quickly. And we're at that point with the platform and dynamics, where these are not new anymore. Relatively in history, they're new. But they're not new products and they're not built by some garage shop somewhere with a couple of developers. This is what 15,000 people building this stuff back there. This is professionally built, well built stuff, that is ready for prime time. So the first movers have already come through and they all survived. So I really feel like we're at that point where it should just take off now, it should just absolutely take off. And I'm sure you guys are seeing this. Vahe: Yeah. And Steve, I think one thing also is that you're right, there's a usual thing about let's say the first mover advantage. At the same time from a customer perspective, you don't want to be the Guinea pig, right? On any situation, especially from the technology standpoint. I think that increasingly what I see in the conversation is that there's almost now, because of the quality of the native integration of the several different applications. Whether you are in the customer experience environment, on the service side, on the supply chain, on the finance or the local no code or app. All these components are absolutely connected to each other. And basically whether you have Teams as a platform in your company, or Azure in environment, all these component are connected very, very easily to each other. Vahe: And so I would say that the beauty of it now is that you have all almost the notion of marginal cost. If you really want to leverage many of the assets that we can bring, and you don't have to take all of them at once, of course it has to be matching what you need now. But the right is that, let's say there's an almost fully integrated benefit all the connectors with the rest of the world outside of Microsoft environment, which is a great value for the partners, ISV and [inaudible 00:13:58], and at the same time to the customers. Who think now, hey I should do more with less. How should I think about my investments for the next, let's say five years? Most of the customers now are really thinking about the longer term relationship. And defining what's the value SLA almost that you're expecting both from the partner of the vendor and the vendor itself. Vahe: And so it's almost like, you remember when we transition from a world of build revenue and licensing, to now more consumption and usage. It's almost the user and consumption discussion is a forcing function about the customer success, how we align on the same definition of the customer success. And what's the time to value that you committed? What are the key milestones, in full transparency, that you need to bring in? And I think that's where we are now. And because Microsoft, I think overall as a company, have been increasing tremendously the level of trust. From the security standpoint, the compliance components, and so on, and the scalability. Vahe: I think that's the great leverage for us now in terms of the conversation and making sure that the customers are getting the value that we have been selling to them. How we show how much skin in the game we have to make them successful. And then it's a flying wheel. It's almost like the innovation will help you to bring new things, respond, anticipate, take the feedback of the customer to the engineering, develop new stuff quickly to the market. So I think it's what we are heading to now, Steve. And I think from a partner perspective you might even see and feel it, right, more and more. Steve: Oh yeah, I mean I think the sales motion has changed completely. Only a few years ago we go into a customer and try and convince them to replace Salesforce with Dynamics. And they'd say no, and we were done. We'd say okay, well we'll come back in a couple years and ask again. We had nothing else to sell them. And now today, I mean if they have Salesforce, fine that's great, keep Salesforce, let's add some things around it. Salesforce will work with Viva Sales, Salesforce will work with Power Platform. Steve: There's so many doors now, I think, for a seller to be able to get into a customer and solve problems for that customer without having to do the one big yank and replace. Which is very difficult to do, it's difficult to do on opposite as well. I mean once a customer gets a big solution like Salesforce or Dynamics 365 installed, those are very difficult to uproot, it takes a very long time. And you guys have created now, this product mix, where we don't have to uproot something to sell that customer and to get engaged with that customer. We can go all over that business without having to uproot something. And I think that's huge. Vahe: I agree Steve. And I think that it's almost this notion of rip and replace type of strategy, right? In some cases it works because this is what the customer wants. They are fed up about let's say competitive environment that didn't deliver on the expectation. And we should be ready to cope with that and respond, and we have a lot of this. But at the same time as you said, what we call the strategy of having a hub and spoke, let's say, almost environment, gives us for every line of business. That we decided as a company to go and have a significant acceleration of growth and market share, is very much to give that option to say, Hey, you know what, Mr. Customer, Mrs. Customer, you decide to be on that type of environment, who we are to ask you to change? Vahe: If you are happy that's fine. But what we can bring you is almost to enhance what you have with some component that absolutely will be transparently integrated to what you're using. And it's a great circuit, an additional circuit for the partner, it's a great value for the customer. We don't feel harassed to change something because we know the cost of transitioning from one to another one. And then it's up to us to demonstrate the value we can bring and eventually we can take from there to the next level in the future. Steve: It's got to put some pressure on the competitors also. I if think of, I might just use Salesforce because they've always been the big competitor. I'm sure that they were confident sitting there at their large customer when all we had was trying to replace their instance that was going to be difficult to do and then we'd go away and they didn't have to worry about us. Now we're coming in and we're circling around, and we're solving problems in this department, and we're building apps in this department, and we're literally bolting into Salesforce. And one potential outcome is that the customer decides over time that wow, all of this Microsoft stuff that we've brought in works really, really well. Steve: That's gotta put some pressure on the incumbent big application in there that hey, you're surrounded by a bunch of stuff the customer is very happy with, you better make sure they're happy with your stuff and they don't reach that point. Cause like you say, oftentimes when you see those rip and replace, it's because the product, or the company, or something hasn't met the expectation. And to be fair, that could actually happen with any of us, right? It has a lot to do with implementation, design, how thing was put together. Less to do with the application itself, that could happen to any vendor. But certainly raises the bar to some of these competitors when they're surrounded by well performing Microsoft products that are satisfying customers. Would you think? Vahe: Yes. Absolutely. And that's why there's a continuity between what we sell, how we sell, to who we sell, and how we drive the implementation. It's an ongoing wheel that is a very different mindset that we all learn in the transition to the cloud, let's say, environment. But absolutely. I think it's a good forcing function to raise the bar to some degree, raise the bar for the benefit of the customer. You mentioned the competitiveness of what this type of hub and spoke strategy can create. You're right. But in the end, the biggest, let's say winner, will be the customer, right? Which I think is always and should always be the north star for us and our partners. Vahe: And I would say the relevance of the innovation should be in fact the pressure that we put to each other to make sure that say we listen carefully to what the customer is facing as a challenge, but potentially to translate their current challenge into the future challenge, to push them also to think differently. Because I think the notion of rip and replace [inaudible 00:21:06] One of the thing was, I don't know if you remember that the initial issue and worry was that people were saying Oh, we are moving to the cloud, therefore we are transforming. Well it was not that tried and true. People were just keeping the same processes in the cloud and the one that they had on premise. Which was not benefiting at all of the scalability and the agility of the cloud environment. Yeah, you remember that right? Yeah. Steve: They just changed the way they were paying for it. Vahe: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think that's what we have seen on this application modernization, on some of the enterprise wide innovation also opportunities that we had discussed, is how much you can really say, in this new world of competitiveness, of un-expected challenges. How you can, let's say, keep your applications fitting always in fact proactively the challenges that you're going to have too. As opposed to keep going with a quite heavy code to maintain, with people who leave that cost you a fortune to maintain. So I think this agility that the power apps, [inaudible 00:22:22] to made, have been bringing I think is the reason why we have seen this huge acceleration of growth, which is today is six, seven times faster than the market growth of local no code. Vahe: So I think it's a great, let's say indication, of what people start to realize. And I think in the conversation that you had with Charles when he was referring to, hey some of the AI capability have been slower to be picked up by the vast majority of customers. And it's true because there's a level of, let's say, can I trust this thing? Am I going to lose completely ground and control of what I'm doing? All these natural thing. I think as we bring more and more, let's say tools, are manageable. The Power Platform environment, or let's say the device sales capability on top of the teams or Salesforce environment. That people will start to test this. Vahe: And I think we're going to be more and more advocate about Hey, what are the benefits of the organization that are using this technology and how we can trust them lean forward. And I think Charles was referring to our digital sellers. Their daily life is very much, let's say, using all these AI lead capabilities in terms of reporting, in terms of let's say incident management, in terms of even coaching for themselves to do a better call next time, is just fascinating to see. Maybe we should even do a kind of, let's say talk on this, once we have a bit more, let's say after the GA, maybe a few months after, we should have, let's say what the key learnings and [inaudible 00:24:00] from a customer standpoint. Steve: Yeah, it always makes a customer confident when they know that the vendor is using the product that they're trying to sell them. It's interesting, everything moving to a subscription has changed kind of the mindset, not just of you guys obviously, where there's no big sale. There's a sale of a big subscription, the revenue of which will come over a long period of time. But the customer has this option every month to say, you know what, I'm not happy, you're not solving my problem. In the old days they were kind of stuck, they bought all this stuff and they had to make it work. Now they don't have to make it work, we have to make it work, we have to keep them happy enough. Steve: We recently launched a professional services on a subscription, which is an interesting model, that I lay awake at night thinking about that same thing. That before a customer would pay you a bunch of money to a bunch of stuff and now they're paying you a little bit of money every month for as long as you keep them happy. And this bar of, I mean we've always wanted to keep customers happy. But it's never had the impact or importance that it does when you're on a subscription with that customer who can just any time say, “I'm not happy, goodbye.” It raises the bar I think for you guys to have to continuously innovate, what do you done for me lately? You got to continuously innovate and bring new things. And you've got more motivation probably than the company's ever had in history because of the subscription model. Do you feel that internally? Vahe: Yes, yes. As I said, it has been a great enabler to raise the bar. And it's almost like you know can have a beautiful slide deck and saying the right things, but the execution doesn't match what you are saying somehow, that you don't walk the talk. I think you could have been in that situation in a kind of on-premise environment. I think the cloud has been a forcing function to say, hey you know what, you can claim you are customer success, or you are customer first, or you are customer obsessed. But the reality is that if you don't deliver the service properly, if you are not as responsive timely, if you're not proactive, customer will say enough is enough, I can stop my subscription. Steve: I have options. Vahe: I have options. So I think it's a good hygiene, how it makes you having an embracing habits, that I would say are the natural thing when you engage with customer. But I think it's almost, let's say, for the one who might have forgotten that basics, it has been a great, let's say, opportunity to bring back the roots of what is it to satisfy a customer, right? And I think that's what the cloud licensing model helped put together. And I think there are still always room for improvement. Vahe: And similarly I would say, what you have seen on the collaborative applications, what we have seen on the low-code, no-code, you are going to see it now, also I would say on the supply chain environment, which is shipper, shipper at stress because of what we have seen on the Covid, but also in fact on the geopolitical aspect and some of the recession discussion. And also, on the overall, what I would say the contact center in our environment at large. How this world is going to change is going to be led a lot by the capability that technology can bring, and the ability to listen carefully to the strategies and the challenges of the corporation that are involved in. So it's quite exciting actually. Steve: I don't get involved a lot with the call center operations. But I picture the old call center is this massive building full of cubicles and people with headphones. And I picture that now that most of those people are probably working remote. A call center now could operate at my desk, just about, and have thousands of people all working from their home. So, that whole industry feels like it's changed significantly. And yes, I'm sure they're starving for the technology that fits the model that they're being pushed to adopt. Vahe: Yeah, yeah absolutely. I mean it's interesting, if you summarize some of the business challenges or the things that are coming from multiple conversation. We had the nuanced [inaudible 00:29:04] a few months back. And so it's almost the first fiscal year where we're going to be able to strategize, operate together as one organization. And it's great because somehow you take their own experience in terms of conversational AI and what they have been leading in for many years. And at the same time you hear both, let's say, the customer feedback when it comes to, as you said, the traditional contact center or call center evolution. How to translate this into a modern service experience, right? Vahe: And how AI can contribute to that on the seamless integrated way. How to think about customer retention in this world where people are a bit more struggling with their bottom line. How to protect the customer privacy as well. Because you talk about voice capability and recording, but how you cope with the privacy and the security during this service journey. So all these are absolutely great opportunities for us to combine what we're hearing, the technology and the acquisition that we did a few months back, to put that into a great component. And I would say the data analytics that the power Platform Power BI gives us on the back end, is going to be a great platform for us again to differentiate from the rest of the world. Steve: Well and it'll also help kind offset the fact that these people are all remote now, right? They used all be sitting in this big room. And people were standing up there looking over a rail at them making sure they were doing what they were doing and available. And you can't lose any of the customer service quality just because you've moved everybody out of the building and nobody can physically see them anymore. AI is the only way to plug that hole really of being able to know what's going on in this organization with all those people remote. In your day-to-day activities, I'm assuming that since you're head of sales that you get engaged with all of the big opportunities that come to Microsoft. And you're in there leading the charge to get them to make a decision for the services. What are the areas that you're seeing among those larger customers that they're really excited about? Is it the low-code stuff, is that very exciting to them? Or are they still wrapping their arms around that? Vahe: No, no. I would say that the notion of, let's say, application modernization, which doesn't mean I do the same thing I was doing before in the cloud. Really thinking about, what do I want to fix? And how much I can include some perspective about what could happen in some, let's say options or scenario? That capability that Power Apps has been giving them. And now we see that the corporations who are the most successful are the one who are almost creating a center of excellence within their own organization, that let's say help the IT to monitor someone, in fact the usage rate. But also to amplify the user experience and to spread it across the organization. And the ability to almost measure the positive impact. Vahe: The second thing I've seen is on the low-code, no-code, is the time to value. It's almost like you can almost now, and when I say “we,” it's almost we with the partners. We can almost say for this type of let's say expectation, or application, or challenge, it will take three month to be ready, not three years, two years. Or we have a heavy development environment. And so this center of excellence, let's say mindset or framework, is a very powerful one. Because it helps to almost create a concentration of hey, what are the most critical things to fix and how long it's going to take? Vahe: And people are almost, let's say very impressed, about how quickly you can have great quality because you bring both the expertise of, as I said, almost the person who is facing the challenge every single day. Being non-technical guy, we have in fact the support of IT. And I think that's the business decision makers along with the IT. I think to me, that's why we have been on this six, seven times faster than the market rate. We have huge ambition there. And be aware that we have also 20 million of users of Power Apps today that came from the city campaigns. So people are actively using it, not yet paying it. So that means that it's great, it's the future almost by, for us to go after. Because people are starting to use in fact at least the basic functions to get adjusted customers to and so on. Vahe: The second thing I would say is that people have realized how easy it is, and recognizing that Teams became a platform close to 300 million users. It started at 25 or 30 million almost pre-pandemic. And so that became, almost as you said, you are at home, or you are wherever you are and that's the interaction that you have with your customers, partners, ecosystem and employees. And so now it's a marginal component to say hey, can I have one tab that is going to do that type of task? My forecasting, my thing. So this is again the connection between what you use every single day at scale, and the marginal cost of bringing a component of Dynamics 365, a component of the application that you create quickly for Power Apps or Power Automate from the process, implementation, and automation. So I think that's what I see the two biggest part of the customer reaction, and I would say feedback for us. And encouragement to be fair, to keep going in that direction. Steve: We've got lots of examples that you guys have got out on the case studies of large companies that have really got in head first. And just thousands of apps in the organization solving thousands of problems. And just excellent, I mean you just have to almost grin when you look and hear about these things. But for every one of those there's still a bunch of them out there where, I don't know, IT maybe is still an obstacle. I mean IT has been, it's interesting because IT's been a friend of Microsoft for a long time because a lot of the products that they have engaged with were Microsoft products, servers, et cetera. They've had to make this transition to cloud, which was scary for them. But they ultimately did it for the most part, not all of them, did it. And now here comes low-code, no-code that's got to scare the bejesus out of a lot of IT folks. And how are you at that company size? Because frankly, we struggle with the same thing in the mid-market. How, at that big company size, do you deal with that occasional obstinance from it? Vahe: Yeah, it's a great point. You're right. I think Microsoft in general, I don't want to generalize, but in general have been for the last four years, very, very close to the IT decision makers. And rightfully so, because there were so many and still so many things to achieve in partnership with the IT and CIO environment. At the same time, when it comes to business applications or business process, I would say that you need to find the balance between the business decision makers, who are the ultimate decision makers when it comes to what is going to affect their business, or the way they work from a Salesforce perspective, or the way the marketing leaders wants to automate some of the processes that they believe is important. Vahe: And so that we probably are in a unique business case at Microsoft, where you have to talk to both. And the learning is that in the very beginning where you were only talking to IT, for example in the low-code, no-code, you could have signed a deal with IT, but then you know almost had to start to sell it again internally. Because you had to knock to all the doors of the business decision makers to say, Hey, do you know that you have this thing in your corporation, and anyway this is the thing that you can do, do you mind starting over there? Vahe: And so that was basically almost a waste of cycle. And so we said we have to do these two things together. We need to be able to articulate what is the value of low-code, no-code, maybe in FSI, financial service, or manufacturing, or in retail. And of course there's a strong common denominator. But there are some specifics that may resonate more for some industries more than others, and therefore the decision makers. And we have seen that when we do these things well together in parallel, when you sign the contract, or the deal, or the agreement, the time to move to usage or the business case implementation is much faster. Basically you bring more value both to IT and the business, and for Microsoft. And so I think that's the piece where I think it evolved on low-code, no-code, from being afraid in the beginning or skeptical, to a place where they are increasingly embracing this center of excellence environment. Where they own it as [inaudible 00:38:55]. It is connected to the business decision makers, therefore it brings value. Vahe: And so IT brings value to the business decisions or the business unit and the line of business. And then what was missing so far was, how can we give them the monitoring environment, almost the control board to manage the budget, to manage let's say, or having warning to say, hey, business A, you know are over consuming. Should we lower the investment or should we accelerate because of what you are doing? So I think that the kind of tools that we are bringing now to the IT, so that they are absolutely part of the success of the company and they are connected to the business decision makers. I think that's the best way for us to demonstrate value and keep it completely aligned with the business directions. Steve: And the opposite would be true also if you're going in trying to sell the line of business owner without talking to IT. And you convince the, now you got to go sell IT. So it's two cycles. Vahe: Absolutely. Steve: You have to somehow get them both in the same room and do it at once. So we've got so many products coming, we've got so many products here. And if you imagine a generic customer of a large size that you're going to be going to talk to next week about all the Microsoft has to offer. What are a couple of the key products that you're going to want to make sure you land in their head, that you feel across all companies are extremely high value or differentiators? The thing you don't want to walk out of that room without mentioning? Vahe: Yeah, I would say, and somehow you touch on it Steve, earlier on. As part of the transition that we are driving, one of the thing is also to simplify. To simplify the portfolio, to simplify the go-to market, to simplify the strategy. We discussed the hub and spoke, let's say strategy. And so I would say at the very beginning, what we said is that instead of saying, hey, there's a proliferation of products. And every year we add more and more and more. And at some point you confuse your own sellers, you confuse the customer, you confuse the product, it's super tough to digest everything, and even understanding what's the hierarchy across all these things? Steve: For licensing Vahe: And licensing on top all this complexity, right? I mean we have gone through it, and it's still not perfect. But at the same time I think what we said is that there are the categories, or the line of business, that we want to go in. We want to have a fair shot to take a leadership position in the next let's say years. And what it takes to get to that point, from an innovation perspective, from a go-to market perspective, from a part program perspective, from a sales and seller investment capacity perspective. And so on. And so I would say that's more the starting point Steve, where we say we define five categories, a fine line of business, where we believe we have a shot to become a leader. And these categories we need to be able to be clear on where the value that we bring. Vahe: For example, if you take the customer experience, let's say OLAP, which is more the connected sales and marketing, if I may summarize at the high level. It's going to be all the conversation about the collaborative apps, the customer experience transformation. You have already Teams for the vast batch of you, hey that's what you want to achieve. The Dynamic 65 sales is going to give you that capability, or the LinkedIn Sales Navigator on top of it is going to give you that type of insight. You know are not touching about AI, you think about almost sales automation, Salesforce automation. Let's show you how the AI infused capability within Dynamics 365 sales and marketing, give you that asset absolutely naturally integrated on your team's environment. Vahe: And same thing on Viva Sales, the sales productivity, we can measure it the way you want, and you're on control of that. And by the way, if it works on the environment that you are working, could be Microsoft, could not be as we discussed, that's more the conversation that we want to have. And of course on the back end you are going to have Dynamics 365 sales, and marketing, and Viva sales, most of the time for that line of business. If you think about let's say low-code no-code, I would say you will have probably three type of conversations. You know will have a conversation about hey, you're a large enterprise, multi-deals coverage. And basically the benefit of having an enterprise wide, let's say engagement, what does it mean? What's the framework for you to make the most of it? And how we commit with our partners to deliver you the value. Vahe: And so you can commit on five years maybe with Microsoft and how much value we can bring already to you. Or it's purely an application modernization. You move to a hyper-scale environment, but you have all these old fashioned applications. So basically, you are a platform that is modern but all your application are still old fashioned. How low-code, no-code is going to help you to accelerate that transition. And let's start with one company, one app. Pick one and let's do it right, and then replicate from there. And then potentially, in fact, the last one which I think is going to be the biggest one potentially, is the business process automation. Think about the forecasting process. I have to say that when I was running my business in Western Europe, we have been doing this traditional forecasting process, which in every company when we talk with business leaders or CFOs, that's the same thing. You ask the forecast at the lowest level of the organization, then the manager of that organization, do a judgment. That judgment moves to the next level of management. The management do another judgment. Vahe: So all the way up to the top level, who does a judgment anyway on top of it. Or they find, depending on who is doing the forecast, almost let's say a coefficient of let's say correction based on who is doing the forecast. When you start to do that thing into AI and you say what, we know the behavior of people [inaudible 00:45:26] potentially, you come after 18 months or one year to a trend of forecast that is so close to in fact what you were getting before. That you say how many hours, thousands and thousands of hours of productivity saving I'm going to have just because of this AI forecasting capability? That's the kind of example of it, for say an application for low-code, no-code, that is just checking in fact the behavior or the intelligence so far to help you to drive your business. Vahe: And so we have been running that internally as well and it's quite impressive. And so that's the kind of conversation that you want to have both with the IT, but you see this perfect example of hey, having that conversation with the CFO, or the sales leader, is a great one. Because it's a marginal cost again, to what you are using already. And the same thing happened on finance, and supply chain, and service when it comes to, all right so where you, what are you using? Are you still on-prem? The vast majority of ERP, the vast majority of contact center and call center are still on-prem. So you can think about hey, what does it take to move to a cloud and more agile environment? What are the best that you want to do? Which is the strategic partner or vendor, who are going to take this? Because you're not going to change this environment every two years. It's a 5 year, 10 year bets, right? Steve: The marriage. Vahe: It's a marriage. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean does it help Steve? Steve: Yeah. And I think interesting, one of the things I think about AI in forecasting, is it doesn't have any personal bias. And obviously in larger companies I'm sure there's a lot of checking and cross checking. In the middle market it's a bunch of optimistic sales people coming up with optimistic projections that have no basis in history or anything else that's going on, of what's going on. And I've been in meetings where we've been displaying some AI facts, or figures, or forecasts, or projections. And listen to senior people just adamantly disagree. That number is absolutely not correct. And I've had them tell me I've been doing this for 30 years, I know, I know. And then here comes next month and guess what was right? The AI model was right and the guy who's been doing it for 30 years is making up some excuses. Steve: So I think that the world right now is fraught with bad projections on everything. Cost projections, sales projections, there's too much personal bias involved in the process of creating those things. And as leadership of a company, you're relying on these things. They're going to drive you right over a cliff potentially, if you're not careful, if you don't have good information, if you can't get the bias out of it. And I think that's one of the big things that AI brings that I've found resonates with leadership sometimes, is kind of remove all the bias. I mean it's just removing all the bias. You don't want to hear smoke, you know want to hear reality so you can act accordingly. You're surrounded by a bunch of people who want to make you feel good, but AI doesn't care how you feel. It's going to tell you the truth, doesn't care if you get mad. Vahe: Steve also, it's interesting because sometime, you point to this that sometime when you are too early on the innovation, some people might be again scared or skeptical as we said. But I remember we were looking at let's say some numbers when it comes to, are we operating consistency, for example, in the world? Or there are some that say practices that are bringing more growth or more relevant than other places. And so, one thing was interesting was in the services line of business or category, you think of case management. And it's one of the opportunities. And you might say well case management is not super innovative. Well, it's something that is quite well known. But case management was one of the fastest growth in majors. And that was because it was responding to the fact that vast majority of the case management processes are still on-prem today. Vahe: And the one we're moving to the cloud, especially in public sector, to make sure that the queuing system is working, you have a full up, let's say email to tell you and tracing where you are on the request that you put in place. All these things we believe is generic everywhere, but it's not, it's by far not. And across mid-market, and large corporation, and private sector, and public sector. So it's not always innovation that drives in fact the next generation of work. It's also in fact the basics that are not fulfilled today and that create a bad customer experience. And that's interesting, in a way, to keep very humble about let's say what we still have on our plate. Steve: I can remember not that long ago, when you talk about customer service, the goal of many companies was to provide as bad as service as possible so they didn't have to do it. I mean it was a cost center for them. They hadn't come to the realization yet, this is decades, but hadn't come to realization yet that customer service is what drives future revenue. They just looked at as a cost center and figured the worst it is, the less people will use it and it'll cost us less, so that mindset has changed. You talk about fears that people have of technology. And so a lot of this is people self preservation fears. They see something coming, we saw it even in the partner channel, uh-oh here comes low-code, no-code, customers are going to be doing all the work themselves, they're not going to need us partners anymore. And it's like this first reaction that people have about anything new, is how's that going to affect me? And generally they're going to assume negatively. Steve: Our business is busier than we've ever been as a result of low-code. So it's actually been the opposite. But partners, and just like people, you know need to be prepared to pivot into that wind. If you're just going to stand there with your arms crossed and not move, yeah low-code's going to hurt you. You know need to lean into that. And the same thing with individuals that are looking at new technology. It's coming and you can either stand there with your arms crossed and let it knock you down, which is a foregone conclusion. Or you can bend with it. And to be honest, the younger folks are more flexible than us older folks. So they're not having any trouble with this technology at all. We recently signed a new customer, it's all young people and man they just get it. I mean there's no explaining anything. They understand every single thing you're talking about, why and what. And I mean they're born with a cell phone in their hand. None of this is foreign, but we still got to get rid of all of us old guys. Vahe: I agree, I agree. And time flies. And it's almost like, often, let's say, you need read to embrace that. Always a zero regret strategy in this type of, let's say, evolving environment. Anything that you postpone, to some degree, is almost let say a loss. And that has been proven in the technology run. And when I look at, we always have to be humble. It's a highly competitive market, and people are smart, and that's great. Cause as we discussed, it's all good for the customer. But I think that when I look back to the commitment of the company, the investment that we put in place last year with the support of Satya, Amy Hood, [inaudible 00:53:27]. With more than 1000 sellers injected in the marketplace, we keep going on the investment on the local no-code, even more so to drive the acceleration of the growth in addition to the Dynamic 365. Vahe: When I look at every category that we are in now, and I think it's a good confidence level that we on the path here. That first of all, we are between two times and three times the growth of the market for each of these category, that's a good indication. And I think that also raise the confidence level of the product sellers at Microsoft. To bring these different components together and add more value to the customer. So look, it's a journey Steve, and it's quite exciting to be on this. And people like yourself because we have been there also for a long time, and you know what it takes to transition. And you never fail, you learn always. And everything that you learn and that works, it's almost to think how we can scale and bring that to the mass as quick as we can so that people can benefit from it. Steve: Well success breeds success. And you know guys have got it going right now. I've taken up enough of your time. Anything that you want to get out there that I didn't ask or we didn't talk about? Vahe: No, I think, Steve, you did a good overview of let's say where we are, how we think. Again, I think that the simplification, the portfolio, the much more focused approach, the category, and more consistent execution on the go-to market is really the next level for us. And the hub and spoke strategy across all these categories gives much more room to increase the business opportunity for us and the partners. Steve: Yep, I think so, I think so. All right, listen, it was great talking to you, I'm glad you made the time. And I definitely hope to able to talk to you again in the future, get something new to talk about. Any time you want to reach out, and jump on, and talk about some stuff, let me know. We're happy to get you on. Vahe: We are all, let's say reading all these, let's say headlines on the recession. In a few months from now, between now and then of calendar year, we're to see a bit more clarity on how the planning is happening for the mid-market, large corporation, how the public sector is evolving in this dimension. And also, we'll have a few, let's say product launched that we talked about, Viva Sales, any learning from that, let's say maybe the first two, three months, would be interesting to see how people react. And maybe that could be a great opportunity for us to chat. Also what's going on the [inaudible 00:56:17] Steve: Yeah, yeah. Vahe: Plenty of things to talk, I guess. Steve: Sounds good. All right, well hey, thanks again for your time. Vahe: Thank you. Take care Steve, have a great day.

covid-19 ceo ai office sales microsoft cost ga cfo dynamic excel crm sellers dynamics salesforce cio azure erp western europe redmond guinea cfos great plains sla satya isv power platform powerapps fsi power automate james phillips vahe olap steve it amy hood steve you steve oh steve well steve yeah steve there steve so microsoft business applications navision viva sales steve for steve they steve mordue

July 2022 (pre-Inspire) news roundup

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2022 16:50

With Microsoft's annual global partner event Inspire 2022 set to begin this week, we look back at some of our relevant reporting and features. Recent coverage discussed by the MSDW and MSCN editorial team on this episode includes: The departure of channel chief Rodney Clark and some analysis of the future of Microsoft's executive leadership of channel and ecosystem. And just after we recorded this episode, Microsoft announced its new partner ecosystem leadership. Microsoft has unveiled Viva Sales, the first role-based module in the Viva lineup. P&G's new commitment to new manufacturing tech built on Azure Our discussion with Steve Mordue on business apps leadership, channel issues, and more The announcement of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2022 release wave 2. The impact of the Synlapse vulnerability A partner's Business Central priorities New features on multi-tenant Azure projects in federal agencies, Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse, and the MVP experience.

microsoft mvp inspire pg dynamics azure news roundup power platform business central dataverse steve mordue

Talking Microsoft leadership, products, and channel with Steve Mordue

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 11, 2022 56:44

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

leadership thinking microsoft products differences reviewing adapting dynamics power platform lamanna force works d365 microsoft business applications charles lamanna viva sales steve mordue

Steve has yet another Chat with Charles

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 1, 2022 27:51

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.

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Steve has another Chat with Toby Bowers

Switched On with Paul Modderman and James Wood

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 2, 2021 36:03

I have had my head down working on some big things, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Toby Bowers, the Leader of the Microsoft Bizapps ISV Program. I managed to catch him in his car, and got a great update on some new things happening in the ISV arena. Enjoy! Transcript Below: Toby: Hi, this is Toby. Steve: Hey Toby, Steve Mordue, how's it going? Toby: Hey, Steve. I'm doing well. Thanks. How are you? Steve: Not too bad. I catch you at a decent time? Toby: You've caught me at a fine time. I'm actually in the car at the moment. I'm just taking my team out for a little celebratory launch after our big Inspire event and also our Ready event earlier this week. So it's actually a good time. Let me just pull over so we can have a chat. Steve: It's Been a pretty frantic couple of weeks for you guys. Toby: Frantic, but good. Yeah. Yeah. We had a great showing at Inspire. We made some exciting announcements across the business applications business, but especially around our ISV program, ISV Connect, as you and I have chatted about before. So, it's been good. Steve: Well that's [crosstalk 00:00:50]- Toby: How about you [crosstalk 00:00:51]. Steve: [crosstalk 00:00:51] the reason for my call is to try and catch up on ISV Connect. We talked some time ago about some things that you kind of had just inherited this role from Googs who moved on and were kind of getting your feet wet. Now you've had a close to a year in this position, right? Toby: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I remember our initial chat and I think in fact I'm guilty, Steve, because we agreed to speak a little bit more often, but it's been an interesting year this past year, as we all know, but yeah, it's been almost a full year of execution since we last spoke and I even remember Steve, the nice article you wrote with some suggestions for me as I sort of took over. Toby: Yeah, I'd love to actually go back to that. We can talk about a little bit about some of the enhancements and announcements that we made last week. Steve: Yeah. I mean last week, I think for a lot of the ISV's that they weren't thrilled with some things as the program got launched, they were starting to kind of get their arms around it. But some of these announcements that I was hearing and hopefully we can talk about today, anything of course isn't NDA, I think should make the ISV community pretty happy. It's making me pretty happy. And really kind of throw some gas on that fire. Toby: Yeah. Well, absolutely. I'd love to reinforce it. I know, I know you get a lot of people listening to your impromptu calls here. So why don't I do this? Let me maybe just set a little bit of context, just kind of where we left off Steve, and then I can hit on the high notes of what we announced and then we can dive into any particular areas. That sound all right? Steve: Yeah. You are pulled over, right? Toby: I am pulled over now, yes. Steve: Okay. Toby: You got my full attention. Steve: All right sure, kind of hit some of the highlights. Toby: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, for those who don't know, we originally set out with the ISV Connect program a couple of years ago to attract ISV's to our platform, building and extending upon it. That platform being both Dynamics 365 and the power platform with a specific focus on partners who had great industry or vertical IP to enhance the portfolio and delivering better value to our joint customers. So through the program itself, it's a revenue share program and we reinvest back in the ecosystem in the form of platform benefits, go to market benefits, co-selling with our field. Toby: So when I sort of took over Steve, I wanted to sort of get a full year of execution in place. And in that first year we were pretty happy with the numbers. We have over 700 ISV's enrolled in the program. Now we use AppSource as sort of the cornerstone of the program. We have, we have 1400 apps or more certified in AppSource. But after that first year, I really with the team wanted to understand how things were landing, and I think your feedback was good Steve. We did a bunch of research. We do partner satisfaction surveys. I of course talked to a lot of partners in my travels. Steve: [crosstalk 00:03:59] in a year's time, you can kind of get a pretty good gauge on what was working well? What could work better? What wasn't working well? What do we need to just abandon? What do we need to step on? And I kind of got the feeling that was this readjustment that we just saw was kind of bringing some of those things to light. Toby: That's exactly right Steve. I mean, it's such a diverse ecosystem of emerging partners to large mature partners across a pretty vast portfolio. So, it was a diverse set of feedback, but you're spot on. We wanted to give it a little bit of time, but then check in and listen and make some adjustments. So that's what we did, based on a lot of the feedback we got. Toby: I'd sort of summarize what we changed in three big areas Steve, the first is that the business model itself, the fee structure, and we talked about this last time, but not only having an investible model where you can reinvest, but actually investing in the ecosystem, especially as it's growing like this business is growing. Toby: The second thing was a lot of feedback around the go to market, whether it was the marketing benefits, the co-selling with our field, really just getting that value proposition right Steve, and really delivering on the promise we made. We needed to balance that equation a little bit and equalize the effort. Toby: And then the third piece is really around the platform itself. And again, we've talked about this in the past, but just the platform, the tooling, dev test environments, app sources, and marketplace itself. Toby: So those were the three key areas that we sort of listened and got a lot of good feedback around. So with that in mind, what we actually announced at the event is that first of all, back on the business model we're significantly reducing the rev share fees down from 10 and 20%, which you might recall, we had a standard tier and a premium tier. So we were bringing those fees down from 10 and 20% to 3%, just a flat 3% going forward. Steve: That's across the board? Toby: That's across the board. And in fact, it was part of a broader announcement we made as Microsoft, Steve, where we're also bringing our commercial marketplace fees, so that's both Azure Marketplace and app sources. We get transact capabilities down to that same flat 3%. Steve: So what's the motivation behind that? I mean, what is it that they're hoping that will accomplish for Microsoft? Toby: Yeah, it's interesting. If you catch any of the sessions, even starting with Satya, he really talks about Microsoft wanting to be the platform for platform creators. And then if you parlay that into what Nick Parker said and Charlotte Marconi around being the best platform for partners to do business on, it really just came down to helping the partners keep more of their margin to invest in their growth. Toby: So it's not a P&L, a profit center for Microsoft. It's a way to deliver benefits. We think it's pretty differentiated in the market compared to some of our peers. And it was sort of interesting to see, because we were planning on bringing the fees down for ISV Connect specifically, and then we started to align across the organization and just thought, gosh, we should just do this in a very consistent way across the entire Microsoft Cloud with that one flat 3%. Steve: So the math equation had to work out something like, if we dropped this to 3%, that's going to grow that side of the business significantly, which is going to increase platform sales, right? There has to be an up for the down. And I guess maybe... I mean, not that the platform wasn't already growing by leaps and bounds, but somebody must've been thinking this thing can grow a lot faster if we get rid of some of these hurdles. Toby: You're exactly right. I mean, it's kind of what we've talked about in the past. Just the value that an ISV ecosystem brings to Microsoft with that, whether it's the industry relevance, industry specific IP, or just a growing ecosystem in general. I don't know if you'd caught what we just did, our earnings earlier this week, but Dynamics 365 is growing 43% year over year, we doubled our power apps customer base. And so to your point, the business is growing, the platform is growing, and we want the ecosystem to grow and we want to attract as many partners to do that as possible. Steve: So, I mean, you can't reduce fees and increase the benefit, you have to have taken some things away or maybe gotten rid of some things that weren't being utilized, or how did that kind of offset? Toby: Yeah. Great question. Yeah, so we are investing deliberately to build this out and kind of putting our money where our mouth is, but we did, you're spot on. We learned a lot around the benefits, the go to market benefits in particular, the second key thing we announced is that we are reducing just down to one tier at that flat 3%. So no more 10% and 20% or a standard and a premium tier. And we're reducing the thresholds within that one tier for partners to unlock those go to market benefits and those marketing benefits. And then what I heard, especially from partners, again, to my point around, you've got some mature partners and some emerging partners, it's not a one size fits all. And so we've got an option sort of an, a lA carte, option for partners to choose marketing benefits that make the most sense for their business. So we just tried to simplify things and streamline things a little bit. Steve: You know, I talked to a lot of partners. We're, kind of unique in that our application is free. So, the revenue shared didn't really come into play for what we were doing because there wasn't a fee for our app or any recurring services with it. But you know, a lot of these ISV's their business is significantly different. They've got revenue generating applications that run on top of your platform. Many of them that kind of told me in confidence that they just weren't paying the fees. They were getting the notice from Microsoft saying, "Hey, please do us a favor and tell us how much money you've made and what you owe us." And many of them were just kind of ignoring that. Steve: I guess if we're getting down into a 3% range, it'd probably make it a little easier for some people to be more honest about things too you think? Toby: Yeah. Well, yeah we hope so. Again, that was kind of my point around balancing the equation and making sure that we're delivering on the promise that we set out with the program itself. And I talked to a lot of partners as well, and there's definitely benefit being realized, whether it's from a marketing perspective or co-selling with our field, again, based on what's important to their business, but you're right, we do think by reducing it to this level and also just getting better at delivering the benefits in a consistent way, we'll have more partners participating in the program. Toby: The one thing I would say, Steve, that I was just going to close off on with this sort of consistency across Microsoft is we also realized that's our value proposition. If we can not only have a similar model with the 3% marketplace fee and ISV Connect fees across Microsoft, but a similar model to the way we deliver those benefits, to the way we engage with technical resources or engage from a co-selling perspective across Azure Teams and 365 Dynamics Power Platform, that's kind of how we differentiate ourselves versus, the rest of the players out in the market. Toby: So we made a bunch of enhancements and announcements across the business Azure teams, ISV Connect obviously, and you'll see us continue to sort of work towards a much more consistent approach from a Microsoft Cloud perspective, because obviously we'd love it if partners were integrating with Teams. We have over 250 million monthly active users with Teams now driving dynamics integrations all the way through to CDM and Dataverse and integration into Azure Synapse. Those are the partners we want to work with and the type of partners we want to support and go to market with. Steve: Well, I'll tell you, I think the 3% has probably eliminated a hurdle for a partner, certainly I remember at the time a lot of partners complaining about the 10 and 20 saying things like, "If it was like three." Okay, well it's three now, so shut up and move forward. Toby: Yeah. We've had a lot of- Steve: And it's interesting, because it's kind of the way we sell is I guess for an industry ISV who built something specifically for Dynamics 365, maybe they approach things a little different. Our approach is more, we really try and sell the potential of the platform because we've got a simple CRM. So we're up against a lot of competing simple CRMs. And when you open one of their CRMs and open, rapid start, for example, they look very similar and do very similar things. So for us, we really have to sell the value proposition of, hey, behind that little CRM that you're using from Acme Cloud CRM company is really nothing. You've got the extent of what you can do with that right there in front of you and there's nothing more that can be done, and we really lean in hard on the potential for things like integration with Teams, with things like integration with Azure. Steve: Obviously the integration with Microsoft 365, all of the pieces that are available in the power platform that we haven't enabled in our app that are there to be enabled, you like the forums and some of the AI stuff, it definitely seems to be a huge differentiator in that sales conversation. Toby: Yeah. Well, that's great to hear that's really what we're trying to get right and stitch together the teams if they exist across Microsoft and iron those out. I think your company is a great example of that Steve, and I know you talked to a bunch of our partners and sort of as an independent third party, we had a few partners join us at inspire. Icertis has been a longstanding partner of ours. They're a similar story from, from Azure Dynamics Teams really across the board, and getting more and more focused on industry solutions with their particular IP. Toby: And then we had more emerging partners like Karma, Frank at Karma talked to us about some of the benefits we're building into the platform, specifically license management, and now he's taken advantage of that. And we have big partners like Sycor, that's been working with us for a long time on the Azure side of the business and is doing some really interesting things now on the dynamic side and sees value in that co-sell motion. Toby: So I think that value prop is what we're trying to land, and then we're seeing lots of different types of partners take advantage of it in different ways, which is great to see. Steve: Yeah, it's not often that you see both a cost of participation come down and the value of the benefits go up. And when we talk about benefits, and before, you and I have talked about some of these go to market benefits, there's a segment of ISV's that could make use of those probably mostly new ISV's that don't really understand that system. Steve: But for a lot of the ISV's, they really didn't see value there, but in the meantime they're maintaining their own licensing systems and their own transaction systems and things like that, which as an ISV, that's just like a tax. You're building your solution to solve a particular problem, but you can't just stop after you built this wonderful solution, you got to protect it, you got to monetize it. So those things ended up being just kind of attacks. Steve: And, every ISV out there has had to kind of build their own system for licensing and transacting. And you guys coming through now recently here would be with the licensing capability we were in that pilot, and that thing's got some great potential, a couple of things left for them to do on that to get that really where it's going to solve a lot of problems that ISV's have had, even with their own licensing. Steve: Because with your own external licensing system, you can only do so much, but working with one that's on the platform, that's essentially the same one you guys are utilizing, is going to be huge for ISV's, and then we'll get to transactability, that's just going to close another piece that ISV's have had to deal with, especially when you talk about those startup ISV's, they know an industry and they can build an app, but when it comes to licensing and transacting, and if they can just tick a button and plug right into a couple of those things, that's going to lower the bar to entry and make it a lot easier for some of those folks to get in I think. Toby: Yeah, I hope that you're right Steve, in fact, I didn't know you were working with Julian Payor and the team on piloting the license management stuff. It's great to hear your feedback. That was kind of the whole intent with the journey. If I rewind a bit with AppSource itself, you'll recall we had to do quite a bit of work on the overall user experience for AppSource. We worked hard with the engineering team to improve that, improve discoverability and search capabilities and just sort of the plumbing underneath. And then the next step was, was licensed management, which we've just GA'd working again with the engineering team, and then from there, to your point, the value proposition, a lot of ISV's put all this together and then you add transactability and the ability to actually sell your stuff on our marketplace to what's now more than 4 million monthly shoppers, going to that destination is it is definitely a point of value that I've heard positive feedback from ISV's on. Toby: So that's why we really invested there. I know it's taking us a little bit of time to get there, but that was another key announcement. We announced license management later in the fiscal year. We'll have translatability and AppSource for our customer engagement apps, for power apps, and then we'll continue to roll out a roadmap from there. Toby: And then the other piece I forgot to mention Steve, we made some noise about as well, was these new sandbox environments. And I know you've given me this feedback before, but you know, sort of in the broader internal use rights world, the value in having sandbox environments for our partners to do dev tests and do customer demos around, I heard loud and clear from you and from other partners. And so that's the other thing we announced. We have these new discounted skews, which are basically just at cost skews across the business for those dev test environments. And then for partners who are participating in ISV Connect and hitting those new lower reduced rev share thresholds, we'll provide those licenses for free. Toby: So we think that's going to be a great new benefit for partners as well, more on that technical and platform side of things. Steve: Yeah. Particularly for the ISV's, because ISV's don't necessarily see a lot of value or need to get Microsoft competencies. Competencies are definitely, as a program that was designed for resellers to demonstrate their competence. But a lot of ISV's don't want to have a need for that. And that's where [inaudible 00:19:22] had historically kind of been tied was to those competencies. Steve: So is there any talk about any sort of... I mean, they did do that kind of short-lived ISV competency, which was primarily around, hey, if you've got an app in AppSource you qualify. Here's some IUR. Steve: So this new program will replace that, but are they going to be revisiting any sort ISV competencies or need? Toby: Yeah, well I won't say too much as far as future plans are concerned, but what I can say Steve is that we did this for biz apps, we did it for ISV Connect because that's our program and we got feedback and we think there's value in that. Toby: I did mention that going forward we'll have a more consistent approach across Microsoft Cloud. There's lots of different benefits out there. Azure Credits, we announced some new things around Teams. And so we just need to, as one Microsoft, provide that to our partners in a consistent delivery through these benefits so that we can support that kind of value proposition we talked about earlier. So look for more from us in that area. You're spot on, on the competency side. And I wouldn't even say resellers, I'd say more SI, system integrators services partners. Steve: Yeah. Toby: The key difference there is, we want those guys to be able to differentiate their organization. As a company, you can say, "I've got 15 certified individuals in this role-based certification. And I've got this many credits to my business that make me a gold partner at an organization level"- Steve: Which is something a customer looking at SI would be looking for. Toby: Right. Steve: But when you're looking at an ISV solution, they're really just looking at the functionality. Toby: It's the app, right? You would want to badge in app versus badge and organization. And so that's the key difference there. And I think we've kind of figured that out and again, you'll see us do more in that space going forward. Steve: Yeah. I just want to mention, just go back for a second to make sure everybody is aware that the transactability and the licensing are optional. These are things that you can take advantage of if you spend a ton of money on your own systems, nobody's going to expect you to rip and replace. These are really designed for... I mean when I think of a partner like myself, if I can get out of the license management and have transactability just be automatic, where all I really have to do is focus on building my IP, getting it in AppSource, hopefully promoting it properly, but then the licensing becomes automatic and the transactability becomes automatic, and I'm just getting money coming into my account. Of course, you guys are scraping your 3%, which I don't begrudge because your given me those tools. That just makes things a lot easier. Toby: That's right. And you're right, it's not mandatory. It's again what makes sense for the partner. And so, you can do business with us and ISV Connect outside of the marketplace and work with us on the new 3%, get those benefits, or you can transact in the marketplace, it's that same 3%. And it's a different benefit. You get that whole commerce system, you get that whole billing engine. You don't have to worry about that. And there's a lot of ISV's out there that see value in that. So yeah, you're spot on. Steve: Yeah. I remember Goose had kind of recharacterized the revenue share after the kind of flap up from some of the ISV's about the benefits and stuff and he recharacterized it as a cost for the use of the platform that you're building on top of a platform that Microsoft has built, Microsoft maintains, Microsoft advances. So look at that as a cost for that. And I think you still kind of need to look at that as a cost for that. It's not 3% for licensing and transactability, it's a cost for maintaining the platform, there's these pieces you can take advantage of or not. But if you're not taking advantage of license management, transactability, it doesn't mean you don't have to pay the fee. You're paying the fee for something else. Toby: Yeah. Steve: I'm trying to head off some things I know I may hear from some folks [inaudible 00:23:24] licensing. No, no, no. Toby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right, Steve, and again, to zoom back out again, I mean, it's not about the 3%, it's about attracting partners to build on the broader Microsoft Cloud and supporting their business in a way that works for them. And you're right, there is a cost of doing that, but we want to invest, and I think we just sent a message hopefully to the market that we want to be aggressive in this space, we think we're well positioned, we've got a great value proposition with this broader Microsoft Cloud thing that we're just seeing incredible growth across the business. Toby: And I guess most importantly, we're listening back to that, after a full year, really sort of staying in tune to feedback from partners like yourself, that [inaudible 00:24:07] at large to make sure that we're doing the right thing and delivering, that's kind of what was most important to me. Steve: So those discounted skews for ISV's, in order to qualify for that, what do they need to do? They need to join ISV Connect? Toby: Yeah. So the discounted licenses, which are again, just basically at cost for us, are available to anyone who's enrolled in ISV Connect. All you need to do is enroll in the program, but then if you hit the new reduced rev share threshold that sort of unlocks additional benefits, then we'll give those licenses to you for free. And I can't here in the car, remember all the details of the numbers and stuff like that, I think, and you probably have it. I think aka.ms.bizapp.ISV connect, I think that's a link to our website that has all the benefit details and stuff, but that's basically the way it works. Steve: Are those available today? Toby: They are. There's a whole bunch of them available today and there's more coming. I know that the sales service, field service, marketing, I think the customer insights products, maybe commerce, I might be forgetting a few others and then there's more coming down the pike shortly. Steve: All right. So a good reason for people to go back to revisit ISV Connect site if they haven't in a while. Toby: I would love that. Yeah, I think so. If we can get people to go back and like you said, revisit, just get educated, hopefully get re-engaged and then keep the feedback coming. That's a great outcome. Steve: So I've had a few ISV's asking me about what's the future of ISV Embed, and maybe you can speak to that because that one's kind of a little vague, I think, for a lot of folks right now. Toby: Yeah. It's a great question Steve, that's kind of next, next on our list. And again, today I can't share a lot of specifics, but this is a good topic for us to come back to probably in our regular chats. Toby: As you know, Cloud Embed is a model that supports kind of like an OEM like model where a partner's just packaging their IP directly on the underlying license and selling it together through our ISV Cloud Embed program, which leverages our CSP vehicle as a way to transact. And so we've had it out there for a couple of years. And I may have mentioned before that we're sort of modernizing a whole bunch of our commerce capabilities and new business models and so we're working on a few different options still to support that embed scenario where things like co-selling with our field or certain other marketing benefits aren't the most important thing for a particular ISV in a particular scenario, they don't want to have to mess with reselling the underlying dynamics license. They're not resellers. They just want to sell their IP. Steve: Yeah. Toby: So we're working on some stuff there, especially, on both the core dynamics business and the power platform business. So we can stay in touch and I can come back to you for some feedback once we have more to share. Steve: Yeah. That, I mean, that program worked for a particular kind of an ISV. Toby: Yeah. Steve: A lot of the ISV's that have add on solutions that are not SI's, there's a partner already involved with a customer and they just want to sell their add on solution. Steve: Yeah. Licenses have probably already been sold by that partner. They don't want or need to get involved in that management of that sort of stuff. They just want to sell their IP. And then there's some ISV's that the customer is actually buying, which I think we're starting to see now. And I think I told you this before, one of the things that Salesforce had going for them with their ISV's was there were a lot of very robust ISV's that did a lot of direct marketing to customers about their solution and less so about the fact that it ran on Salesforce. Steve: Salesforce is this platform in the background, but this is what we're selling is this ISV solution, and in that scenario they own the customer because the customer wasn't buying Salesforce, they really were buying the solution to their problem for this ISV, and we hadn't seen as much of that on the dynamic side for a long time. It was definitely, you start with dynamics and then you add on ISV features and capabilities. But I think we're starting to see more of that, that holistic ISV solution that a customer is buying the solution that happens to run on the power platform or on dynamics. Toby: Totally. That's the scenario we see mutual opportunity in. That example, you said where the ISV owns the partner or the customer, the relationship with the customer, frankly that helps us reach more customers as Microsoft. And then if we provide that ISV still the underlying technology and the right business model to support their business, then that's goodness on both sides. So, that's exactly [crosstalk 00:29:10]. Steve: So that's the one where ISV Embed probably makes the most sense, , that type of partner. So we're starting to see more of them. Toby: That's great. That's great. Well, I always appreciate the feedback if you have any. So I'd love you to go through these new things in a bit more detail, and then send me your feedback and we can continue to keep the lines of communication open as always. Steve: I'm not letting you off just yet. I'm keeping you for a couple more. Toby: Oh man, I've got my team waiting, I'm hungry Steve. Steve: I just want to ask, "What is the most exciting thing you're seeing in the space coming soon that people should really be paying attention to?" I know we've got some things happening that aren't so much related to ISV, like the power platform pricing coming down, but what are some of the things that you're seeing in your group, or maybe some things that are already out there that you're feeling like ISV's are not understanding what this is obviously or they'd be all over it? Toby: Hmm. That's a great question. I'd say probably two things. One is, again, one of the big announcements we made at Inspire that wasn't necessarily related to ISV's or ISV Connect specifically, but what we announced with Teams where Teams users will now be able to sort of view and collaborate on Dynamics 365 records from directly within Teams. Toby: So this concept of collaborative apps you'll see, and that's at no additional cost. Obviously that concept you'll see us continue to do more around to bring that again, pretty large install base of Teams users that are out there, 250-million now, together with Dynamics, we think is sort of unique to our value proposition. So there was [crosstalk 00:30:58]- Steve: So this is somebody you think ISV's out there should definitely go do a little bit of investigating into the Team story? Toby: Yes, yes. Teams on the front end, it's such a large install base that we can take advantage of as partners. And then on the backend, I mentioned that again, power platform, Dataverse, leveraging our data services like Azure Synapse Analytics, again, stitching that all the way from the front end of the backend. We as Microsoft, we're really focused on that combined Microsoft Cloud story. And I think the partners that are recognizing that and investing in that with their own IP are the ones we're going to engage with and hopefully generate some good opportunity around. Toby: The second one, in that vein Steve, the second one I was going to say is just what we continue to do with our industry clouds. So we have cloud for healthcare out there at the moment, we've got financial services, manufacturing, retail, we announced the cloud for sustainability, we've got not-for-profit. So, these things continue to roll off the conveyor belt, but it's such a great opportunity. I was sort of surprised with how much interest we had from the ISV ecosystem around these industry clouds. Obviously as we build more industry IP, we need to sort of adjust our relationship with our partners who serve those industries, but there's still so much space to add, specific IP to that industry and work with some of those very credible industry partners that we were sort of talking about just a moment ago is a big place that we're going to invest going forward. So, that's an area I'd encourage people to keep a close eye on. Steve: Are you satisfied with the level of ISV engagement with the accelerators? Are they still kind of too many of them on the sidelines kicking or poking it with a stick or have we got enough of them actually coming in now that you're happy with that velocity? Or are you feeling like there's a bunch more that need to get in there? Toby: I think, first of all, we've evolved a bit from that original industry accelerator approach to now just real industry IP that we're building first party in these verticals that I mentioned. Obviously there's great partners out there that can work with us with those solutions to, like I said, have their IP built on that broader Microsoft Cloud. Industry clouds are just a great example of a Microsoft Cloud solution, frankly. And so to your question of, do we have enough partners there? You want to obviously get it right when you launch an offering like that with the right, frankly, small number of partners to complete the solution and have it be good and relevant and useful for customers, but the more the merrier around that investment. Toby: And so it's early days, Steve, we only have one industry cloud in market GA'd at the moment, but as I said, there's a lot more coming. So we want to make sure we're building the ecosystem around it pretty aggressively. Steve: Yeah. I mean, we've got partners of all sizes, so we got some big healthcare ISV's I'm sure engaged in some of the heavy lifting, but healthcare is an awfully big market, awfully big field, and there is spot, point solutions kind of across the healthcare organization that need to be filled by probably a smaller ISV's. So it seems like there's stuff across that whole thing. Toby: Yeah. Totally. There's plenty of opportunity and plenty of space around that. And even from a geographic perspective, I mean, different parts of the world have different regulatory requirements and are different, and so there's yeah, to your point, and that's what I was trying to articulate earlier. I think there's still just a massive opportunity for partners to work with us around those new offerings. Steve: Well, I know you've got to get to your thing. You've told me twice in the call, I appreciate you pulling the car over to chat with me to catch up. I just wanted to get some of this stuff out to the listeners about some of these changes that just occurred. Steve: And I'm definitely going to go through, like you said, and study it a little more closely and I'll reach out to you directly with some feedback and some thoughts and see if we keep this thing moving. Toby: Awesome. Well, Hey, I'm so glad you caught me, Steve. It's always a pleasure to catch up and have a chat, and yeah, please do go through it in some detail. Again, your feedback is important. Whole ecosystems feedback is super important to me, so I appreciate it. And yeah, it was great to catch up. Steve: All right man, talk to you soon. Toby: All right. Take care, Steve.

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Dynamics, ISVs, Power Apps, Industry Cloud, and more with Steve Mordue

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 8, 2021 44:03

cloud dynamics powerapps isvs steve mordue

Steve has a Chat with Ryan Cunningham

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2021 62:48

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.

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Steve Mordue on ISVs, Power Platform, Teams, and IP

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2020 63:15

The Microsoft channel is ever-changing, and ISVs can spend considerable time optimizing their approach according to the latest incentives, rules, restrictions, and opportunities. Microsoft MVP Steve Mordue returns to talk about some of the latest updates in the channel. Steve is the founder of the ISV business RapidStartCRM. He's also a popular blogger for channel pros. He has also started a new site, ISVConnectED, a private community for ISVs who want to talk channel strategy and tactics, ask their peers questions, and otherwise compare notes. We discuss Microsoft's current partner programs that impact the Dynamics channel, opportunities around Power Platform, including Dataverse, the risks ISVs face when Microsoft builds similar IP, and what the Salesforce Slack deal means for Microsoft. Show Notes: 1:30 - Microsoft's ISV programs and why Steve started ISVConnectED 3:45 - Why Steve writes about the state of the Microsoft channel and why it continues to create complexity 6:30 - The complexities of Microsoft programs like Direct CSP, and the importance of large CSPs today 15:30 - Power Platform - the business model and special offers 20:00 - Microsoft's efforts on industry solutions and what it means for vertical-focused ISVs 24:00 - Working in Microsoft's shadow as an ISV - searching for white space 28:45 - Encouraging news on AppSource 33:00 - Dataverse rollout 36:30 - Why Dataverse is so important to Teams and Microsoft 365 43:00 - New opportunities for custom Power Platform development and the importance of governance 46:00 - The Slack acquisition by Salesforce 48:30 - How Microsoft competes with Salesforce 54:00 - Microsoft's current approach to business applications acquisitions

microsoft ip encouraging slack dynamics salesforce isv power platform isvs csps dataverse salesforce slack appsource steve mordue

Steve has a Chat with Toby Bowers

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2020 32:53

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.

france canadian office sales leader microsoft new zealand mvp inspire labor day ip sort pac buck lt dynamics suggestions salesforce btw acquiring sis azure redmond bowers csp seismic satya mark smith 5x ocp isv power platform bdm isvs james phillips bpos nick parker appsource iur charles lamanna guggs steve mordue alysa taylor

Steve has another chat with Alysa Taylor

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2020 27:50

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

covid-19 power ai marketing office microsoft model mvp excellence coca cola chat deeper phillips crm dynamics toyota cds btw chipotle unilever walgreens sis smb virtual events mark smith sharepoint sku skus power bi customer insights corporate vice president sati overpaying isb power platform microsoft cloud powerapps power automate power app googs microsoft business applications summit steve mordue alysa taylor

Steve has a third chat with Guggs

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2020 33:37

In this episode of "Steve has a Chat", I catch up again with Steven Guggenheimer "Guggs" to get the latest on the ISV Connect program. It seems that the word is out at Microsoft about calls from me... they all seem ready now. But I still had a few surprises for him. 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: Steven Guggenheimer: Hello. This is Guggs. Steve Mordue: Hey, Guggs. Steve Mordue. How you doing? Steven Guggenheimer: Good. How are you doing? Steve Mordue: You know how I'm doing. You know why I'm here. Steven Guggenheimer: I do. I do. I assume we're get to go do a little update session, and so I know or I assume you're recording and- Steve Mordue: You bet I am. Steven Guggenheimer: ... whatever I say is ready to go. Steve Mordue: You got time? Steven Guggenheimer: Sure. Yeah, I got a little time. Steve Mordue: All right. Perfect, perfect. Well, it's been a while since we talked. It's actually been a while since we've heard from you. I was looking, and I think November was the last post, kind of an update to the world of what's going on. I've been hearing the hammers banging back in the background, but lots of folks, lots of ISVs are reaching out to me for some reason or other, saying, "Hey, what's the latest? What's going on? What's happening on that ISV front?" Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. Like you said, lots of hammers in the background. Once you get into that middle of the year, you're just mostly heads down trying to do two things, trying to solidify all the work that's going on for this year, so working with the field. The team went out and did a field tour and, on lots of calls, we have our middle of the year checkpoint. You're just grinding away on that, and you start doing the planning for the next fiscal year. It turns out our Q3, which is January, February, March, is kind of double busy. You're working pretty hard to do whatever tweaks you need for this year and you're busy planning for the next year, and so I think everybody's been pretty heads down. Steven Guggenheimer: Then you get into January and February with the virus coming out, I think you're busy trying to figure out, "Are we going to do [MBAS 00:02:13] live?" You plan for one version of it, and then you plan for a different. You're working with customers and partners. I think all of those things combined means everybody's busy. My virtual team gets together on a regular basis, and I've got a couple of calls after this, so that's where we're at. Steve Mordue: The ISVs have definitely had some challenges with Microsoft. Not all of this, of course, is within your area. You're working on the program for ISVs that will link to the products, which you're not related to the products. You're related the program. But on the product side, even, the ISVs are having some challenges. I know that there's been ISVs that... The platform keeps shifting, keeps moving around, new things added, things dropped. I even know some ISVs that have said, "Hey, they just launched something, and it kind of wiped out my whole solution." Steve Mordue: I think there's multiple things going on on the ISV side that's got a lot of them nervous, and I think they're looking for some reassurance that, "We bet on the right platform, and was that a good bet, and when are we going to see a payoff on that bet?" What kinds of things can you say to maybe reassure some of these ISVs that are out there that are scratching their heads saying, "Hmm, what's next? I mean was this a good bet?" Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. I can't think of a better bet right now, but that's me. Of course, I'm on the wrong side of the fence for that. The- Steve Mordue: Well, we're all biased. Even us ISVs are biased. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, we're all biased. Steve Mordue: We're all biased. Steven Guggenheimer: Well, people want a little reassurance that, to your point, that they made good decisions. From a platform and product perspective, there's probably never been more energy in the combination of Power Platform and D365 than we have today. I talked a lot about product truth. I didn't think there was a lot of product truth for an ISV in the platform SaaS offerings if you go back five years when we were in the DPDx days. Steven Guggenheimer: James and [Mohamed 00:04:24] and Charles have just been cranking along, and so from the breadth of the portfolio and the quality in that link to Azure going down the stack and that link to SharePoint and M365 going up the stack and the coherence in the platform. Then we've been cleaning up. I mean God bless the team for all the work they've had to do to clean up just years and years of monolithic offerings that weren't in good shape. That speaks a little bit to the change of the underlying platform. Steven Guggenheimer: We're probably as solid as we've ever been. We've got a twice-a-year release train. The notes come out early. We did an ISV session for the partners to get ahead of it. We'll do that again on an every-six-month basis. Satya is sort of heavily invested. Scott's heavily invested. Amy, our CFO, is heavily invested. I think there's both product or platform truth. There's good energy in the marketplace. I mean we're growing very well. Steven Guggenheimer: Can't say anything. Q3 will be coming up, but you look at Q2 and Q1, you look at just quarter over quarter, now the platform's growing and, if the platform's growing, that's opportunity, in particular, Power Platform, Power BI, some of the D365 services. I think all of that speaks to just incredible momentum. I see a decent number of ISVs coming into the program and the platform unsolicited wanting to take part in that. Steven Guggenheimer: Now, the one place people might feel a little discomfort is, as the platform solidifies and as the services solidify and we add things like AI and mixed reality in there, there might be places where people were making an investment or were looking to extend that we might be extending in that area. I would say, look, if you're an ISV on the Microsoft platform, historically, one of your trademarks is being somewhat nimble. I don't care if it's all the way back to the Windows days and Windows 95 working your way up through the internet era or intelligent cloud, intelligent edge. The value of a platform is that balance between giving developers something to build on and having enough coherence and consistency that both customers and ISVs can count on it. Steven Guggenheimer: There's a fine balance there in terms of where you add features or functionality or new capabilities to keep up with what your competitors are doing, to keep up with what the customers are asking for. It's a balancing act. I think the good thing, at least in the Dynamics side, is that we're always open for conversation. Whether it's myself or Greg or Mohamed or Charles, look, we'll pick up the phone and we'll have the discussion. There'll be places where people might feel uncomfortable that we've gone in that direction. Great. We'll have that conversation, and we'll talk about, roughly, where we're going without breaking NDAs on either side. Steven Guggenheimer: My feedback to ISVs has always been the, "There's always someone at Microsoft who thinks, someday, they're going to build something that competes with you, so let's focus on the 90% where we don't compete and know that there's going to be 10%." I think that's just a truism. Look, energy is really good. I mean product coherence is good. Product truth is good. If you look at what's going on, right now, during the COVID response and the pickup for the Power Platform in terms of helping hospitals and healthcare workers and quick solutions, holy crud. Steven Guggenheimer: Then the new areas are good conversation, so let's have the discussion. I mean I know a lot of the historical ISVs have been around a long time, and some of the work they did that was either custom on the product side or custom in terms of working with our field as we make that available to everybody, that feels a little less comfortable. We do a good amount of handholding for that. Steve Mordue: Yeah. I think one of the things you guys have been telling ISVs, for years, as a way to build a business but also, in a way, to protect your business is to go vertical. The more vertical you can get, the safer you are. You guys are not going to go there. A lot of horizontal ISVs, and they're... If you're horizontal, you're plugging a hole. You're always at risk that Microsoft's going to get around to the time to plug that hole. You're definitely safer going vertical. Steven Guggenheimer: That's for sure, and that's even more true today. As some of our competitors invest in the acquisition of vertical solutions, it opens up that direction more. I would say, as a company, we're making that pivot, albeit slowly but surely, to industry-led versus product-led. We've always had product conversations. We've always had audience conversations, developers or IT pros. We've always had sides of organization enterprise, but industry was always kind of a... not as strong a direction in terms of how we went to market. We pivoted the company pretty heavily, and Azure's doing a lot of this work at M365, and so is Dynamics. In industry-based solutions, those are always the ones that get the best pickup, and now our sales force is pivoting more and more in that direction. That's the way to stay aligned. Steve Mordue: Yeah. You talked about nimble. Frankly, one of the challenges some of these ISVs have is they're not that nimble. They built a bunch of IP on something, and their goal was to just sit back and collect checks, but you can't do that anymore. We're no longer in a space you just build something and sit on it for years. You may not be able to sit on it for months before you've got to go back in, modify, refactor, take advantage of some new technology or... It's a continuous motion now for ISVs. They're in continuous development mode where they didn't use to be. It was like, "We're going to go build something, sit on it, and cash in." Steven Guggenheimer: And particular in this space, and we see it a lot. I use the term, sometimes, there's this notion of lifestyle businesses where you build something and it supports the lifestyle, and there's not a lot of interest or energy in reinvesting to change it or modify it. Truthfully, that doesn't work. There are places where- Steve Mordue: Tell me about it. Steven Guggenheimer: They're- Steve Mordue: That's what I've been trying to do. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, it's not working. Part of the blog series I've been working on, it's called Continuous Transformation, and it's all... If you look at 25 years or the 26 years of Microsoft, all we've ever done is evolved and changed, and it's driven by technology and scale and culture. I can't remember a period of time where something's not upending the conversation. Steve Mordue: Yeah, but the pace is much greater in the past few years. The shift to the cloud and the catch up, really, because we were behind getting in the cloud, the catch up necessitated a pace that we have not ever seen from Microsoft, this kind of a pace. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. I think, in the line of business application space or the Dynamics/Power Platform, we were further behind in that move, as a Microsoft property, than some of the others, be it Office or Azure, and so we're doing a lot of catch up, and that's why think that... I talked a lot about product truth. I think they've done a phenomenal job, but that's like a bit of a whip where we're as close to it as you can be and, the further out you get, the more you're going to have to go and make those changes, and you're playing a lot of catch up. Steven Guggenheimer: The truth is, D365, there were custom deals floating around there and custom support and all kinds of things that, as you modernize and change, that goes away. I think some [crosstalk 00:12:10]- Steve Mordue: It's not scalable, yeah. Steven Guggenheimer: Well, people get frustrated because they had this special deal. Well, look, we don't even build that product anymore or that product's not one we're trying to sell. We're off doing cloud stuff, so no, we're not going to go renew a set of terms or a set of conditions for something that we're not trying to drive anymore. The market's moved on. That's gone, and so you need to go modify and change your solution to meet the current market needs. Yeah. Steven Guggenheimer: On one hand, I get it. On the other hand, look, the time to move is now. The world is moving, and the opportunity is very good. Despite current conditions which are there, look, there's... The world, the first thing they move is their infrastructure as a service. They move the core horizontal infrastructure out, but sooner or later, the next thing they're going to do is they're going to want to go to a set of SaaS applications. They're not going to want to have a cloud-based infrastructure then run some client server on-premises solution. They're going to want to set a SaaS services. Steven Guggenheimer: Even though people may feel like it's a push or it's a hurry, that's where the world's going. We're going to go push on it, and you need to move your solutions there. Steve Mordue: I'll tell you, it's been very acute, these folks that have on-premise solutions, particularly if they're physically on premise, with this virus and the push to send everybody to work from home in organizations that really weren't set up for people to work from home from a technical standpoint. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. Steve Mordue: I'm sure there are people out there now that are thinking, "Damn, I wish we were in the cloud right now because those guys got it pretty easy working from home if you already made this transition." It's very acute right now. Steve Mordue: I was talking to Charles two weeks ago. I pounced on him, or a week ago, I pounced on him for a call. He was saying one of the things that's a- Steven Guggenheimer: You are getting a bit of a reputation, but keep going. Steve Mordue: Yeah. People are going to be scared and have my number blocked. Steven Guggenheimer: Nobody's going to pick up the phone. Steve Mordue: One of the things he said that was a big focus right now is making everything work better. It's like we were firing off lots of solutions, getting them to like 90%, move on to the next one, fire it off, fire it off. Now there's this effort to kind of go back to this. Let's close these gaps. As he was talking about, there's still some significant gaps in not the product truth. The product truth is there, but there's some gaps that they're now really going to focus on closing. It feels like it's kind of like it's time to do that. We've shot out tons of things. Now let's go back, tighten them all up, and then go back to revisit shooting out more things so- Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, I think that's right. You look for gaps and overlaps. You look for how do we take all the AI scenarios? They're kind of scattered. Can we bring some of them together? Do they make sense together? When they first came into the portfolio, they were sort of all independent, so we ran them uniquely and independently and just kept them going and, excuse me, tried to find alignment with the various SaaS services. Now you go back and you say, okay, where is their consistency? Where is the sum of the parts greater than the individual? Steven Guggenheimer: You go and you look for whether it's process automation and the work we're doing there, whether it's the power of virtual agent. If you look at what they've done in terms of for COVID-19 in terms of using a virtual agent, making it available, how do you turn these into tools that can really scale and operate and work at the levels needed? Steven Guggenheimer: I think Mohamed's got the same thing. There's a bunch of solution areas as we took ERP and CRM and took them into their natural marketing and sales and finance and operations, and we picked up some other areas. He's doing that same work. Now is a beautiful time to not necessarily double the number of offerings or add a whole bunch of new products. It's now is the time to take the momentum we've got and the offerings we've got and fill in the gaps and, where there's overlap, bring things together, make these things really operate at scale. Steven Guggenheimer: When you have the energy and you've got the interest, then what you start to get is feedback on what you're missing or what's not quite right. We want to take advantage of this time to go work on that. Steve Mordue: Let me circle this back to your space, the ISV side specifically. Over the past month, I've had two calls with some folks on your team that were looking for my opinion about some complaints they were getting, because you know I have opinions, about some complaints they were getting from some ISVs that had built their solution depending on this Team Member license and the changes to Team Member. I am actually aware of a couple of these ISVs that actually built their solution on the Team Member license without regard for the restrictions of that license. Certainly pretty easy to make your ISV solution have a lot of appeal if you've put it on a lesser license than it should be on. Steven Guggenheimer: Right. Steve Mordue: They're complaining now about the changes. Both of your folks had asked me my thought about that. I said, basically, "The hell with them." I mean I have no sympathy for somebody who built a solution on top of a license they shouldn't have. If you can't make revenue on the right license, then your solution's not right or you're thing isn't right. I mean do you have similar feelings of lack of sympathy for those folks that did those things? Steven Guggenheimer: I sort of think about it a little bit differently. Yes, look, there's people that take advantage of, it maybe intentionally or unintentionally, of licensing they shouldn't. That just has to get fixed, and we'll go work on that. Steven Guggenheimer: What there is that I think about is there are two scenarios that I think of as light use or light functionality scenarios. If you have something, a very large group of people... Students is a good example. Healthcare workers might be a good example. Pick your scenario where you have lots of people, and you have some people that are heavy users, and you have some people who might touch the solution once or twice a year or who touch the solution quite often, but they need just a very lightweight answer to it. They're not- Steve Mordue: A light touch. Steven Guggenheimer: They're users. They're users versus creators. That lightweight or light touch scenario is one we still are trying to figure out the right scenario for because there's not a great license type for this. By the way, this isn't a Dynamics-type conversation. I can say the same thing for Office for all the years it was there and people would talk about different types of workers. It's one of the- Steve Mordue: Contract workers, things like that. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, yeah. They used to use the term knowledge workers, and there was something else I can't remember. There is a collective challenge, which is how do you build a licensing framework where you can't tell between the two, light touch or light use, or you can tell but there's no consistency. If I ask the question, "What does light touch mean to one ISV or light use?" I'll get a very different answer than what I get from another one, so you can't design a licensing type that works for everyone. Steven Guggenheimer: That's one where I definitely have some empathy. It's not a sympathy term. I get it. I don't know what the answer is. To your point, ultimately, you have to design the solution to work with the licensing types that are out there. There's this funny juxtaposition between everybody wants simplicity but everybody wants all ultimate choice. Well, those two things aren't the same. You either get simple or you have the... and not as much choice or you get all the choice in the world. It's the most complex thing you'll ever seen, and so I don't know the answer to solving for this one. Steven Guggenheimer: I know that the licensing teams are very aware of it. They've had tons of these calls, in a good way, but there's not... I don't know the answer. I haven't seen anybody figure out the answer in 10-plus years of banging heads on this, and so I do think trying to design a solution for the licensing types that are out there is the right thing to do. Team doesn't serve that purpose. It's gone relative to that where people try to use it for something that it wasn't designed for, which in many cases, is that light use, light tough scenario, but it doesn't work. Steven Guggenheimer: We'll keep banging our heads. We'll keep talking to people. People do have to work within the licensing confines that are out there. We're always evolving them. We're always taking feedback. We're always trying to do better. Assuming something's going to come magically, it doesn't happen. Steve Mordue: We're not alone there. I was reading the Forrester Report on low-code solutions. We're obviously up there at the top now with a couple of others. The negative for all of the ones at the top was overly complex licensing. I was just thinking to myself, "You know what? Whoever figures that out is going to win because that's the thing holding all of the low-code platforms back a little bit is people can't figure out how to buy it." They just can't. Partners can't figure out what to sell. Customers can't figure out what to buy, too many moving parts in the licensing. Fortunately, we're not the only ones that have that problem, but whoever could figure that out is really... I'm sure you guys have got some smart people trying to figure that out. Steve Mordue: A couple of other things before I let you go. On- Steven Guggenheimer: Well, just on that one, there's also a difference between the customer angle for that and the ISV angle. Trying to figure out a licensing framework that works well for customers and ISVs, whether it's the low-code scenario or some of these others, it adds to the complexity. I highlight that in the sense that customers are a big chunk of... That's typically where we start first when we're working on a licensing framework because they're the... many times are the purchasers or it ends up as part of a broader agreement set, and so we have to figure that out, and so that- Steve Mordue: Actually, I think it's easier for ISVs because, as an ISV, I can figure out and understand what license would be necessary to run my solution and talk to a customer about, "Here's exactly what you need to run my solution." Bigger challenge, I think, for customers and SIs where a customer's like, "We want to do all these wonderful things," and then for them to try and figure out what kind of licenses they might need to accomplish those things. At least I know what I'm doing with my solution. It's pretty straightforward. I may have to shift it from a license I used to have it on to some different licensing construct as things changes, but it's a little easier for me. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. Steve Mordue: One of the things that came up in one of my calls with a pretty good size ISV recently was the lack of... I think he told me his costs this year are going to be over $90,000 for Microsoft licensing to be able to actually build and develop their solutions on between their multiple sandboxes, different things like that. It's a frustration for him that, "I'm building an ISV solution, a big one. I have lots of customers that are generating licenses and revenue for Microsoft, but I'm having to spend, as an ISV, a ton of money to even be able to do that." Steve Mordue: We had that ISV competency out for about eight minutes, decided that wasn't a good path. Some of the other paths to get IUR and those sorts of things that you would need to build on aren't always relevant for ISVs. The biggest thing the ISV competency really gave was, "Here. Here's some benefits. Here's some resources for you to go build on." What can we tell those folks that... I mean this guy's literally having to buy retail. You know? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. That's a Microsoft-level challenge in many ways. It's the what's the benefits? It really comes out of the MPN, the Microsoft Partner Network. What's the benefits? That's where that competency came from of being a partner and, if you're an ISV, how can you get access to the software you need to build a solution? Steven Guggenheimer: I know that the team is deeply aware of that. It's from the day the ISV competency went away to through all the conversations. I haven't checked in in a while to see where they are on coming up with an offering. I'll go back and ask. It's a good question. I don't know. Look, I don't know the answer, the how do you provide software? It ends up being, to your point, sandboxes or one-offs or these other things versus what's the programmatic approach that scales across Azure, Dynamics/Power Platform at M365? How do we make it available? What do you need to do to qualify, as a partner, so it's not just out there for everybody? It's an expensive offering [crosstalk 00:25:23]- Steve Mordue: Yeah, so is manning an ISV practice with developers and people to build, so- Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. No, they're both... That's right. Steve Mordue: Yep. Steven Guggenheimer: How do we find that balance? I don't know. Again, it's a little bit like a light-usage, lightweight licensing SKU where I haven't seen the answer to that. This is one of those ones that pops up and down in terms of, sometimes, we seem to give a lot of benefit in that direction, and sometimes we don't. Let me go back. I'll go back. It could be one of the last things I can go poke on a little bit, especially since- Steve Mordue: Yeah. That would be good. Steven Guggenheimer: Especially since I know Nick super well. Nick Parker took over the... He has the ISV remit underneath him now, so I'll go bug him about that. Steve Mordue: Yeah, we kind of kicked the can down the road when the ISV competency went away, kind of grandfathered everybody into business biz apps or some other competency while we figured it out, but now we'll be looking at people coming up on that expiring, and they'll be like, "Okay, now what do I got?" I mean it's obviously a big expense for ISVs when they're looking at partnering with Microsoft. They're thinking, "Here's something you can do for me," but other things- Steven Guggenheimer: No, that's super constant, consistent feedback. That's not a new one. We probably had that conversation the first time we did a call and- Steve Mordue: Every time since. Steven Guggenheimer: Every time since, and I still haven't... It's one I get to poke on. It's not one that I own, but it's one that I'll go poke on again. Steve Mordue: How is ISV Connect? Have you guys collected revenue yet? Are we at the point where we're collecting revenue from ISVs? Steven Guggenheimer: Oh, yeah. Yeah, collecting revenue. We crossed 1,000 ISVs that have signed the agreements. I think we've crossed 1,000 apps in AppSource now. We've done all the work to remove the ones that didn't go through certification that didn't join ISV Connect. Steven Guggenheimer: We're actually in a good in a good spot. We've got a decent number at the 20% level, and we're trying to get the ones that our field is really asking for aligned with more of the 20-percenters because those are the ones that are going to close out with the most. I feel really good about the getting people into the program. We've gotten the time to do the certification down. That's all been cleaned up. I think terms and conditions, we've been through all of that. We're heading into the next year. We won't add a lot, so keep it simple, do more of the same. Steven Guggenheimer: The place we're spending energy now is on the benefits side. We've got almost all the partners activated with their marketing benefits now, and they've had the call, and we're working on that. On the co-selling side, look, we're continuing to do the work with the field to drive that forward. Some people feel pretty good about it and we get really good feedback, and some people don't feel as good quite yet, and so we're working on both of those. Steven Guggenheimer: Now as you head into Q4 with an economic challenge around the world, everybody hunkers down a little bit, so we're going to have to work a little harder. One of my meetings later today is how do we stay focused on the right things and the fewest number of things to keep the momentum going as we head into this year and next? We're doing the planning for what would we tune for next year. Overall, it's going well. Steven Guggenheimer: The operations, a lot of the challenges we had, once you got past the people discomfort with a new program, a lot of challenges we had were operations. We're cleaning those up. We have some marketplace work to do. We've had good calls with that team. When people give us feedback, we understand it. We're doing the engineering work now. I sort of feel like we'll work our way through Q4 this year and then, as we head into the next year, we'll have both an engineering uptick on operations work, on the marketplace, on the back end. There's work going on on Partner Center because it's going to scale to more and more partners across the company. Steven Guggenheimer: I feel pretty good, not perfect. I always say these things are a journey and they take time, that's for sure, and so we'll- Steve Mordue: Yeah, yeah. It always takes longer than you think, right? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, yeah. I'm scarred enough to know that we still got another year of cranking away, but we're in a good spot given where we were. The energy's in a good place. We just got to keep focused and keep going. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Maybe there's a way to solve both those problems. I seem to recall, at least, the initial benefits that were being, "Here, in exchange for the rev share, we're going to give you guys these benefits." A lot of those benefits were targeting brand-new ISVs. A lot of the benefits on that list for an established ISV, they were like, "Oh, I don't need this. I don't need this. I don't need a bunch of these things as an established ISV." Those are all, certainly, high value to someone brand-new to the platform, which is something we all want is more ISVs. Maybe there's a way to tie in those IURs or the benefits back to, "Okay, you don't want a marketing thing? Fine. How about if we give you some credits that you could use towards the underlying platform stuff you might need that could be a little more value to those folks?" Steven Guggenheimer: That's some of the conversations we're having is which benefits are people finding value in? Where would they like to see other benefits? The IUR is a constant one, so that one I sort of table off on the side because it's a consistent. Steve Mordue: Yeah, yeah. Definitely, benefits will be different for someone brand new to the platform who's never done anything versus someone who's been there for a long time. Let me ask- Steven Guggenheimer: Right. This is one of the trade-offs when you go... A platform is only as strong as its ecosystem. To make the ecosystem stronger, you're going to add more people in, and so you're going to bring people in. Part of what you're trying to do is attract that. Not all of those things feel great for the people that have been there and been working on it. That's where a little bit of the tuning and being agile helps because you're adapting to... Look, the platforms are going to scale and grow. It's in a good spot, so there's going to be more people you know on it, and so we have to find that the tools that work for everyone. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Thanks to your little kick, I got a call next week with about a dozen people on the AppSource team, so they're going to get an earful of all my opinions so they can put that in the mixer. Steven Guggenheimer: No, I think it'll be good because look... and they know. To be honest with you, they know. We told them, "Look, it's better to hear directly. There's a couple of folks, we're having them talk to you. They're sending me the feedback," and then they can tell you where they're at and what they're doing and why it's taking a little longer than maybe people had hoped for. That's the beauty of doing it right and getting it fixed is... not the beauty, the reality. Steve Mordue: Necessity. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, the reality or the necessity. It's a little like rebooting this program. Steve Mordue: I want to wrap up here because I don't want to take up too much of your time. Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. Yeah, I got somebody- Steve Mordue: You recently announced a retirement. Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. Steve Mordue: Coming soon. Who's going to be stepping into your shoes for this ISV motion? Figured that out yet? Has that been just thought about? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. No, we're going to move the team into another part of the organization. It'll be close to the Accelerator Team, which used to report to me anyway, and the Industry Team and with one of our real good leaders and with DSI. It'll end up in a spot with Greg and Sean still running their teams aligned with the work going on for another key part of the ecosystems, which is SIs, and the industry work, which has a ton of ISV work. It's all the accelerators. Again, that team used to report into my org, so it'll feel like a pretty natural connection into places it would fit and the people we've worked with pretty closely all along. Steve Mordue: You're going to have every single one of these issues fixed, buttoned up, running like a well-oiled machine before you walk out the door, right? Steven Guggenheimer: I'm going to stay committed to doing the best job to make sure we're set up well for our next fiscal year to transitioning well and to being there. Then I'll be around for a little longer to make sure if there's questions or engagements that are needed to done that I do them. Steve Mordue: All right, cool. Well, I'm looking forward to everything that that comes. Thanks for making the time for the call. Steven Guggenheimer: No worries. I always enjoy a surprise call on whatever day it is. Days get lost nowadays, but- Steve Mordue: Yeah. I'll bet you enjoy them, right? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. Steve Mordue: All right, man. Have a good one. Steven Guggenheimer: All right. We'll talk you, Steve. Take care. Bye.

covid-19 god ai office microsoft team healthcare students mba product partners customers windows ip chat cfo saas crm dynamics btw assuming sis azure team members erp figured truthfully ndas satya mark smith sharepoint sku power bi dsi isv power platform m365 isvs mpn nick parker d365 appsource microsoft partner network iur guggs steve mordue

Steve has a third chat with Charles Lamanna

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 30, 2020 33:52

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.

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Episode 61: Here we go again with Licensing changes

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 8, 2019 48:20

Starting October 1st, 2019, Microsoft will be enforcing new licensing rules and offerings, and this new licensing model is completely new. Steve Mordue is back on the show to discuss the new licensing model. Whether you are implementing for a brand new Dynamics 365 customer, or you've been a customer for a while, this episode is a MUST LISTEN! Guest: Steve Mordue: www.stevemordue.com More info: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/powerapps-flow-licensing-faq

microsoft dynamics licensing steve mordue

Licensing updates with Steve Mordue

CRM Audio

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 24, 2019 41:29

This episode is brought to you by ClickLearn. Today Steve Mordue joins us to discuss the changes to Business Applications licensing announced last week at Microsoft Inspire. Topics in this episode: Licensing changes Goodbye plan licenses Attach license pricing for Dynamics 365 Forms pro vs VOC licensing Seeded PowerApps and Flow Per-app licensensing Licensing for the future of the platform Links: Mark Smith and Steve Mordue weekly Youtube live stream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va9_vEEtlSg

voc dynamics goodbye forms licensing attach business applications microsoft inspire steve mordue

Episode 55: Building your personal brand like an MVP

Microsoft Business Applications Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 16, 2019 61:10

One of the most effective ways to increase your impact in the community - and even become an MVP - is to build your brand. As MVPs we get to meet countless super talented professionals who have so much to offer to the community but whose voices and contributions go largely unnoticed since they lack a personal brand. So how do you stand out in the crowd? How do you build a reputation that draws people to learn from you? How do you build a personal brand when you operate under the shadow of your organization? These and more important questions are answered by four CRM MVPs who have built a personal brand over the years. Guests: George Doubinski: https://twitter.com/georgedude Steve Mordue: https://twitter.com/stevemordue Mark Smith: https://twitter.com/nz365guy

mvp mark smith building your personal brand steve mordue

Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2019: What to Look Forward To with Steve Mordue

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2019

Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2019: What to Look Forward To with Steve Mordue Full show notes available here: https://www.nz365guy.com/112

look forward look forward to microsoft business applications summit steve mordue

Power Platform Daily Brief: April 18, 2019

CRM Audio

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2019 5:00

This is the Power Platform Daily Brief for Thursday, April 18, 2019. This episode is brought to you by Mscrm-Addons.com. In today's update: Canvas apps debugging with results view shows you the results of your formulas: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/canvas-debugging-with-results-view/ Use new screen properties for responsive canvas apps: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-properties-for-responsive-canvas-apps/ Mary Jo Foley chats with Steve Mordue about Power Platform: https://www.petri.com/mjfchat-how-microsofts-power-platform-can-empower-citizen-developers D365UG Summit call for proposals has been extended: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/UGSummitNA2019 CRM Audio Live! Got any feedback or suggestions for other topics? Email voice@crm.audio.

canvas power platform daily brief mary jo foley steve mordue

CRM Audio 102: LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Brian Galicia

CRM Audio

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2018 58:33

In today's episode (brought to you by KingswaySoft), Brian Galicia from Microsoft joins Joel Lindstrom and Steve Mordue to talk about LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Discussed in this episode: The value of LInkedIn Sales Navigator Sales Navigator and Sales AI Who Knows Whom Individual vs team subscriptions for Sales Navigator Experience when sales reps leave your company Experience in Online vs On-Premise Experience in Dynamics vs competing CRM systems Leveraging Sales Navigator controls outside of the widget InMail and spam LinkedIn best practices This episode is a production of Dynamic Podcasts LLC. Subscribe to the CRM Audio network of podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Steve Mordue on the MVP Show

Microsoft Business Applications Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 17, 2018 27:38

Steve Mordue on the MVP Show Full Show Notes: https://www.nz365guy.com/36

steve mordue

Microsoft & Salesforce.com - The 800-Pound Gorilla vs. the Elephant in the Room

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 1, 2018 8:40

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

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Power Platform with Steve Mordue

CRM Rocks

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2018

Episode 68: Markus Erlandsson talks to Steve Mordue from Forceworks about the Microsoft Power Platform. Steve starts by explaining what the Power Platform is and how it includes the Common Data Service (CDS), PowerApps, Power BI and Flow. Steve continues how this change to the Power Platform will change the apps that we build for … Continue reading Power Platform with Steve Mordue

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Episode 32: Five CRM MVPs in a room

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2018 53:47

The conversation we started on Episode 31 with CRM MVPs Ulrik Carlsson, Chris Cognetta, and Steve Mordue continues now with Sean Tabor joining the party. These guys were visiting Atlanta for D365 Saturday so I invited them to the CRM MVP Podcast studio to talk all things Dynamics 365 and Microsoft MVP. Follow us: Ulrik: https://twitter.com/crmchartguy Chris: https://twitter.com/ccognetta Steve: https://twitter.com/stevemordue Gus: https://twitter.com/gusgonzalez2 Sean: https://twitter.com/crmhobbit Podcast: https://twitter.com/crmmvppodcast

dynamics mvps microsoft mvp ulrik steve mordue

Episode 31: Four CRM MVPs in a room

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2018 52:17

CRM MVPs Ulrik Carlsson, Chris Cognetta, and Steve Mordue were visiting Atlanta for D365 Saturday so I invited them to the CRM MVP Podcast studio to talk all things Dynamics 365 and Microsoft MVP. Follow us: Ulrik: https://twitter.com/crmchartguy Chris: https://twitter.com/ccognetta Steve: https://twitter.com/stevemordue Gus: https://twitter.com/gusgonzalez2 Podcast: https://twitter.com/crmmvppodcast

dynamics mvps microsoft mvp ulrik steve mordue

Episode 27: Analyzing the current Marketing Automation landscape, with Steve Mordue and Mike Dickerson

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2018 58:13

With the release of the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing App, I wanted to explore its capabilities and how it compares with ClickDimensions and the Adobe Marketing Cloud. I didn't want to tackle this topic by myself, so I invited someone who has spent a lot of time working with the new marketing app, fellow CRM MVP Steve Mordue. I also wanted to explore how the new app compares with well-established marketing automation solutions for Dynamics 365, so I invited Mike Dickerson who is the CEO at ClickDimensions to explore not only the differences but also to understand how ClickDimensions feels about the new app, and Microsoft's partnership with Adobe. One final note regarding this episode: we had some technical issues with the solution we typically use to record our podcast episodes, so we had to switch to Plan B, and this is why this episode sounds more like a conference call rather than the crystal-clear sound you are accustomed to on this podcast. I apologize for the inconvenience. Connect with us: Steve Mordue: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemordue/ Mike Dickerson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdickerson/ Gus Gonzalez: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ggonzalez2/ Follow us: Steve Mordue: https://twitter.com/stevemordue Mike Dickerson: https://twitter.com/MikeWDickerson Gus Gonzalez: https://twitter.com/GusGonzalez2

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Episode 23: So you want to be an Independent Consultant?