#52 The Episode we talk about the Microsoft Power Automate Platform....Gartner...and Low-Code

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. My name is Sascha Kottura and I'm here with the other Automation Guy, Arno. Hello, Arno.

Hi, Sascha.

So, Arno, in the recent weeks we have been asked, I guess a lot, isn't it, of times how we see the strong push and the success from Microsoft in the low-code space. And yeah, that's why we thought it would be great to talk about the, the Microsoft Power Platform, the Power Apps, the Power Automate, all the different terms associated with the Power Platform. And I think it was around the end of last year when Gartner published their report called Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms. So one, one of those reports everyone is looking out for in that space. And there are lots of reports from Forrester and Gartner and a few other analyst firms. So this is a very big ones. So when Gartner says they are the leaders, everyone is looking at it, isn't it? And as one of the leaders, yeah, Microsoft is now on there with its low-code Power Apps service offering. And yeah, and over the years, so they climbed up more higher and higher and higher coming through. And now they are here at the leader's quadrant next to OutSystems. Maybe you heard about Mendix. Salesforce is a very big one there, and ServiceNow, and some other really well-known names now in the challengers. Probably they would have seen themselves more on the leaders part. Yeah, is Zapier, Pega, Oracle, and then, yeah, so then a few other vendors, they're just on the sort of niche player part of the quadrant. It's Kintone, NewGen, Quickbase and Creatio. Quickbase actually is making a good push in the market at the moment. Um, yeah, but, uh, yeah, Microsoft there is a leader. And, um, yeah, so this is why we have that episode here today as well. And yeah, throughout that report, Gartner also predicted, um, that by 2025, 70% of new applications, um, developed within larger companies and enterprises will be sort of low-code and with no-code technologies. And that's a huge increase from 2020, where it was just 25%. So that's a big increase and driven by lots of things we have seen over the last 24 months. And yeah, we have covered, covered that, that low-code, no-code technologies and the trends here on the podcast several, several times. So yeah, feel free to, to jump to, to other episodes we have recorded. And yeah, because there is a huge increase in that topic, and we have decided to, to look at that Power Platform specifically, and we'll cover sort of the benefits of the platform. And of course, we also will share a few examples and why that is a good platform to use. So Arno, let's tell the listeners what the Microsoft Power Platform is.

Yes, thank you, Sacha. So that was a really interesting intro there with the Gartner report and the leaders. And it's fairly obvious that Microsoft is sort of creeping towards that top spot. A lot of people are asking us, what is the Power Platform and what can you do with it? And in a nutshell, the Power Platform is just a set of low and no-code tools with inside Microsoft 365 that you can create business applications with. So the, the whole Power Platform might be a fairly new concept But the components that makes it up is, is, is not new, you know, and, and I'll summarize these components for you. So Power Apps is one. So Power Apps is something that you can build custom applications very quickly and easily using no or low code. You know, you could bring data in from different data sources like SharePoint, Excel, Oracle database, a sort of an API, and surface that in these easy to create apps that citizen developers— so these are people that's kind of business people that's very good at Excel and they're very good with their data— they can sort of create these productivity apps within Power Apps, you know, without prior knowledge of technical coding or how to build custom applications or perhaps integration with other systems. So these apps are very easy to assemble within Power Apps. It's all within the Microsoft 365 environment. So it's very easy to get started. There's not a very, you know, high barrier of entry in terms of getting these apps developed. So the apps is a key component. And then also we've got something called Power BI. So Power BI is a tool that allows you to visualize and analyze your data. And that gives you very good insights very quickly to make informed decisions. And, you know, you can then use those, you know, information that these Power BI reports provide you and apply changes inside your business. So you might have a Power App that harvests some data, you might have some Power BI reports that give you some information based on the data, you might actually integrate that with various other systems. So you've got this user interface bit, you've got this reporting bit, but then you also have this automation bit. So Power Automate is a very easy way to automate and integrate, you know, business processes. So you can look at a business process and, you know, it might be an approval, and within Power Automate you can actually implement an approval process that assigns tasks to various people. Now, when you leverage Power Automate, it allows you to turn very time-consuming tasks into fast automated workflows. And that obviously frees up resources that can concentrate on your core business. So Power Automate's really a powerful thing, as the name suggests, and it does increase productivity within such a company because it obviously provides you the ability for automations, right? So again, we've covered the user interface bit. We can create these nice apps, connected to your data. We looked at this Power BI bit, which is the reporting, and we've brought in the, the process automation. And the final component within the Power Platform is the virtual agents. Now these are chatbots essentially, where you can create very sophisticated chatbots, and you can do this without the help of any developers or without any knowledge of complicated coding. So again, with this platform, you can create really rich business applications, you know, that you drive productivity and you solve sort of day-to-day problems that you would have done, you know, otherwise by creating a spreadsheet and emailing that to colleagues for approval. So very popular, you know, obviously Microsoft is pushing the Power Platform really hard. It's very easily accessible and it is a valid contender within that sort of Gartner leadership board.

And especially when we talk about the enterprise low-code side of it, lots of companies, larger organizations, enterprises have some form of sort of free version of that already available. So there's some really big big license agreements which make that sort of available to anyone who wants to try it out without sort of incurring immediate cost maybe. So this is why it gets as well so much traction at the moment, because pretty much every enterprise is running on Microsoft, right? Yeah. And yeah, and as well was this genius move to bring the of the Power Automate onto every Windows 11 machine. So just sort of more the attended RPA functionality, bringing that onto a Windows machine. Yeah, that's great. So this is why everyone is talking about it. And yeah, and the reasons why we're doing this, of course, or why businesses are doing it, are quite clear. SBS, we talk about low-code and no-code opportunities here on the podcast a lot. Yeah, the big, the big reason is companies do not have sort of IT staff or lots of staff available to actually get to the normal traditional development, isn't it? So, and there are so many ideas out there. So with the Power Platform, for example, yeah, you can, you can give your employees the opportunity to actually create these applications, even chatbots. Integrations, even AI capabilities in that Power Platform. We talked about this here as well on the podcast. So you make that available for employees without being sort of a proper high-code developer or pro developer. Yeah, usually those things will be very scary for normal business people to do. So now with that capability of the platform, they are now able to build their own solutions with very little technical knowledge. That's one of the very big benefits. Generally, that's true not just for the Power Platform, for low-code. Whatever platform you might use. This is one big benefit using the platform.

Yeah. Another good benefit or big benefit is mobile accessibility. All these tools with inside the Power Platform. You can download a mobile phone app or an app to your tablet, and all of these apps can be optimized for these different types of screens. So, you know, people can use these apps and visit your dashboards and read these reports from any device. So, you know, the Power Platform, it can be as simple as it needs to, but they always say it provides power when you need it. So if you want to do more complicated things, for example, the power is there. You know, you can go very deep and you can create very sophisticated applications.

Yeah, I think that's— so recently we had as well sort of offline capabilities and the sort of workforces doing audits. So yeah, this is something which is also possible once an application is built. Downloading it on the tablet or mobile. Yeah, it's great. Okay, so the next huge benefit is of course automation of business processes. So having processes from manual on paper and suddenly have them digital, that's great. But I think the next big thing is really sort of the automation. And the majority of these repetitive and mundane, time-wasting kind of tasks. So automation of that is very, very much in focus. And we, we of course had sort of the last 24 months where we had to deal with a very difficult situation and was working from home and all that stuff. So automation became more, more of a focus topic, and that, that of course continues. We all want to get more done with sort of less of resources, want to be more efficient. So to increase sort of general productivity with that Power Platform, business have the opportunity to really automate that sort of work process, the sort of end-to-end process. And yeah, orchestrates basically lots of things. Yeah, it's part of the whole process. And yeah, it's a big driver for digital transformation in your business.

Yeah, and you talk a bit about, you know, the last sort of year and a half, two years, coming up for two years, and people needing more flexible working environments and flexible working opportunities. And I think one of the things that, you know, low-code platforms and, you know, the Power Platform included in that provides is this high degree of flexibility for employees to build these bespoke solutions to meet their productivity requirements. Again, with the Power Platform, that's all integrated with Microsoft Teams, for example. You can publish your apps to Teams. That just allows your employees and members of your team to improve their business processes and be more efficient by creating these seamless working experiences. So again, our platform is really ideal tool for, you know, turning your business into a sort of a modern working, a flexible workplace. And, you know, I think in, like I said, in the last 2 years, we've become so used to Teams. There's so many, you know, collaboration around Teams. So that's a perfect place to put your applications for new intake of work or to start the process when somebody actually sends a message or upload a document. So it's a really, really good catalyst for that sort of creating those flexible working scenarios.

Yeah, this is really, really great. I think a great advantage for the Power Platform and maybe another reason why it becomes so popular. All businesses already running on Microsoft technologies, and it is Outlook, Word, SharePoint, all these things were already or are very very much in place for companies. And now with the Power Platform on top of it, or underneath, how you want to describe it, so you have the power of process automation and all that stuff suddenly just connects it all up, isn't it? So it's just very, very powerful, I think, because it's already there. Everything is on the Microsoft 365 platform and security is already taken care of and all that stuff. So this is, this is why it works so beautifully.

Yeah, yeah. And of course, if you have the need for ERP system, because of course a lot of these low-code and no-code applications can exist in a silo. And, but of course, with the Microsoft offering, you can actually subscribe to their Dynamics ERP system, which is, you know, Dynamics 365. So in a way, that's your line of business system, that's your single source of truth, and, you know, that's the place where you have your orders and your contacts and, you know, all of the, all of the various sort of ERP assets that you need. So you could build Power Automate solutions or Power Apps against that as well. So it really provides a powerful sort of mix of we've got our source of truth, but we are opening up, you know, the opportunity for people in the business to actually develop their apps against that ERP system. And of course, Microsoft Dynamics is built on top of a Power App as well, and it uses flows. And so all of that is you know, integrated. Your data's in the Dataverse, so it's all very, very tightly integrated with your Microsoft 365 tenant. And I think that is part of the reason why Microsoft is moving into that leadership space. Easy to get started, power when you need it, easy subscription models, and, you know, obviously big scalability opportunities.

Just mentioned Dataverse, probably that's, that's one, one topic we can cover in one, one episode at some point. I think everything Metaverse, Dataverse, it's, it's all very become, it's all becoming very popular, those kind of terms. So we will have an episode just about that. Yeah, you mentioned data, data sources, and of course within the business, large, small, too large, and enterprises generate crazy amount of data these days. And having that within the platform and the Microsoft 365 sort of Dataverse, and then you can access that data and really gain sort of valuable insights. So we looked at, or Arno mentioned, the Power BI tool as part of the Power Platform. So was that you can look at that data, you slice and dice and predict and bring AI in it and that kind of stuff. So that, that will help businesses to, to get all the insights they need and to keep improving. I think that's, that's very important so that the business are continuously improving. And was, was that, that tool Power BI businesses are enabled to do that.

Yeah. Yes, I hope that's very insightful for our listeners. We do get a lot of questions about Power Platform. I think it was about time to sort of just touch on it again, specifically off the back of the Gartner report. So I'm pretty sure we will keep that in the topic list. In 2022 to continue to talk about that. And, you know, just to bring to our listeners, you know, some of the developments within that space. It is definitely very interesting what Microsoft's doing. And, you know, we are seeing a lot of sort of businesses leveraging, you know, the Power Platform to get started with automation and to scale as well with Insight there. I guess their digital transformation journey.

Yeah, and of course platforms like the Power Platform and like many other local platforms sort of have that citizen developer or the non-high-code developer in mind. But generally from our experience, they are the best of those implementations done with a bit of guidance and support and that kind of stuff. So if you feel you like to get a bit more sort of specialist insights more than just what you hear on the podcast. So please reach out to Arno, myself, by email or on our social channels, Instagram, LinkedIn, and then of course we are very happy to help you. And yeah, so that's it again for another episode of the Automation Guys podcast. It's not called the Automation Guys podcast actually, it's called the Process and Automation Podcast. So, but we are the Automation Guys. Thanks for listening and yeah, looking forward to welcome you soon again. And until then, let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process in Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time. And until then, let's automate.