I’m in my mid-fifties, and I have spent half my adult life working as a Microsoft full-time employee. It would be easy to assume that I would grow skeptical of the company after spending decades working there. I freely admit that when I left Microsoft in 2008, I was skeptical. The company was filled with in-fighting, politics reigned supreme over everything, and all our energies were devoted to protecting the Windows and Office monopolies. Real tech innovation seemed to be at an all-time low. Since Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft’s CEO in 2014, I have found my skepticism has disappeared. It took a couple of years, but I love what Satya and his team are doing to make Microsoft relevant again. I love that he came into the job and remade the company into a cloud-first organization. Satya made partnerships with Adobe, Apple, Java, and other previous long-time adversaries. He removed ego from the executive offices and showed he was willing to work with anyone and everyone to promote responsible technology worldwide. When I left Microsoft, I sold all my stock, so I am speaking as a fanboy rather than an investor; but it is safe to say that if I were an investor, I would be thrilled the stock has risen from $22.45 per share to $241.46 per share in the last 12 years.  

So what’s so cool that we need to keep an eye on?

What is an example of Microsoft making major innovations again? Microsoft has restructured all their analytics and automation solutions under the Dynamics corporate umbrella. Dynamics executive product teams will call the shots, which means that the Accounting, ERP, and CRM solutions will now be joined by Power Platform, a unified set of analytics and business processing products. The days of InfoPath and SharePoint Designer are gone, freeing companies to build business solutions on many platforms.

Microsoft Power Platform includes four major products:

1. Power BI for data analytics
2. PowerApps, a universal form designer, used to collect and process the information on any device.
3. Power Automate, which can string business process logic together with PowerApps to create unique solutions.
4. And lastly, AI Bot Automation integrates Microsoft cloud AI services into chatbots, applications, and solutions.

 

Here are the main advantages I see for customers:

• These tools are designed with no-code / low-code in mind. Most solutions can be built with simple drag and drop objects, allowing business decision-makers to directly develop their own solutions.
• Microsoft has spent a lot of time creating great data connectors to all the major and minor database products out there. Any custom solutions should easily connect to any data within any organization.
• Microsoft has added the Common Data Source, a modified database that holds your data using a universal naming convention that industry partners have standardized. Like PowerQuery before it, this provides a temporary storage method that allows users to transform their imported data without worrying about modifying the central database’s underlining data. All Power Platform apps can access and utilize data in the Common Data Source.
• Power Apps and Power Automate provide a business solutions engine that can be incorporated into Microsoft’s other Dynamics packages. Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), ERP, and the various accounting packages can now all automate their interactions easily using Power Platform.
• Microsoft announced PowerApps is now integrated into Microsoft TEAMS. This gives TEAMS extensive functionality it did not have previously. Users can build business solutions in Power Platform, and have them run inside of their TEAMS sites.
• Finally, Microsoft has begun talking about a previously unannounced Process Mining program that they are working on, which will likely also be a part of the Dynamics product family. No word on when that product will come to market, but it will provide an additional tool to help map out operations and analyze data looking for waste and roadblocks.

On this last point, TechStar has been partnering with Abio, a company that has created an amazing process mining program called VIVE built natively on the Microsoft technology stack. It can integrate directly with almost all of your other Microsoft products. Unfortunately, it may be a while before we see a process mining solution from Microsoft, and even then, it will be version 1. In the meantime, you can check out our process mining webinar, where we will demo the VIVE product.

For our latest webinars on TEAMS, Power BI and many others, go to http://dev.techstargroup.com/events

Register for one of our Webinars.