Steve reads his Blog

Dynamics 365 - Dead is a Strong Word

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

Power Platform - The Uncommon Data Service

Fresh from a week of "drinking from the firehose" at the Microsoft MVP Summit, several things became quite apparent to me. MVPs like to drink, and the Common Data Service, is anything but "Common". It will continue... indefinitely It seems that whenever Microsoft announces a "new" way to do something, they are hesitant to say the the "old" way will be eliminated. "We have no plans to deprecate the old way in the foreseeable future". In reality, they can't wait to pull the plug on a whole slew of inefficient, or misaligned things; but they can't grab their customers' legs and swing them back and forth like rag-dolls either. Or can they? One Version? It's no secret that Microsoft is the final stages of snapping all online customers onto a single version of the product. With rare exception, most of us are already there, whether you knew that or not. This is the best place for Microsoft to have us, and for 99.9% of us, it is the best place for us to be. Why is that not as scary as it sounds to people who are slow movers? Because the old things, that have been replaced by new things, are still there. When will they be removed? ITFOT It can't remember exactly how long ago it was, that I heard Ryan Cunningham say in response to a question from an audience, that something will happen "In the Fullness of Time". I can distinctly remember trying to deconstruct that phrase; was it a month, year, decade? It was such a brilliant response, I adopted it for use with my wife and kids. When my wife asked when we could get a puppy, I replied "In the Fullness of Time", with a wry smile. Turns out, it equals exactly three days. Chunks of Fullness One of the awesome things about being an MVP, that I share with my fellow MVPs, is the ability to see into the future... in chunks. The fuzziest chunk is the 2-5 years out chunk. As MVPs, there is an expectation that we are all smart enough to "get it", so of course we all nod knowingly as we are being exposed to the distant future state. In reality, our brains are all scrambling between excited and terrified as we try to wrap our heads around things we never thought about. I'm pretty sure the team knows this, as there seems to be the occasional unnecessarily long pause for effect. I did take a look around the room for a two-way mirror that the team might be cracking up behind, but did not see one. It is reassuring as a partner, to know that the team is thinking that far out, but in today's world... 2 years is a long damn time. The Aw-Yay Chunks The upcoming release vs. the one after that. Let's face it, at any point of time, there is an upcoming release. As soon as it lands, the next release is now the "upcoming" release.. every six months. As a partner, your highest focus is always on the upcoming release. As a partner you are, or should be, in a continuous state of preparation. If you are not, you will be replaced by one who is... it seems Darwin was correct. As we are being presented with things that will be in the upcoming release, vs. what got pushed to the next one, it is an odd mix of "Awws" and "Yays". Since the release notes are now released 90 days before the release, there is a 3 month window for surprises. The best surprise is that stretch goal, that was not listed in the notes, that suddenly appears. Of course there is also that occasional listed item that lands, but not exactly as we had hoped. Yet, all clearly within the doctrine of ITFOT. Preparation Test The most critical chunk, is actually the present, which, not that long ago was a future chunk also. But now that chunk has landed. If it was a new "way", then it landed next to the historical "way" chunk... if it was a new "thing", it landed by itself. Even though we may have known it was coming, and had time to test, play and prepare for it, often we are still caught unaware... like we forgot. It's like sobering up real fast, when the blue lights flash behind you, when your customer asks, "Hey, what's this new button do?". No More Rag Dolls I wrote a ISV focused post a while back on Ryan's Five Things. This was based on a response from the Business Applications Chief Traffic cop, Ryan Jones when asked about what ISVs should focus on. Turns out it was from his own playbook for how Microsoft is running the Platform today. Ryan and his team may be the most important cog in the entire Business Applications team. Their job is not coming up with the newest whiz-bang feature, rather their job is making sure it will work efficiently, and reliably for end customers once it launches. I get the feeling that Ryan says "No"... a lot. This was not the case in the not too distant past. Less than two years ago I wrote about what seemed like a strategy of punching customers in the face... a strategy Ryan has clearly obliterated. Common Data Service Okay, so I know I veered off of the topic quite a bit, and I don't want to be accused of link-baiting. So this Common Data Service thing... yeah, it's pretty big. I will unpack it in a future post, but now I need to prepare for another week of firehose drinking at the Partner Advisory Council meetings... then can I go home?

Power Platform - The Developer’s Dilemma

As I have been exploring the Power Platform, I continue to make new discoveries every day. I am not a developer, but I have developers on my team. Lately, I am noticing that we are pulling them into projects much less often than in the recent past. I wonder what the future-state of this will be... Power Platform We are in that fuzzy time, between something "new and significant" being launched, and the world understanding what it is, and what it means. Many customers are still saying things like, "I don't want this new Power Platform, I want Dynamics 365". Of course, Dynamics 365 runs on top of this "new" Power Platform. While confusion remains, I have covered this in other posts, so the "confused" obviously have not read them. For this post, I am more interested in the Developer's Dilemma. What is a Citizen? Lately, Microsoft has been using the term "Citizen Developer"... a lot. To listen, you would think that any boob could build an enterprise grade application in an hour. That may be the case in the future, but we are not quite there yet. However, we are at a point where a technically inclined, non-developer, who understands their business, can indeed get quite far, all the while thinking that C# is either a musical note, or some kind of cheese. So what is the current, and future role of that hard-core developer in this equation? Deep Water Even though more apps are now being built by non-developers, most of them will hit some deep water at some point. That deep water is about a mile further out than it was just two years ago, but eventually they will reach it and either settle, or engage a developer to help paddle through it. But they got a mile further before having to do so! That's a mile of work that previously would have kept a developer busy... and the deep water line continues to move out. The End of C#? Not anytime soon, but I can see the need for advanced C# developers fading over time. On most partners' benches, these are among the highest paid resources. It is because of this, that the off-shore industry was born. But as the need diminishes, and the opportunities become scarcer, rates will come down, and never go back up again. This spells long term trouble for both on-shore and off-shore companies focused on deep development. Automated Code I was chatting with my good friend and fellow MVP, Mark Smith (aka @nz365guy) the other day. Mark has been around development for decades. He suggested that all code is logical. At the end of the day, all code results in 1s and 0s. It's not emotional, it's not creative. Mark feels that in the not-too-distant future, code will be written by AI. I can't come up with a single reason to disagree. What replaces C# Skills? So, if the world continues to grow... a given, and platforms like the Power Platform continue to evolve in the direction they are... another given, what skills will be needed? Whenever I have looked at complex things built by coders, one thing always stands out to me: it's some ugly shit. In a world where UI/UX trumps functionality, the world that we have been living in for some time now, it seems the future needs are clear. Business Analysts and Front-end Developers will be the coveted skills. BTW, Mark is with me on that one. Javascript, HTML and CSS The tools of the Front-end developer trade, are currently the tools that will become even higher in demand than they are today. I'm not saying that we won't need that occasional bit of complex code to accomplish some thing, but that box keeps shrinking. Far more important to me, and customers, is the UI/UX we engage with. We don't really care, or appreciate, what goes on behind it. Just like everything else, UI/UX tools will continue to evolve also, and at some point that skill set may be in jeopardy also. Rise of the BA If you abstract out the developers, both front-end and back-end, what is left is the business logic and process. I have always found developers to be lousy analysts, they work with the other side of the brain. But those people who are able to dissect a business, really imagine all of the components of it floating in the air, see how they connect, see where they fail and can improve, from the front all the way to the back... they will be the kings. And they won't need to know a lick of code. Of course the Business Analysts I have known, are not UI/UX capable, they take more of an "I'll know it when I see it" approach, rather than a "Here's what it should look like". Couple a good analyst, with a good front-end developer, and you can rule the world Who sees this? Microsoft sees it.  So do the other major players, but Microsoft has a unique set of assets to actually seize upon this. The "Power Platform" is the tool-set that is rapidly evolving to fulfill this exact scenario. I don't know if Microsoft actually coined the term "Citizen Developer", but they have taken ownership of it, just like they did with "Cloud", which contrary to what you might hear, Microsoft did not invent. But unlike Cloud, this time they are not late to the party... they are right on time.

Steve Chats with Steven (Guggs) Guggenheimer

In this episode of “Steve has a Chat“, I called Steven (Guggs) Guggenheimer, who was not surprised that I had the Record Button on when he answered. "Guggs" is the Corporate Vice President - AI & ISV Engagement at Microsoft. Among other things, he is responsible for engaging with Customers on AI, as well as assisting Partners with ISV Motions focused on Microsoft Business Applications. We chatted about a bunch of stuff, including the fact that I can't do calendar based math, the AI Landscape and Partner Opportunities in it, as well as ISV plans and a lot of other things. Enjoy! People Referenced in the episode: Satya NadellaJames PhillipsCharlotte Yarkoni Links Referenced in the episode: Nadella on the Power Platform April '19 Release Notes

Steve Chats with Alysa Taylor

Steve Chats with Gavriella Schuster

Microsoft Business Applications - Breaking Down the Landscape

Dynamics 365 vs. Salesforce - The Debate Rages on

Power Platform - Ryan’s Five Things

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

Dynamics 365 - A Single ERP Solution?

Let me caveat this post with a couple of things; first, I am not an ERP partner, so I don't actually have a dog in this fight at the moment. Also, none of the following came from anybody at Microsoft, it is purely out of my own head and my opinions from my reading of the tea leaves as I see them. I am also sure I will piss a few people off, but that has not stopped me before. The Emperor's New Clothes In this fable, the Emperor is convinced that his new invisible clothes are "awesome", and as he walks naked around his kingdom, no one dares say otherwise. It reminds me of when I hear Microsoft attempt to calm the fears of GP partners today, by telling them that their platform is not a target for elimination. I'm not sure if the SL partners are even hearing anything. Da Cloud Over the last month Microsoft has been trading places with Apple as the world's most valuable company. The difference is Apple's growth rate is declining, where Microsoft's is increasing, so it won't be long before they "own" that spot. The way they got there was with the Cloud, starting with Office 365 eventually overtaking every other productivity application on the planet. Right on it's heels was Azure, from nowhere to neck and neck with Amazon as the largest cloud infrastructure provider on the planet. Next is Business Applications and the Power Platform. Given the success Microsoft has seen with cloud, do you really think they are going to continue to invest in, and support on-premise technologies for long? Hybrid The Hybrid story feels like making lemonade out of lemons. The fact that Microsoft can support you both on-premise and in the cloud is an advantage today, only because of laggards that have not moved to cloud yet. For some, it is a good story today, but that story will not be needed for too much longer. One of Microsoft's biggest on-going motions, is moving their on-premise customers to their cloud, once they have enough of them over there, the Hybrid story will fade away. The Tell In Poker, a "Tell" is something that a player does unconsciously, that an astute opponent can spot, that telegraphs their position. Back at the Directions NA conference in Orlando in September of 2017, Marko Perisic stunned the audience by saying something along the lines of "Tenerife" will become a white-label only solution. Again, with no dog in the fight, I wrote about it at the time, which started a shit storm. It was later that I learned that this concept was also being floated at Inner Circle, an NDA environment, at the same time Marko was speaking, at a public event. I don't know this for a fact, but I think Marko saw the writing on the wall and spoke out of turn, intentionally to rally the NAV troops.  What was the writing he saw? I think he saw Phillips looking at all of these ERPs and thinking out loud, "why do we need all of these?" Shortly after, Microsoft walked all of this back, which I wrote about here. It seems Marko was at least temporarily successful in thwarting this idea. Marko Go Bye Bye Marko recently announced that he is leaving Microsoft. Again, I have no knowledge, but I am guessing he was asked to leave. Tenerife, now Business Central, the cloud version of NAV, was brought under Muhammad Alam, the PM for F&O, the cloud version of AX. This is interesting. While for small or large customers there was clear distinction between the platforms, for customers of a certain size in the middle, Business Central and F&O competed. They both now fall under one leader... CDS & Codebases CDS 1 gave way to CDS 2, which was the existing XrM platform that sat underneath Dynamics Customer Engagement. Smart move, one less database to deal with. Since that move, CDS has sprouted many more branches: canvas apps, connectors, flow, platform licensing, industry accelerators and the list continues to grow. I think it is clear that CDS is a big bet for Microsoft, and the biggest so far for the Business Applications Group. Most of this is a common codebase, as well as common data model riding atop a common database. But then here we got these two ERPs, each with their own codebases and schemas, that want/need to jump on CDS, in a "real" way. Imagine a Common Database Schema under both your CRM and your ERP? I would call that a Power Platform! But we're not quite there yet. For the time being we have some hacky "connectors/integrators". Meat on the Bone Getting an ERP stood up fully, and directly on CDS is going to be a significant undertaking. Is Microsoft really going to do that twice, once for F&O and again for BC? Remember Phillips' first reaction when he walked in the door, "Why do we need more than one ERP?" Maybe we don't. Steve's Talking out of his Ass again I got a lot of heat from NAV partners the last time I even suggested this. I get it, you built an entire practice around the product, and you have a bunch of happy customers, and it generates a bunch of revenue. The same can be said for GP, and I think you have to thank Marko's herculean efforts for NAV not following GP towards the path to exit. But the product champion has left the building. I had also heard that F&O would never work for anything but the largest enterprise customers, which I think was a hope more than a reality. We proved with RapidStart that a small customer could be successful with an Enterprise focused app on the Customer Engagement side, so I am sure it could be accomplished similarly with F&O. Why F&O instead of BC? I could be wrong, but I sense that F&O has a shorter path to standing up on CDS than BC does, and could ultimately handle a broader range of customer segments. If in fact BC has a shorter path, then maybe this flips, but still... only one needs to go down that path. The codebases will continue to be different but the data will reside directly in CDS with a Common Data Model. Is this Project Green again? To be honest, I don't really know what "Project Green" was all about. The best I can tell, it was an effort to merge several products into one. So to those of you who think I am tossing out a new scary idea, clearly this idea has been around since long before myself, or Phillips were involved with Dynamics. I don't now if the Project Green effort actually failed, or just failed to launch, but clearly as far back as 2003 Microsoft was questioning the need for multiple ERP solutions. White Label? The white label idea, that was proposed in 2017, was not a bad option for attempting to keep the partner and customer base, while pulling NAV out of the mainstream D365 effort. NAV Partners did not agree, and blew up the phones over their potential loss of the D365 brand. With Marko leading the pitchfork wielding base, James clearly decided to save that fight for another day. Is that day coming soon? Focus The huge opportunity still exists for an end-to-end, fully connected enterprise solution, that spans Customer Engagement and a single ERP, all of which is extendable by citizen developers using the Power Platform. No other vendor has grabbed that brass ring yet, and Microsoft is reaching for it. How does more than one ERP solution make that easier to get to? It doesn't. Back in 2017, there were still a lot of things to sort out with CDS. Today, most of that is sorted, and I expect to see Microsoft focus hard and put the pedal to the metal on it. The last time I wrote about this, a bunch of NAV partners said things like, "You suck, you're wrong, I'm unfollowing you". They were at least temporarily right!