Steve reads his Blog

Walking the Talk

I usually avoid discussing my products or services on the blog, people seem to get annoyed. But I was having a chat with an ISV the other day, who said he had found me via this blog. He asked me how much of my ISV opinions were "theoretical", and did I actually have any ISV solutions. So if you don't want to hear about my stuff, stop reading or listening now. AppSource As many of you know, I have had a love/hate relationship with Microsoft's AppSource. Apparently I must be a masochist, because I have still not given up... on the potential anyway. Anyone else would have, and many others have, given up, but I keep falling for the rhetoric. I am in frequent contact with the team behind it, and I keep pushing as hard as I can for improvement. At this point, I pre-date any of the current team's involvement with AppSource, since I was involved with it before it even launched a few years ago. Maybe that's why I just can't let it go, I have way too much invested. I still get excited when the revolving door spins and a new leader takes over, hoping I can accomplish some incremental change, before the door spins again, and the conversation starts back at square one. The Promise AppSource is more than just Power Platform and Dynamics 365 related. It has a few other doors for Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) apps, and Azure apps. But the impetus for the Business Applications door was frankly Salesforce's AppExchange. Basically Salesforce was kicking Microsoft's ass by leading with ISV solutions making their product look highly specific to industry customers. This was not new, this has been a Salesforce strategy for a long time. I can remember sitting through many demos, that included a lot of third-party I.P., where it was not clear where Salesforce stopped and the third-party began. But it didn't matter to customers, all they saw was a targeted, relevant solution. In the meantime, the Microsoft seller in the following demo showed the generic CRM solution, and talked about the ability to customize. Game, Set, Match to Salesforce. This was not lost on James Phillips, leader of the Business Applications Group for Microsoft. It's a Freaking Store The internet is full of online marketplaces, for all kinds of things. AppExchange of course, but also Amazon, Target, etc., almost everybody has an online marketplace these days. The online marketplace technology road is well-traveled at this point, the focus is now on UI, customer conversations, cross-sell, upsell, etc. For some reason, Microsoft decided to re-invent the wheel and ignore well established norms. AppSource is an example of a poor user experience, with no excuse for it. In spite of the obvious importance, and huge competitive advantage that Salesforce made out of their Marketplace, Microsoft has just not put in the effort. Why? I have no clue, but the revolving door has not helped. Still today, I do not see the level of commitment that I think there should be, not just with AppSource, but with ISV in general. But I can't help but continue to believe that eventually, someone will have the full brightness of the lightbulb go off over their head and become the hero to all. In the meantime... In spite of a clear lack of light at the end of the tunnel, I have pressed onward. It may well prove in hindsight some day soon, that it was a complete waste of energy, but for now I am cursed to be an eternal optimist. So we have doubled down on AppSource. Our RapidStartCRM App was one of the very first apps in AppSource. I would love to say that it was based on the success of that AppSource effort, that I was compelled to create more, but that would be disingenuous (fancy word for "Big Fat Lie"). If pressed for a reason to continue, I would say that I still feel there are unmet needs out there for I.P., regardless of AppSource. I still feel compelled to build I.P., even if the success of that hinges on everything other than AppSource. At this point, we'll also put it in AppSource, with zero expectations, but why not. Our Apps We currently have five apps in AppSource, all under our "RapidStart" app brand. These were all built by my team at Forceworks Global. Four of these are horizontal, targeting the concept that Dynamics 365 is simply more complicated than it needs to be, and always has been. It's no wonder the adoption of any CRM solutions is so low. We launched our first application, the Original RapidStartCRM in 2015, targeting SMB who was struggling mightily with the first party applications. Our churn rate was near zero, so we knew we were onto something. Microsoft noticed also and made a couple of moves in our direction. The first effort was "Business Edition" targeting SMB. I was annoyed, but not for long. Microsoft's appetite for SMB comes and goes, and it went out the door before Business Edition even launched. There was one survivor of that effort however, Dynamics 365 Marketing, which was originally going to be an SMB solution. More recently Microsoft took another stab at SMB with "Sales Professional", an effort that is still ongoing. Again, I was annoyed, particularly when they would ask me for feedback on their SMB app. But again, since Microsoft does not understand the SMB customer, they built a complicated SMB app. Their SMB appetite will wane again soon, as it does perennially. One of my favorite opportunities, is when a vertical customer wants us to customize our simple horizontal application. This was what led to our first vertical version: "RapidStartCRM for Homebuilders". The key challenge to building vertical industry applications, is being able to get the domain knowledge of that vertical. It's even better when you can obtain the domain knowledge, while being paid to apply it to your I.P.. Last year we recast our apps as "Accelerators". The idea that any app is going to work perfectly for any business out-of-the-box, is not realistic. In almost every case there was a "customizations" effort, sometimes small, other times quite large. I wanted to make sure that customers understood that our app meeting their needs exactly without any effort, was not realistic, so "Accelerator" seemed a better characterization. We have three other apps. RapidStartCRM Referral, is our app for referral model businesses, which are different than businesses who sell products or services. The three apps I mentioned so far are really offered as standalone applications. We also built two applications intended to be Addons to either our applications, or any other applications built on the Common Data Service. Our How2 by RapidStart is a simple application that we offer at no cost, that basically brings your internal video training content into whatever Model Driven Application you might be using. Lastly, we built RapidStart Project, after having deployed PSA enough times to know that for most customers' needs, it too is a monster. We have four more applications in our development pipeline, that I will talk about after we launch them. Consulting Services Offers Another facet of AppSource is being able to create Consulting Services Offers. Again, I was engaged with the team long before that concept launched, and we had one of the first consulting offers in the marketplace. This has also failed to meet expectations from a marketplace, and we have tried multiple types of offers and strategies. As of this writing, we have a total of eight consulting offers, both free and paid. So far the only ones that seem to generate any interest are, of course, the free ones. I would be very interested to hear of any partner who offered a paid consulting offer that a customer took them up on via AppSource. I can't decide of this is a doomed motion or not, because again, AppSource sucks at getting the right message in front of the right customer. Not wanting to rely on AppSource, we have our paid offers on our website also, so we'll see how that goes. So that about covers it for now. For anyone who thought my ISV opinions may have been "theoretical", you can now see that they are actually the result of continuous disappointment.

Steve has another chat with Alysa Taylor

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.

Steve has a third chat with Guggs

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.

Tried Dynamics 365? Take another look at Power Apps.

As I think back to past customers of Dynamics 365, not all of them were successful. The challenges that brought them to Dynamics 365 were real enough, but at the time we only had one solution to try and solve them with. I would love to snap my fingers and take Power Apps back in time. Sledgehammers Dynamics 365, borne out of it's predecessor, Dynamics CRM Online, is a software marvel. I'm talking specifically in this post about the "CRM" side of Dynamics 365. For a midsized to large business, D365 has all of the tools you would need to transform your entire operation. XrM was a blessing and a curse. In layperson's terms, XrM was the capability to customize almost any of the significant out-of-the-box capabilities to meet organization specific needs in a highly targeted and relevant way. XrM was also the path utilized to "Extend" D365 to solve other problems not contemplated by the out-of-the-box capabilities. It is a powerful combination that can be brought to bear on almost any business problem. The Curse Over the years, many Dynamics 365 partners became very proficient with XrM. As a result, D365 became a solution to "anything", not just Sales or Service related issues. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. A customer has a business issue, not related to any of the out-of-the-box capabilities, no problem, we can solve it with XrM! And so it begins, provision an instance, hide most of the out-of-the-box capabilities, and start building custom capabilities. Or, maybe to save some time, we'll re-purpose some of the OOB capabilities, and contort them to fit the requirements, sorta. It's one thing to modify the Opportunity capabilities to better fit a customer's specific Opportunity requirements, even if modified heavily, it's another thing to re-purpose the Opportunity process to solve for Asset Tracking. As a result there are a lot of "bastard" deployments in the wild. Commitment Many well-intentioned partners, offered D365, planning on extensive use of XrM, as a solution to many customers' non-sales or service related problems. Could it solve those problems? Yes! But never as easily, or quickly or cost efficiently as anticipated. Trying to build a custom solution within D365 to a unique problem, is like doing laps in a crowded pool. Your route from start to finish will end up being far from a straight line. For some customers the cure was worse than the problem. All partners have experienced the customer who eventually pulled the plug on the effort. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to get the XrM capabilities in an empty pool? Power Apps Over the past couple of years Microsoft has been rolling out Power Apps, now part of the Power Platform. You may have seen it pop up in your Office 365 environments, you may have even played with it. That is really one face of Power Apps. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom decided to use the same "Power Apps" name for another, completely different, solution. I personally put this at the top of my Dumb Decisions list... but that's another story. The Power Apps you might have seen or used in Office 365 are what are called "Canvas" Power Apps. If you look at a SharePoint list online, for example, you may have seen the Create Power App button, which if clicked, will automatically create a "Canvas" Power App from your list. As a result, a significant number of customers feel they are familiar with Power Apps, I know because I talk to them all the time, but they are only familiar with half of Power Apps, oblivious to the other face of Power Apps. Model-Driven What a shitty product name, or rather qualifier of a product name. Even when I try and explain it to customers, they are confused, because of what they think they already know. Microsoft really botched this one. I know that the plan was that these two completely different things would eventually converge, but giving them both the same name in the meantime was a huge mistake. Customers are thoroughly confused. It's not like Microsoft is afraid to change names, they do it unnecessarily all the time. As I am writing this, they are announcing a name change for "Office 365", a well-known and understood product, to "Microsoft 365", a name that was already in use for something completely different. For a really smart company, they can be quite stupid sometimes. XrM in an Empty Pool Model-Driven Power Apps are the XrM capabilities, in an empty pool. What I would give to go back in time to those customers who pulled the plug on D365. This was the product they actually needed at the time. But... it did not exist, so there's that... maybe I would have just suggested they wait a couple of years. What we have available today is an empty pool, with a low-to-pro code development platform sitting on top of it. We no longer have to waste time and money emptying the pool, or dodging big floats. Time to Value has been slashed. Development costs have been slashed. Time to ROI has been slashed. There's just a hell of a lot of slashing going on. A Big Ask If you are one of those customers, who went down the D365 path and wasted a lot of time and effort, only end up with nothing, I am aware that suggesting you to take a look at something else is a big ask. But, if you still have the problem, Microsoft may have caught up with your needs with Power Apps. Umm.. the other Power Apps.    

Steve has a third chat with Charles Lamanna

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!
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.

The Cost of Hemorrhaging Money

Most people I am talking to today are starting to think about their businesses in these odd times. Many are naturally concerned about a reduction in revenue. But the counter-part to revenue is cost. Since the revenue side may be out of our control to some degree, the cost side is more critical than ever. Athletic I work with a lot of businesses of all sizes. From my first-hand experience, the smaller the business, the leaner they operate. That is not a result of smaller profit percentage, many have very high margins. The biggest difference is that from the smaller business owner's perch, they can see better. There is not much that is missed in a small a business. As businesses grow, layers are introduced that start to obscure visibility. Undetected leaks start to form... leaks that can be hidden by high margins. BBW At the opposite end of the scale are large businesses. While their margins may be smaller, their volume is huge, and of course their costs are also huge. Well beyond the scale that a single person can have any visibility; with layers upon layers, there are leaks all over the place. We are working with a Fortune 500 customer right now that discovered a $250K/month leak that had been unnoticed for quite a while. The solution was not complicated, we are plugging the hole with a Power App at a total cost of about $15K. Of course since this was a big ass company, it took 4 months to approve the expense, and about 90 days more so far, to mobilize their side. This leak could have been plugged in two weeks, but instead another $1.5m will have leaked out first. Such is the ineptitude of large business, this could never happen in a smaller business. A Few Extra Pounds Sitting in the middle, between small and large businesses, are the midsized businesses. While a $250k/month leak will not go unnoticed for a second, the midsized business has enough layers to have many leaks. Where are these leaks? Usually some faulty, or inefficient business process. What kind of leaks? Time not captured properly, customers not billed properly, vendors not paid properly, inventory not managed properly, inefficient project management or production line management... leaks are potentially all over. Every business has leaks, some are significant enough to warrant immediate attention, and others are just considered a "cost of business", absorbed by margin. But if margins compress, every leak will start looking pretty important. Plugging Leaks Depending on the leak, you may need to use a different set of tools, but many of these leaks will be occurring in your business processes. Microsoft's Power Platform is the tool to use for those. Unlike Salesforce.com or even Dynamics 365, both of which require significant time and cost to implement, the Power Platform can solve many business process issues in days. Built on top of the Common Data Service, the Power Platform includes a suite of tools including Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual Agents. Each of these tools are low-code options that can be deployed quickly, and at a low cost, to plug leaks. If you would like to learn how you can plug leaks with the Power Platform, we offer a free briefing to get you up-to-speed. Go to Appsource.com and search "forceworks".

The Last Nail in the On-Premise Coffin

The Conona Virus is having many different effects on the world, most are negative, but there are some that may actually be positive. For example, with workers being asked to work from home at an unprecedented rate, and that will no doubt go higher, one major point of failure will be on-premise based solutions. Let's unpack this. Remote Workers Looking from the balcony of my downtown apartment, my view is dominated by office buildings. They are full of financial services firms, law firms... professional services firms of all kinds. Most of these office spaces consist of executive offices, conference rooms, kitchens and cubicle farms. With the exception of decor choices, they are all very similar. Recent events have lead many of these firms to voluntarily, yet reluctantly, allow many of the people who work in these spaces to work from home... "temporarily". It does seem like an unnecessary risk to pack all of those people in elevators a few times a day, just so they can sit in their cubes. In many places this has already been mandated, and the list of those places will continue to grow. I see a couple of eventual outcomes from this. First, many companies who believed that virtual workers was not an option for their business, will realize that they were wrong. Over time, they will adapt to remote workers and become efficient out of necessity. In the meantime, they will continue making expensive office lease payments for unused space, shining a bright light on that recurring cost. When current events pass, I foresee many companies will continue with the remote worker concept. Now is probably not a good time to invest in Class-A Office Space. First-Mover Advantage For those companies who had previously transitioned to cloud based productivity and business solutions, this move to a remote workforce will be much simpler. But for those companies with on-premise infrastructure, there will be challenges. Even those who had VPN solutions in-place, for occasional remote access, will find their systems woefully inadequate for full time use by the majority of their people. In addition, their IT staff will be overwhelmed by the new demands. I expect there to be shortages of VPN related hardware and equipment as companies frantically try to upfit to meet these new requirements. In addition, security and compliance requirements are not going to be waived. This will be particularly acute for those whose on-premise systems are actually on their premises. What happens when their physical access to their server rooms becomes limited? Their peers who previously made the transition to cloud are going to look as smart, as they are going to look stupid. There will be some Monday-morning quarterbacking going on. The credibility of IT will be in question, as their past reluctance to move to the cloud, will suddenly become a huge issue for their business. In some cases, some may be unable to even work properly and compete, in a time when it is the most important to be able to do so. Cloud is the new Toilet Paper We are already seeing the wave. Every customer who had been talking to us about moving to the cloud, is now wanting to execute on that immediately. Some out of necessity because of reasons I explained above, and others who are seeing this as a good time to make a disruptive move, like migrations, and be prepared when current events pass. In addition to the move to a remote workforce, few businesses will avoid a general slowdown. For those who had been hesitant to move to the cloud while their businesses were operating at full capacity, some are seeing this as as good a time as there has ever been, and hopefully ever will be again, to make that kind of transition. All cloud providers and their dependent service companies are going to be very busy for a while. Capacity is going to be an issue. Not for the cloud services, they were built for future scale and are licking their chops at what is about to happen. But the capacity of the supporting companies, who do the actual migrations and implementations for end customers to utilize these cloud services, will be strained. The backlog is growing and is about to become very long. We Hate to say we told you so I have been talking to IT about cloud for almost two decades now. In the early days their fears were quite legitimate. But today, I find a few common reasons for not wanting to make the move. Number one is unspoken: job preservation. Many in IT have no concept of the cloud, had they moved earlier they could have been cloud experts, but they didn't, and now there are many cloud experts. They could rightly lose their job in a move to the cloud and be replaced by a "cloud expert". They missed that window. This "Number One" reason, has lead to many other supporting excuses. Compliance, Security, etc., all of which had been overcome for quite a while now. Cost is another one. If they have not realized their full ROI on previous hardware and software expenses, there's a financially legit reason. Of course it ignores the benefits of cloud over on-premise, and focuses solely on capturing their investment in outdated technology, something that I don't think is even possible. I don't really feel bad for these people. they intentionally held their organizations back for their own selfish reasons... they should have been fired. However, there are many IT pros that have been proponents of a move to the cloud, but were over-ruled by management or bean-counters. Now they, as well as I, get to say "We told you so!" Is it too late? My first thought is that it will never be to late, but I could be wrong. The situation is fluid and changing rapidly, what comes after mandating that your workforce has to work from home? Maybe padlocks on the doors, maybe shutting power to unoccupied floors. where your servers may sit. Who knows? Am I being alarmist or opportunist? Maybe, but it does not mean I'm wrong. I'm just making an observation based on observed activity of our own. Regardless, moving to the cloud was a good idea before this, so it still is, and possibly a hugely good idea now. Microsoft and it's partners are in a unique position given today's issues, based on decisions that had been made before this situation was even contemplated. The phrase "Right place - right time" feels appropriate. Over recent years the partners who specialize in Office 365, have gotten migration down to a pretty painless process. The partners who specialize in Azure, move on-premise servers to VMs in their sleep. The partners like us, who specialize in Business Applications like Dynamics 365, have also done our share of migrations. We even offer a free On-premise to Online Migration Briefing to explain the process. Go to appsource.com and search "forceworks". I am sure that there will be some that may feel that my pointing all this out, at a time of tragedy for many, is insensitive. But the reality is that business must continue, or what will be left on the other side?    

Dynamics 365 Team Member gets Locked

You were warned, you panicked, then realized nothing was happening immediately. So the trusty Team Member licenses kept chugging along, continuing to perform well beyond their boundaries. I wrote about this day coming back in May of 2018, and now finally, it's just around the corner.... prepare for the panic. Sum it up In a nutshell, if you bought Team Member licenses after October 1st of 2018, this applies to you immediately. If you have older Team Member licenses, I'm sure you will have to replace those on an upcoming renewal. Microsoft has released, as part of early access, three new apps: Customer Service Team Member, Sales Team Member and Project Resource Hub. Microsoft first announced last week in an email to Admins that as of April 1st (yes, this upcoming April) your Team Member licensed users will only be able to access these apps, and no other apps, including any custom apps. They since updated the announcement this week, that for existing instances that would be impacted by this change, you will get a 90 day grace period. These changes mean that "some" of the restrictions will no longer be enforced just with paper, but rather technically, meaning you can't ignore it and just keep chugging any more. What are these Apps? For those of you who never paid any attention to the paper limitations of the Team Member licenses, these apps are the real-life manifestation of those limits. A Team Member licensed user, can do whatever they are able to do within one of these apps, as delivered, without the fear of being out of compliance. That's good news for those who are concerned with keeping in compliance. However, it will be a shock for those who have been using Team Member as a full access rights level license. The invisible lines will rise to 20 foot concrete walls on 04/01, or 6/30 for existing. But, the concrete is porous, because these apps are also customizable. Does that mean you could potentially customize these apps to take you right back out of bounds? At the moment, it does. But this is just the first phase of the full enforcement plan, so you would be doing so at your own risk... again. Phase One Microsoft started with the low-hanging fruit, because you have to start somewhere. They figured out how to technically limit the apps available by license. So your Team Member licensed users will only see these new apps.... they will no longer see the first-party, or any custom apps. Theoretically, this should help keep them "in bounds". They also figured out how to technically limit the maximum number of entities that an app can have. Jukka recently pointed out, that since a right of Team Member is "Read" access to everything, does not the 15 entity limit for these apps obstruct that right? I think if I were Microsoft I would say the answer is "no". You pick the 15, and they can be from anything. So they still have rights to "read" everything... just not all at once. What Might Phase Two look Like? For the sneaky people, this "handicapped", but did not fully eliminate the issue... since these apps are customizable, I can still modify one of these apps to put me out of bounds. I expect the next phase, now that Microsoft has realized that "paper" is not worth the paper it's printed on, will be to add the layer that will technically limit the privileges to match those of the license. That is going to be a much bigger undertaking. How about another idea? Scrap it? The Team Member license was necessary to gain market share at the time, but ended up costing Microsoft a lot of potential revenue. Of course, that was potential revenue they would have never captured anyway without the team member license.... so it's a catch-22. Launching it with Technical enforcement from the jump would have prevented the problem, but there was no time for that then, we're in a feature race with the rest of the world! However, since the time Team Member was launched, we have some new options today, namely Power Apps. Team Member vs. Power Apps I have several customers asking me about switching to Power Apps instead of Team Member, particularly the $10 App Passes, since the cost is similar. This is a thought, but it is certainly not a direct swap, there are several caveats. Whereas the Team member Apps will have a limit of 15 entities, a Power App has no such limit. However a Power Apps cannot use "Restricted" entities without triggering a full price license, and Team member does not have a concept of "Restricted entities". You can freely "create" new Account records in a Power App, but that is not allowed with the Team member license. These are a few of the differences to understand, and there are more. What they have in common, is that they can both access the same CDS via an app, their "rights" differ, but it is definitely an option worth exploring. Who cares about any of this? I have been pretty consistent in my lack of empathy for the knowing violators, I hate cheaters. However, I am concerned about the unknowing violators, those who were oblivious to Microsoft's invisible lines. I foresee many of these customers not even getting this messaging now, making no preparations at all, and on June 30th they smash into the 20 foot wall. WTF? ISVs? I am aware of a few ISVs who have also taken advantage of the Team Member licenses. I have been an advocate for ISVs to think about building their solutions on the least expensive license that is "necessary". Some have instead built on the least expensive license that is "available".  After 04/01 or 06/30, Team Members will not even be able to access these ISV apps. I actually see a couple of them collapsing as a result. Do I have empathy for them? Nope, they knew what they were doing... but again, their customers didn't. A Culling A hand-full of ISVs and some customers will be lost as a result of this motion. The economics of compliance will outweigh their current benefits of the platform. Many of these people will be looking at a roughly 8X license cost increase to continue doing what they have been doing. Without taking advantage of much more of the platform's capabilities, they will probably migrate away. That will be a rude awakening. When they have been using enterprise capabilities, for less than $10 a month, their low-cost alternatives are going to look pretty weak. But the "free-ride" is coming to an end, ready or not.

Power Apps Potholes

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

Power Platform - ISV Ready

As an ISV I want to be able to take full advantage of everything that Microsoft's Power Platform can offer. Like SI's and customers, I get excited when I see the roadmap of features that are coming... it is mind-boggling. Unfortunately, just because something goes GA, does not mean it is "ISV Ready". ISV Connect Technical Summit I recently attended the least "technical", technical event I have ever been to. As part of Microsoft's larger "ISV Connect" effort to create excitement for ISVs, they had extended what had previously been a smaller F&O ISV focused event to encompass all of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. I missed the follow-up email suggesting that I send my technical people, and instead went myself. Cave Dwellers It seems that this majority F&O crowd, did send their technical people, who apparently all live under rocks. Many of the sessions were about things like "What is CDS?" Content I had already seen 100 times. What I found interesting, was that this far into the game, so many people still did not understand what we have all been talking about for the last two+ years. Twists and Turns I have seen the Power Platform slides many times, but these had been updated to include "Power Virtual Agents" in the mix. To be honest, I don't think Power Virtual Agents should sit at the same level as Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI. It feels like the dwarf on the basketball team. If I were in charge, I would probably have renamed "Dynamics 365 Customer Insights" to "Power Insights" and given it the upper level. As a standalone product, similar to Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights does not even require Dynamics 365. Ironically, I had predicted a while back that "Dynamics 365" would eventually become the brand name for Microsoft's "finished" apps that run on the Power Platform, which is the reason I was given for this naming. But it is not that dissimilar a level of "finished" than Power BI, and we don't call that Dynamics 365 BI. Burned by GA With my ISV hat on, I have become suspicious of the GA tag. Microsoft should really clarify that a feature or product is "GA for SIs and Customers", but not ready yet for ISVs. What's the difference? Well, as an ISV, who is drinking the AppSource Koolaid, I have to look at it differently. In an ideal world, my customer can go to AppSource, click a button to install my solution, and just use it. For the most part, this turnkey dream only works for Model-Driven apps today. ISV Ready Tag In one of the session Q&As, I asked one of the Microsoft ISV leaders about the possibility of an "ISV Ready" tag. He said "Good Idea!", which I have heard many times with no subsequent action. But he was actually all over the idea, including creating a slide for his closing session about the "ISV Ready" tag, I had previously caught him in the hallway and suggested the ISV Ready tag should not be applied by the product teams, but rather by a volunteer committee of actual ISVs.... because we actually know when something is "Ready" for us. What is ISV Ready? Well, since Microsoft seems to be running with the idea, I guess we will eventually find out what they think it means. I also think it will vary from ISV to ISV. Many ISVs have an intentional services component that comes behind their IP, to perform various tasks and configurations. For me, I want turnkey. I don't want to have to get on the phone with every customer, or create some complicated instructions, for them to be able to use my solutions. It's more than just being "Solution Aware", although that is obviously part of it. I mean Power Automate is now "Solution Aware", but is not "ISV Ready" in my opinion. I recently installed Microsoft's own Center of Excellence Starter Kit solution on an instance, and then spent half a day manually connecting all of the included Flows to make it light up. I can't expect a customer to do that, as soon as it does not work as advertised, they'll just delete my solution. Customers First I get that Microsoft is going to build things that solve issues for customers first, and I am not suggesting that they hold off on GAing things until they are ISV Ready. But don't think that feature is truly done, and move on the next shiny object, until it is ISV Ready. This assumes of course that Microsoft is sincere in their desire to grown a thriving ISV ecosystem like SFDC. At the moment, I believe they are sincere, but as my ex wife used to say to me, "Actions speak louder than words".