In the last week of August, Xpand IT has travelled once again to London where on the 28th and the 29th took place the first European stop of the 2019 Power Platform World Tour. We departed Lisbon with some expectations we hoped would be fulfilled: we wanted to understand this platform even better – a platform which is experiencing an interesting growth – and also get a glimpse into its future.
For those unfamiliar with Power Platform, this is a platform that brings together 3 Microsoft products that together bring to life a platform that promises to streamline and promote the Digital Transformation of organizations. PowerApps, Flow and PowerBI are tools that enable the digitalization and automation of internal processes and have enormous potential to transform the way companies manage their processes and make their decisions. With these tools, companies will be able to make informed decisions with agility and with technology-based processes, therefore taking advantage of the benefits that come from it.
The Event
Getting back to London, though… the event offered us two full days of interesting content where it was possible to meet the growing and enthusiastic Power Platform community, to explore the challenges that different industries are tackling with PowerApps and, no less important, to get a dose of inspiration from the showcased solutions and how various companies are already taking advantage of these technologies. With The Shard as background, the event was a community get together and a genuine sharing of experiences…in fact, one of Microsoft’s most powerful messages is the Power Platform’s simplicity of use. When they say that everyone can build an app using PowerApps and Flow, it’s true. With these products, both developers and business users have the right tools and are empowered to get better business results by building apps. This is not a tool that can be used to solve every problem. However, it is undoubtedly possible to use these powerful technologies to address some of the challenges companies face nowadays.
One of the highlights of the event was being able to hear first-hand what Microsoft has to say about these products’ evolution and what the future holds, especially with regards to enhancements and new features that will be available to all users from October 1st onward. The AI Builder is an example of the new features we can count on: capabilities such as binary classification, object detection and form processing make it easier to include Microsoft’s cognitive services in enterprise applications and providing them with a layer of intelligence that up until now wasn’t within the reach of PowerApps applications. The platform includes a whole set of new features – more than 400 in the last 6 months according to Microsoft – that will allow more and more citizen developers to emerge.
Another of the highlights of the event was related to how these initiatives should be managed within the company in partnership with the IT department. Even though there’s a lot of advantages in putting the power of app creation in the hands of any user – in fact, these users are even now using Excel or Access to solve many problems – the company needs to guarantee that the theme of Enterprise Management is properly addressed. More importantly, we need to look at these initiatives in a more programmatic way: their adoption will have to be promoted continuously so that they aren’t regarded as one-shot projects only.
We also confirmed our suspicions related to the unprecedented growth of the platform: 700% growth in production apps and more than 2.5M of monthly active developers in the Power Platform. These are surprising numbers that show us that the low-code market is growing: Gartner and Forrester have named Microsoft PowerApps as market leaders. It’s safe to say that the future is looking bright for PowerApps and the rest of the Power Platform.
In Conclusion
In short, you can expect more news about PowerApps very soon. The event was an excellent opportunity to witness how companies are innovating internally and to learn from the many experiences of the community. We have returned to Lisbon with the certainty that the PowerApps value proposition for internal empowerment scenarios is very interesting and, in this sense, can complement our mobile development offer whether in cross-platform (Xamarin) or native development.
Strategically speaking, our vision for customer facing apps doesn’t include low-code tools. However, we see potential in low-code tools when we focus on internal and Employee Empowerment scenarios. More news coming soon!
Marketing Manager