Celebrity Encounters and Anchor Apps: A Hilarious Dive into Power Platform's Enterprise Impact

Mark Smith: 0:00
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. Welcome back to the Ecosystem Podcast. This week we've got three of us on the show William Dorrington, andrew Welch and myself, mark Smith. Our other colleagues in crime haven't been able to make the show family commitments et cetera preventing it, but we're going to have a fun day today, and today one of my pet things at the moment is a term coined by none other than Steve Mordu. In a discussion that we were having with Ryan Cunningham at the recent MVP Summit, steve Mordu arranged a side meeting with Ryan. We went back to his offices and we discussed something, a concern. Are you just name dropping? I'm name dropping? Of course I'm name dropping. What is this? Guess what, guess what. Not only was Ryan Cunningham in the room. Ryan Jones was also in the room. How many other names do you want me to?

Andrew Welch: 1:17
put in there. Do you know, I met Queen Elizabeth once.

Mark Smith: 1:20
Did you really Do? You know what?

Andrew Welch: 1:23
I went to her house Did you, so do you know what I went to her house, did you. So do millions of others every year.

Mark Smith: 1:30
I did a tour of Buckingham Palace, yes.

Andrew Welch: 1:33
How did you get through security Christ All right, so Will Mark knows Ryan Cunningham, ryan Jones and Steve Mordew. I met the queen. Who do you know? Who do you know? Drop a name. Drop a name, bro. Mark Smith Good friends of him.

William Dorrington: 1:49
Great guy, that's a good one.

Mark Smith: 1:51
Wow, Come on. Will we know you're from aristocracy in the United Kingdom?

William Dorrington: 1:57
Do you know? Actually I had the most epic trip back from a client the other day. The clients we partied with until about 3 am in the morning. Fantastic, I had to get a half four train, not so this is the experience when you work with curve digital.

William Dorrington: 2:13
Oh, it's beautiful, recruiting right now, so on. In addition to that, about an hour and 38 minutes sleep. I get in my uh, my cabin on the, my carriage on the train and this guy walks in. I'm like I recognize that guy. He gets his breakfast from a little breakfast trolley and, yeah, he speaks to the lady. I was like, no, and you may only get this if you've been long enough in England. He was the guy from grand designs, kevin McLeod, oh wow.

Mark Smith: 2:35
Yeah, yeah.

William Dorrington: 2:35
It was just. It's like I have no idea what you're going on here three and a half years.

William Dorrington: 2:40
I'm sorry it was just such a beautiful moment. I had a, but he just wouldn't shut up, but a lovely guy, but I was so tired and hung over and he just kept speaking. But if anyone's gonna bother me at that time in that state, I'm glad it was kevin mcleod, because he and the irony was he was about to go and get his portrait painted and he was going to do a talk throughout that about how he stays away from technology. So we, uh, we got that.

Andrew Welch: 3:04
But he was going to talk while getting his portrait done. Yeah, I know.

William Dorrington: 3:08
His lips would be one of the places in the painting.

Mark Smith: 3:11
Yeah. So if we're going to name drop about name dropping, I used to live in West Hampstead in London, right, and it seems that a lot of people that are movie stars live in West Hampstead, hampstead, heath or any around those type of areas. And so one day a gentleman going into my local bookstore on the high street opened the door for me and I looked up and it was like, oh my gosh, professor McGonagall from, was it McGonagall? It was one of the professors from Harry Potter. And then another day, walking down the street, the lady that was the really mean lady that became the principal in Harry Potter.

Andrew Welch: 3:51
I forget who?

Mark Smith: 3:52
she was, but you know, she was put in by the, the ministry of magic, the pink suit and the yeah yeah.

William Dorrington: 3:57
Yeah.

Mark Smith: 3:57
Yeah.

Andrew Welch: 3:57
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, going downhill her eyes, her eyes.

Mark Smith: 4:01
I'm like, oh my gosh, like. And then, you know, bill knightley, you know, lived around the area. He'd be on the train and it's just like it was nuts. And this is what I love about the uk. It's. It's so different than the us where everyone be like, oh hail, the movie stars. It's just like it's just going about their life.

William Dorrington: 4:21
No one's like I love that about british people but mark the other person, the other person I met on the train which, after your phenomenal list of people there was Craig Revel Hallward from Strictly, come Dancing. So I don't know, if we can, well, there we go then. That's what I mean. We just can't compete.

Andrew Welch: 4:39
So shall we go back to talking about murderous robot toasters, like the last episode?

Mark Smith: 4:46
Did we talk about murderous robot toasters? Like the last episode, I didn't. Did we talk about murderous toasters?

Andrew Welch: 4:48
I don't remember that. I don't think it was clear if the toaster was a robot or if the toaster had just been possessed by the artificial intelligences.

Mark Smith: 4:55
Right, yes, that was chris what I realize, that we actually didn't even say what steve mordew's word that he came up with.

Andrew Welch: 5:04
We didn't, so what's the word?

Mark Smith: 5:07
The word he came up with, and it was I was illustrating a concept, which I'll illustrate in a moment, and he came up with this concept of anchor apps. You know what is an app that is such an anchor inside an organization and let's define the term further, because it is one that has been invented at the moment is this concept of an app that is so large that there's no way the organization can go on a whim? Let's get rid of that and replace it with something else. It's a serious application. Think of you know in the past, you know, erp systems. I'd never get updated less than seven years of life, right, normally 10 plus years, right, you'd update an ERP. How it came about. I've got a you know, in the company that I told you that I had resigned from and I finished from in two weeks time. One of our customers is a large, a large customer that has 44 000 premium license seats sold on an ea, of course, ea standing for enterprise agreement, something we want to make clear.

Mark Smith: 6:13
We're not talking about enterprise architects that was two episodes ago that was two episodes ago yes, yes, new ea my challenge was to ryan was this is that.

Mark Smith: 6:24
Ryan who Mark Cunningham, Is that so many times enterprise licenses are sold into organizations, often without the actual organization knowing what they're buying. In other words, a line item of a package of licenses has been put in there and with the onus on Microsoft sellers to turn that into consumption over the term of the enterprise agreement, along with all the other licenses that have been bundled in there. And so my concern was this is that if that organization has been sold on low code, no code, we don't say low code anymore, mark, no more low code.

Mark Smith: 7:02
If the organization has been sold on that concept, which they have for the last since 2016, 2019, maybe what's happened is that, to coin another phrase of steve modu, a lot of shitty little apps have been built that are really the modern info path form type apps.

Mark Smith: 7:22
as I see them, or as as Ryan Jones name drop again calls them craplets, a lot of craplets have been built across the organization, and the thing is is that none of these are anchor apps, because, at a sweep of a pen, a red line through an Excel spreadsheet if you could do such a thing that line item can be deleted and replaced with another app solution that's available off the shelf in the market.

Mark Smith: 7:54
And so my concern was why aren't we telling the big enterprise app stories, those ones that have, you know, 10,000 terabytes of data sitting in Dataverse and then, of course, flowing over into a data lake of some sort? Where are the apps that are, you know, evidence collection for federal agencies, that are, the data that they collect are presented in court and decisions are made right? These are key kind of app technologies made right. These are key kind of app technologies. Um, where are the apps that are used to um, coordinate all military personnel in a battle formation that in my career I've built on dynamics 365 right, butchering the sales app in the past into an xrm solution and built this for one of the five nations in the world I didn't't know New Zealand had an army.

Mark Smith: 8:47
I wasn't working in that country at the time.

Andrew Welch: 8:52
By the way, I do know it's true, and New Zealand is one of the Five Eyes, so don't want to hate mail.

Mark Smith: 8:59
I just took that as, like you are right that it is, but I wasn't even referring to New Zealand.

Andrew Welch: 9:04
Should we explain what the Five Eyes are?

Mark Smith: 9:07
Yeah, what are they? Andrew, You're the most closest to that. Oh no, you're both ex-military, aren't you?

Andrew Welch: 9:12
Yeah.

Mark Smith: 9:13
So Will. Why don't you want to know Will?

William Dorrington: 9:15
what are the Five Eyes Will? Do you know what I could not tell you?

Andrew Welch: 9:20
Okay, so the five eyes are five, five countries that have very like long standing historic ties to one another and they are very, they share intelligence very closely. So it's not five letter eyes, but the five eyes, and they are New Zealand, australia, canada, canada, the united kingdom and the united states. They all have something in common they were all colonized by colonized by the british.

Mark Smith: 9:50
Yeah, yeah colonized.

Andrew Welch: 9:52
So so britain and her favorite children, plus america, that's who it is so.

William Dorrington: 9:56
It's the uk usa agreement and and those that have attached themselves to it, they prefer it, prefers to go by august now okay, australia, yeah anyway.

Andrew Welch: 10:07
So back back to the back to the anchor apps so yeah, those, those five eyes.

Mark Smith: 10:39
So yeah, those are all examples I wanted to give of really large apps that have been implemented at scale inside an organization. My concern is this is that these ea agreements come up for renewal, and this is well. I was pitching it as a concern to Microsoft, right, because they're interested in EAs growing, not EAs shrinking. Nobody makes bonus for a net neutral EA. In other words, it didn't go up, it didn't go down, it just stayed static on renewal time. My concern is this everybody's talking about co-pilot and so if you've got two lines in your EA agreement one wanting to go and call co-pilot for everybody and one going you know we've got these tens of thousands of seats of Power Platform and only 300 of them have ever been used in production. Why don't we get rid of the Power App story and go co-pilot? Because, wow, that's the talk of the town at the moment. And I said the problem is it's net neutral to Microsoft. One got swapped out for the other. The agreement didn't grow. That was my concern.

Mark Smith: 11:44
That's brought me back into this whole concept and that's where Steve Mourou goes. Oh, you're talking about anchor apps, an app that is so large in the account that to pull it out, you know, would be like ripping up the seabed um from the, the anchor effect. And so, and what I realized is that back in the xrm days and this is a you know if you've heard that term this was a concept that actually was coined by microsoft and it lasted only about six months. And then there were so many complaints inside microsoft about the concept of xrM that all of a sudden everybody stopped talking about. It was just like don't talk about XRM.

Mark Smith: 12:17
And the concept was, if you took CRM customer relationship management dropped off the C, you could have anything relationship management. And so it could be, you know, guide dog relationship management, which was something back in my early start of my career was done for training guide dogs, their vet bills, how they get placed, all their care, all their training, that type of thing. And you saw it. You know grants management, or grants relationship management. You know first aid relationship, and so what we built is these big solutions that had nothing to do with CRM but did a massive thing. Right, they were epic large solutions that were deployed, and when I look back across my career, some of these were built over 10 years ago and guess what? They're still in production, they're still being used. Nobody's getting rid of them because they are mission critical to an organization.

Mark Smith: 13:09
So I don't know if we define a mission sorry, an anchor app as mission critical. Is it got like? I just came off a call this morning from somebody in Portugal that has 10,000 users a day using the app. That's pretty important to their business right Internally. So I can say, okay, that's pretty important to their business right Internally. So I can say, okay, that's an anchor app. We've got the one, andrew, that we've discussed, which has 10 terabytes of data in it. That's pretty mission critical. What are you guys seeing in? What are these big anchor apps and why organizations need? And what I'm trying to do is saying, hey, the Power Platform is not just for children with low code, it's actually for building big enterprise juicy applications.

William Dorrington: 13:50
You covered two points there, Daniel. By the way, really, really love the term Anchor Apps. We were discussing just before the podcast that I've not heard the phrase before. I need to follow Steve a bit more.

Andrew Welch: 14:01
But you would have had to follow him into the room with all those heavy hitters.

William Dorrington: 14:06
Oh, what a beautiful place to be. But I describe anchor apps but never had a word for it. So I enjoyed it. But, mark, what you were saying, there were two interesting things which is the categorization of what would be considered an anchor app, which is those critical solutions. Ie, if the solution goes down, the business is either limping along or has to stop.

William Dorrington: 14:31
A really important solution. It's not like it's a HR system which, yeah, it's an important solution, but if it goes down, it can come up the next day or the day after. It's going to be okay. This is your manufacturing IoT management solution. It's got to be something that will really affect. But then the other thing you said, which? But this app has 10 000 users.

William Dorrington: 14:54
So what's the graduation curve for something to become an anchor app? So is it the amount of people that has been shared with, the types of people it's been shared with, and actually the fact that an app can go from something that's classes of productivity type application, like you know, dave the receptionist just building out a way for people to to check in and out of the uh of the office all the way through to. Then dave extends that to making sure that when we do our our pat testing on our electrics. That all goes through, they get signed off. Then all of a sudden, all our air conditioning units, then all our other units are offices and suddenly it's a full office management app that affects your ISO accreditation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera being used by loads. So I like the categorization first as the graduation path there.

Andrew Welch: 15:36
So when we defined this, we defined this a long time ago in the Power Platform adoption framework back in 2019. And we said you know, basically there's three tiers of applications, there's three tiers of solutions. So productivity important and critical. And I think that at the time because I had come from the background of building anchor apps I mean, that's that's what I did for for a number of years is I built anchor apps, first with Dynamics and then with Power Platform, and at the time I just sort of took it for granted. Of course we're going to be building critical, mission-critical solutions.

Andrew Welch: 16:17
In later times we referred to those apps as being core business systems or part of the core business systems neighborhood in ecosystem-oriented architecture. So you could have an anchor app, the technology used to build the anchor app. It could be Power Platform, it could be SAP, it could be Oracle, it could be Workday. It could be something very, very bespoke that you build atop, say, azure SQL, as your data service, that you build atop, say, azure SQL, as your data service. But what defines the Anchor app is that it is critical to the functioning of the business.

Andrew Welch: 16:58
An outage in this solution, downtime in this solution, is going to stop a critical business function, one or more critical business functions, from moving forward right. So these apps are out there in the world. Just not enough of them are being built with Power Platform or Power Platform plus Azure, and the result is that one companies have these highly, highly fragmented application landscapes right there. They've got anchor apps that are reliant on multiple different technologies, which means that those technologies need to be supported and maintained and secured and governed, all in isolation of one another, and they're squandering these, this investment that they've made in their premium power platform licenses.

Mark Smith: 17:41
I don't know that. It's just that they're not out there. I think they're not being talked about, they're not being identified, and one of the things I'm hoping is that, if you're listening to this podcast and you know of and as something, that what we've talked about here, about an anchor app that exists, that you would reach out to me directly because I'd like to have a chat with you about it. I want to do a uh, a five-part podcast series just dedicated to five mega apps that are out there in the wild that kind of nobody knows about, and just to give a, to really give examples of the art of the possible. So, when people are, because I think it's a mindset that's been set we've had a mindset since 2016 and these low code app you, you know the Power App, you know, starting with Power Apps and then in 2019, the Power Platform is that it's only low-code, it's only for craplets.

William Dorrington: 18:36
It's only for shitty little apps. But that's the issue. Yeah, that's the issue. Right, that's what he's pointing out, it's not a serious enterprise platform in so many eyes of so many people.

Mark Smith: 18:47
And then when you get other people like, let's say, servicenow is an example, right, which is considered a low-code platform, but they've pitched themselves totally differently to the market. It's an enterprise solution. They've pitched, they've sold, like that, where I think that the and so therefore, people go it's an enterprise solution. But when you go, anybody can build with this and that productivity space, they go oh, it's the modern Excel. Oh, we don't have to worry about that, we don't. Whatever people do, it's Excel. It's just Excel in the cloud. That's fine, let them do what they want. We're never going to build our evidence collection process in Excel. You know, as a law enforcement agency, we'll never do that. We'll go and get a proper system, not realizing that they actually have the proper system. But their mindset is you can't do that in the spot on. Anyone can build on it's a perception.

William Dorrington: 19:43
It's an absolute perception based thing and Microsoft's marketing engine cranked too hard on the term citizen developer, on the term low code, and it's it's. It's a constant sales cycle that we have to position to our clients when we are faced with that. But you can't do that with low code, where we suddenly have to reel off all the clients that they will know of that they would have used a power app solution for that they would have never known, like we've rolled out some of the largest ones for for central government clients that everybody in the uk has to use and they'll have no idea they're going through a power pages portal type of approach there I.

Andrew Welch: 20:17
I think just as an aside also, though, that the microsoft community around power platform has not done itself. I'm not talking about the itself. I'm not talking about the marketing engine. I'm not talking about it. I'm talking about the community of technologists around Power Platform. They've not done themselves any favors, right?

Andrew Welch: 20:36
It drives me crazy when I hear experienced professional people, right, who do this every day and have true, bona fide expertise in this technology, refer to themselves as citizen developers. It drives me crazy because it it just, first of all, it discredits them and, second of all, it discredits the technology that they and so many others work on. There are legitimate people out there who are building you, you know, who are citizen developers and who are building some some mighty useful uh. Uh, I'm not going to call them craplets, I'm going to call them toys. Um, I'm going to, I'm going to be be positive here Uh, and they're mighty useful, so I don't, but, legitimately, I don't want to take anything away from someone who is using the technology to make the work life of them or their team better, right, but there's so much more that can be done in the hands of engineers.

William Dorrington: 21:32
But this is the same principle and, although it's completely different, it's very similar to those that used Excel to do some naughty things like equals. You know equals some, this cell plus that To those that started applying VBA across the top and did some hardcore stuff with that. You know. So when you look at what actually business users build and I hate the term system developer, I refuse to use it anymore it's business users. When they're using the productivity side of those tools the equal sum and plus and minus they build some really cool stuff. But to make it scalable, to make it appropriate and to use it in a professional way, then we know that it's a lot more hardcore than that and I think we do need a better term for it. You know, because we've got a tool that can be used in an advanced way or a simple way, and I don't like the term system developer.

Mark Smith: 22:18
Here's the thing. You know, XRM back in the day was what we were doing. I mean, I can count on less than half a hand, three fingers, the number of sales relationship management systems. I put it like CRMs. All of them were XRM solutions. We would take the product and turn it into something else and we used to beg Microsoft back then why don't you give us what we, what back then we called a headless SKU? Don't give us all that, Just give us the whole model-driven piece and let us build. They turned around and they gave us that with the Power Platform and Dataverse, right, they gave us that and then they stopped talking and then they never talked about how amazing it is.

Mark Smith: 22:59
And you know, here's the other thing why do we talk about? You know five different workloads that sit on the power platform, and what I'm talking about power apps, power automate, power BI, power pages and now Copilot Studio. Why don't we just talk about, like, everything has all those in it. Why don't we call it the power platform, right? And like why don't we have a sales sorry, a sales SKU, a license SKU? That's for the power platform that allows you to build solutions, right, it's not just about apps, it's not just about automation, it's about the whole story. Absolutely one ring to rule them all. Yeah, I like that yes, well, okay.

Andrew Welch: 23:39
So let me ask you guys, let let's make this, let's make this real. Um, I want to talk about some, uh, anchor apps, some of our favorite anchor apps that we've seen through our careers in this technology.

Mark Smith: 23:53
So, mark, go ahead, I'll go first Main Roads in WA, western Australia, just to give you an idea of sizing of this bit of land it's 11 times the size of the United Kingdom. Right, that's one state in australia. It's large. Back in the day we built an xrm solution that managed the every piece of road, every bridge, every light fixture, every signpost on that entire network in what we would modernly call Dynamics 365, sales. Right, there was no sales component. What we did is that we used that offline comm component. We put it in a toughened device that sit ahead and road workers trucks. We put ArcGIS into the mix. When that person went down the road, if they saw a pothole, they would GPS dot it with the circle on screen to say it was this size, and it would auto-calculate what type of fix needed to be done no, human. And this was like eight, nine years ago, right before the Power Platform ever existed or anything. Now, if you did that today, you would 100% not use a dynamic SKU, you would use the Power Platform.

Andrew Welch: 25:08
There are many who would, who mistakenly would, use the dynamic skewed today.

Mark Smith: 25:13
You know, just thinking, even when I said that maybe I would use field service as part of what we were doing. Now, when we built that solution, it was because we could build it cheaper than the Oracle off the shelf solution for managing infrastructure assets like that. We were able to build it cheaper. Guess what? It's still in use today. Right, it's still.

Mark Smith: 25:34
And you know what? That organization ain't ripping it out in five minutes because it's every one of the hivers, folks out on the road. They know how to use that app now, eight years on, they know how to do it. They know how to put in data. When it came back to the office and got Wi-Fi access, it would do a sync. It would then assign out all the work orders for the. You know it would decide. You know, if the defect ratio on a one kilometer or one mile strip was X, it needed the whole resurface done. If it was lower than Y, it would only have the you know rudimentary fixes done to the potholes on that area, and I'm just giving you as an example that's what I call an anchor app.

Mark Smith: 26:13
It's an enterprise-grade app. It won't get pulled out within five years. Yep.

Andrew Welch: 26:19
Will. What about you?

William Dorrington: 26:20
Sorry, man, I just had someone ping me on Teams, so can you quickly take your turn?

Andrew Welch: 26:24
I'll take it. Are they going to edit that out?

Mark Smith: 26:29
No, no, go for it. Yeah, actually it might be edited out, who knows.

Andrew Welch: 26:32
We'll see.

Andrew Welch: 26:33
We'll see. So my favorite examples from that era come from. You know I was involved with app development within the military and within a lot of public sector agencies. That did a combination of things that everything from keeping track of who's jumping out of which plane and how many times they've jumped, to human resources, managing HR and personnel across organizations with 100,000 people in it right, managing the electronic medical records of thousands and thousands of people. One of the cases, one of the anchor apps that I and it's not even an anchor app, it was like an. It was an anchor ecosystem of apps, so we didn't call it this at the time. So we didn't call it this at the time.

Andrew Welch: 27:53
I worked with the US and New Zealand mission to Antarctica, the scientific mission to Antarctica. All of HR happened right. So it tracked every single employee, every single scientist, every single person being taken into the organization, what their medical workup was, their psychological profile, their medical history, their blood type, right. So if someone was injured in a remote place, you could identify the correct blood donor. We called it the walking blood bank. What else? It ran air terminal operations. We built apps that ran air terminal operations at the coastal stations in Antarctica and at the South Pole and, because of the way that the Earth turns and the alignment of satellites, we had to deploy on-premise infrastructure at the South Pole because we would sometimes go a long time with you know, I mean a number of hours without connectivity. And it also meant that I got to say that I was part of the team the only team, to my knowledge, that ever got to deploy Microsoft business applications at the South Pole which is one of the coolest Golden right, but once again, a great example, Will Will.

William Dorrington: 28:56
So a couple spring to mind. I'll omit names, but one that I just think is incredibly cool because I take in mind mine was never a pre-Power Platform. When I really got into customizing CE et cetera, it was due to Power Apps and Canvas Apps first launching.

William Dorrington: 29:13
I was a finance supply chain management guy or AX7 or AX4 before then. So keep that in mind through this. So two things. One of them is and I can't say the name, but it's going to be pretty obvious is a test that you take when you're around 17.

William Dorrington: 29:31
In the UK you have up to a million people take this, because it's not just the UK that actually feeds into the system and the Power Platform. What people won't realize is the Power Platform actually manages all that. So all the behind-the-scenes booking, all the behind-the-scenes actually making sure that you attend on time, that you have the right people there, you're getting the right exams, you get the right questions, that's all managed by power, huge scalability. But that also feeds into further down your journey that once you pass that test successfully and you get issued what you need to get issued from that, that if you have any criminal convictions, if you, if you receive anything that goes against that, that also gets stamped as well. And then this goes further and further down to inspections of the thing that you're getting to use due to that certification you received.

Andrew Welch: 30:17
Sorry, I'm being slightly cryptic, but it's not that cryptic at all the English education system is baffling to me and seems very convoluted, and I'm actually quite nervous about when my daughter has to enter it, because I just think it's gonna be perfectly fine, andrew.

William Dorrington: 30:33
Your brain it's uh, you know, and your dna it's gonna be perfect. The the other one, just just to mention quickly, because I haven't seen it done by this point. It's very similar to something you've been speaking about. We got approached by a, a company that specialism was actually building airports and then making sure they were operationally ready, and they wanted what they referred to as an operational readiness assessment test.

Andrew Welch: 30:55
So this was clearly not Berlin, because you haven't seen the solution, have you? If you're out there, Mats, I'm sorry for offending your people.

William Dorrington: 31:07
But this was checking everything, from the ability to check off and map out the routes that people will take through the airport through to, you know, dropping their luggage on getting on their plane, making sure the runway and the runway surface and everything was just spot on. They can measure every single test, every single route they had to take and actually collect all the evidence, all from within the solution. It was absolutely humongous and the guy who actually built it was a guy called marco cruz. He still works at, uh, curve digital. Uh. Now he worked with me at hitachi.

Andrew Welch: 31:35
Prior no advertisements come on, man, we do this, that's, that's my version of name dropping.

William Dorrington: 31:41
This is not a sales call, but yeah, and, and that to me really showed um, uh, to the client at least, it was started off as a proof of concept and they thought, actually, you know low code, you know can do this, yeah, and that was when the penny dropped for them and after that it just took off.

Andrew Welch: 32:00
It really took off, and they were all in so I'm I'm curious now listening to will's examples mark you and I both went with a went with an old and a long times ago example. Do you have a modern like a recent? This is proper, proper power platform example.

Mark Smith: 32:20
Are you asking me?

William Dorrington: 32:21
I am Well, I've already said my no, no, well, but yeah.

Mark Smith: 32:26
Yeah, Well, that was a really really good example. I'm just trying to rank my brain now for something that I would consider.

William Dorrington: 32:33
He's too senior now. He doesn't get his fingers dirty.

Andrew Welch: 32:36
Yeah, he's not hands-on enough. Hang on a second.

Mark Smith: 32:39
Too senior. In two weeks I'll be a freelancer. I'll not even. I'll have no title, role, anything hey.

Andrew Welch: 32:47
Andrew, is that what we're calling it now? The the worst kept secret in the industry, right?

Mark Smith: 32:55
we the secret, still a secret, anyhow. What was they saying? Um, yeah, so I've been involved in apps that are, or solutions 100 built on the Power Platform that had massive ROI and they won't be ripped out because of that reason. But they only did a slither of something inside an organization. In other words, this app that I'm thinking of only affected the executives in the organization. It had a $27 million impact per annum on that executive layer of the organization, so it won't be thrown out from that perspective. But the other you know, 100,000 employees outside of that, you know 5,000-odd aren't using it, you know, because it's not designed for them.

Andrew Welch: 33:41
I think this is actually a really good point and it's probably where I believe we'll choose to end this one here in a moment, because it gets us back to the beginning, where we were talking about what really makes an anchor app. And to me, I think that an anchor app you can have an anchor app with that's very high impact but relatively few users. That's not necessarily exactly what is best for consuming licenses from a Microsoft perspective. Or I think you can have an anchor app that is high impact and a lot of users. So to me, a couple examples that come to mind. There was one I worked with a Fortune 100 insurance firm several years ago and by the time we were done they were running. They were using Power Platform to manage the entire process of updating their product lines, making rate adjustments, etc. Etc. And in that world right in financial services you make a small percentage adjustment and that can impact your profitability and other financial metrics wildly, wildly. There probably weren't tens of thousands of users there, but at last count they were running about $2 billion of business through this solution.

Andrew Welch: 35:06
On the other hand, I actively work with a law firm that We'll just say this is a law firm that has had a profound effect on people's lives, even though probably almost nobody has heard of it, and they have been in a process of completely replatforming case management onto Power Platform. So this is not customer service. This is not you're running a call center or you're managing field service. This is managing legal matters and court cases. Right, this all happens for them on Power Platform. There's not a single person in the organization who is not using this particular anchor app every single day to transact the core business, the core purpose that this firm exists, and it's all happening in Power Platform, and I think it's marvelous.

Mark Smith: 35:50
I mean, I could have shared another one, but I only learned about it this morning. It's not mine and it's a story that is going to be on the podcast in the coming weeks. It's dedicated just to it and it's and it's going to be a good story. Okay, we're going to wrap up here, um, but my call to action folks, uh, if you're listening to this, please reach out, hit me up, uh, on linkedin um, I'm pretty findable there. Um, send me a message and say hey, I've, I could tell you about an anchor app or you know an app that fits the profile of, like, what we've been talking about, and let's have a chat because, um, if everyone's happy, I would love to do just a dedicated podcast on that topic and really, you know, educate the market about the art of the possible on the power platform, because it's so much better than when I started my career with XRM. It's so much more powerful, it can scale like never before.

Mark Smith: 36:44
You know, one of the solutions I built in the past was a full payroll system on top of Dynamics 365 sales. It was the stupidest thing I could have ever done. It was when I believed that. You know the hammer Dynamics CRM. Everything was a nail and I could smash it with it. The headaches that caused me, the technical debt it created was just off the Richter scale. Would I build it now on the Power Platform? Absolutely, because back then we never had Azure behind us and you could do the scale that we needed this payroll system to do and, mark, we need one.

William Dorrington: 37:18
One doesn't exist. We need one.

Andrew Welch: 37:20
Mark, don't worry, many, many Dynamics people out there would still I mean, they still take the. I'm holding the Dynamics hammer. Everything must be a nail. That is our mission on the Ecosystems podcast to convince Dynamics land that Dynamics is not always the answer.

Mark Smith: 37:36
Yeah, it's one of the apps on the Power Platform. It's not necessarily an app that you need to use. With that, stay around, please message and we'll see you on the next one. Ciao guys, bye guys, bye guys. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.