Elevating Enterprise Architecture with Microsoft's Power Platform Agility

Mark Smith: 0:30
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, all righty, welcome back. Ladies and gentlemen, good to have you on the show. All of us are in the house today, which is absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately, we should have hit the record button about 20 minutes ago, because we've just been riffing with so much ideas and stuff and thoughts that we have now hit the record button and we're ready to go. But to introduce the show I'm going to throw to you, mr Dorrington, no, I'm not. I'm not going to throw to you. I'm starting, mr Huntingford. Mr Huntingford, why don't you take us away in the intro?

Chris Huntingford: 1:16
Good day folks. Welcome to the Ecosystem Podcast. Yeah, so today we're going to be talking about the perception of low-code with pro-coders Super exciting subject. We've had a number of discussions about this over the last few years and I guess you know we need to start thinking about what is low-code really and what do maybe not even just pro-coders, but what does everyone think of it? Right, mark? You and I had a discussion with a certain bunch of folks yesterday talking about where developers sit in the world and where enterprise architects sit and kind of the focus we need to give to them, and you know how we really change the perception of what low-code is. So, yeah, that's what we're doing today.

Mark Smith: 1:56
I like it. I like it, and this is, yeah, a discussion that's probably been boiling for with all of us for the last two weeks. But I was doing some research this week into some of your work, andrew, and I found, in some of your back articles, some really good points of view on this. One of the illustrations you gave um was new amsterdam and the new york map, you know, and brilliant storytelling, by the way, and I think for another topic, we need to get on to how to present well at events, that is riveting, that attracts people to want to listen to your content, and that is no more than 18 minutes long, because the facts show your presentation is, uh, too wordy if it's more than 18 minutes long. Um, that aside, so one of these things that we've been riffing on and and I I even want to challenge microsoft on this a bit is that the concept in 2016, when the the power platform about even though it wasn't labeled the Power Platform until 2019, it was this concept of low-code development or no-code development was also used interchangeably and this other phrase, citizen development, and I think that it has done a massive disservice to the enterprise nature of what the power platform really is, and I'm working with a couple of accounts and I won't say who they are, but I'll just say the seat sizing. So this one seat sizing is 44,000 premium licenses on the power platform. Another one is 220,000 premium licenses on the power platform. So they're big right.

Mark Smith: 3:35
And the thing is they've all got these big license spends through their enterprise agreements. They've been put in place Sometimes not in these cases, the organization and a lot what goes into EAs. A lot of people don't even know that they own the software licenses on these. The problem is, if they don't consume those licenses, when renewal comes, out comes the red pen by the CIO or the CFO and they go we're not using that and they cross these things off. Now Microsoft, in my observation, they don't want a license type to be swapped out on an EA. They want that EA to grow, not to stay static, but year on year ana or at renewal should get larger, not stay the same. They don't want all the premium power platform licenses to be swapped out, for example, with co-pilot licenses, because it's kind of like there's no delta right, there's no change.

Mark Smith: 4:28
And so with this in mind, I come back to that story, one from a and this was a scott durrow post a couple of weeks ago on um. How does a developer get onto the power platform? And what I realized is back in the day when we had xrm before power platform we had a set path of if you're a dot net developer, this is how you could onboard and get really good at uh, using back then the xRM platform to build solutions, which is, of course, now the Power Platform. Play it Forward. We have a much more enterprise-scale platform. The automation on what we have now, compared to what we had with Windows Workflow Foundation, is just at an epic proportion Logic Apps epic proportion. Service Bus what we had to deal with back then, what was it called the Service Bus tool on-prem I forget BizTalk.

William Dorington: 5:17
Yeah, yeah, biztalk, biz bus, what we had to deal with back then what was it called?

Mark Smith: 5:18
the service bus tool on prem? Um, I forget this talk, yeah, yeah, this talk, this talk, best talk server, yeah, back then the, the jobs of integrating was just like so difficult. What we have now is amazing. Yet we've relegated from an enterprise architecture perspective. I think they look at the power platform and say that is for the children to do some personal productivity stuff. That is not an enterprise play. We'll use it strategically. We'll build one app, maybe two, but this is not a core platform. This is not an sap, this is not a pega. This is not a fill in the blank enterprise piece of software where so they use it tactically not, and so hopefully I've set the scene there for a discussion to go how do we fix this so that the power platform is really used again for enterprise applications and is used at scale, because we know from our experience it absolutely meets those requirements, but I don't believe the market does absolutely meets those requirements, but I don't believe the market does.

Ana Welch: 6:21
I believe we've been having this discussion, or this fight, for years and years and years. I myself didn't understand it, even when it was XRM. If you were a developer, you were classed as a lower level developer. If you started writing some plugins because you've not developer, if you started writing some plugins because you've not written that piece of functionality from scratch, all you're doing is a class. How do you mean Unless you build like libraries on top of libraries and write things from scratch, you're not a real developer. So, for me, the way I gained adoption you know for myself for low code as it, you know, within the XRM platform, well, it was money If you wanted to apply for a NET job, you had a certain salary.

Ana Welch: 7:14
If you wanted to apply for a job playing with toys for kids not being a real developer, only writing a bit of JavaScript, only putting in some, you know, plugins or custom workflow activities, your salary was higher by 20%. What do you think that is? What do you think you know, even to this day, actually being able to customize the platform, and if you can write a little bit of code on top of it, even better it's just valued better Business value, right.

Mark Smith: 7:53
It's time to value is so much quicker, right.

Ana Welch: 7:56
Business value Exactly.

Chris Huntingford: 7:59
But I could also tell you that people need knowledge. Like that's a good point, anna, but like it's kind of like can you build a house? Is building a house from scratch easier than building on top of you know a current construction? And actually you need to have a lot of knowledge of the platform underneath and how the classes work and how the APIs work, and that that's why people get paid more. I can categorically tell you that, like building something from scratch is actually a lot easier than having to build on something else, because you need to have that foundational, fundamental knowledge.

Ana Welch: 8:29
Yeah, but what people understand is that you never, ever build from scratch anything. There's no greenfield ever.

William Dorington: 8:37
This, though I think there's a. This is an interesting and related issue, right, where, if I still see a lot of folks today who come from a dynamics background, where they see something that maybe matches the dynamics use case 20% and they say, all right, we're going to go customize the bejesus out of Dynamics, rather than actually using the platform and the umpteenth microservices that we have available to us, we're just going to go customize the Dynamics application, I tell people, listen, if that Dynamics application is not at least an 80, preferably a 90% fit for the use case, dynamics is not the way to go. Build custom with Power Platform. And then I get this look like you can build custom with Power Platform, which is bizarre that we don't know this yet. But yes, yes, you can.

Mark Smith: 9:36
That's why I said in Amsterdam right, dynamics 365 is dead. Long live the power platform. The reason I said it is that I was on a hackathon with Chris in London and I had a group it was Purple Team and it was a bunch of consultants at New Dynamics and the power platform was in play. And it was a bunch of consultants at New Dynamics and the Power Platform was in play and the first discussion after they decided what the solution was which Dynamics product would we use to build it and I was just like what the hell.

Mark Smith: 10:05
None of them are a fit. But you've got back then CDS, now Dataverse. You've got that. You can build the years that we asked for a platform SKU back in the XRM days it was headless right. Don't give us any of the Dynamics bullshit. I love Dynamics, by the way. I built my career on it.

Mark Smith: 10:26
But just give me the core platform and let me build what I want. Right, because I spent years creating stuff on, like you know. I'll give you an example. In in west then wa, which is called west australia, right, it's uh, it's 11 times the size of the united kingdom. I built, with my team, an asset management system of the entire roading, bridge, lighting, infrastructure, of that. Right, we're talking about massive, 11 times the size of the united Kingdom, and we built it on Dynamics 365, sales. Yeah, do you know? There was, which is what sales is today, which was Dynamics CRM back then. Right, do you think we had any need for a customer record or an account? No, we were creating service orders for damages to the infrastructure right across that state structure right across that state.

Andrew Welch: 11:18
But, mark, this goes back to what we're talking about with, with the understanding of uh, a technology ecosystem which is a lot of architects, even down to to consultants. We only understand a certain tech stack, so if all you've got is a hammer, everything's a nail and exactly the dynamics path that you just you discussed there, which is we know dynamics, we know how to customize that they haven't quite made the connection that that you just discussed there, which is we know dynamics, we know how to customize that they haven't quite made the connection that actually you can start from scratch and you know that really well too.

William Dorington: 11:41
Yeah, I think that you know I'm going to go back to CRM 4, CRM 2011, the godforsaken CRM 2013, 15, 16 era, which was terrible.

Mark Smith: 11:56
Let's try and copy Salesforce era all the way through.

William Dorington: 12:02
Before we actually just modernize the 2011 interface and call it a model driven app, and there you go, that's the day. But I think for me, there's a lesson in that era, and you know, mark, like you, I built applications. My team and I built applications that, on top of Dynamics CRM, that had nothing, I mean even further. We're talking apps that ran air terminals at the South Pole, or human resources for the military, or that ran, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever, and we were always doing our best to hide the functionality of sales so that you wouldn't the user wouldn't have to interact with it. And the lesson to me here for your original question, though, is that back then, architects and developers, we were thinking about CRM as a really great data service that allows us to build the app that we need quicker.

William Dorington: 13:07
Right and in this weird sort of I don't know if it's reverse psychology, but the psychology of it is certainly strange right, when power platforms started to drift away from being, you know, at its core, the core value is the data service and when it started drifting more into the build, the Canvas app and I don't want to take anything away from what building that Canvas app made possible, but I think that it weirdly reoriented, even though the data service has improved by leaps and bounds. It reoriented the technology away from being a data service that helps developers move faster to being an app service that helps non-developers build toys, and the psychology of that is strange. Strange and it's going to take us still years to to unpick but, dude, that's also down to marketing.

Chris Huntingford: 14:00
That's also very much down to marketing yeah, bro, I think that, um, you know, when you look at the way that this whole thing was put out, like you have mendix out systems, lightning platform, um, all these tools right, and the way that they they pitch themselves I mean, look at, look at Mendix, right, like Mendix were very good at pitching, sit dev OutSystems tried it, but they sucked okay. But the whole idea is that I think Microsoft tried that and the other thing that they did is they bolted it into Microsoft 365 as a business productivity tool. So if you're going to bolt something into Microsoft 365, it's going to get treated like a Microsoft 365 tool, so and that. But that's how Power Platform got its branding. It's got its name. I mean, if you listen to the stories, a certain person calls it Power Apps apps or Power Apps platform. Anyway, we won't talk about that, or PowerPoint apps.

William Dorington: 14:47
Anyway, Do you remember someone at a conference once tried to give a presentation and refused to use slides and wanted to build a Canvas app?

Chris Huntingford: 14:55
which interesting engineering app which interesting engineering, but this is it, dude. This is what happens If you treat it like that. It's like calling everything an app. Right, if you call it an app, it's going to become an app, and it's never just an app. There's so much more, and I think that's what's happened with Power Platform. Is that perspective?

Ana Welch: 15:19
and the way the messaging has come out has been incorrect. Yeah, that perspective and the way the messaging has come out has been incorrect. Yeah, Chris, we even had targets sorry, but at Microsoft for Power Apps and we were like what?

Chris Huntingford: 15:30
Yeah, I remember.

Ana Welch: 15:31
How can one do? What is even that? So it wasn't even treated as a whole. It was like Power Apps. How many Power Apps?

Andrew Welch: 15:40
it's like no but that's when you start realizing the the, the relationship between trying to target a business number and having a very aggressive sales team that is cutthroat to get there and actually aligning the correct technology in the correct way to your clients. You know, and that's why, sometimes, when I see companies and actually, anna, this is something you and I come up against occasionally which actually it's the reverse, where they don't have any system developers but actually it's kept within their pro dev team and only they're allowed access to it and actually they shut down anything else and you go. Well, I wonder how that's going. Oh, it's going really well and I'm for business users to use it appropriately, but I actually do like when I see that approach because you know their maturity towards adoption is significantly higher.

William Dorington: 16:30
The constituency that I care the most about in an organization using Power Platform. This is not to say don't go back and find a clip of me saying that Andrew doesn't care about citizen developers but the constituency I care the most about are professional developers and architects right, because those are the ones who are building the solutions that are going to become strategic the fastest, and that, to me, is the real power of the platform. That's spot on.

Mark Smith: 16:59
Let me give you an example and tell me if this resonates or if I've got this wrong. I'll talk about, I won't say, the customer. The customer was a federal government customer that was around border security in Australia. Okay, so it's pretty clear who it was, okay.

William Dorington: 17:14
And and Thank you for not making this about the United States. That's all.

Mark Smith: 17:18
I'm very grateful, yeah, and thank you for not making this about the United States, that's all. I'm very grateful. Yeah, so you can imagine the CIO when they're going to make a decision around building something and introducing new technology into the ecosystems that they have, whose advice are they going to take? They're going to look at their senior enterprise architect and generally in a large organization that will have an s on the end, right, they will have a discussion and they will make a decision and, depending on the size of the organization, you have to check whether those senior architects are on somebody else's payroll and and what I mean by that is that, let's say, an ibm has a consultant in there, or a PwC or whoever has seen you consult, and they're full-time in those roles inside the organization. Now, in the IBM situation this is before I worked for IBM, right, the situation was that entire organization was run by IBM mainframe architects.

Mark Smith: 18:15
And when we introduced this way of building a rapid solution to protect the borders and create an evidence trail for the Australian Federal Police on criminal activity, guess what they said Microsoft's not enterprise, microsoft's not it, there'd be danger. You know the old saying there'd be dragons there. Right, the fear of like this is not of the scale. So the CIO said listen, can you build the solution? How long will it take you to build?

Mark Smith: 18:41
I said, well, it's probably about a two and a half year project for us to build that. In fact, we're going to adopt Pega and we can do it in about two and a half years. They asked me how long can we do it? I said I reckon we can do it in six months, worst case eight. You right, if you look at the size of a project and if you look at the total economic impact report that Microsoft did a few years ago with Forrester, they showed that a $75,000 project was generally 50% cheaper to do on the Power Platform, or a $250,000 project was generally around 70% cheaper to do on the Power Platform. So it does give you this rapid development framework to work with and it accelerates.

Mark Smith: 19:23
Yeah, but listen, just going back to the point I wanted to land, there was the enterprise architects are advising the CIOs, ctos, about which way to go. And listen, I just was with another major bank recently and they said, if that guy doesn't give it the green light, our conversation's over, because that executive is not going to put their body part on the line and make a call over somebody that technically knows apparently what's safe and what's not safe for the organization. Right, and so I come back to there needs to be a massive re-education that comes from Microsoft around the enterprise scale of this platform, the need to educate enterprise architects around the solution so that they talk to the CIO, cto and give it the. You know this is a strategic part of our ecosystems going forward.

Andrew Welch: 20:22
And that brings us back on to what I mentioned when we hadn't hit record, which is has this been named inappropriately when we talk about low code in general? And we could tie a few things together here, anna. I believe it was Anna who stated that actually you weren't seen as a professional developer if you started Absolutely. But then should we say if you're not doing it all in binary code or ASCII or something else, then you're not over. True, because that's what happens we evolve and we put layers upon layers upon layers.

Andrew Welch: 20:53
Democratization has existed for years. It hasn't just existed for low code. Every high code language is actually a democratization of what it was before and what it's engaging with. So, quite frankly, when I look at low code and I look at some very complex, scalable uh pro dev, extensibility, canvas apps as well as model driven apps, as well as power automations, you would never be able to give that to a sit dev and you could never say it was low code. It. It is entirely complex. So, yeah, I throw that out to you all, my lovely friends.

William Dorington: 21:22
Will I think about this? I think about my, my best friend in the world, brilliant guy, he's not. He's not a technologist, he's a pediatrician. I'm going to have drinks with him later tonight.

Ana Welch: 21:36
Yeah, thank.

William Dorington: 21:36
God. So useful advice for future parents Go befriend a pediatrician.

Ana Welch: 21:42
But in any case.

William Dorington: 21:44
I'm going to have drinks with him later tonight, and it's going to be drinks on teams, because we live thirty five hundred miles apart and on my end I'm going to be speaking with him using a modern, beautiful laptop. On his end he's going to be speaking to me using a beige metal box that he built with his own graphics card, with his own power supply, his own motherboard.

William Dorington: 22:08
He wired the whole thing up, and I used to do that too. If you're a long-time geek like us, probably lots of us used to do that, but I tell him all the time I'm like John, it's not worth it. Just, you're not a gamer, You're just it's just not worth it, bro.

Andrew Welch: 22:27
You've been so involved.

William Dorington: 22:30
Do you know what he says to me every time? He says, yes, but I want to be able to control it without having to rely on a major technology vendor. I'm like, yeah, okay, okay, you do, you do you because, clearly, yeah, yeah.

Ana Welch: 22:45
That's actually a great point. That's actually a great point. People want to be able to control things. Remember the war when we started moving CRM as it it was back then to the cloud and everyone was super outraged that you're not going to be able to access the SQL database. Which they would never mean to access.

William Dorington: 23:09
They shouldn't have been doing it anymore, so I got a story for you guys. I was giving a presentation at a conference. It was the Power Platform World Tour, washington DC. I think it was in 2019.

Ana Welch: 23:24
On a Tuesday afternoon.

William Dorington: 23:26
You know what.

Chris Huntingford: 23:27
It doesn't matter the details don't matter, it was raining and it was shade and it was very plain. I mean the adjectives. Keep on compounding.

William Dorington: 23:35
But right, Thank you.

Chris Huntingford: 23:36
Thank you.

William Dorington: 23:38
Sorry I was extolling the virtues of the common data service, cds. We called Dataverse at the time and there was a woman in the room who raised her hand and she said, well, I just don't, I could never use Dataverse. And I'm like, okay, well, why don't you tell it did what a presenter does when I ask some questions? And her response was well, I can't ever move from on premise XRM because in Dataverse I can't do the stored procedures. And you could have heard a pin drop in the room. And what was really interesting is that people who knew what they were talking about it's like their heads rotated, like Stewie's head from Family Guy, to look at this person. And then we all just sort of took a moment and then I went back to doing what I was doing because I thought I'm not going to convince you, I'm just moving on.

Andrew Welch: 24:29
This comes back to just the basic principles of change management, which is, if we were left to our devices, we'd still be chimpanzees I know we would be. We wouldn't evolve because we've always done it this way and it's how we like doing it. Yeah, change management's another great podcast, by the way yes, that's why people.

Ana Welch: 24:50
But that's the the point is, people love control, which which is fine, and now we've got tools and everything. Because the reality is when we started saying citizen developers, you know everyone can do their own thing, and then we started like showing use cases where people have done so, and all of a sudden, not only we found hundreds of Canvas apps all over the place, but you know, some citizen developers became crafty. Like you had model-driven apps in the default environment. You had custom connectors that nobody knew what they did and what sort of data shifted outside of the organization. So, whilst it is the whole low-code concept, like Will is saying, is doing such a disservice, because not only people don't take it seriously, not believing it this is not an enterprise solution, an enterprise-scale solution but also others who find out how to use it can cause real damage.

Chris Huntingford: 26:08
Yep, look at implicit connectivity into data, my favorite thing in the world. Like some person, some genius, gets access to a sql data structure, generates an implicit connector up to it. It's like the old sa12345 password and, oh my gosh, why has everyone got access into my data? And you know it's. It's wild, right, like there's so many loopholes, but there are loopholes in every piece of software that you'll ever use. Yeah, and I think that's why ea struggle with this stuff. And it's not like you're looking at, like Pega as a platform. Right, there's lots of moving parts, but it's a platform. This thing connects out. It's got arms into every part of Office and every part of, by the way, is by far my favorite slide to present ever. It gives people an idea like it gives an idea of what it can do, but it really goes so much deeper and EAs do not get that depth. I don't think at least.

Mark Smith: 27:11
So to wrap, because we're at the three minute wrap mark, we've kind of expanded on a concern, a problem that we've identified. What I'm keen to hear now what are potential solutions? How could we address this in the next 6, 12, 18 months? Do people have resources out there that they use to take a dot net developer and it could be x type of developer could be python develop, whatever it is to being very proficient on the power platform? Does anyone have a tailored path? How do we convince microsoft of the need to do a shit ton of marketing to re balance the ship? And I'll just throw out one other thing.

Mark Smith: 27:51
It just clicked on me the other day. You know what canvas apps are and I know they're not, but they they are. They're just InfoPath forms that just took off right at the end of the day and became the main thing. Let's call them what they are. They're fucking InfoPath 2.0. Now I say that tongue-in-cheek because I've got some beautiful Canvas apps that are still back into Dataverse, but it was just a thing that dawned on me this week that it's InfoPath 2.0 as a Canvas app that we've been told is going to save the world in the Power Platform, and I don't think they're the primary thing to index on.

Chris Huntingford: 28:30
Oh no, no, not at all, I think you're right.

Ana Welch: 28:34
I love the fact that you've mentioned, though, that they're hooked onto a Dataverse backend Like. That's very important.

Mark Smith: 28:43
You know, I tried to do an enterprise app using SharePoint. It just did not work for me, as in the ALM around, SharePoint is yeah. I think the facial said it all.

Chris Huntingford: 28:55
I'm literally not going to comment on that. I've already been in trouble this week for being rude about SharePoint.

William Dorington: 29:00
Is SharePointisdeadaf actually still alive?

Mark Smith: 29:03
No, no, sharepoint is amazing.

Andrew Welch: 29:05
You know where SharePoint is amazing at it is amazing.

Mark Smith: 29:07
When you add syntax over it, when you add AI automation over documentation next level Amazing, Absolutely amazing.

William Dorington: 29:25
I want to be clear. I want to be clear. What I was asking is. There used to be a domain that I registered. It's an Afghani domain extension because it's af and it was called SharePoint is dead af and it pointed to Chris Huntingford's Twitter profile, but I let the registration lapse because Afghani domain names are expensive, man.

Mark Smith: 29:41
Are they really?

William Dorington: 29:42
Yeah, weirdly costly.

Mark Smith: 29:45
Yeah, I think the opium trade would be covering everything.

William Dorington: 29:49
Subsidizing SharePointIsDeadaf, and on that note.

Andrew Welch: 29:53
The real trade is domains, really. That's the difference.

Mark Smith: 29:57
So have we got a solution just as we wrap Any solution, ideas to solve this quandary.

Andrew Welch: 30:03
Well, it's as all things. Microsoft's marketing machine will always bring a nightmare of different issues to us. Think about what it's done to those three little letters, coe. You know we could no longer use that without talking only about tooling now, when actually central access has been around for years but yet that is now gone. We have to use a different language for them.

Andrew Welch: 30:28
And then the next stage is just education. We need to educate professional developers that actually it's a highly scalable, highly flexible and very secure solution and a set of tools to build your solutions. And until we've got those two things going, it's going to always be us having very strong and similar conversations with our clients. When they say, well, our pro dev communities haven't quite brought into it, we have to go okay, let's do this. Then let's get the slide deck up, let's get the engagement plan sorted and let's spend some time, because if your pro-dev community aren't using it, you won't see the proper value and then you'll blame it on the tooling and then it will go into the same box as PowerPoint, word and Excel.

Ana Welch: 31:10
And I think we also need to use the whole thing. Stop referring to just a piece of it. Stop trying to sell Power. Automate, it's not a thing. Start showing people in their own Azure portals these professional developers or like security engineers, cybersecurity database admins, doesn't matter. Let's start showing them power platforms right there. Exactly like Chris said, it's everywhere, so you have to know it or else.

Chris Huntingford: 31:47
Yep, I agree. I think that you're absolutely right. I can't stand the word app. I've actually abolished it internally. I'm like it's a solution because it's more than it's never just one little thing. There's lots of pieces to it. So yeah, I just wish that people would see the propensity about roping into the wider parts of Azure and looking at all those wonderful things it can do.

Mark Smith: 32:08
Andrew, what were you going to say?

William Dorington: 32:10
No, I was just going to say that I think that I do know people out there five of them are on this podcast right that are doing some of the heavy lifting right. To get folks and to get organizations to start thinking of the technology in this way. There's only so far that individuals and say, an individual enterprise architect or an individual CIO or an individual cloud strategist can take this. I think that one thing that occurs to me is that I would love to see Microsoft kind of package all of the power platform tools, the developer tools, the studio tools, right into some sort of you know solution studio and link to it directly from the Azure portal right, just put it in front of developers who you know are playing in with Azure services, and make it available to them. Those are the little sort of changes at the margins, but you know it's going to take a lot of work to do.

Mark Smith: 33:10
Kill a COE starter kit, move it all into managed environments. So we stop using that word like a swear word and have to explain it to every customer. You don't have a center of excellence. You've turned some tools on that's called coe starter kit and then you have to explain what starter means. It's just like what a waste of time managed environments.

Mark Smith: 33:31
The beauty is nobody knows what managed environments is. No one has a preconceived what managed environments is. It's freaking amazing. But then you've got this whole thing, which is another. I know I'm meant to end my own show here at this point, but here's. The other thing that we need to unpack is the value of premium outstrips. All the legacy BS you create by using freemium.

William Dorington: 33:52
Oh, my God, I agree, there's just a whole story that needs to be unpacked there.

Mark Smith: 33:56
I see people that I look at them another government agency in New South Wales recently and they're like they're ahead of a lot of people and I go in and it's 99% free and they're like we're wanting to do that. Yeah, it's all available there, it's you got to do it, you got to pay for it. Oh, I don't want to pay for those licenses. The software economics story could not be overemphasized for the next 18 months to rewrite the ship and the value of premium, the true TCO of premium, over farting around with the freemium, non-premium licensing model.

William Dorington: 34:29
Let's see where we go on that one over the next little while.

Mark Smith: 34:32
I'll leave it with that. We would love your feedback. By the way, if you're listening to this, watching this, honestly, jump on the LinkedIn thread and abuse us. Tell us what we got wrong. If you're Microsoft and you're listening, we're open to conversations to write the next narrative and how we really scale us in the enterprise.

William Dorington: 34:51
And Mark as we wrap this up, have we told everyone about Dynamics Minds and the Ask Me Anything that the five of us are doing at Dynamics Minds?

Mark Smith: 35:00
Tell us Andrew.

William Dorington: 35:01
The five of us will all be together in person for the first time in years and certainly since we launched the podcast at Dynamics Minds in Slovenia, which is one of the very best Microsoft conferences of the entire year, and we'll be doing an Ask Me Anything panel. We won't be recording, but it'll be basically a live podcast.

Mark Smith: 35:24
Yeah, May the 27th or the 29th right.

William Dorington: 35:27
Please come.

Mark Smith: 35:28
Have you guys had your cartoon photo images done?

William Dorington: 35:32
Yes.

Mark Smith: 35:32
You know that they're putting up. You know that Dynamics Minds folks they put up the you know. Guess who this person is? They've got some awesome graphic artists that are doing like on.

Mark Smith: 35:43
LinkedIn and I was like this stuff is cool, man. It's such a cool way to promote the event, so they have this whole kind of guess who the person is and it's a caricature of an individual. And then a couple of days later they release the photo and the caricature and you're like, yeah, I can see that they are epic. They're epic, make sure you get yours, if you can. Of um, I reached out behind the scenes and said where's my one, and it got sent to me and I I love it yeah, I'm gonna check this out all righty, I'm going to hit the stop button.

Mark Smith: 36:16
Thanks everybody, ciao, ciao. 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 nz365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.