Transforming from Introvert to Influential Tech Speaker Manonmani VS

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Sydney in New South Wales, australia. I actually first met her in Singapore. She works at NCS Group as a pre-sales lead. She was first awarded her MVP in 2021. She is actively involved in the Microsoft Dynamics community through leadership, contribution, event organization, speaking engagements and blogging. She is co-leader of the ASEAN Microsoft Biz Apps user group and is the co-organizer of the UG Talks and Hackathons for the ASEAN community, which is totally amazing. You can find links to her show notes, bio etc. In the show notes for this episode. So any of her bio sorry in show notes. Welcome to the show, Manonmani.

Manonmani VS: 1:54
Thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

Mark Smith: 1:57
Did I pronounce your name right, mano Mani? Is that correct?

Manonmani VS: 2:01
Manon Mani. Manon Mani is my correct name, manon Mani well, in Greece it was for me. It's like jumbled up almost all alphabets in the English, I think. Hence I just keep it short Manon, money, vs, and even easy, keep it Manon. What's the VS for? Well, in Greece it was. For me, it's my father's name and my grandfather's name.

Mark Smith: 2:22
Awesome, awesome. That is so cool. That is so cool. Before we start telling stories about last time we met, which was just pre-pandemic, tell us a bit about food, family and fun. What took you to Australia, what do you like there, what do you miss from home and anything else that you do when it's not about Microsoft business applications.

Manonmani VS: 2:46
Awesome. So I'll start with a little bit of my background. So I was born in India and lived in a small city in the southern side of India called Coimbatore and it's known as the Manchester of South India. Industry is business predominantly and also agriculture is the backbone there, and something unique about the city I still enjoy is like when you step into the city itself, you will still see farmlands within the heart of the city. You don't have to go to the countryside, and that's predominantly because of the nature of I mean the mindset of the owners. They don't want to leave farming. Generation by generation they still live in that land and some of them are still my relatives as well. So that's something I find unique in that city and graduated with a Master's in Software Engineering and moved to Singapore that's when I got married to my husband.

Manonmani VS: 3:38
Yes, of course, my husband and I worked in Chennai for a year before moving to Singapore and it was prominently on PeopleSoft CRM. And it took me nine months in Singapore to find my first job, because it wasn't easy for me to like get into the market with just one year India experience and PeopleSoft wasn't picking up well during that time. So I started to do a little bit of research. So what's going on in this market? What's more demanding? It was like I didn't have much support from the community or outside, just all by myself Googling and finding stuff. And I saw this Microsoft Dynamics CRM popping up a lot, getting a lot of traction and a lot of recruiters were asking for profiles around that technology. And it's not like today. You just click a few clicks, you get a 30-day trial and you get to see what's in the system. But those days it was like I have to literally set up the VMs, hyper V-days and install SQL Server, crm Server and the reporting services and then I have to open the system and say, oh yeah, this sounds familiar to me. It's leads, contacts, leads, contacts, opportunities. Pretty much same what I have done, but in a different software. Okay, let me learn it. And did some certificates and in a few days I think I was able to get a job. And it's like small boutique firm where I started my career first with 2011, but I did work on 4.0 versions as well. Since then, I think I have never turned back and said or regretted for choosing this. I'm still enjoying this career and did a little bit of technical side and functional as well, and moved into that architecture side of things and lately into pre-sales and in Singapore.

Manonmani VS: 5:33
I definitely enjoyed the convenience there, but, um, after a couple of years I felt like, um, there's nothing much to see here. I've seen a lot here, so let me just, uh, move to different cities. So that's when I thought, okay, let me move to sydney I mean australia and um, I think in 2021, during covid time is when I made this move, spending like 14 days in quarantine and that was the best time. I would say. It's like do nothing time for me, like you can't do anything anyway, even if you want to and food is served. You're treated so well. There's a positive of being in quarantine, like give some rest to your body, otherwise I'd be like on my toes always, and three years to four years I'm living here.

Manonmani VS: 6:17
So what I miss most about the place where I came from is like, of course, India my family is still there and in Singapore. That's when I explored a lot of food options and it's like I'm spoiled for options. I half the time I don't do cooking at home. I'll be like spending time outside, hanging out with my family, always exploring food, and I think I have picked up on Thai and Chinese and Malaysian cooking as well. I still do it at home. So at home it's not always Indian food, it's like a variety I make and my daughter is like a little bit spoiled as well now, and if I like go back to Indian for a couple of days, she's like no, I'm eating Indian food always mom.

Manonmani VS: 7:00
No, that's the thing. So that's about the food. So I'm a foodie, I love exploring a lot of varieties, which I also try to cook at home. And, of course, people I do miss as well. And it's in early 30s that you establish those connections and like by way of like interacting with your kids, like I have a daughter and a son and you just get to like establish that relationship with your friends in the neighborhood. And I have to like leave everything after 10 years living in Singapore and move to Sydney. That's something I still miss and my daughter also misses it. And in Sydney, I definitely enjoy the culture here and a little bit relaxed life, I would say if you want to keep it relaxed unless you want to get busy yourself.

Mark Smith: 7:48
Yeah, that is brilliant. A couple of things I want to highlight, or my takeaways from that is for all of you listening that complain about you know you only get a 30-day trial. What Manomani described there was our experience in the early days of Dynamics. We had to set up our own VMs. We had to install all those big you know. Exchange Server was another one, right, if you needed email to run, you need to install Exchange server on your VMs to make it all end-to-end run and as you plugged into a third party like a SMTP type setup. So there was a lot of work where, if you wanted to set up a play environment or a demo environment, it's a lot easier nowadays.

Mark Smith: 8:37
I'm interested in just indexing on one little thing there.

Mark Smith: 8:40
When I look and talk to people all around the world in this community, different markets pay different salaries and income levels and my observation is this because I lived for four years in Sydney myself and when I went from New Zealand to Sydney, my income went up over four to five times the amount that I was making in New Zealand.

Mark Smith: 9:05
So it was a phenomenal jump and I always in my time in Australia felt Australia is a land of milk and honey, as they say, is that you can make really good money in the business applications community. However, when I moved to the UK and in the UK, I was shocked about how low people are paid, and it comes down to market demand right. They've got all of Europe on their doorstep and so there's a lot of skilled talent and even my wife working at Google at that time was paid a lot less in the UK for the same job that she was doing in Sydney at Google. So Australia is one of those markets that pay really well. But there's one market that even pays better than Australia in the research I've done and I want you to confirm it, and that is Singapore. And I suppose Singapore the difference is it's 8% flat tax right is the tax rate in Singapore Absolutely?

Manonmani VS: 10:01
you got it right, mark the. The tax rate in singapore. Absolutely you got it right, mark. So if I come, like I have lived in both these cities, I would say like my savings was way, far better in singapore compared to what I'm saving now. And I would say like if I go to singapore I I will definitely earn the same amount that I'm getting now right here in this market for business applications, but the saving obviously will be higher. The maximum tax I remember paying is like 11%. When I left Singapore, 11 or 15.

Mark Smith: 10:30
The worst case you will pay 15, not more than that, and that's crazy, because what is it in Australia at the moment with the ATO?

Manonmani VS: 10:38
49%, I think the highest.

Mark Smith: 10:41
Crazy, crazy, crazy difference. It's the same in new zealand, just absolutely ridiculously high. I think 39 is the top tax bracket in new zealand, um that you can go into for a p, a p-a-y-e, or is it a salary based employer, wages based employee?

Manonmani VS: 11:00
yeah, and and also other fact I would like to highlight is like recently traveled to Singapore for an event BISAP's co-pilot launch event and I had to like spend some I mean time in the local food courts, and I specifically went to the same one where I used to always go during my Singapore days and the Hainanese chicken rice is still $5.90. It still hasn't changed after three years, but here it's like $18 easily minimum.

Mark Smith: 11:27
Yeah, it's crazy, and just for those of you that have not been to Singapore, the street food that you can get there earns Michelin stars. That's the kind of quality I literally have earned Michelin stars. So it's like a top quality street food in singapore. I love singapore. I could I personally could easily live there. Um, uh, I just think it's. It's an amazing country, city, um, uh, in my experience, tell me about you've had, you know, quite a career, being that you started in dynamics, um, crm, oh, sorry, cr 2011. Back then, I don't think it was even called Dynamics in the real OG versions. The Power Platform came out, you know, in 2016,. Or Power Apps first came out in 2016. In 2019, we had the term Power Platform, which is, of course, this grouping of apps together. What's been the biggest change across your career that you've observed in how you think about building applications for customers?

Manonmani VS: 12:31
Well, so it was during 2016,. I still remember those days and I was introduced to PowerApp first by Scott Duro. So I was working in his team for a real estate organization where he joins us from UK. He lived in UK those days and within the same team and I was involved in a project where I used Sparkle XRM framework Scott's framework and we used to do a lot of extensions like editable grid and stuff like that Pretty easily. Easily we could spin up that um functionality with this uh, xrm component of side of things and um, when we saw power app, I was like um, I didn't realize it's a low code or something, that that was not the introduction I had. I just said I just thought, okay, it's, it's another. I wasn't really sure how to use it or navigate with that.

Manonmani VS: 13:25
But then from CRM 2016, it just moved to 365.

Manonmani VS: 13:32
It was another big change during the same time as well, and we saw how the CRM and ERP side of things were pulled together from AX and GP, I think all moved into like a WinOps side.

Manonmani VS: 13:47
And then when we started I saw it as another app, didn't go much deep into it, but then I think it was such a boom, it was so fast that it picked up and whatever we used to do in those extensions like custom extensions, like breaking our head around bringing those HTML components, like you need to find the HTML to match the CRM application, which was really challenging. It's like when you open a CRM application, you will have developers building some custom components that will be like it's like as if you have stitched a piece of cloth on your torn jean. That's how you will see, but with Power Platform and like it's also running on ScriptShop, I think, and you will get the same look and feel. It's like you don't feel it's a patched piece of work, but you just see that it's uh, it blends so well within the crm ui yeah, yeah, so true, so true.

Mark Smith: 14:52
In your extensive career, what do you think has been the highlight project? If you could only tell one story about one project, one customer and, by the way, you don't need to use their name but, um, what's been that kind of kind of what industry was it in? What was the use case that you were solving for? That's kind of like the pinnacle project you've been on in your career so far.

Manonmani VS: 15:14
I would like to discuss this project for the real estate client where we had like implementation across the EMEA region and each of these regions.

Manonmani VS: 15:26
They had their own CRM processes but they were managing the properties and within the property you have to capture the floor information and you have to also capture the availabilities and stuff like that and creating brochures and marketing.

Manonmani VS: 15:45
So it's marketing side of things and sales side of things covered within that one system. The challenge for us was like to bring into an alignment in our CRM system with all these different deployments, all these different deployments. So if you compare a core instance where you have a set of functionalities and if you compare it with one or two regions, you will see that one region will have 40% deviation from the core and the other will have 30% deviation and it's not feasible for us to always have separate instances and build their functionalities as well. So we wanted to like bring it to an alignment and um with the, with the core, and streamline those processes. But it was really hard for us to like negotiate with those individual um country leads or something and they were like no, this is the. No, we do cross sell this way. No, this is how our opportunity works. So that was an interesting conversation and to bring that alignment was really challenging for us nice, nice, good example.

Mark Smith: 16:54
Tell me a bit about the asian microsoft business uh applications user group. What do you, what are you doing in that? Who is the community? Because we've got listeners from all over the world. Perhaps you can give us some background how it came about and how that community is made up and kind of what you do within it um, well, so it started just before covid, I think right in time.

Manonmani VS: 17:21
And, uh, before the community engagement, especially the microsoft one, I was like my personality, if I define as an introvert, wasn't like outgoing and engaging more in the community. None of that's not me. But after being introduced, a few folks there they just pulled me hey, manu, would you be able to join me for this dinner? How to introduce to the rest of the community members? It was Dipesh, jeeva, kasut and Sanchi a few others in the community who just pulled me and said sit down here, talk to these people, it's so good to be there. And we didn't have that community initially and slowly we started thinking of having one for ourselves in Singapore and we had support from Microsoft as well. And when we started it it was like really a challenge for us because not many people want to come in person. But we just leveraged the COVID thing where you could go online and people were like excited to come for online events and uh, sometimes we did have in-person events as well. Uh, but uh, we did see another challenge where, like, if you look at a photo, you will see only mostly men. I would say so the, the gender was like not in balance. So we thought like we need to create a safe and a small community for women to come in, step in and, you know, like share and feel comfortable. So we came up with Asians Women in Tech and the reason we call it Asians is like we started as a Singapore community but then we stepped into other markets as well. Microsoft backed us up and we had our communities in malaysia, thailand, philippines, vietnam, sri lanka, indonesia as well. So we used to run um annually and annual conferences once in a year and apart from that, on a monthly basis. Each country will operate in their own local communities. They run sessions with support from the local Microsoft. With that said, I would call myself you know that they call.

Manonmani VS: 19:28
Sometimes people call themselves serial entrepreneur I would say like serial community leader.

Manonmani VS: 19:33
So after that I moved to Sydney and I joined the Sydney BizApps women user group where I was like contributing as an organizer as well.

Manonmani VS: 19:43
We built the community and supported it and slowly we thought like let's be more inclusive, we'll bring more people in, because we don't have a Microsoft business applications user group for the entire crowd. We had a women one running. We didn't see one happening for everyone to come in. So we thought we could switch the focus and let's open it for everyone and we came up with Sydney Microsoft BizApps user group, which I'm still running. It and it's purely an in-person user group we don't run online events here and for the past two years I've been contributing as a community leader I mean organizer in national or we call it Australian BizApps user group as well. And apart from this, I work with Alexandro Harbajuku for IT Transfer Launch, and that has a totally different concept where you empower people who is taking that shift from non-IT to IT career, or students who wanted to like get into the IT market. So that's another community focused on that specific target audience.

Mark Smith: 20:54
Wow that is a lot. That's incredible. So so good that level of involvement in the community. Just back on the ASEAN site, is that still running? Is that still how active is that across? It's probably Southeast Asia type countries, right.

Manonmani VS: 21:13
Yes, so we still have individual user groups running at the local level, but it's been a while that we haven't done the annual conference. Maybe for the past two years we haven't done the annual conferences. But apart from that, the individual Singapore one is running, Philippines and Malaysia are still running.

Mark Smith: 21:31
Yeah, awesome, awesome, so good, so good to hear. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Your story has been amazing. Hopefully it inspires a lot of people and I look forward to seeing you again soon.

Manonmani VS: 21:42
Thank you, mark, it was my pleasure having you.

Mark Smith: 21:48
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.