Unraveling Data Centricity and Power Platform Licensing Quandaries with Chris, Ana, Andrew and William: A Dive into AI, Integration, and the MVP Journey

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. Hey, welcome everybody to the podcast today. We have finished with that humor. We're now going to get super serious. Why don't we just go around the room and do a quick introduction? Who's here today, chris? Why don't you start?

Chris Huntingford: 0:57
What's up, I'm Chris. I'm the Director of Innovation at A&S and I quite like AI and low code a little bit a lot.

Mark Smith: 1:04
Nice Andrew.

Andrew Welch: 1:06
Hey everyone. This is Andrew. I'm the CTO for Cloud Services at Microsoft Partner called HSO. This crowd here has been doing amazing work with ecosystem architecture and helping people get strategic with the Microsoft Cloud. So great to be here again.

Mark Smith: 1:27
I love it, anna.

Ana Demeny: 1:28
Hi, I'm Anna. I've recently joined Will and I am now a solutions director for the company that he's being a CTO at Jesus. That was a lot, so very happy to be here. I also like AI and data and other things as well.

Mark Smith: 1:49
I love it, mr Dorrington.

William Dorrington: 1:51
Hi, I'm William Dorrington. I'm the CTO at Curve Digital, but now Anna's joined, it's only a matter of time before she becomes the CTO at Curve, dennis Shaw and I become her assistant.

Mark Smith:  2:03
I love it. I'm your host, mark Swith, otherwise known as NZ365. Love, and today we're going to be talking about data and how it is the gold of everything ecosystem, ai and the future. And so, with that, I was thinking, andrew, why don't we open with your thoughts on the subject?

Andrew Welch: 2:34
So I think that the topic for today right, it's really driven by this scenario, right, and many, many folks who are listening have probably seen this or been involved with this, right. So you sit down and you are architecting across a cloud ecosystem in an organization and what do you have? What is the center of the diagram? It's a stupid app, right, and I think that one of the big challenges that people have taking cloud technology big across an organization and really thinking with an ecosystem mindset is that they take their favorite app, their favorite solution it might be a big app, right and they stick it in the center. The center, like that's the sun and everything else revolves around that one app. It might be ERP, it might be CRM, but that's wrong, right, that's increasingly a dead end, because data is the center of your ecosystem, your ability to integrate it, to store it, to use it, to derive value from it, and that, I think, is the lesson for today. So, guys go. What do you see?

William Dorrington: 3:56
It amazes me that people don't think about data as being the omnipresent, omnipotent deity of any diagram when it comes to tech, or to organization or enablement in general.

Andrew Welch: 4:09
Would you say that's a deity in a diagram or a deity in a diagram? What would you?

William Dorrington: 4:15
I'll leave that one down to the audience. Sorry, sorry, but the reason why I say that is because everything we do within technology is either to get data in a validated way, report data back out, or store data or churn it in one manner. Everything else is just a method to do one of those few things. But at the end of the day, everything comes down to data. It's a bit like everything comes down to atoms, and it always amazes me that people don't move to looking at their data quality, their data aggregation, as their key milestone, their key foundational stone of their entire technology strategy. That's why I want to get that out there while I stay awake.

Mark Smith: 5:04
When organizations think about data and they think they have their data or they have their data in a digital format and that it's accessible and things. Then all of a sudden you point out that one organization I'm working with at the moment a very large enterprise customer and you find that they have got so much data sitting in file shares on their network that are non-connected and I'm talking about stuff as simple as spreadsheets and databases from whatever point solution they might have, and they think they have their data accessible, but of course it's at a department level. It's not like people in the organizations don't even know some of this data exists and it's data that they need. And I was reminded of a guy that was working for a major car manufacturer, heard the story and his job and his team's job was to do collision testing on a single model of car and just to look at the data on how I think it was just like a front fender stood up under certain impact conditions and he was only stuck with his model and he found a data set showing all the models of cars this manufacturer did, tapped into it and found that with that data, that wider data set, they could bring up patterns of failure points much quicker than just the single departmental data. And guess what his manager said no, your job is just to stick with the L model, right.

Mark Smith: 6:40
And what I took from that is that, yeah, how many organizations have much larger data sets but it's not available in your team or it's not accessible. You don't even know they exist and therefore you're losing or not getting the full picture of the art of the possible for the organization or making benefits from that. Because the outcome of that story was that once they tapped into that data set, the cost savings for the organization was phenomenal because so many departments were just doing the same thing just for a different product line or a product set, and the collective data was so much powerful than the individual. I don't know, do you guys find this that you come across a lot of organizations that they fundamentally don't understand their data landscape?

Ana Demeny: 7:22
I see a lot of people look at data and they see it as an impediment because they wanna build that app, the app in the center. So they'll be like we need to do a data migration, whatever, and that's like a tiny little point. And then every time you go and do like a status check or you're trying to actually move the needle in any sort of way that counts, they're like okay, whatever, how do we get to that app? Like they don't care really about the data or what sort of data they've got. Or if you point out that, oh, look, that department actually has something that you could use for your app, they're only mildly interested, as long as it's super quick. Okay, what are the quick wins, the things that I'm hearing a lot or that I've been hearing for a long time? So, yeah, data is just like an annoyance in the. They're like whatever, but I want to try co-pilot.

Chris Huntingford: 8:36
That statement makes me immediately angry. Yeah, no, genuinely, that statement makes me immediately angry. Like I'll tell you why. Right, I have this discussion with our team a lot internally and customers actually and I said okay, folks, what is the number one reason? An app, an app and I'm using the term app on purpose here, so we use the terms from Steven we'll do a shitty little app.

Chris Huntingford: 8:58
What is the reason a shitty little app or an app gets booted out of production, like, what is the primary reason something gets taken out of production? Okay, it's data. The second primary reason is security. Okay, infosec will never pass something that's got PII, or should never pass something that's got PII. Okay, that lives in a terrible data structure.

Chris Huntingford: 9:19
So I'm like you can spend, you can have the app as the center of your diagram as much as you want and do the look and feel and the CSS and do the wiffly-puffly visibility bullshit that people do in apps and do the wonderful UX, but if your data is terrible, that app is bullshit and it'll never make it through to a production scenario. So, congratulations, do all the UX and UI you want. It will never be productionized. Well done, you've wasted all of our time, right, and that's something that happens everywhere we go, so we had to implement a data strategy internally called the data up approach, and we live and die by it.

Chris Huntingford: 9:55
Somebody came to our company recently and said we need this thing built on SharePoint. We said absolutely not. That was our answer straight off the bat we won't do it, and it's because we have respect for our data so much. I'll go on another rant on this later. But like, I just feel as if people disrespect the information they have in their business and because they disrespect the information through whatever it is lack of knowledge or whatever they disrespect themselves and the business.

Ana Demeny: 10:19
I do feel like you took this question and, like you, punched it in the face. It really upset.

William Dorrington: 10:26
It makes him angry, even the wiffly, piffly parts.

Chris Huntingford: 10:29
It truly infuriates me Like I wish it was you how angry I get, right, because there's so many of these developers and UX people spending time piffling about with the front end when nobody's thought about actually what data they're talking to, so like I've seen a data breach happen live in front of my eyes, right, like it literally happened in front of me not any of my kit, by the way, somebody else's and I'm like well, there we go, well done, congratulations. And it's great, because you just spent a hundred grand on making a front end but didn't take any care about your data and security, which is actually the thing that matters.

William Dorrington: 11:06
But the key thing here and just to say just to sum up some of the wider podcast compensations we've having it goes back to that tyranny of the deliverable again, but it's so focused on that one part of the app they don't have a data strategy underneath. Well, they may. They just don't think about it, because a line of a business owner has just got off and has engaged a supply and said I just want this app built. They grab all that data. Maybe it's all validated, maybe it's trustworthy data. It just sits on its own and adds to the siloed, segregated, dispersed data sets in a really shitty data landscape that you can never use again. And it all then goes back to everything Chris has just said, which is then that app is built in a bad way and it just magnifies the issue, because not only do you have dispersed data, you then have dispersed shit data that you can never use.

Ana Demeny: 11:51
And you spent all of your customers money, very important. It's done, the money is gone. There's nothing more.

Andrew Welch: 11:59
There we go. That's what I wanted. Will said tyranny of the deliverable. And I say thumbs up, come on, there we go.

Chris Huntingford: 12:09
Dude honestly. But don't worry guys, you have a really pretty front end with CSS and GIFs and SBGs. All will be fine, because that's all you need is a Candicep to solve all of your problems.

Ana Demeny: 12:23
That's not the UXer's problem or fault, actually, because the UX designer and developer. They have their purpose and it's great that they're doing a great job.

Chris Huntingford: 12:40
Yeah, for sure.

Ana Demeny: 12:41
Like, look at Andrew right now. He wouldn't be having so much fun without a UXer.

William Dorrington: 12:46
A lot of user research has gone into that, mainly just for.

Ana Demeny: 12:49
Andrew, exactly Like. Have you seen anyone who's using it? That stuff has been live for months.

Chris Huntingford: 12:58
It's got the you know what it is right? I'll tell you what it is. It's the fault of the process and the people defining the process. You think that it's a wonderful idea to start with your screens and work down to data. I'm like why?

Ana Demeny: 13:17
It's our lack of being consultants. It's our lack of being consultants and I'll tell you why. You know why. It's because we know how to do what we know how to do and we will recommend that and not go beyond it. And when someone picks up like Mark's friend and they're like dude, we're going to save so much money, our results are going to be so much better. Unfortunately, there are sometimes barriers to create that, so we go back to. I love it when my husband takes me seriously.

Andrew Welch: 13:57
You said we're going to make so much money and I thought that deserved fireworks.

William Dorrington: 14:03
We accept that Andrew likes playing with this gadget. He's gone.

Andrew Welch: 14:09
All right, I'm done for now. I'm done for now.

Ana Demeny: 14:11
But then you still do what you can do or what you know how to do, and that's how you end up starting with the UX or with whatever, and never with the data, and the customer has a responsibility there as well. As a customer, I think it's not super responsible to say I've got whatever. Let's just say five million dollars, pounds, non-new Zealand dollars Sorry, mark, that means I have 20p.

Mark Smith: 14:50
Monopoly, money, monopoly money.

Ana Demeny: 14:53
But like, build me something and then, like you, sort of go away and not understand or point out the fact that you want your data to be healthy, like it's the customer and responsibility there as well, in my opinion. What?

William Dorrington: 15:59
was in Andrew's burrito.

Andrew Welch: 16:04
I think this is the New Zealand one. It's all I mean. This is the New Zealand one.

Mark Smith: 16:09 
Five dollar note. Five dollar note yeah.

Andrew Welch: 16:11
Yeah, australia, same queen, just worse money, you know.

William Dorrington: 16:15
Thank you for tuning into the ecosystems podcast. Today we're talking about currency Guarantee.

Andrew Welch: 16:22
I've got a whole envelope all of it. We got some Swedish, polish, british, anyway, sorry.

Ana Demeny: 16:28
Hey, that's a type of useful data, right. You know when you use that money and how to use it.

Andrew Welch: 16:35
That is true, that is true.

William Dorrington: 16:38
Well done for trying to rescue that yeah.

Andrew Welch: 16:40
Yeah Well so something. Anna, that you said earlier. That got me thinking about this.

Ana Demeny: 16:48
Really Whilst you were doing this.

Andrew Welch: 16:51
Yes, I'm back to being serious. We had to enliven things a little bit. So several of us, in fact I do believe four of the five of us, because one of us couldn't be bothered to come to South Coast Summit. We were at the South Coast Summit. Yeah, lazy, exactly.

Mark Smith: 17:10
Lazy, so lazy.

Andrew Welch: 17:12
It was so lazy we were at South Coast Summit so that we could see Chris Humpingford receive an award.

Ana Demeny: 17:18
Yes.

Mark Smith: 17:19
In a penguin suit.

Andrew Welch: 17:21
It was sort of a penguin suit.

Mark Smith: 17:23
It wasn't early.

Andrew Welch: 17:25
Which fun fact, since you brought it up, there are penguins on the New Zealand $5 note. Just bring all the pieces back together.

Mark Smith: 17:36
Do you know that those penguins live at the beach, literally 1K from my front door?

Ana Demeny: 17:42
Really Wow they're right now.

Mark Smith: 17:45
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Let's get my drone out and send it.

William Dorrington: 17:52
Yeah, there we go. I might be adding extra.

Andrew Welch: 17:55
Yeah, I mean, this is no one bargain for this.

Mark Smith: 17:57
I've never done live streaming from the drone before, but let's do it now.

Andrew Welch: 18:02
Well, I think you know when this goes into editing. I mean, what are they going to do with this segment?

Mark Smith: 18:09
You'll just see yeah.

Andrew Welch: 18:12
So we were at South Coast Summit a few weeks back and one of the conversations that yes, I'm going to go there, one of the conversations that it still is mind blowing to me that we are having is about licensing right, and about I'm thinking specifically right now power platform licensing, because most of the rest of the Microsoft world is on ACR, but fine, but in any case, this conversation around licensing and then there was an email that I saw flying around recently basically complaining that SharePoint was insufficiently feature-rich as a database. Right, like Microsoft, why have you made this lousy database called SharePoint? And I wanted to just berate this person when I read this. But the point is that, you know, I see people out there using technology like power platform and they're skipping when you don't buy the license, right, you're skipping actually the most powerful part of the whole platform, right.

Andrew Welch: 19:20
We want to have all these conversations about co-pilot and about AI in your apps, but to me, the real power of this thing is dataverse and the fact that when you standardize your app development on dataverse, you're bringing all of these, as Steve Mordew would say, shitty little apps. You're bringing them all in from the cold. You're getting all of that data into a transactional data service that is one hop via the lake, one hop away from being accessible to AI workloads or to analytical workloads run through Synapse, for example. So you know, it's just mind-blowing to me that we're, in late 2023, still having an argument or a debate about why someone doesn't want to pay for a proper data service, when that is the most powerful part of the technology.

Mark Smith: 20:11
Yeah, and I do, because you know that Bill Gates, when CEO of Microsoft saw Dynamics sorry, mscrm back then and saw the way the data set work, et cetera and the model-driven nature of creating solutions, he was like we've already got a share point, why are we even investing in this right? So he in fact understood even use expletives in that quote as into why there was an engineering team investing and this is, I think, when Satio was actually leading product development for business applications. So it's not a new thing, but interesting. You talk about full. You know why are people still talking about this?

Mark Smith: 20:51
I just had a guy of my team come to me this week and say to me that a customer asked for XYZ solution. Obvious fit. They're already a Dynamics customer, obviously fit with the power platform from a data-verse perspective. On that call was one of our internal SharePoint gurus oh, we can build all this in SharePoint. And I'm just like how many times in my career have I heard that Without an understanding what the customer is required at a fair level of security around this dataset and the default? Which is my question to you guys what are your top three answers to somebody that's normally within your own organization, that's normally the SharePoint guru that says that kind of statement oh, we could just build this all in SharePoint, it's cheaper.

Chris Huntingford: 21:42
Absolutely Mark.

Mark Smith: 21:46
Absolutely not.

Andrew Welch: 21:48
I will fight you in the road. I will fight you in the road. I'm not even joking.

Chris Huntingford: 21:51
So actually I say to people all the time I'm like do you hate your data in your business that much Like so? The thing is. The thing is, is that SharePoint okay? Yeah, it's designed for data sharing, not data locking down, right? So I'm like okay, so when you are a dumbass and you put all your private data in SharePoint, what the fuck do you think is going to happen? Okay, people are going to Share it's with everyone else.

Andrew Welch: 22:25
I'm never going to be able to say this without the information Share.

Chris Huntingford: 22:32
Share. I'm so ridiculous. I'm quite good.

Mark Smith: 22:35
This is what I love about way Chris says things.

William Dorrington: 22:39
The thing is and I keep trying to tie it back to the other podcast we have, which is that severe of understanding. So if you only have a hammer, everything's going to look like a nail right, and that's like they only know SharePoint. They know nothing else. They're just going to want to push that. And you know what? I still have clients all the time just because they don't want to pay for the licensing, and then you end up getting into positions of absolute madness. Our guy named Chris, if you push through with that and I'll tell you some of the stuff that I'm out with, no this is important, right?

Chris Huntingford: 23:07
Because the licensing thing. I would like to show you a comparison, If you.

William Dorrington: 23:12
if I may, yeah, bring it up, bring it up, but you never know where it's going with Chris. Is that BatSquatch first?

Chris Huntingford: 23:17
It is always BatSquatch first. It is the BatSquatch licensing guide 101. Okay, power Platform licensing for premium is more, is way more expensive than everyone else. Okay, dipshit, go to Salesforce and look at their per app license. Okay, and look at their extended license. We are $5. They are 25. We are 20. They are 100. Okay.

Andrew Welch: 23:42
These are real dollars yeah.

Mark Smith: 23:45
These are USD USD.

William Dorrington: 23:47
Oh, EUR Okay.

Chris Huntingford: 23:49
So you can. You can create some apps for 50 euros a month, okay, but look, I mean look at their standard price, and every way is get a quote. Like Mendex, cloud is basically get a quote right. Build mission critical. Get a quote. That means it's not going to be cheap. We are $20 per user per month. Before negotiation, look at our systems.

Ana Demeny: 24:09
Right and you should, and you should always fear the get a quote right Like yeah, yeah, when. I was when I was slunning our honeymoon right and I wanted these nice resorts and things and they never had a price and I was like I'm not, why would I even bother?

William Dorrington: 24:28
Yeah, you're going to sell your soul to the salesman down the phone. That's pretty much what that is. Yeah, sign in blood just here, please.

Mark Smith: 24:35
You're so right as on this software that we're recording on, I pay, I don't know. Let's say I pay $25 a month, right, and I've used it for two Navias.

Andrew Welch: 24:44
Did you get a quote for?

Mark Smith: 24:45
that no. So there's new features that they've introduced and they're like get a quote, right. I'm like okay, and so guess what a get a quote was? An appointment was booked with me and a guy comes on and, you know, has this meeting with me. They're razzle-dazzle yeah. Guess what the next tier was. Four and a half thousand a month, Like 25K, Are you serious?

William Dorrington: 25:08
Like I mean what features are you getting for that jump? Why don't?

Mark Smith: 25:12
you just qualify me out. Right, why don't you qualify me out? You wasted a call on somebody that obviously I am not Microsoft and going to drop coin like I'm not an enterprise organization. This is just a hobby for me, and you go from 25 to 4,000. Like, what a stupid.

Andrew Welch: 25:31
Yeah, but Mark surely, surely, the reason that you have this perspective is because you, for most of your career, I'm sure, like all the rest of us here, we've worked with very, very competent salespeople who are very skilled at qualifying things out, and they have never wasted your time getting on a bullshit call.

Mark Smith: 25:49
Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got a meme for that. That's awesome.

Ana Demeny: 25:55
That happens in all industries. So, and about the if you're a hammer, every problem's a nail.

William Dorrington: 26:03
So every one's. Mark Smith, I only have $25. What can I get?

Andrew Welch: 26:10
Yeah, Looks like. Looks like I'm going into podcasting, yeah.

Ana Demeny: 26:15
So in our, in our house, not the one that we've moved into, but the old one that got flooded and it's not rented out anyway. It got fixed the first before being rented out.

William Dorrington: 26:30
We got this family living in the floods.

Ana Demeny: 26:33
Like the family's doing well. Anyway, we've got this smart meters system put in. It's a for everyone who's dialing into us. This is like a very UK thing.

Mark Smith: 26:51
No, we have. We have a New Zealand to they. They got from the colonies out, they got out to the colonies. Yeah, we have smart meter.

William Dorrington: 26:58
I thought we don't have anyone dialing in.

Mark Smith: 27:00
Yeah.

Ana Demeny: 27:01
Well, I thought. I thought you didn't need them in New Zealand Mark. As all of your energy is clean and pure and nice, we need to pay big money for the oil.

Mark Smith: 27:10
You've watched the tourism.

Andrew Welch: 27:12
I just sort of assumed you had a geothermal vent in your living room. That was how you exactly.

Ana Demeny: 27:19
So we have these marmitters right. So and the smart meters desynchronized when we changed the wifi system and the new tenants. They cannot set it up. So I could have gone and said it, said the whole thing up myself, but then you know, my Mark Smith's voice was just in my head telling me that I should not do this if I can pay for someone to go and do it. Here I am trying to find a person to go and do it.

Andrew Welch: 27:50
Also, it's worth pointing out that she was in Australia at the time, just to be clear.

Ana Demeny: 27:55
Yes, person number one. I got a quote. He he like calls me and stuff. And he's like why don't you install this smart meter system? And I'm like, well, I have this other one that I'm telling you that needs to be synchronized. He's like, no, no, no, but you should use this other one. I'm like I take it you do know you have no idea about my smart meter system. And he's like, no, no, you should just install this one.

Andrew Welch: 28:26
Maybe he was just trying to be a good consultant and not just take your orders verbatim. I don't know.

Ana Demeny: 28:32
I mean I. Person number two swears that they know about the smart meter, but the cost would be too small for them to come and fix it. Therefore I need to do something else. I'm like, fine, I'll do your, my servicing with you as well. So they do like a whole boiler servicing. And then I find out that they also don't know anything about my smart meter situation. Person number three again, they recommend a different smart meter system, but not the first recommendation either.

William Dorrington: 29:03
So, like I feel like this is just therapy. I am.

Ana Demeny: 29:09
I am using it and when we're talking about data and why aren't people doing it properly? If they get the same advice from consultancies, like I did, then it's also confusing. And then you get on the call with a Microsoft partner and you're like I want to do everything, like I want some governance and compliance and I want the good environment or landing zone strategy and I want to take care of my data because I actually want to use AI.

William Dorrington: 29:48
Anna was raising a really good point there, though, which is because clients get into the space of thinking they're always trying to be upsold, and Microsoft are always so relentlessly pursuing the license sale that whenever you actually say to them you need an increased license to really drive benefit and have this done properly, they just think that you're playing the charlatan electric meter man, or whatever your smart meter is. Yeah, so I can see where Anna's coming from there, that there is definitely a pattern of that as well.

Mark Smith: 30:18
Here's the other thing I find that Microsoft folks themselves, sellers, get stuck on the pricing themselves. I was called in recently to speak to an organization on behalf of Microsoft because the ceded licenses from E3 and E5, they had squeezed that limit that there was nothing left in it. Right, they needed to go pro licensing. And the Microsoft guys were like, oh, we can't tell them, like so they bring me in to talk about why they need to go pro was quite clear. But the thing is is that I've come from a world of dynamics where the pricing was over $100 per user, right, and I see these prices for power apps and stuff and I'm like what is the problem?

Mark Smith: 31:03
People, the value is so exponentially more what you get to what you spend. But they get fixated on this, on this, these tiny price points, because you know, in any form of negotiation, it's what you reference against a price is what you said in your mind. And what happens here is that if you've come from a SharePoint and a kind of very freemium model, you know $1 is expensive. You know from free, I mean, look at, look at Elon. He's now saying that to X, he's going to charge everybody a fee to be on a social network and people like whoa you know now it's like and he's only saying it's a dollar a year but it's still. People are like and of course he's wanting to control the bots on the platform and therefore, if they have to pay for every bot, that might be, but I can't see if someone's got a bot network operating at dollar.

William Dorrington: 31:52
Seems pretty cheap for them to very cheap, yeah, and the thing is that they're only, you know, back to the licensing point. If they're, if they're thinking they're paying, you know, the upper more premium plans and they're only seeing it as one solution and they're not looking at in a more. You know he listed way with with all the different aspects, what different solutions they can bring. Of course it's bloody expensive, but that's not how you see it, and I see that's also another thing that happens all the time, which is they don't look at the graduation curve of you're going to end up building in so much technical debt. You're going to have loads of these shitty little apps on a shitty, shitty database.

William Dorrington: 32:25
Sorry, you can tell you can tell I'm very tired. So you know, on this awful, awful SharePoint lists, and then all of a sudden you're going to get to a point where you realize you're seven, eight solutions in, you're starting to see the value and that's when you go, okay, yeah, we'll do it. And by then you've got all that technical debt. You have to re platform everything and it is an absolute pain. This really is therapy I'm enjoying this.

Mark Smith: 32:47
Yeah, can I add something? Have any of you read the book Tools and Weapons?

William Dorrington: 32:51
Yeah, Brad Smith.

Mark Smith: 32:52
Okay, yeah, yeah, I have, and so this quote stuck out to me and I tried to search online. I couldn't find it. So I actually opened the book and went back to where I highlighted it and said Well, data has always been important to society. It has never played the role it does today. Even when trade slows or economics falters, data continues to grow at a steady pace. Some say that data has become the oil of the 21st century, but that understates the reality. A century ago, automobiles, airplanes and many trains ran on oil. Today, every aspect of human life is fueled by data. When it comes to modern civilization, data is more like the air we breathe than the oil we burn.

William Dorrington: 33:34
I love that that's so powerful yeah.

Mark Smith: 33:38
I read that maybe what he bring that book out, maybe five years ago, so pre AI, like the AI we know since, you know, november 30 last year.

Mark Smith: 33:49
But I love the visionary nature and what he like he was seeing that dad. He was talking about some of the data around cancer and cancer research and the problem is every cancer researcher is doing their own siloed thing right, because everyone's after the money for what the results of they could solve the problem of cancer. But imagine if we had open data sets and this is where a lot of that open thinking around data came about and we started as a, as a humanity started sharing this kind of important data and I know I'm digressing into a utopian world here, but the power that would bring. But if we bring it back to what we're talking about, I think that once again organizations are not understanding the fundamental priority that should be putting on data. It's more the air we breathe and the oil we burn is such a different way of thinking about how the life that giving nature to a business is health, moving forward is on how they have that data.

William Dorrington: 34:49
A great example of that is you must have had the human genome project. I mean that was groundbreaking for lots of people coming together to completely map the entirety of the human genome. You know what the benefits we've got from that around sort of improved diagnosis of various genetic diseases, actually improved medicine, actually some of the groundbreaking RNA aspects of knowledge that then actually help with the whole COVID vaccine regardless of your view on it which is now helping implement other medicine, which has helped with CRISPR and all the genetic modification. I mean huge, just because we got together and created this disconnected, integrated data set that all the scientists contributed to. And you know, half the issue we have in the UK and others is a lot of the public bodies and health organizations such as the NHS gets so clingy to their own data. They don't want to share it for the common good, and that is just insane, right? Yeah, I'm going to go to bed now. Catch you soon.

Mark Smith: 35:51
But if you liken this back to any organization, right, it really does stem into how important this discussion, as part of an ecosystem, needs to be had and needs to be catalogued and understood. Do you really you know, and that leads into connectors and how you make data available, and of DevSecOps around all that how do you have these discussions when they're not in the scope of the delivery, of the delivery of the deliverables? Right, that's not in the brief, so we're not focusing on that.

Andrew Welch: 36:22
You know that's.

Andrew Welch: 36:23
That's something where and and I'll give some practical advice here right, if you're a, if you're a Microsoft customer, right, or you're any sort of your customer of any cloud, you know cloud provider and you go out and you have firms, you have consultancies, partners, whatever come to you with proposals on on on how to, on how to do something right, toss them out of the room If they're not bringing you a compelling story about, about your data platform, right, and I see and I see this all the time where you know, and I see this across organizations, right, so where the customer will go out and they'll say I need an app that does A, b and C, and then you try to turn this into a responsible conversation right around what the data story looks like and what you get is oh, no, no, no, you're going to distract me from the app.

Andrew Welch: 37:22
You're going to distract. I don't, I don't want to be led down that path. You're just going to distract me from the thing, from the thing that I really care about. You know, and it goes back to what Chris said. What Chris said when we, when we opened up, right, like just that that obsession with the app is is really killing you, I think hugely.

Chris Huntingford: 37:42
So, andrew, I love, I love the fact that you like toss them out of the room, right? So one of the one of the things yeah, yeah, one of the things that I've started to learn is that and this is why, like, I do get very passionate about it and I do get a bit snotty as well, but, like, I'll tell you why, okay. So, mark, the fact that you brought up that quote actually goes perfectly in line with the way that I talk to organizations, perfectly, and I'm like, okay, guys, so look, why do you have data? Okay, the reason you have data is the digital representation of you and your company. Okay, that's like the primary. So your core data structure is effective via representation of you, the cut, your company and the transactions you have with other people.

Chris Huntingford: 38:23
Now, if you are so happy to treat that data with respect, with disrespect, and you're so happy to not care about it, you would affect actually just doing that exact same pain, that exact same respect or disrespect to your organization, yourselves and the people you're serving.

Chris Huntingford: 38:39
Right, and I know it's like a little bit sort of it's a tariff maybe, but I think it's bullshit and I hate it, like I would if my data is stored in a Terrible data structure and somebody gets hacked like I'm angry, right, because they haven't paid my data respect, and I think that the way in which we design applications, power apps, that's used that as an example and somebody is really stupid enough to store my information inside an Excel document on a desktop Like screw you, man, I'm gonna remove my business from you straight away. And the way that I want my customers and organizations I work with to treat data is with high respect. Yeah, and I tell people this my words, I use these words legitimately on Friday last week at a customer and I said this is how it is, man and Will's point to will's points about you know people like the NHS and they're not sharing data. It's just selfish and it's so money grubbing and money grabbing and actually what organizations misses the fact that they've got such an opportunity to make more money by sharing?

William Dorrington: 39:42
another key point and I was fortunate enough to meet and it's just another example, chris, just to color what what you're saying, but there's a genuine example that I'm sure they won't mind me sharing. Oh so it's been lovely to know you and they're physically imprisoned. I Was fortunate enough to meet these really, really clever doctors. You know, all doctors are clever, but these are the guys that literally set the foundational baselines for a lot of the medicine within the UK. Very clever people. I sat there and I felt like they took me along. They took me along to this dinner. I think I was just the entertainment, quite frankly, you know. So they might address me up in a little suit and what they wanted to do and they were being stopped from doing on some level because of the data sharing was the fact that, when it comes to oncology so so cancer, study of cancer, and and and the and working with cancer Our medicine's got so advanced now that it's not always the cancer that kills the patient that that has.

William Dorrington: 40:38
It is actually the medicine.

William Dorrington: 40:39
Starts affecting their heart Before the cancer actually gets them, because the medicine makes you outlive and then, all of a sudden, you have started having cardio events such as heart attacks and and and and other factors and I'm getting to my point here.

William Dorrington: 40:53
But what they found is if they had all the data and they could start actually seeing what medicine started affecting people based on their vital. So come in all the time and have their heart checked and have ECGs that have blood pressures, in that they could soon get to a point when they can adjust the medicine in time so that actually it can sustain and keep the cancer at bay but also ensure that they don't have any any sort of cardio episodes that would cause a fatality. But because they're not allowed to access and aggregate loads of data from around the hospital, around Europe, around the UK, it wasn't able to go forward and it's becoming a real issue. And it's things like that which makes so much sense and will have so much benefit that we are literally cutting off our nose to spy our face at that point, which is just insane. So let's talk about wars. I mean, we are rich, you go through.

Mark Smith:  41:42
For the same reason. Right, it's like the stupidity of it, but people are there to make money on it, right, and they, they protect this. This, yeah, it's horrible.

William Dorrington: 41:52
You're right, mark, very personal point, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Welch: 41:55
I think, though, for a long time, it's easy now to assume Mal intent, right, or maybe it's just easy to assume selfishness, that you selfishness that comes across as mal intent, right. But listen, it's for a very long time. What we're talking about really wasn't possible, right? It was not necessarily technically feasible for data from Different parts of an organization, to say nothing of data from different organizations, to be co-mingled in any sort of useful way. Right, and that, I think, is changed, but it's changed very quickly. The technology has surely outpaced the ability of Mindsets to change, right. So now we have we have the ability to, you know, say, you had a lot of, you had a number of different Organizations, and they were all kind of pursuing broadly the same mission.

Andrew Welch: 42:54
So we'll take, you know, the medical field since we keep coming back to this, right, and they're gonna have different applications, different systems, and some of that data is gonna be kept in data versus. It's gonna be kept in sequel. Some of it might even be kept in SharePoint, you know, it's gonna be kept in different cloud providers, in different data storage technologies, and it's only very, very recently that we had, it was achievable to say, direct all of that data downstream into a lake, secure it properly, govern that data properly, and then have to wear with all to do something with it. Right, so maybe we could have gotten it into the lake, or we could have gotten it into a, an acceptable Commingling technology, but then what then? What do you do with it? I think that this is a huge. We often talk about Data as being a prerequisite for AI, but I think there's another way to invert that and say AI gives us the ability to extract value and make sense of data at Scale in a way that we couldn't have done previously, like very recently.

Ana Demeny: 43:58
I think that's a great point actually.

Chris Huntingford: 44:00
Yeah, I'm a bit worried about that though really. Yeah, I'll tell you why. I say this to customers all the time. I'm like AI is a loudhaler for shitty data. Right, it really is. And what I found? Okay. So do you remember when the low code thing came around probably around 2015?, I guess and People like, okay, you know no one here remembers that. Chris. Yeah, well, you know what's low code. You're low code. You're low code and low maintenance. Go to bed, no, I think. I think people panicked about that, but um.

Andrew Welch: 44:39
Chris's face is like a power app. It's a beautiful exterior, but there's no data behind it.

Chris Huntingford: 44:45
Yeah, and he's back in some mess back in some mess because of you bro.

William Dorrington: 44:53
Because I shared my point.

Andrew Welch: 44:55
What is? What did we do before that we recorded this episode like?

William Dorrington: 45:02
I can't wait to integrate next to your back. I.

Andrew Welch: 45:13
Mean, we'll spend the day hanging out with you. Anna will have spent more time with you today than I have, yeah.

William Dorrington: 45:21
Thank you.

Andrew Welch: 45:21
I've enjoyed it.

Ana Demeny: 45:32
So Chris was saying that what you said, andrew, was a bit of BS. This is what he was saying.

Chris Huntingford: 45:39
Oh, I don't think it's beers. I think that you have to be careful, right, because if you put the bad data and couple it with AI, it's like putting bad data with a power bi report that's been shared with your entire business.

Ana Demeny: 45:53
Oh, it's shit and shit out yeah well, yeah, but I think that's exactly what Andrew's saying. He's saying like this is so before, yeah, or maybe it's not, that's just my opinion. So, whereas before we used to say, oh, you need to categorize your data, you need to bring it all into a user, into a usable Version of it, you need to have your PII data protected, etc. Etc. But no one really understood the value because they were like, oh, you're asking me to spend a load of money and not get anything in return, because, guess what, I am still, you know, feeling in my orders and signing contracts, and oh, sharing information and whatever. So where's the benefit? Whereas I feel like Andrew saying, unless you categorize everything and you look at your data from a sensible point of view, you're not going to be able to actually achieve anything with AI, like you're saying, crapping crap up.

Chris Huntingford: 47:08
Okay, I got the opposite. I got the. You need AI to help you with your data.

William Dorrington: 47:14
So I got a third part of that.

William Dorrington: 47:16
Sorry, Andrew, let's jump in on this because it's an interesting part here.

William Dorrington: 47:20
I got a slight third thing where I was typing, actually to our good friend Cheryl Netley, so I only listened to the last thing you said, which is around actually getting being able to access the amount of data you've got in a format that is actually consumable One thing that I think that large language models has allowed us to achieve.

William Dorrington: 47:37
And if we ignore the business aspect of this right now and just talk about the humanity as a whole and all the knowledge and articles and pages and journals and images and graphs and everything we have to really progress and move us on as a human race, as it were, to advance us in science, advances in medicines and tech and everything else, we need large language models to really allow us to understand all the data we have, because it's impossible now for any one person to create reports and that, to understand everything that's there, to understand all the images and read it and digest it, as your cognitive search was as close as we got to it, but that was only search, it wasn't actually an interpretation. So sorry, Andrew, I don't know if that was the route you was going down. That's exactly it.

Andrew Welch: 48:19
So let's take these high-flying, high-flying medical research, scientific, good of humanity examples. Those are great and I think that's ultimately what we're driving towards. But let's make this a little more relatable. So Anna and I just were on our honeymoon. We went to Bali and to Australia and to New Zealand, because when you're far away you certainly think Bali and New Zealand are close by one another.

Mark Smith: 48:54
You can walk there at low tide.

Andrew Welch: 49:00
Mark, you might want to think twice about it, but I bet we'll do so. When we were on this trip, I was thinking about something that Anna told me, which was that the pieces of the trip that she planned, she planned them with chat, gpt and Bing, and I took this to heart. One day we were sitting in Melbourne and I just pulled out my phone and I asked Bing. I said, hey, bing, my wife and I are at, and I named the cafe we were sitting at. We have a flight in five hours. We need to go pick up our suitcases back from our hotel. This is where the hotel is. These are the things we're interested in. What should we do?

Andrew Welch: 49:51
And Bing just replied and we went and did what Bing said, which, yes, that might make us sheeple of the Bing, but the point is that what AI did there was it took a huge amount of information pertaining to what one should do in Melbourne, and it helped me to quickly be able to deal with that information. And what I was saying a moment ago is that we think of data as being the necessary input to make AI work, and that's true, but saying it that way almost presupposes that AI is just having the AI is the goal, but having the AI is not the goal. The goal is to help humans be able to deal with massive amounts of data at scale, and I think that that's really where a lot of the value is here.

Mark Smith: 50:48
Yeah, and I assume right that somebody's going to create some AI to make sense of the garbage right as in to make sense of the data sprawl in organisation. So then that brings to the second point. It will only be able to do that if it has access to the data right To make sense of the wild west, of how your data is pocketed and segmented and siloed all over the organisation. So connectivity to those data sets, in other words accessibility to those data sets, are going to become increasingly important for AIs to then make sense, to categorise it and make it usable for the organisation, find the trends, behaviours, patterns etc. In those data sets.

Ana Demeny: 51:35
But that's where Microsoft's fabric will behave splendidly. In theory at least, it can index and process any sort of garbage you may have from any sort of data source, Microsoft or otherwise. So unless you've got stuff just sitting on a server somewhere, so on-prem, if your data is on a computer with access to the internet, in theory that can be ingested by fabric and then used accordingly, in theory at least.

William Dorrington: 52:19
Or any other good intelligent data platform like Palantir or others.

Andrew Welch: 52:27
So this was a presentation that I gave at a conference recently. Basically, what we're showing here is on the left, you have a typical model for how AI acts on enterprise data, and then on the right, what I talk through and I'm not going to do the whole talk with you here, but basically this idea of getting your data into places that are accessible or addressable by AI.

Andrew Welch: 52:56
So in this diagram, in this example, we're thinking Azure, sql, one Lake, data Lake, blob Storage and Cosmos DB. All of those data sources are indexable by Azure Cognitive Search. And then I think Dataverse has a really important role to play here, because Dataverse is absolutely phenomenal as a transactional data surface. So you're transacting data via an application and the beauty of it is that it one hops into the lake. You just push or shortcut data from Dataverse into the lake.

Andrew Welch: 53:32
But I think that what organizations need to reckon with here is that much of their data is sitting in services that are not directly or indirectly accessible by AI or, incidentally, by API management for secure distribution, to say, partner organizations or third party applications. They're not directly accessible by reporting and analytical tools Synapse, power BI, etc. So getting data into places, it doesn't all have to be consolidated down into one specific place, but getting data into a place where it is accessible and addressable by a data distribution. This is why we call it an ecosystem architecture, a data distribution neighborhood. It's that collection of services that then take the data that you have and create value from it, whether it's generative or reporting and analytical or some sort of data science workload. Whatever, you have to be able to extract the data from a place where those tools can access it and use it.

Chris Huntingford: 54:40
I used your Anna's awesome diagram again today with the data being accessible and whatnot. I'll talk about the application portfolio neighborhood and how, when the data gets posted, the integration neighborhood from the business applications neighborhood I can't remember the name, but it's really interesting, right? Because basically every organization I'm working with right now I'm saying to them number one, we have to do things like architectural best practice. But number two, we actually have to talk about how to microservice your data and make it accessible, and one of the things I'm working with their goal is to make their student records safely available. Now, we're lucky because the dude we're working with there they've got a super strong, super, super strong CIO. He's brilliant, he's absolutely brilliant. And then it trickles down into their layers of the low code team and their digital lead and it's amazing.

Chris Huntingford: 55:41
I know well, you met the guy I'm just not going to say his name on the podcast, but it's interesting because I see the reference ability on, like, how to microservice data across the teams there at this organization. And it's amazing because they're like we've got to make this data safely available. Yes, we've got this PowerAppy stuff. Yes, we've got this AI stuff. Yes, we've got a cool bot, but how do we do microservice, this service, this stuff so they're top priority. One of their top priorities is to do that and I showed them your diagram and I gave you guys kudos, by the way, so I referenced you both and I said this is how you do it. They were like this is awesome, absolutely awesome. It's true, if you can microservice data, many of your other problems are going to be solved. Safely, microservice safely, the safety around.

Andrew Welch: 56:26
It is still a concern for me and it is a point of nervousness. I sometimes can't tell nowadays whether that nervousness is something that comes from a place of. I need to modernize my mindset. I do think that the technology to generative AI and technology around business intelligence, analytics those sorts of technologies that take the data and do something useful with it have actually outpaced our ability to reliably govern and secure that data. Now I think that Microsoft is making huge investments in the ability to do that, but I think that we are still considerably. As long as I see people screwing with data versus security roles, which I think are extraordinarily powerful, I will think that we are still pretty far off from a true enterprise one security model for your data. I know we are working hard on it, but it still keeps me up at night.

Chris Huntingford: 57:46
I will tell you something, andrew. This will be interesting from a Microsoft perspective. I love mucking around with the database security roles like it's my thing. I love it. I've been doing it for years. I've been trying to break everything and put it back together. It's really strange. I can't help it. I've got a call with the Microsoft fast track solution architecture team, so we get on this call. What I've found was a way to basically mess with security roles in such a way that I could lock down elements and areas of the platform. The dude said to me the words that came out of their mouth was Chris. That is not in the spirits of the platform.

Andrew Welch: 58:32
Which part was not in the spirit of the platform? Was it that you tried to break it or the fact that it was broken?

Chris Huntingford: 58:42
There's a very important distinction here. They've built this. You know that they've released this environment routing thing right. I was like cool, I don't like this thing. So I'd been doing this years before using, so built an app, slash awesome PDA that wanted to ask the user a bunch of questions. Then what it did is I will not use the maker role. I'm like nope, nope, nope, nope, absolutely not. But the only three roles that give you access to the maker experience are environment maker, admin and system customizer. They're the only three. However, if you pick up the good, the actual good of the environment, you can route people to the environments without them having the role. So what you do is you copy the maker role and you can hack it, basically. So rip out a bunch of privileges so you can actually stop people making flows, sharing apps or sorts of things and then route them to that environments.

Mark Smith: 59:34
And that was not in the spirit of the platform, not in the spirit, I'm hoping you're going to do a session at an upcoming conference on how to do a demo.

William Dorrington: 59:41
Just go in spirit, spirit of the platform.

Chris Huntingford: 59:43
Yeah, I'm going to, I've actually, I've actually, I've actually showed them, I've showed people how to do it.

Mark Smith: 59:48
Yeah, I like it.

Ana Demeny: 59:50
I think at the same time, those security roles are just so complex that I'm seeing a lot of people just using the admin role, like all that work where they migrate a huge amount of data, and then they can't figure out how security roles work because the matrix is so complex that they end up giving everyone an admin role just to make sure that.

Mark Smith: 1:00:17
Yeah, yeah, that works.

Ana Demeny: 1:00:20
So where do? Where does that complexity stop, or where should it stop? Or is that one of the blockers and that that goes? It's not just the security roles you know, it's all of the rules of governance and compliance and everything that we we would write to, we would like to adhere to. Is that prospect so scary that organizations would rather just push the can down the road and build a bunch of apps instead?

Andrew Welch: 1:00:51
Organizations love kicking the can down the road. That is absolutely. If, given the chance to kick a can down the road, they're they're going with it.

Chris Huntingford: 1:01:01
Yeah, we have to make it really difficult and really hard, because that's the way we need to do things, because it's for free.

William Dorrington: 1:01:11
So spend all your money on the consultancy instead? Yeah, bro, I don't know. I just I should avoid development.

Chris Huntingford: 1:01:19
Yeah, it is. It's like how many lines of power effects can we write here, in fact? In fact, it's a competition Make as many lines of power effects as you can and then make technical debt. In fact, you know what script like that's just embed JavaScript. In fact, screw it. Let's just embed JavaScript in these SPGs, in these CSS, and write all the things so that we can nest everything and then completely have all the debts because it's free. Other chair.

Andrew Welch: 1:01:47
Exactly and, on that note, when we, when we come, when we come back with the next episode, we'll seek practical guidance and practical advice for Mark Will. But he was, he didn't press us this time. Sometimes you know, like we, you know really deep into theory and Mark's like yeah, we need, yeah, give me something practical, give me real advice.

Chris Huntingford: 1:02:12
He didn't bother us this time, cause Mark has a bunch of sleeping children.

William Dorrington: 1:02:18
Matt, matt, matt, matt doesn't even, he's not even aware he's here. Sorry, matt, matt's not aware, he's here.

Mark Smith: 1:02:23
Actually, let's just address the marmalade thing. Tell me, like I didn't understand that, what was that all about?

Chris Huntingford: 1:02:29
What the marmalade thing.

Mark Smith: 1:02:30
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Huntingford: 1:02:31
So this is going to be hard to explain. It's just the thing, right? It's not really. But anti, anti likes, anti, likes to mock the way the British speak. Okay, right. So it came from MVP Summit a long time ago, where we got obsessed with the word lobbing, ah, lobby. So we basically read it, read around asking people to say the word lobby and boobs, boobs was like can we meet in the lobby? So that's where it started. And then and then we just started taking words, words like lozenger and marmalade, right. And it just cuts to the point where he would message me randomly in the middle of the night screaming marmalade.

William Dorrington: 1:03:08
I've had voice notes for auntie saying lobby as well.

Mark Smith: 1:03:13
I've never quite understood why See how important it was to bring this topic up right, Because it's now the one clarity.

Andrew Welch: 1:03:20
I think our the listenership, the viewership of this podcast, once people find out that this podcast contains the explanation as to why auntie Payunin messages you weird things the lobby. The lobby.

Chris Huntingford: 1:03:34
But the best is he, the wife, the only thing he said he's got, he's got some, he's got a button up and you just see the front of the knife and he's wondering around. He goes to, he's got a piece of toast and he spreads the marmalade on the toast, stops and screams marmalade and just carries on and no one no one that's in a group with me is like ever amused and I'm like dying laughing because I think it's the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life.

Chris Huntingford: 1:04:09
It's it continues to do it and won't stop, and it's my favorite thing.

Mark Smith: 1:04:17
Another news, anna. Now that you're you no longer a blue badge. Yes, how long do you become an MVP? I?

Ana Demeny: 1:04:25
don't know, I don't know. It depends on whether my good friends are ready to nominate me to begin with.

Mark Smith: 1:04:37
You need to know at MVP, don't you? I do need some good friends.

William Dorrington: 1:04:42
You need some good friends.

Ana Demeny: 1:04:46
Right, right, but you know what? It takes 12 months. This is what I'm hearing. It takes 12 months.

Mark Smith:
1:04:54

You're doing such amazing speaking sessions at events around this whole ecosystem piece. I think that definitely qualification material.

Ana Demeny: 1:05:04
I think it's important and I am taking it. I am taking it super seriously, so it is a goal of mine. Let's just say Good, Good To get another blue badge, only not the bluest badge.

Andrew Welch: 1:05:21
Yes, you won't get the other blue badge because Microsoft has really cheaped out on the MVP merch. We used to get a whole kit right with a certificate that some people who need a lot of validation would have. This year you got like a little bit of a discount.

Mark Smith: 1:05:38
Do you think that they don't give that for first time comers? I thought that would still. Surely they're still giving that to the first, you know, as in when you first get awarded.

William Dorrington: 1:05:48
Because I mean, I haven't seen what I haven't picked up my mail. My desk came and, as the driver gave it to me this year, it fell out the hole in the bag and just dropped on the floor. That was my experience this year. I had my coats.

Chris Huntingford: 1:06:06
I didn't even know where the disk is.

Mark Smith: 1:06:09
It is interesting, as you know, the changes.

Andrew Welch: 1:06:13
It's just got this lousy envelope in the mail with this thing wrapped up in it. I was like what the hell is? Oh, I know what this is. This thing used to travel in style, yeah, now it just travels in.

Mark Smith: 1:06:23
It used to travel with an instruction set. How is it? It's just handled with the Really no, no jokes. It used to come with a card that. It used to come with a card that would go in a quite a way. I'm not flexing anybody, I'm not flexing, but I need to go over there. It came with a card that said it literally had fingers and was like that's how you do it.

William Dorrington: 1:06:57
To be honest, I didn't realise that I was there and I kept just shoving out my nose. I'm glad I found that card in it.

Mark Smith: 1:07:05
I was just supposed to see that?

Andrew Welch: 1:07:07
that showed the quality of some of my piece. I feel inadequate bringing this out after Mark is well flexed.

Chris Huntingford: 1:07:16
Where is? Look at the time man, my ward.

Andrew Welch: 1:07:18
We've come a long way since the one year when I mean now we just get the thing in a paper bag. But then there was the one year when Microsoft was so excited that they sent me too, so I actually have multiple of the same year. It wasn't just two glass discs, it was two certificates, it was two little lapel magnets that I've never worn, and it's not that I need the lapel magnet, I just want to know that it's there.

Ana Demeny: 1:07:44
No, but it used to come with friends. You also got the little picnic blanket that we never used.

William Dorrington: 1:07:50
Oh yeah, yeah.

Ana Demeny: 1:07:52
And like the boomerang or what was that? The little disc that you also never the free speed. There you go, and there was a speaker with a bad input, but anyway, it was nice though, the fast track stuff was pretty slick, I'm not going to lie.

Chris Huntingford: 1:08:07
The fast track stuff was pretty slick. Yeah that was slick, without a doubt.

Mark Smith: 1:08:11
Without a doubt.

Chris Huntingford: 1:08:12
I have to show you guys one thing this is very funny. I don't know if it's going to work. Let me see if I wake it up. Nope, he's asleep.

Mark Smith: 1:08:21
He's asleep, he's asleep, he's asleep.

Andrew Welch: 1:08:26
He's asleep, he's asleep.

Mark Smith: 1:08:31
He's asleep I saw the photo of this. I saw on Twitter.

Chris Huntingford: 1:08:36
He's just gone to sleep, but when you pick him up he gets angry. He goes. I'll wake him, I'll let him sleep and I'll show you guys tomorrow.

Mark Smith: 1:08:44
Hey guys, I know we've had some frivolity. We've got to draw to a close, I've got to go and deal with the situation and I've got a customer appointment, and this is the joys of little kids. Any final words? Will you stay down for the entire show? Congrats, thanks, thanks. Do I get an?

William Dorrington: 1:09:03
award? Yeah, you do. Do I get a disk every time I come to a show?

Mark Smith: 1:09:06
You get a glass of disk. Next time I see you I'll give you your award, that's a hurt-shut Reward, not award.

William Dorrington: 1:09:15
No, no, no, Mark, I'm not going to give you a discount.

Mark Smith: 1:09:18
I'm not going to give you a discount.

William Dorrington: 1:09:20
I'm not going to give you a award. No, no, no, mark, mark, you best give me my trophy when I see you. Yoohoo, no, no, thank you, it's been great. I feel like a guest on this podcast.

Mark Smith: 1:09:34
Now, it's been fantastic. Thank you, yeah, good to have you back, man. Good to have you back.

William Dorrington: 1:09:40
Yeah, oh, one last plug.

Mark Smith: 1:09:42
Dynamics Mines. You can be sincere, Andrew. Jesus. Yeah, dynamics minds. I cannot wait. I've got the privilege of being one of the voters for the session track for Power Platform. Chris, I saw that you made a submission.

Chris Huntingford: 1:09:59
Sorry, buddy, but I'm also one of the session selectors.

Mark Smith: 1:10:05
No, I actually put a must-have session because I've actually the one session that you put forward. I've seen that session and it was epic, so I was like this is a must-show and tell Because, after all, you've promised to send me the PowerPoint that many times and I still haven't got it.

Chris Huntingford: 1:10:18
I know, dude, I can't forget it. I'll send it to you now, actually, thank you.

Andrew Welch: 1:10:22
Are we going to do a live podcast recording at Dynamics Minds?

Mark Smith: 1:10:28
It's hard right to do it at an event Like it's, because it's such a different technical setup, like I'm not personally a big fan because of the equipment that I have to take to make that a reality. How about you?

Andrew Welch: 1:10:39
get over yourself and figure it out, Mark.

Mark Smith: 1:10:41
Oh no, I've got the equipment, it's just I have to carry that all the way around the globe to make that a reality for a podcast recording.

William Dorrington: 1:10:49
I'm hearing excuses. We want results. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Welch: 1:10:53
And I mean, I mean, who's the guy who said you shouldn't do it yourself, just pay someone Very wise man Do you want five dollars, Andrew? I already have five dollars, if you're on my day, also known as two and a half pounds, okay.

Mark Smith:
1:11:06
Yeah, so now it is Monopoly, monopoly, mate. I love it. I love it. Anything else, guys, before we go?

William Dorrington: 1:11:16
Love you all. Any renaming of products that have popped up recently. We're not a lot of sad, but yes.

Mark Smith: 1:11:23
Anybody, anybody, maybe a Microsoft that we're not mentioning? No, no, we won't mention that.

Chris Huntingford: 1:11:29
Oh, oh, low blow.

Mark Smith: 1:11:32
I will say that on Monday, I think that I will catch up with Ryan Cunningham because he is coming to New Zealand, probably the first trip of his life. So, yeah, I hope to catch up with him in person.

Chris Huntingford: 1:11:44
I think that's going to be great man. Please give him a squeeze for all of us.

Ana Demeny: 1:11:48
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm happy to hear you're out of sightphones now.

Andrew Welch: 1:11:53
Yes, as well, yes. Yeah.

William Dorrington: 1:11:56
Yeah, this is a real long goodbye. Yes.

Mark Smith: 1:12:00
Okay.

Ana Demeny: 1:12:01
All right bye guys, love you. Ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao, bye guys.

Mark Smith: 1:12:05
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.