The Emergence of the Microsoft Biz Apps Consultant?
In 2008 Apple opened it's App Store, and by 2009 the phrase "there's an app for that" began to be used heavily in their marketing and was eventually trademarked. Although the general populous didn't fully grasp what Apple meant back then, it's safe to say we understand it now, and we've mastered it to a point where it seems like everyone has had an app idea of their own in the last 10 years.
While Apple's idea was aimed at consumers to enhance their lives, it's seems that Microsoft has now taken the same concept a step further for the world of business, by putting the power of creating meaningful business applications in the hands of everyday professionals. How did we get here? Where are we going? Let's dive in.
In 2021 I was on call with one of my contractors in the Dynamics space who told me "mark my words, by 2023 Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations will cease to exist, it will just be Dynamics 365 as an engine, and everything will be a la carte that sits on top of it or interacts with it. Everything is just a model driven app now".
Fast forward to Friday afternoon, October 27th, 2023 another illustrious "Dynamics" Consultant and I were talking when they said, and I'm paraphrasing "When I'm meeting with clients these days I find myself talking less and less in terms of CE, or F&O or even Sales or Customer Service, none of it matters anymore. I feel like with the advent of the Power Platform and all of it's capabilities all I need to know is the people, the processes, and then guide a solution from there, and more and more I'm finding that the faster, more effective, and sustainable way to a solution is through the Power Platform. I'm not even a CE or CRM Consultant anymore, I like to think of myself as more of a Microsoft Business Applications Consultant."
According to the statistics I've found Microsoft purports to have 7.5 million citizen developers building on the Power Platform, and boast $2 billion annual revenue from sales of Power Platform licenses. Those are sobering numbers from a suite of technologies that have barely scratched the surface as far as growth and capabilities. And while these numbers are impressive, the word on the street is that there are a wealth of SMBs that are more than just curious about the Power Platform and what it can do, but they are begging to be trained on it. But where's the help for them?
The future I'm envisioning is one where virtually every single business in the world has a designated Microsoft Business Applications Admin and / or Consultant they work with, be it contracted out or as an internal FTE. We live in a world where practically every business has some sort of Microsoft footprint already. Now that buzz words like ERP, CRM, and digital transformation are escaping the lexicon of CIO's and CTOs and are traded for AI / ML, RPA, etc., the Microsoft Power Platform seems to be an efficient, affordable, and sustainable way for any sized company to see immediate ROI on automating certain business processes.
Microsoft is very deliberate with their posturing, and it's brilliant. There's really no point in trying to grow Dynamics to take a larger market share of delivering large enterprise ERP and CRM customers. Competing with the likes of Salesforce and SAP in that space is a waste of time for them. They can keep the Fortune 500s of the world, that's fine. Dynamics already dominates total market share of all ERPs in the bigger picture worldwide by doing very well in the $250 million - $999 million annual revenue space. So where's the best opportunity for growth? It's with small and mid-sized frustrated end users that want to reap the benefits of the age of automation with minimum investment up front.
The Power Platform will be the great equalizer for $10 million - $100 million annual revenue companies that are continuously frustrated with implementing, and maintaining solutions too robust and cumbersome for their specific business needs. End users of this size and status might benefit from Dynamics, they might not, they might need one piece of it or the other, or maybe their entire P2P process can be handled by Power Platform? The point is that we are about to see the dawning of the age of the Microsoft Business Applications Consultant that can understand the people, and the processes, then architect a solution comprised of virtually infinite combinations of Microsoft's Biz Apps tools to deliver what their client needs.